Merely the Groom by Rebecca Hagan Lee
“Yes, sir.” Pomfrey turned on his heel and left the dining room as quietly as he’d entered.
“Colin?” Gillian reached over and placed her hand on his. The butler had spoken so softly that she hadn’t been able to hear his side of the conversation. But she had heard Colin’s side, and she recognized the look of concern on his face. “Is something wrong?”
He looked across the table at Gillian. Her cheeks and nose were sunburned, and he knew that other parts of her anatomy were also sporting a new pink color. “The world is about to intrude on our honeymoon.”
Gillian sighed. “We knew it couldn’t last forever.”
That was true. But he’d thought it would last the week. He thought he’d be granted that much. Four days wasn’t enough. Four days wasn’t nearly enough. “I thought it would last a sennight,” Colin told her. “At least.” But he was scheduled for France at the end of the week, and Colin had no choice but to attend to the mission.
He finished his dinner and pushed his plate aside. “Excuse me, my sweet, but Pomfrey tells me urgent messages to which I must attend have arrived from London.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked, as he stood up and walked around to her side of the table.
“I won’t know until I re—” He’d almost told her that he had dispatches to read. “See what work Jarrod sent up from London.”
“Jarrod?”
“The Marquess of Shepherdston. We share several business interests.”
Gillian pretended to understand, though Colin offered no further explanation. “Oh.”
He leaned down and brushed his lips against her hair. “I may be quite late coming to bed,” he said. “You’ve had a hard day winning sailboat races and collecting the bounty for it. No need for you to wait up.”
“You’ve had an equally hard day losing sailboat races and distributing the bounty.” She smiled at the memory of the hours they’d spent in the labyrinth after the toy sailboat races. I’ll wait up for you no matter how late it is.”
* * *
G,
Sorry to interrupt your holiday, my friend, but duty calls in London. Your schedule is fixed, and we require your presence as soon as possible.
As ever,
M
The message, written in code, was addressed to G, which stood for Galahad, and signed by M, which stood for Merlin, Jarrod’s code name.
It was Colin’s summons back to London and had been accompanied by a stack of coded messages marked urgent. He stared at the stack of messages he’d spent the better part of the evening deciphering. They had been opened and resealed with Merlin’s seal, so Colin knew that they had been opened and read in London, but Jarrod made it policy not to send the deciphered messages, only the originals. These originals had come from one of the French agents operating in Edinburgh. Colin pulled out his most recent copy of the French deciphering table. The messages were written in a form of numeric code. His deciphering table saved a tremendous amount of time in the deciphering process because it showed the numbers and their alphabetic equivalent in current use. But the French had begun changing the code in recent months, rearranging numbers to make code breaking more difficult. Colin had studied Conradus and been taught by George Scovell and Colquhoun Grant, and he knew that anyone with a full command of the French language and the knowledge that e was the most commonly used letter in the French language, or that words ending in double letters most frequently ended in ee, or that et which meant and was the most common word in the French language, or that a single letter on its own was an a, y, or a consonant with an apostrophe could begin to decipher the messages without too much trouble.
No, the problem with these messages wasn’t breaking the code but believing the message. Bloody hell and damnation! They were wrong. They had to be. Anything else was unthinkable.
But the source of the information contained in these messages was impeccable. He knew the agent. He’d recruited her. And she’d never been wrong before. But there was always a first time, and this appeared to be it. Because, according to these, his father-in-law, the baron, Lord Davies, was in league with the French. Davies’s ships transported French agents and government officials to ports of call in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, the major port cities of Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas. According to these, everything that had happened since that night in Edinburgh had been part of an elaborate ruse to draw the real Colin Fox into the baron’s trap.
Everything. Gillian’s elopement and abandonment in Edinburgh. The baron’s investigation and the hiring of the Bow Street runner. All of it was a ruse to force the real Colin Fox into declaring his true identity.
And it had worked like a charm. Not only had the real Colin Fox declared his identity, but he’d married the baron’s daughter. According to these, the baron had used his daughter as bait. And Colin had walked into the trap with his eyes wide open.
It couldn’t be true. And yet...
I’ll do whatever’s necessary to secure you as husband for my daughter, because your position doesn’t allow for scandal any more than hers does. The baron’s words came back to haunt him. Time and time again. Had he? Had the baron done more than simply blackmail him? Had he engineered the whole scheme? Colin didn’t want to believe it, and yet he knew that while the messages intercepted from the French might not be entirely true, a great deal of what they contained was.
But what was truth? And what were lies? Was it coincidence that the ship that had taken him from Paris to Edinburgh had been one of Davies’s ships? Was it coincidence that he had first seen Gillian at the Blue Bottle Inn? Or that a husband who happened to go by the name of Colin Fox had abandoned her there? Was it a coincidence that the trail the Bow Street runner followed had led straight to the War Office and the secret Free Fellows League?
What was the truth? And what was all a part of an elaborate scheme to catch a spy? And was Gillian part of it?
