Of the hundred tickets optimistically made available for the Night of the Nightingale, ten now had been sold.
“Perhaps people come the day of the show. Perhaps on the day of the show we can send Dot out with a bell to lure people back for a shilling,” Delilah said, half joking. But only half.
There was a silence.
“May I?” Dot asked quietly.
She loved the idea of shouting and ringing a bell. She fervently longed one day to do it. She hardly dared hope she would be allowed.
“I think not,” Delilah said regretfully.
Handkerchiefs, neatly folded and embroidered with TGPOTT, awaited early guests. Bowers of paper flowers bloomed in the sitting room.
The days seemed to pass rather too quickly.
Several of their handbills advertising the event had been slid under the door of The Grand Palace on the Thames. One had been violently hatched through with an “X,” on a second someone else had written, “Are you mad?” and on the third someone had drawn a surprisingly accomplished, very detailed penis.
They all mutely stared at it in astonishment.
I think I recognize him, Mariana was tempted to say.
She thought they might laugh. They were not milquetoasts, these ladies.
Then again, they might not. Recognizing penises was probably what harlots did, and her reputation had only recently been mildly rehabilitated by one article.
“It’s going to be a triumph,” Delilah maintained, firmly.
James could never possibly answer, let alone read, all of the letters sent to him.
His Man of Affairs did that for him, sorting out and setting aside the ones he thought he ought to see, or would prefer to personally answer. A fresh stack of these had just been delivered to him at The Grand Palace on the Thames. He reached for the one on top, from a Mrs. Anne Jenkins of Portsmouth.
He broke the seal on the letter. Something that flashed silver like a coin spilled out into his hand.
He exhaled. It was a Waterloo Medal. The heft of it was familiar; every man who’d been at Ligny, Quatre Bras, or Waterloo had been given one. He had one, too. He ran his thumb across the name engraved on the edge: William Jenkins.
The letter read:
Dear General Blackmore,
My son Billy passed of an illness recently. He said to me on his deathbed, “Send my Waterloo Medal to General Blackmore, and tell him he’s the finest man I ever knew. He’s the one who brought me home to you.” He was on a rough path, my Billy, before the army. I thought I would lose him to gaming hells and bawdy women and other bad sorts. We scraped all we had to buy a commission, and he said you made a man of him. He never left home without your book in his pocket. He married a good woman and we have two grandchildren.
Billy was my heart. I should have liked more years with him. This is a small thing indeed, but I wanted you to know that you had Billy’s gratitude and his mother’s. There are no words for how much you have meant to us.
Yours Sincerely,
Anne Jenkins
His breath left him in a short gust.
He dropped his forehead into his hand and thought: Jenkins. Did he remember Jenkins? He thought so, yes: an ensign when he was a lieutenant colonel in India. Blue eyes like wide, terrified circles when they’d first met. Quick learner. Ultimately a very good soldier. He’d been the boy’s first commander.
He could not recall when he’d last wept for one man at a time. He wasn’t certain he even could now. He’d needed to learn how to accommodate that kind of loss swiftly early on, and besides, the English were not weepers. Grief was part of his soul’s geography; it had formed a canyon of sorts, through which it ran, deeply and contained. It did not slow him. He did not hover on its banks and stare into its waters. But it was there, nevertheless. Always driving him on to his victories. It was one of the things that gave him gravity. It made him grateful for every bloody day he still walked the earth.
He knew what it had cost this mother for Billy to be a soldier. And that’s what he would write to her. Thank you for your sacrifice and for your son. His service was exemplary. And more. Whatever he wrote would never be enough, but it would mean the world to her.
He experienced a swift internal whipsaw between irritation, then guilt over the irritation. The pendulum always steadied itself at duty again. This adulation and gratitude formed the confines of his world. He was a blessed man. He was a trapped man.
He picked up the miniature of his son. Closed his hand around it as if he could protect that twenty-two-year-old from any harm. How bloody lucky he was that he still had his boy.
As he’d told Mariana, he had no awareness of being a hero as he apparently went about being heroic. Would it break this mother’s heart all over again to know that her son’s hero was something less, or something more, than everyone thought? Would it dishonor the memory of the son she’d given to the war, would she think him a hypocrite, if she knew that he’d willfully broken rules and violated the hospitality of The Grand Palace on the Thames to have vigorous sex again and again with the kind of woman who’d been to a gaming hell and had inspired a duel? A woman who would generally horrify a mother like her?
