The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

Chapter Twenty-Three

“About what?” The Purple Gentian yanked Amy over to the side of the quay with such force that her cloak rippled out behind her like a pennant on a windy day.

“Bonaparte’s plans! They were under his blotter on his desk.”

Richard’s memory momentarily clicked back to that afternoon, to Amy, flustered, running into him as she raced out of . . . Bonaparte’s study. He’d been so delighted by the opportunity that her running into him had afforded him, so focused on flirting with her, that it had never occurred to him to wonder why she was scurrying through that particular anteroom.

“He plans to land a force of one hundred seventy thousand men with twenty-four hundred ships,” Amy whispered urgently. “But Mme Bonaparte has emptied the treasury, so he can’t do it until gold enough to finance the expedition arrives.”

“So that’s it!” That was what Murat had been about to say. Nothing could be done until the gold arrived. Richard could have kicked himself. After six years of close contact with the Bonapartes, six years of listening to Bonaparte rant about his wife’s extravagance, you’d think he could have put two and two together. “Does he have the money?”

“That’s the splendid thing!” Amy hugged the Gentian’s arm in her glee. “He’s arranged for a loan—as if he intends to pay it back—from Swiss bankers. It’s due to come in by carriage to a Paris warehouse the night of the thirtieth. Don’t you see, it’s perfect! If we can just—”

“Intercept the gold before it reaches Bonaparte. . . ,” the Purple Gentian continued for her, grinning broadly.

“We can stop the invasion of England and topple the government!”

“Shhhh!”

“Oh, sorry.” Amy bit her lip. “I got a bit carried away. But can’t you just see it? When that gold doesn’t arrive . . .”

“But how do we keep it from arriving?” The Gentian paced in a little circle around the quay. Amy watched in appreciation, enjoying the way the cape swished about his booted legs as he walked, the way his jaw shifted as he thought through plans. Most of all, she basked in that thoughtless “we.”

The Gentian whirled with a particularly satisfying swish. “How many men will be guarding it?”

“The letter didn’t say,” Amy admitted. “Fouché just wrote that it would be heavily guarded, whatever that means.”

“Stealth, rather than force,” muttered the Gentian, resuming his circles.

“What about a smaller version of the Trojan Horse?”

“A smaller what?”

Perching herself on a piling, Amy explained, “In Greek mythology, the Trojan Horse was a—”

The Gentian flapped his cape at her. “Stop! I know the story. You want to intercept the Swiss gold with a small wooden horse?”

“Not exactly.” Amy swung her legs back and forth as she expounded, her heels hitting the wood block with a series of dull thuds. “But you could send a delivery of barrels or something to the warehouse—barrels of something they might want—and when they haul them inside, we can leap out and seize the gold.”

Richard rather fancied the idea of springing out of a brandy barrel, rapier at the ready. “Not the vintage you were expecting, gentlemen?” he would drawl as he leaped out of the cask, brandishing the shining steel of his blade in their astonished faces. With a thrust to the left, and a stab to the right, he’d fight his way through the room, dueling personally with the man in charge, flipping his sword in an arc across the room. And then he’d deck the man guarding the gold with a quick uppercut, whirling to fight off the three men who’d jump on him from behind. He’d kick the first in the stomach, trip the second, and run through the third. And then he’d make some sort of witty remark. “Huzzah for the Purple Gentian!” his men would cheer.

If only it ever happened that way.

Ruefully, Richard shook his head, forcing himself to abandon his happy dreams of swashbuckling in favor of less glamorous realities.

“What if they don’t stop to pick up the barrels? If they’re Fouché’s men, they’ll be under strict orders. We could probably float by in a trunk with HUGE TREASURE IN HERE painted in foot-high letters across the top, and they wouldn’t so much as glance at us.”

“Drat.” Amy absently kicked at the piling with her heel. “That also ruins plan B.”

“Plan B?”

“Yes, I thought if the Trojan Horse idea didn’t work, maybe Jane and I could pretend to be dancing girls looking for work, and—”

“Let’s skip straight to plan C, shall we?”

“You don’t like plan B?”

