And pigs might fly, Gabriel thought with a dour smile. “Let's get on with it, lassie.” He pushed back his chair. “You're fretting yourself into a frazzle.”
“No, I'm not,” Tamsyn denied, but she couldn't hide her relief that the waiting was over. “You'll wait in the mews until I'm in the house?”
“I'll wait until you let me know I can seek my bed,” he asserted.
They walked briskly and in silence back to Audley Square. St. Simon's house was lit up, and a lantern hung over the front door. “Perhaps he has visitors,” Tamsyn said, the possibility occurring for the first time.
“Once you're in the house, you can wait until they leave,” Gabriel said calmly. “If there's only a skeleton staff, you should be able to dodge them, and you've a decent plan of the house.”
“Yes.” Tamsyn slipped her hand into the pocket of her britches. Lucy had said that Julian kept a very small caretaking staff in the London house because it was used so rarely. It had been very easy to engage her in a casual discussion of the house, and with very little prompting she'd sketched a floor plan to illustrate her description. The paper now crackled reassuringly against Tamsyn's fingers. If Julian was not alone, or wasn't in the house, then she could make her way upstairs and into his bedchamber.
The mews was quiet, only the soft shufflings and whickers from the horses bedded down for the night. The night was overcast, but a lamp glowing in a round window above the stable block where the head groom lived threw a puddle of golden light on the clean swept cobbles. Tamsyn and Gabriel slipped soundlessly through the shadows, Tamsyn's bright head covered by the hood of her dark cloak pulled tight around her.
The gate into the garden was locked as Gabriel had expected. “Up you go.” He lifted Tamsyn easily, setting her atop the gate.
She dropped from sight immediately, then whispered from the other side, “There are lamps lit in the book room.”
“Buena suerte,” Gabriel whispered back, and stepped into the shadows.
Tamsyn crept around the edge of the walled garden, once catching her cloak on a thorn from an espaliered climbing rose. She stopped and painstakingly pulled out the thorn, flattening herself against the wall beside the rose. Light poured from the windows of the book room, illuminating neat flower beds and a square of lawn, and she prayed the shadow of the wall was sufficient concealment if anyone was looking from an upstairs window.
Free again, she flitted forward until she was pressed against the wall beside the lighted window. It was closed but the curtains were open. She sidled sideways until she could peer into the room. Her heart was thudding and her palms were slippery, but she couldn't decide whether it was nerves or excitement.
Julian was sitting at a desk with his back to the window. He was writing, his pen flowing over the parchment. As she watched, her heart in her throat, he paused, leaned back in the chair, and stretched, arching his neck; then he dipped his quill into the inkwell again and resumed writing. Her blood seemed to speed through her veins as she watched him in his absorption, imagining his face when he turned and saw her. He would be delighted… of course he would.
Tamsyn scratched on the window, then stepped back into the shadows.
Julian was preparing a report to present to the prime minister in the morning. Lord Liverpool had asked for yet more information on the action and casualties of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajos to bolster the Peer's request for more men and more money.
At the first scratching sound he glanced over his shoulder at the window. A branch tapping against the pane, presumably. Wearily, he rubbed his eyes. He was finding it difficult to concentrate, and he couldn't seem to connect with the words he was writing. He kept hearing Tamsyn's sensual chuckle in his head, and her smile, mischievously inviting, hung disembodied in his mind's eye. He supposed the images would fade in time. Once he got back to Spain, he wouldn't have time to think about her. But even as he told himself that, he knew that in Spain it would be even harder to forget her. The memories would be even more achingly vivid in the land that had produced that extraordinary, impossible creature, with her Penhallan blood and…
Frowning, he squeezed the back of his neck, trying to massage a crick; then resolutely he returned to his report.
The scratching came again, more insistent this time.
He ignored it. Then it changed to a drumming, a rhythmic tap-tap-tap. He spun round in his chair. There was nothing at the window. Impatiently, he pushed back his chair and went over to the window, flinging it wide. There were no bushes or trees near enough for an errant twig to be scratching the pane. He stared into the garden but could see nothing.
Then an unmistakable voice said from somewhere below him, “Good evening, milord colonel.”
He dropped his gaze to below the level of the windowsill. Her eyes gleamed purple in her pale face, the hood of her cloak had fallen back, and her silver hair was a beacon in the shadow of the wall.
“I was beginning to think you'd never come to the window,” she said when he seemed dumbstruck. Turning her back, she reached up to rest her hands on the broad sill, then jumped her backside up. Turning in the window, she smiled, and if he'd been less stunned, he would have read the anxiety behind the smile. “Aren't you going to say anything?”
“You… you imp of Satan!” He found his voice.
“How the hell did you get here?” Catching her around the waist beneath the cloak, he lifted her off the windowsill into the room, but instead of setting her on her feet, he held her up as easily as if she were a rag doll, his large hands spanning her waist, her face on a level with his. Her cloak fell to the floor, revealing the britches and shirt of the brigand.
“On Cesar, of course,” she said, smiling.
“Don't play games, girl!” He shook her as he held her off the ground, but she couldn't tell whether he was really annoyed or still just surprised. Either way, though, he didn't seem overjoyed to see her.
“I had to come,” she said. “You went off without a word and-”
“I was under the impression we'd had all the words necessary,” he interrupted flatly. “You'd made it very clear-”
“Yes, but you took me by surprise,” Tamsyn protested, still dangling from his hands. “How was I to know you would just waltz off into the night without a backward glance?” She tried an experimental kick to encourage him to put her down, but it didn't seem to have any effect.
“Oh?” A red-gold eyebrow lifted. “So that little exchange in the salon was merely an opening skirmish? You tell me with that goddamned arrogance of yours that you want no more to do with me, and I'm supposed to interpret that as an invitation?”
“It wasn't quite like that,” she said, her voice low.
“You were the one bringing everything to a close, not me.”
“I thought I was suggesting the opposite,” he replied quietly, his gaze fixed steadily on her face.
This wasn't getting them anywhere. He was still holding her as if she were a scarecrow stuffed with straw, and she was damned if he was going to put her in the wrong when it was as plain as day to anyone with eyes open that he was the one causing the difficulties. He was the one who couldn't see straight.
“You talk about my arrogance. Well I tell you, Colonel, that you're stubborn and stiff-necked and twice as arrogant as I am!” she snapped.
To her fury tears suddenly clogged her voice and filled her eyes. She wanted to say she loved him, but the words wouldn't come. She wanted to tell him that he loved her, he had to love her, because she couldn't feel the way she did if he didn't feel the same.
“You,” Julian said deliberately, “are a stubborn, spoiled, manipulative siren.” He thought he'd accepted that the adventure was over, that she would leave his life as decisively as she'd entered it, but now he knew that he hadn't accepted anything of the kind.