What on earth was he doing with Mariana? Was he mad?
Would Jenkins think he’d lived a lie if he’d discovered before he died that his hero had feet of clay?
How many Jenkinses were out there, even now?
He was in many ways perfectly ordinary. Last night he and Mariana had discussed Helga’s apple tarts, and he’d found it a very satisfying conversation. It seemed, in fact, that a conversation merely required her participation in order to be enjoyable. In fact, increasingly, moments merely required her presence in order to be enjoyable.
He was capable of being diverted by stories of a cobbler’s shop. He liked, but did not require, ceaselessly elevating conversation. He was learned, but he wasn’t Aristotle. The blood of his peasant ancestors still ran through his veins. She was dazzlingly clever and funny. But she was also, surprisingly, a source of peace.
He glanced down at his heavy, gleaming signet ring, the first one in his family’s history. The one he hoped to pass down for generations to come. The seal that had become synonymous with all that was good and right and brave. What he wanted for his family and for his legacy remained unchanged, and what he needed to do to ensure it remained unchanged, too.
Christ.
If they could only see the way Mariana looked at him at night. That welcoming, fiercely joyous, tender, almost too-open generosity. Take all you need, she seemed to say.
He hadn’t known. He hadn’t known what he’d needed. Or that he’d needed so much.
“What do you call this?” she murmured as she trailed her tongue along the cords of his neck.
“Neck. Collo.”
James was flat, naked on the bed, like a great, beautiful beast she’d slain.
She was going to devour him.
The thrilling, massive, hard, dangerous beauty of him. He looked built to conquer. The ditches between the rises of muscle. The dips between his belly and hips, where she could fit her hands and hold him fast when he was inside her. Thighs like furry cannons. Her head was light, too filled with lust and admiration.
“And this?” She traced the outline of the furred chest with a single finger tangling in the dark hair, a thread or two of silver in it.
“Chest,” he murmured. “Il petto.”
She did not know if the gully between those muscles had a name. He was sectioned in quadrants, like armor. She found scars.
She ventured there anyway, with tongue and fingertips, with teeth and breath. She loved feeling the ripple and tension of him as he hissed in a breath of pleasure.
She smoothed her hand across it, laid her cheek there. Applied her lips.
“This?” she murmured.
“Belly. Pancia.”
She felt his voice rumbling beneath her lips.
“And this.” She dipped her tongue.
“Ombelico.”
“And this?” she whispered. She closed her lips over his cock.
“Paradiso,” he sighed.
Heaven.
She laughed softly and pulled away. “I am getting quite an education.”
She closed her mouth over his cock again.
His low groan of pleasure was more inebriating than a pint of bolted liquor. More drugging than anything Mr. Delacorte might sell to an apothecary.
“Mariana . . .” He half laughed. “I beg of you . . . succhi . . .”
“Ti succhio adesso,” she whispered, and did just that.
It was quiet apart from the tiny sounds of the crackle of the fire, and of her lips, her fists, her tongue, her fingers moving over him in the rhythm and friction that she had learned, in a few short nights, drove him near to insanity. He twined his hands in her hair. There was a part of him that battled the pleasure, and she understood. To be so wholly owned by it, to abandon yourself to the mercy of desire, to another person’s mercy—it wasn’t in his nature to surrender. But the deep and molten seam of passion was in his nature. And the primal hunger was. And the gift he had for giving pleasure was. He understood pleasure the way he understood war.
Or maybe all of this was just the alchemy of the two of them, the duke and so-called harlot, together.
His low groans and soft oaths, his hips lifting from the bed.
“Dear God,” he rasped. “Please.”
And who was this person she became? She wantonly sought her own pleasure. She wanted to look down into his face consumed with his own lust. Watch the stunned wonder in his face at the sight of her body moving over his. The dark ferocity as he raced toward his release.
She lowered herself onto his cock.
And for a time she controlled it. Until she heard him growl, and he arced his hips upward as his release rocked him. Whipped from her body, she heard her own voice as if from a thousand miles away, frantically calling his name.
They collapsed side by side. He turned and wrapped his arms around her, pulled her against his body, and she burrowed in.
He felt ferociously protective of this small, lush, velvety, feral, gentle, generous person. How dangerous, in some ways, it felt to just hold her.