Like? What an incredibly inadequate word like was. To say that he liked the idea of Amy dressed up as a dancing girl would be like saying that Midas liked gold, or Epicurus liked food, or Miss Gwen liked poking her parasol at people. It didn’t cover the half of it. By the same token, the word dislike didn’t even begin to describe the revulsion that flooded through Richard at the thought of Amy exposing herself to a warehouse full of hardened French operatives. In comparison, it made the whole Marston incident look about as dangerous as a peaceful stroll through Hyde Park at five o’clock at the height of the season. Chaperoned.

“I loathe, revile, and detest plan B,” Richard replied blandly. “Next?”

“Setting the warehouse on fire,” Amy suggested promptly.

The Purple Gentian stopped his pacing and knelt beside Amy’s makeshift pedestal. “Do you mean to try to burn down the building around the gold?”

Amy decided he really didn’t have to know that burning down the building around the gold had begun as plan F on the walk over, been demoted to plan M, and finally discarded altogether as impracticable. “What we could do is start a small fire that will let off a lot of smoke—there must be some way to do that—and someone could start shouting fire. With any luck, the guards would panic, and leap out of the building. And even if they didn’t, they would be so preoccupied with putting out the blaze that we could slip inside during the confusion and make off with the gold.”

“The gold will be heavy,” the Purple Gentian pointed out, but his tone wasn’t dismissive. He sounded thoughtful.

“We set the fire, bash them over the head during the confusion, and then make off with the gold?”

“You might have something there. We’d have to find out how the men in the warehouse were to be dressed. My guess is they won’t be in uniform. They’ll more likely be disguised as workmen. If my chaps can slip in and blend with the guards . . .”

The Gentian hopped to his feet, nearly colliding with Amy’s chin. “Wait! How do we know which warehouse it will be? We can’t go up and down the streets setting fire to every warehouse we see.”

Amy gave a little bounce on her perch. “And we don’t have to! It’s a lumber warehouse in the rue Claudius. A bit arrogant, don’t you think?”

The Gentian’s lips twisted wryly. “They picked the street for the name of the Roman emperor who conquered Britain? Clever. Very clever.”

“But not clever enough for us!” Amy’s outstretched hands and eager smile issued an irresistible invitation to the Purple Gentian to join in her exultation.

She laughed delightedly as he bypassed her outstretched hands, and, seizing her around the waist, whirled her in a triumphal circle. Amy felt the muscles of his shoulders move under her hands, the folds of his cloak swirl about her own legs, and tilted back her head with the dizzying joy of it all. It was better than a fair, better than a play, better than any daydream she had ever devised.

The Purple Gentian’s arms tightened around her as he completed one last whirl. Amy’s body brushed slowly along the length of his as he lowered her to the ground. Amy’s wits seemed to have been shaken away while the Purple Gentian was spinning her in circles. After all, she should be thinking about defeating Bonaparte, not about the shocking intimacy of the Purple Gentian’s cloak entangled with her skirts. Some witty comment was in order, Amy supposed, but the warmth of the Gentian’s body against hers, the warmth of skin seeking skin through thin layers of fabric, made wit well nigh impossible.

With the uncomfortable feeling that somehow she was losing the thread of the conversation entirely, Amy dragged herself back to the matter at hand. “Where shall we meet to storm the warehouse?”

The Purple Gentian blinked once. Twice. “We?”

The pesky pronoun broke into Richard’s enjoyable contemplation of Amy’s lips. We. There was an ominous ring to that small word.

Amy nodded vehemently. “Of course! I can dress up as a workman. What do you think?”

Richard was spared from answering by the swish and bump of a boat pulling in against the quay. Richard silently promised to pay the boatman an extra large tip for extricating him from what would have undoubtedly been a highly uncomfortable discussion. True, he and Amy were bound to tackle the topic—if not each other—before the night was out, but it would be much better, Richard decided unilaterally, if they tackled it at Amy’s door as he dropped her off. That way he could flee into the night when she disagreed with him. Yes, definitely better for all concerned. Shakespeare knew what he was about when he said that discretion was the better part of valor.

On no account would Richard allow the topic to be brought up while they were in the boat. He didn’t care what ruses and distractions he had to employ; the waters of the Seine were cold and dirty—not to mention, wet—and he had no desire to sample them.

“You waiting for a ride?” the boatman called out, punctuating his words by spitting into the water.