Colin pushed aside his cup of coffee and reached into the top desk drawer for a bottle of whisky and a glass. He poured himself a glass of whisky, downed it, and poured another. He sipped his whisky as he pulled another message from the stack of papers, this one detailing the routes of Davies’s ships. Colin studied the routes and realized that those particular ships had docked in ports that coincided with his most recent travels. But he was unable to come up with any other clues that might lead him to discover the identity of the impostor Colin Fox.
He finished his whisky, then pulled out the urgent messages Jarrod had sent Colin to decipher.
* * *
Gillian was as good as her word. She waited up for him through the long hours of the night and into the wee hours of the morning. When the casement clock downstairs struck the hour of three and Colin had still not come to bed, she decided to investigate.
She found him asleep in the study, his head cradled upon his arms on a stack of papers. A cup and saucer that had contained coffee and a bottle of Scots whisky and a glass had been pushed out of the way to the far corner of the desk.
Gillian walked over to the desk and placed her hand on his shoulder. “Colin?”
Colin awoke with a start and shot to his feet, sending papers scattering across his desk and onto the floor. A gold seal suspended from a thick gold chain rolled off the desk and landed on the carpet beneath a sheet of paper under Colin’s chair.
Gillian dropped to her knees and began picking up the loose papers at her feet.
“Leave it!” Colin ordered.
But it was too late. Gillian had already gathered a handful of papers and begun straightening them. She looked down at the papers covered in cipher. “What is this? Some kind of puzzle?” she asked, looking up at Colin.
He groaned and reached for the papers.
She handed them to him, then bent once again to retrieve the single page beneath his chair. She pulled the sheet of paper from beneath Colin’s chair, then reached for the gold seal on the chain and picked it up, too. “Can’t lose the Grantham sea
“It’s not th—” Colin could have bitten his tongue out.
“Whose is it?” she asked as her curiosity got the better of her and she turned it over to study the indention. “Shepherdston’s?” No, not Shepherdston’s. She’d never seen the Shepherdston seal, but she’d seen this one. It was engraved with the impression of a mounted knight, and she’d seen it once before in a puddle of hardened green wax.
Gillian glanced from the seal she held in her hand to the cube of bright green sealing wax sitting on Colin’s desk as shock lowered her voice to a stunned whisper. “Galahad.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
“Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,
And be it moon, or sun, or what you please.
And if you please to call it a rush-candle,
Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me”
—William Shakespeare, 1564-1616
The Taming of the Shrew
“What did you call me?” Colin asked.
Gillian supposed that someone else might be intimidated by his tone of voice and the furrow in his forehead, but he didn’t intimidate her. “Galahad,” she answered, pulling herself up to her full height and looking him in the eye. “I called you Galahad because that’s who you are. You’re Sir Galahad.”
“Sir Galahad?” Colin arched an eyebrow and pretended innocence. “Like the knight in the Arthurian legends?”
“Yes,” she replied, “just like the knight in the Arthurian legend. Sir Galahad, whose purity and virtue allowed him to see the Holy Grail.”
Colin laughed, showing all of his perfect white teeth. “You have obviously mistaken me for someone else, my lady.”
Gillian firmed her lips into a thin, disapproving line. “A situation with which you seem to be increasingly familiar. I mistake you for Galahad. My father and his Bow Street detective mistake you for Colin Fox. Yet your name is Colin McElreath, Viscount Grantham. Or is it?”
Her words stung. But her disapproval stung even more, and Colin responded in kind. “You know my name, Lady Grantham,” Colin told her. “You share it. Along with my pillow.”
She’d also shared a pillow with Galahad. It had been a chaste pillow, but he had shared it with her. Gillian thought of that night Galahad had slept beside her. Remembered that she’d been thinking of Galahad when she’d told Colin about the time she’d spent at the Blue Bottle Inn. “I liked touching,” she’d whispered. “I liked being held at night and knowing I wasn’t alone anymore. I know it sounds silly, but I liked sleeping beside someone.”
And he had been the one to hold her.
Now, Gillian understood why she’d felt so comfortable in Colin’s company from the very beginning. Why he’d seemed so familiar. It was his scent. It had clung to the pillowslip and the bedclothes of her bed at the Blue Bottle the morning after he’d spent the night there. And she had remembered and recognized the warm, welcoming scent of the sandalwood soap he wore. She had trusted Colin from the moment she’d met him and all because she had fallen in love with Galahad and Galahad had proven himself to be trustworthy.
“I shared a pillow with Galahad, too,” she said, softly reminding him of that night. “In Scotland.”
Gillian realized she had given him ammunition with which to hurt her the moment she’d opened the door to old wounds her first honeymoon had left. She prayed he cared enough about her to live up to his reputation as Sir Galahad and protect her, rather than hurt her.
“Did you?” he asked.
Tears burned her eyes as she breathed a prayer of thanks. “You know I did,” she replied, holding the seal close to her heart. “You were there.”
“I’ve never been to Gretna Green.” He tried to bluff once again, but she wasn’t having any of it.
“Nice try, my lord,” she informed him, her heart in her eyes as she looked up at him. “But you know as well as I do that Gretna Green can’t compare to the Blue Bottle Inn in Edinburgh.”