For four mad nights in a row, she had come to him.
Last night he had closed the door and had at once gently pinned her against it. He hadn’t said a word, but she’d read now in his face, and she had reached for the buttons on his trousers. He took her against that locked door, his hands scooped beneath her buttocks as he thrust, her legs wrapped around his waist, her breath in his ear, whispering oaths, begging him, urging him on.
The night before, on a blanket laid out in front of the fire, she’d crouched on her knees, round arse up in the air, while his hands glided over her back and between her legs as he moved in her. He’d watched her fingers curl into the blanket to withstand the pleasure, her little muffled moans of amazement at the sheer magnitude of pleasure the two of them could conjure together.
And conversation meandered, lazily and idyllically as a spring, between lovemaking. Profound and utterly mundane. Laughter and lulls. Those moments were the easiest his life had ever been.
Now, behind them the pendulum on the clock swung toward one o’clock in the morning. Gently, softly, he stroked her shoulder, her arm, her hip, her thigh and back again.
“Lovely as velvet,” he murmured. “Velluto.” He would love to dress her in velvet. Shower her in shiny things.
“Velluto,” she murmured. He could feel her smile. Feel her body begin to melt into surrender again.
He slipped his fingers softly, softly between her thighs. Drew delicate patterns with his fingertips.
“Like satin,” he murmured. “Raso.” She would glow in satin.
“Raso.” Her voice lulled. Her breath was swifter now.
“Wet,” he predicted on a whisper into her ear, as his fingers delved to stroke. She was hot and slick again, and he caressed until he heard that sweet sound, that little whimper in her throat.
“Luscious,” he whispered, as he moved his other hand to her breast. He did not know the word for “luscious”; he could not think of words at all anymore.
His hands traveled this path, teasing, languorously arousing, until she was rippling against him.
“James . . .” His name on a frantic breath. As though some cyclone threatened to pull her away and only he could save her. It made him wild.
He had never felt more valorous than when he made her come, her body borne upward on a silent scream.
“Yes?” he whispered to her. “Once more?”
“Yes. Again, yes.”
He guided his cock into her, and once again they moved together, languidly, entwined, toward that bliss that seemed to have no end.
And as they lay quiet, recovering their breath and their senses, the clock hand made its inexorable journey toward the time she would return to her room.
“Mariana . . .” he said softly.
He drew her long, long rose-gold hair out between his fingers. Soon she would have to bundle and pin it up again. “Sei bella sotto ogni tipo di luce.”
She waited for him to translate.
“You are beautiful in every kind of light.”
Valkirk had drawn a small picture of a horse with a fluffy tail and had written three paragraphs that thrilled him and, unfortunately, that had nothing to do with his book he was supposed to be writing, when there was a tap on his door.
He glanced at the clock.
Mariana had just departed. She’d brought with her today ten sentences involving the words “velvet,” “suck,” “the duke,” “naked,” and “hairy,” among others. Even Primrose and Phillip made love in exciting ways.
As a result, he was semiaroused, and he suspected he would remain in that condition for the rest of the afternoon.
And then would come the night. He lived for nights now.
He got up, regretfully threw the filthy little sentences on the fire, and answered the door to find Dot.
“Your Grace,” Dot whispered, and curtsied. “I’m so sorry to disturb your concentration.”
“You don’t need to whisper, Dot. It’s broad daylight, and my writing is not so easily addled by interruption.”
How he wished that was true.
“You’ve a visitor in the parlor down below,” she said loudly. “He says his name is Arthur. Your son.”
Christ.
“He looks just like you!” she added, quite pleased. “Thinner, perhaps.”
“How in the bloody hell did he . . .”
He trailed off at Dot’s wide eyes.
“There’s no jar here, Your Grace.” She was back to whispering. “And I won’t tell.”
“But I’ve to set a good example at all times, Dot,” he said gravely.
“Oh, right, of course,” she said quickly. “I forgot.”
“Will you please tell my offspring I’ll be down in about five minutes? Thank you.”
“I’ll bring tea!” she said, and dashed off.
He could not deny that, exasperated or not, his heart gave a leap when he saw his tall son standing in the center of the little reception room. It was admittedly good to see him. He was as lanky as James, and better-looking, and probably a nicer person. He had his mother to thank for that.
“Arthur. How did you . . .”
Arthur spun around to greet him, grinning. “I pestered your Man of Affairs to tell me where you were staying. You haven’t answered my letter.”
