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  Forgiveness. He deserved none of it and she might still refuse him. A lump formed in his throat.

  If he lost her… He shook his head.

  If he even touched her… He shook it again, not trusting the need that he was consumed with.

  A board on the stairwell creaked and he swallowed back pity. The material at his groin strained tight as Eleanor came into the room.

  With her cheeks blushing pink he thought he had never seen her look more beautiful and the danger of his wretched urgency mounted.

  ‘You should return to your bedroom, Eleanor.’ He grimaced at the harshness in his tone, but it was all he could do to stand there and not ravish her as every single particle in his body wanted to.

  She held her palm out towards him, the gold of Alice’s ring glinting in what little there was left of the firelight.

  ‘I have endured one marriage that was not a love match. I do not think that I could endure another one.’ Her voice trembled, but she went on. ‘Especially when I know that my heart would be completely broken.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I love you, Cristo. I have loved you from our first night together and through all our years of separation. It has only ever been you.’

  ‘Lord.’ He stepped forwards. ‘There aren’t many things I’ve done right in my life, sweetheart, but having your love is one of them.’ He didn’t move a muscle but, looking into her eyes, he kept talking so that she might see his honesty.

  ‘“I brought a heart into the room

  But from the room I carried none with me.”’

  ‘John Donne?’

  When he nodded Eleanor smiled. ‘So it was not only for Florencia’s sake that you wished for us to be betrothed.’

  ‘You thought that?’

  ‘You left so quickly.’

  He grimaced. ‘I didn’t trust what I might do if I stayed.’

  Walking straight into his arms. she turned her face up to his. ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you, too. Tout se pardonne quand on aime.’

  Where there is love there is forgiveness.

  She found him in the silence, the strength of him and the gentleness, a man fully aroused, but trying to show his patience and temperance.

  ‘There are only a few hours left until the dawn, Cristo. Why waste them?’

  ‘You are saying that you should not wish to?’

  ‘I am.’

  He pushed down the sleeves on her gown and undid the buttons left at the back. When the blue silk pooled at her feet she was full of neither shyness nor regret.

  ‘I thought you would want everything perfect after the last time.’

  ‘It is,’ she replied. ‘It is perfect because I have you.’

  Much later they lay naked against each other, a blanket pulled across them against the gathering dawn and Cristo’s fingers tracing shapes of a heart across her back.

  ‘I think Martin felt the kind of hatred for you that he had never felt about anyone before.’ Her hand laid out flat against his chest, her fingers splayed across his heart. ‘He was a good man who made a bad choice, but I think had he known what I truly thought about you he would have tried to mend it.’

  ‘You do?’ She could hear the doubt in his voice.

  He brought her close and she could feel his tongue against her shoulder and then her neck, the flare of affection almost making her forget how to breathe, but she had another question to ask him.

  ‘Who were the people who kidnapped us?’

  He took a moment to answer. ‘Colleagues from Paris.’

  ‘Colleagues?’

  ‘I worked as a gatherer of information for England and the Foreign Office and Beraud worked for the Secret Police in France. Sometimes his loyalties incorporated the selling of secrets, for substantial amounts of cash, you understand.’

  ‘You are saying that he would betray his own country?’

  ‘All patriots have their price, and a gambling addiction could not have been easy to manage on the wages Fouche offered.’

  ‘Did you have a price?’

  He merely shook his head.

  ‘How did they know about us?’

  ‘By chance. He must have seen us together in London and saw a way to make some money on the side.’

  ‘And Milne?’

  ‘Is completely trustworthy.’

  ‘Are there others who might harm us?’

  ‘If there are, I will make certain that they never come close enough.’

  The amber in his eyes darkened and there was a menace in his voice that she absolutely believed. The recognition of an agent of death was chilling.

  ‘But your work with the Foreign Office is finished?’

  ‘It was completed when I left Paris and I have had no contact since. With you there is something returning that I have not felt in a very long while.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Joy.’

  She laughed.

  ‘There. That is the joy I speak of.’

  She laughed again, and the release of gaiety felt like an opiate.

  With Cristo and Florencia as her family and the memory of Paris between them, Eleanor felt she could do anything, be anyone, the reckless force of her youth returning in a great and wonderful measure.

