Lost Among the Living(71)

“I don’t want to talk about it.” His voice was a soft, bitter rasp, a tone I didn’t recognize. His hands reached halfway up my thigh, his clever fingers finding the top of my stocking and unclasping it from my garter. “I’m sick to death of all of it. I want to talk about you. Tell me, Jo. Tell me everything.”

“There’s nothing to say,” I said helplessly as he undid the second clasp on my garter. “I floated for a while, and then I ran out of money. Dottie offered me a job as her companion, and I took it.”

His hands had begun to roll my stocking down my leg, but they stopped, his fingers cradling the back of my thigh. “You ran out of money?” he asked, his voice sharpening.

I felt my own anger answering, taking it as an accusation. “What did you expect?” I shot at him, looking into his blue eyes. “There wasn’t much there in the first place, and there was no pension because, according to the War Office, I wasn’t a widow.”

He was still for a long moment as heat pounded through me from the back of my thigh. When he spoke, his voice was low and dangerous. “They told me you would be taken care of,” he said with icy anger I had never heard from him before. “Someone is going to pay very, very dearly for that.”

His darkness was frightening me, so I plunged onward. “Yes, well. Dottie has actually been rather nice to me, in her queer way. She pays me—sporadically, I admit—and I have room and board. Though I shouldn’t have bought this dress.” I looked down at the peacock feathers, which now seemed purchased by some other long-ago woman. “I’ll be working for her until I’m sixty to pay it off.”

Slowly, his hands began unrolling the stocking again. “I’m going to make things right, Jo,” he said.

I nearly laughed as I shook my head. “You can’t. Dottie and Robert hate each other. Martin is sick. He’s marrying a girl he hardly knows because Dottie wants an heir and he thinks he won’t live long. I don’t think he’ll even make it to the wedding.”

“The girl in the parlor?” Alex asked. The torn stocking was rolled down to my ankle now, and he pulled it off my foot. “She seemed polite enough, if not very bright. I think I scared her.”

“She was a better choice than I would have been, for certain.”

“You?”

“Dottie wasn’t about to let me go to waste. She had the idea to marry me to Martin, but we didn’t want to do it. Besides, there was a mix-up somewhere in the War Office, and I had no widow’s papers. I wasn’t free.”

Alex started on my other leg. He slid his hands beneath my skirt in one motion, to the top of my stocking, and unsnapped a garter, his features hard. “Dottie shouldn’t have meddled. You were most certainly not free.”

I stared at him. “You knew,” I said softly, watching his face. “You knew about my papers. There was no mix-up at all, was there? You knew.”

“Jo, be logical,” he said. “What were they to do, let you be free to marry? Then you’d be legally married to two different men.”

I gripped his hand through my skirt and stilled it. “This isn’t about that at all,” I said. “It has nothing to do with legalities. It’s about the fact that even though I believed you dead, you wouldn’t let me go.”

“Are you mad?” Alex’s voice rose as his gaze pierced me. “I married you. I would rather die than let you go.”

“And what about me?” I cried. “It’s all very well for you. Without a husband or a widowhood, I’m nothing. I’ve been invisible for three years. I’m not even a proper figure of pity. I’m just a woman a man might consider a few tosses with, that’s all.” You could do better, even as a mistress, Robert Forsyth had said.

Alex’s hand flinched hard on my leg. His face blanched as the words hit him. Then he fought for control, and his eyes searched mine. As always, he saw everything inside me. His hand softened against my skin. “They were supposed to come up with something,” he said. “Make up an interim payment of some kind that you were entitled to. Whatever it was, if it came directly from the War Office, you wouldn’t question it. That way you wouldn’t have to struggle until I was free to come home. They promised me, and they lied.” His voice cracked just a little—I had never known Alex’s voice to crack. “I am asking you, Jo, to consider what my options were. If I contacted you, I’d blow the entire operation, as well as getting myself executed for treason. Or I could go back to the Front and be killed. I did the only thing I could think of—paid the only price I could—so that I had a chance of coming home.”

A chance of coming home. And there it was again, after three years. I wanted him—so badly it was an ache pressing through every part of me. I wanted my husband, his body that I knew almost as well as my own. I had dulled and suppressed it in my grief, but I had missed him. Yet at the same time I wondered whether Frances had known he was a spy, whether Alex had had to silence her. Whether there had been other women in those years, women he had kissed and put his hands on and taken to bed. I flinched beneath him again.

His gaze shuttered. He pressed my leg casually still and began to unroll my stocking again. I couldn’t breathe. I could kick him from this position, I thought wildly. I could kick him hard in the chest. I nearly did it. “Alex,” I said.