“My Man of Affairs is a bit of a tough nut to crack, given that he both worships and is frightened of me. Well done on the pestering, I suppose.”
“I learned conquering from the best. What are you doing here, Father?”
“I’ve promised my publisher I’d have my book finished by the end of the month. It was a bit difficult with all the hammering going on at the townhouse, and too many other distractions.”
“Ah! So you’ve taken a room in this little plain place . . . a bit like . . . like a monk’s cell?”
If only he knew how far, far from the truth this really was.
James snorted. “No. Not at all like a cell. Good God, I think perhaps I’ve allowed you to live too sheltered a life if you think this place is anything like a cell.”
“But . . . the furniture doesn’t even match, does it?” Arthur looked more puzzled than censorious.
“Of course it does. It all has legs and backs and seats. What more does it need?”
James was being deliberately perverse.
“It’s . . .” His son, unbeknownst to either of them, was looking curiously around the little room as every guest who’d seen it had previously done, with its worn but pretty furniture that didn’t quite match, and the carved pilasters fashionable last century, and wondering at the source of its charm.
Because it was charming and welcoming immediately.
“It is actually rather nice,” Arthur said finally, sounding surprised. “For a little building by the docks.”
“It’s very comfortable and pleasant, it came highly recommended by a friend I hold in high esteem, and it was peaceful up until five minutes ago. I have a feeling you’re going to say something to change that,” the duke said dryly.
“I’m just . . . well, I came about one thing, originally. But on my way here, I saw this in a shop on Bond Street.”
From inside his coat he produced a handbill for the Night of the Nightingale.
James took it.
Mariana Wylde. One Night Only. The Grand Palace on the Thames.
It was instantly, oddly disorienting.
He’d been so nearly cloistered here that he’d forgotten the name of the woman with whom he’d spent mad, endlessly sensual nights was currently distributed around London. Because she was an entertainer. Not only that, a notorious one.
He remembered very clearly how he had once viewed her.
How his son no doubt viewed her now. Common.
For a mad, jarring moment, he wondered: was his affair merely the inevitable result of forced proximity?
Was this, indeed, how men like him became fools for women like her?
One Night Only.
Soon, it would be all they’d have left.
The thought of that tensed his muscles again, and his face went grim. He knew at once that proximity had nothing to do with the inevitability.
“So I wondered . . . why on earth are you living in a boardinghouse haunted by a woman like that?” Arthur sounded a little amused. But mostly deadly serious.
James slowly lifted his head.
“Women . . . like . . . what?” he said softly.
His son’s eyes flared widely in surprise. He’d heard that tone often enough to know he needed to tread carefully.
“It’s just that I was surprised to discover that”—he lowered his voice—“it was thought she’d fled the country, or drowned herself, due to the scandal, and now suddenly all is well and she’s putting on a show?”
“The whole mess involving Kilhone and Revell, you mean.”
“Of course.”
“To my earlier question. Could you kindly elucidate how she differs from other women of your acquaintance?”
He was simultaneously coldly incensed and genuinely curious about what Arthur would say.
But his son was both clearly reluctant to elucidate and baffled by James’s tone.
“You’ve known me your entire life, Arthur. Tell me, what opinion do you have of my patience?”
“Well, they’ve wiles, don’t they?” His son had lowered his voice again. “Women like her. And their morals are . . .”
Something in his father’s expression killed the end of his sentence.
“Are you laboring under the misapprehension that the ladies of the ton, young or old, do not possess wiles? You’re married, for God’s sake. How do you suppose you got that way? I hope you’re not thinking it was entirely your idea.”
“She . . .” He paused and furrowed his brow to think about it. “Do you think . . . my wife was . . . She wouldn’t dream of . . . having wiles.” He trailed off, amidst a dawning comprehension.
Valkirk snorted. “Thank God for women and their wiles, or men would never get anything done.”
“Hmm. Well, Miss Wylde had two lovers, whom she set against each other, and one shot the other, and he barely survived. I shouldn’t like to see that happen to you.”
And this was what happened to gossip. And why, even when it vanished from the newspaper, it grew on, misshapen, like a cancer, and spread among society. At the center was something approximating truth, but the farther it traveled, the more contours grew ragged and wrong and increasingly evil.
“Lies,” James said coldly.