Colin raked his fingers through his hair. “What do you know about the Blue Bottle Inn in Edinburgh?”
“I know that it’s no place for a lady.” She took a step closer to him. “A man who called himself Galahad told me that.”
“What were doing there?” he asked.
“Trying to find my way home to you.” She put her arms around his neck. “When were you going to tell me that I’ve been there all along?”
Her words sent a rush of desire coursing through him. He had been waiting all of his life to find someone who understood how he felt. And Gillian had just put his feelings into words.
Colin held her close. There was no rhyme or reason to it. He’d simply looked up, seen her standing at the window, and had wanted her. He hadn’t even seen her clearly, but he’d recognized a kindred spirit when he saw one. She stood waiting at the window. Colin had wanted her to be waiting for him. “Oh, hell, Gillian, you were never supposed to know.” He placed his hands on either side of her hips and lifted her, without warning, onto the top of the desk.
It was an effective way of distracting her.
When were you going to tell me that I’ve been there all along?
Those words registered in recesses of his brain as Colin skimmed her nightgown up over her legs and bunched it around her waist. Reaching down, Colin freed himself from his breeches, then lifted her hips and guided himself into her welcoming warmth.
Gillian cried out his name as he entered her. She lifted her legs and locked her thighs high around his waist.
Colin closed his eyes, threw back his head, and bit his bottom lip as he sheathed himself fully inside her warmth. His entire body shook with the effort of holding back the tide of pleasure he knew would come. Colin lost his battle to maintain control as her movement forced him deeper inside her. He began to move his hips in a rhythm as old as time.
Gillian matched him thrust for thrust as she followed the primitive cadence of their pounding hearts. She clung to him, reveling in the weight and feel of him as he filled her again and again, giving everything he had to give.
She closed her eyes and allowed tears of joy to seep from behind her lashes and run down her face.
Colin was her Galahad. He was the man of her dreams. He always had been. He was the man who’d set her free and won her heart.
Gillian gave herself up to the emotions swirling inside her, gave voice to the passion with the small moans that escaped her at each wonderful thrust. She tightened her muscles around him, holding on as the exquisite pleasure peaked, then muffled her scream against his shoulder.
“Gillian.” Colin felt her tremors surrounding him and called out her name. As he collapsed atop her, completely spent, completely satisfied, Colin brushed his lips against her cheek and buried his face in her curly brown hair.
Tasting the saltiness of her tears, Colin lifted his head and looked down at her beautiful face. Her blue eyes were wide open and dark with passion. Her lips were plump, swollen from his kisses, and the stubble on his jaw had abraded the soft skin of her face.
A lump caught in his throat. He wanted to say something profound, something beautiful, something to explain the way he felt.
He wanted to say something that would make her open her heart and declare her feelings for him.
But Sir Galahad couldn’t say anything at all.
He could only feel.
I love you.
* * *
“Colin?” Gillian smoothed her nightgown down over her legs and slid off the desk. “This is yours, isn’t it?” She opened her fist and offered him the seal.
Colin took it from her and slipped the chain over his head and around his neck.
“It looks as if it belongs there,” she said.
He glanced down at the seal lying half-concealed by the hair on his chest. “It does.”
“So,” she drawled. “We’ve only been married four days, and you’re already keeping secrets from me.”<
Colin pursed his lips in thought. “Only the secrets that predate our wedding.”
“Your appearance in my life as Sir Galahad definitely predated our wedding.”
Colin exhaled, then closed his eyes and hung his head. “Yes, it did. And so did the only other secrets I’m keeping.” Gillian retrieved the sheet of paper that had slipped out of her grasp and landed on the desktop as they made love. “Secrets that have something to do with these messages.” She glanced down at the paper and frowned as she studied it more closely. “And the trade routes of several of my father’s ships.”
Colin opened his eyes and met her gaze, willing her to understand that as a man of honor, he could not reveal the secrets of a lifetime, even to her.
Gillian took a deep breath. The innkeeper’s wife’s description of Galahad came rushing back. The smuggler. “May I ask you a question?”
“I won’t promise I can answer it,” Colin told her. “But I’ll try.”
“All right,” she agreed. “Did you follow me to Edinburgh?”
“No. I arrived in Edinburgh after you did, but I was there on business that had nothing to do with you. I saw you for the first time standing at the window,” he answered her truthfully.
“You were the one in the alley.”
He nodded.
“But you never worked for my father, and you weren’t hired to follow Colin Fox or to find me and bring me home?”
Colin shook his head. “I’d never met your father until the day before you and I married. And I only learned about the man you knew as Colin Fox the afternoon before I met with your father and the Bow Street runner.”
“Then why?”
“I was on my way back to the Blue Bottle the night I was set upon by the footpad I told you about. Circumstances prevented me from reaching my room by way of the front door. I had to find another way, so I climbed up on the roof of the laundry in the close and used the ledge to make my way to my window.” He looked at Gillian. “My room was just down from yours. I reached it only to find it occupied by characters looking to do me more harm. I knew I was bleeding from my wound and too weak to retrace my path, so I slipped inside your room to escape them.”