  ‘I love you so much, Cristo, that I am sometimes scared because it seems too perfect.’

  ‘After all we have been through perhaps perfect is what we deserve.’

  Leaning over, he rifled through a pocket in his jacket and, when he opened his palm, her grandfather’s lost medallion lay upon it.

  ‘You kept it?’

  The gilded upstairs room in the Chateau Giraudon seemed close as he wound her hair around his finger. ‘It was all that I had left of you. If only I had been wiser then—’

  She stopped him simply by slipping the chain around his neck and the warmth between them grew. ‘Now is what we do have, Cristo.’ The gold glimmered warm in the light.

  ‘I love you, my Eleanor, and I will never let you go.’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘I do.’

  In the early light of dawn they spoke again of the past.

  ‘I always wondered what was in the letter you brought to Paris from your grandfather,’ he said, looking at the sky outside. ‘When you left I tossed the sheets from the bed into the fire and the message was lost completely.’

  ‘I never read it, but I presumed it to be about my Uncle Nigel. My uncle had written a confession in the family Bible, you see, all about his part in my brother’s death, though I don’t think he meant to kill him. He took to the bottle straight after and Grandfather was probably trying to make amends.’

  ‘And because of it I harmed you.’

  ‘Found me.’ She turned to watch him. ‘Besides, you had to run from England for a mistake that was not in any way your fault.’

  ‘I was always running from mistakes as a youth. The only damn thing I have ever done right is to find you.’

  She ran her fingers along the side of his cheek, liking the way he leaned into her touch, his hair silver against her hand.

  ‘You look like an angel, Cristo.’

  At that he did laugh. ‘And one with very impure thoughts.’

  ‘My angel,’ she whispered as his mouth came down full against her own.

  Epilogue

  Aix-en-Provence, France

  Six weeks later Eleanor wore a dress of the lightest yellow to be married in, because the colour suited her mood exactly and because Cristo said that whenever he saw her it was as if the sun had come out.

  Her groom wore a jacket of dark blue cloth, his waistcoat embroidered with the Wellingham crest.

  Florencia wore gold and so did her cousins, the numerous little bridesmaids and pageboys making a line around her. Even the weather cooperated as they stood to one side of the small chapel, a row of cypress trees sheltering them from the light breeze.

  Cristo had leased a beautiful country villa with blue shutters and expansive garde
ns for the Wellingham party and the wedding took place on the third day after they had arrived in the town where Paris had been buried all those years ago.

  She could see his headstone from where she stood beside the front steps of the chapel, white marble newly carved with all the love and pride befitting a cherished first born.

  Smiling, Eleanor tipped her head in her son’s direction and with Beatrice-Maude on one side of her and Emerald and Lucinda on the other, she thought that she had never felt quite like this.

  Young. Free. Alive. In exactly the place that she should be!

  The beginning of a life that stretched on into the years before them. She could barely stand still with the promise of it.

  ‘Well, now,’ Beatrice said, her eyes alight with mischief. ‘All three of the Wellingham brothers are now most satisfactorily married.’

  Emerald cleared her throat. ‘But we have one wedding still to go, Lucinda.’

  Cristo’s sister was careful in her reply. ‘I have long since given up on finding a man who lives up to all my expectations, Emmie.’

  ‘Cristo might have said the same, Lucy, but when love comes it takes no mind of what has been or of what is to come. It only focuses on the now.’

  As if on cue the men joined them, the pin of gold on the lapel of Cristo’s jacket catching the sun: a gift from the French side of his family when they had stopped in Paris to make peace with the past.

  She felt his fingers slide into hers, one tracing the ring on her left hand.

  Semper veritas—Always truth—engraved in the fine gold.

  Placing her other hand across the flat of her stomach, she knew another truth, and when she caught the turquoise eyes of her sister-in-law upon the gesture, knew that she felt it, too.

  A full circle. Like the seasons. A time to be born and a time to die.

  Paris. Florencia. And now this child.

  With the French sun overhead and her husband and children beside her, Eleanor knew that she, too, had finally come home.

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-0586-4

  ONE ILLICIT NIGHT

  Copyright (c) 2011 by Sophia James

  First North American Publication 2011

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