Which brought his son up short. “It was in the London Times,” he pointed out cautiously. “Kilhone was shot. Two men were involved.”
“Yes. That much was true. They printed lies. It was gossip, and the rest was lies.”
Since his father was so seldom wrong, and arguing with him had always proved a fool’s errand, his son fell quiet.
But he was clearly still confused.
For God’s sake. He’d managed to keep his son out of gaming hells and away from lightskirts who excelled at getting young aristocrats, particularly drunk ones, to part with their money. He was educated and erudite. He was a kind person, and perhaps a trifle too lazy and too innocent.
But what had tested him? Did he need to be tested?
He’d wanted him to be innocent of the worst of the world. Who would wish upon his own child the things he’d seen? God willing, there would be no more wars in England in his lifetime. He’d thought doing some actual work might help shape Arthur’s character into something sturdier and more distinct. It was why he’d given him the farm—raising sheep and selling quality wool seemed like just the sort of thing a clever man could transform into a useful, profitable enterprise.
And yet here they were.
“Three things, Arthur. Do you really think one small woman can cause an outbreak of duels? Secondly, do you really think I’d be so reckless with my life or anyone else’s? And thirdly, do you really think anyone is going to best me in a duel?”
“It’s just . . . at a certain age . . . men take notions to . . .”
He wasn’t brave enough to continue that sentence in light of the duke’s expression.
“I’m forty-three years old. I may yet live another year.”
A tense silence ensued.
And then James understood his son, was, in fact, genuinely worried.
He’d lived with a father whose job could have killed him anytime. He thought of Mariana watching her father blown off a jetty, lost forever, and the pure joy she took in the memory of the mere sight of green fields, and all the boys lost in the war, and— His astonishing good fortune swept over him, and suddenly all frustration with his son gave way to patience. And gratitude.
He took pains to gentle his tone.
“You’ve naught to worry about. Miss Wylde is a guest in a boardinghouse. I am a guest in this boardinghouse in an entirely different wing. I have no intention of dying anywhere apart from my bed, at an advanced age. I am focusing on completing my memoirs in a place where I thought no one would be able to find me to interrupt me. Clearly this is one of those rare occasions where I am wrong.”
His son took this in. “Truthfully, it does sound like something you would do.”
“The tea is good, Arthur. Sit. Drink it.”
His son sank down onto a settee and obeyed. He poured, sugared, and sipped, then lifted his eyebrows appreciatively.
He had another look around the room again, and the faintly pleased, faintly puzzled look settled in.
The duke sat on the settee opposite him.
“How are your memoirs going, Father?”
“Oh, apace.”
“What part have you reached?”
“I’m just about to write the chapter about the time my son arrived to warn me about the wiles of women.”
His son grinned. “I told a few friends you were writing your memoirs. They’re eager to read them. Did you know, every boy I knew at Eton was given a copy of Honor as soon as they could read? ‘Cor, he’s your da?’ I was so proud. You made the world seem like a safer, nobler place for everyone. I traded stories about you for favors.”
The duke took this in. Why, suddenly, this swoop of crushing sadness, and where did it come from?
It was as if something, in this moment, was being irrevocably decided for him.
How could he ever tear down or tarnish the image of himself so cherished by his son?
“I’ve friends who confided in me that they grew up asking, ‘What would Valkirk do?’ every time they encountered a particularly sticky wicket.”
“For God’s sake, Arthur. I’m hardly Moses on the mountain. I wrote Honor during the boring parts of war. They could also read Marcus Aurelius, just for starters, if they’d need of some wisdom.”
“True. You’ve not got a patch on Marcus Aurelius.”
The duke laughed. Thank God Arthur had a sense of humor.
“Still, it’s a comfort to me knowing that when I have children they will grow up with you as such an influence. And that boys who grow up without fathers have someone like you to look to for guidance. So thank you, Father.”
James merely gave him a slight wry smile. He had a feeling that all of this flattery was leading to something.
“You look different,” Arthur said suddenly.
“Perhaps I’m fatter. The food here is good, and the hospitality is unparalleled.”
“Noooo . . . don’t think that’s it.” He fixed his father with a startlingly good approximation of his own patented penetrating look. He had his mother’s blue eyes. “On dit says you’ve been accepting dinner invitations.” Now he was fishing.
“Yes,” the duke said curtly.
“Galworthy?”
“Yes. Why?”
“The last time I saw him at White’s, he mentioned he’d invited you to dinner.”
“He did. I accepted. I went.”
Arthur studied him, and apparently realized the futility of continued questions along those lines.
He lowered his teacup to its saucer. He took a breath.
“Well, then. As I mentioned earlier, I’m not really here to interrogate you about opera dancers.” He said it lightly.
“She’s a singer.”
Arthur’s eyes flared in surprise.
Too late, James realized how sharply he’d spoken. Hearing Mariana reduced to two words, one of them wrong, both of them disdainful, had slid into him like a shiv. Somewhere out of reach of his control.
His son cleared his throat. “Opera singer, then. I’ve found a potential buyer for the farm,” he said quietly.
He waited for his father to say something.
James did not.
“I think you’d like him,” he pressed on. “Name of Elkhorn. He was born on a farm in Germany, raised in England. Fought for England, made a good bit of money and inherited some, and he’d like to retire to the country. Knows sheep and cattle. He’ll be here four days from Friday. It’s Cathryn’s birthday that Sunday and I thought . . . I just thought . . . will you come out to talk to him?”
Valkirk sighed.
“We’d be . . . we’d be honored by your visit, just the same. And do you remember that day we went fishing on the Ouse, when I was ten years old?” His son still sounded tentative. Almost wistful.
His son shouldn’t need to feel “honored” to get a visit from his father.
Nor feel so cautious about issuing the invitation. Or have so few memories of his father that they both knew precisely which day they’d gone fishing on the Ouse. By rights he would have had dozens of memories of fishing on the Ouse with his father.
And this was it, James realized suddenly, with a bludgeoning guilt. This was his son’s challenge in the world; the thing that had tested him and shaped his character, for better or worse. He had a father who was more knowable as a book than as a man. Who belonged more to England than to his family. He had so seldom been present. So often away on campaign. A son who had lost his mother five years ago, and had only him now.
He wanted to say yes.
And yet . . . it meant he’d be away in Sussex on the Night of the Nightingale.
And he imagined Mariana standing in front of the staff of The Grand Palace on the Thames. Perhaps some of the local drunks who spent good portions of their days propped against buildings, who could be lured in by the promise of lemon seed cakes and ratafia to fill seats. He wanted her to be able to look out and see someone who understood that her beauty and greatness was due to far, far more than her voice.
He had four more days with her. Only four more days.
Perhaps his son’s appearance was a sign, and a reminder of his duty, and a mercy. The end of their affair demarcated by life’s demands, their goodbyes swift. They would go their separate ways.
“You’re determined to sell it?” Less a question than an affirmation.
He could not deny he was disappointed.
His son stared into his tea. “I understand the farm is important to you, sir. It’s less that I want to sell it, than I would like to build my wife the home of her dreams . . . and I want to design that home myself, and to do it with my own resources. She wants the wing with the dormers and turrets, and I refuse to trouble you for money, sir.” He said this firmly. “I know how fortunate I’ve been and how fortunate my children will be.”
“You’re interested in architecture?” James said sharply. It was the first he’d heard of it.
“I’m passionate about it.”
“Well, that’s quite a fine thing.”
Arthur’s face blazed with pride. “Thank you. I’ve been studying it, to tell you the truth. And . . . I’d hoped you’d give some consideration to my reasons for wanting to sell it. And shouldn’t the land and livestock go to someone who has the will and knowledge to make it prosper? And I know . . . I think Cathryn would like to have you. Show you off a bit around town.” His son’s smile was crooked. A little diffident.
James hesitated.
“Yes. Of course I’ll come. I’d be happy to.”
Arthur’s face went brilliant with pleasure, which he quickly tamped. Probably from force of habit.
Guilt jabbed James in the solar plexus. It was just that easy to make his son happy, and it was a joy to do it. How many of those happy expressions had he missed when he was on campaign? Traveling on business for the crown? When parliament was in session?
“Well, I’ll leave you to your work.” Arthur stood at once. He was used to leaving his father to his work, too.
James also stood. “It was good to see you. Truly. Even if you scolded me,” James said.
They shook hands, and James added a back pat that almost but not quite turned into a hug. “I would hope this goes without saying, but please do not disclose my location to anyone, and that includes Cathryn.”
“I wouldn’t dare compromise your safety or your reputation, sir.”
And with that little offhand reference to the dangerous Miss Wylde again, he was gone.