“Yes,” Richard replied, giving the boatman their destination, and hastily hustling Amy on board before she had a chance to demur. One of Amy’s boots caught on the hem of her dress as Richard helped her over the rim of the boat. She pitched forward, making the boat rock back and forth, and the boatman curse in terms it was good Amy couldn’t understand. Leaping lightly into the boat, Richard caught her before she had done more than stumble.

“Tourists,” the boatman muttered, pushing off from the quay.

Richard steadied Amy and helped her down onto the bench. “All right, then?” he asked, settling himself down next to her, one arm around her shoulders—for warmth, of course.

“At least I didn’t fall off the boat,” joked Amy.

In her stumble, Amy had released her iron grip on her cloak. Richard’s grin turned to a frown. “Your dress is torn,” he said harshly, his arm tightening around her shoulders.

“Oh.” Amy glanced down at the long tear stretching from the center of her bodice all the way to the ribbon marking the high waist of the dress. The fabric flapped open, revealing the filmy fabric of her chemise, and the curves below. Amy hastily pulled the edges back together, her face clouding. “That must have happened when I pulled away from Marston. I thought I heard—”

The hand casually resting on her right shoulder clamped into a viselike grip. “I should have hit him harder.”

Something in the Purple Gentian’s tone, an intense anger underlying the seeming calm, made Amy’s eyes fly to his face. He was angry; it burned from every line in his face, from the stern cast of his lips to his narrowed eyes. But there was something more, something deeper, something that warmed Amy deep down under her ripped bodice and spread through her like strong spirits.

“I think you hit him more than hard enough,” Amy reassured the Gentian, abandoning her hold on the edges of her bodice as she twisted on the bench to look him full in his face. “It’s just a ripped dress. And I broke his nose, which I think is rather more than fair return for some torn fabric, don’t you?”

The Purple Gentian failed to answer. For a moment, Amy was worried that he had been struck ill. His eyes were slightly glazed, and, goodness, crossed. Alarmed, Amy searched for the telltale signs of fever. His forehead didn’t seem to be particularly flushed, but his breathing was certainly coming faster.

“Are you all right?”

The Gentian’s head waggled in an indeterminate way that could have been either a shake or a nod.

You shouldn’t, Richard was telling himself, as his right hand hovered over the crevice in Amy’s bodice. You really shouldn’t. He knew he shouldn’t have kissed her back there, in the gardens. Kissing her just made it harder for him to maintain his resolution not to see her—well, not to see her as the Purple Gentian, at any rate. He rather doubted that Lord Richard Selwick would be getting any kisses from Amy for, say, a week, or even two. Agony.

He shouldn’t have kissed her in the Luxembourg Gardens, but he had. And if the kiss in her brother’s study had been a mistake, this last one had been nothing short of a catastrophe; the kiss in the study had been enjoyable, but the kiss in the gardens had set him ablaze. If he gave in to the urge to touch her again, the result was bound to be something on the order of Pompeii: nothing short of mass destruction. There was no logical reason in the world for him to give in to the urge to slip his hand into the tear in Amy’s bodice and every logical reason in the world for him not to.

Illogic had never looked quite so attractive.

In fact, illogic looked remarkably like a pair of well-rounded breasts, rosy areolae more revealed than concealed through the lace trim of a chemise.

“I’ll just check for bruises,” the Gentian said thickly, as his finger dipped into the valley between her breasts.

“Oh, but I’m really not”—Amy gasped as the Gentian’s hand slipped lower under her chemise, brushing against her nipple—“hurt,” she finished weakly.

“Are you sure?” The Purple Gentian’s palm flattened against her breast, the leather of his glove against her skin making her shiver in a way that had nothing to do with the cool night air rising off the Seine.

Amy reconsidered. “No,” she said unevenly. “Not really.” Maybe there were bruises there she hadn’t felt before. Maybe that explained the sensations she felt as his hand grazed over her again as he hastily pulled it from her bodice.

Amy watched as the Gentian lifted his gloved hand to his lips and used his teeth to yank each finger free until the glove pulled loose and plummeted into Amy’s lap.

Just a little touch, Richard promised himself, as his now bare fingers gently parted the torn fabric of Amy’s bodice. He’d just allow himself the briefest of caresses—after all, there might be bruises there she should know about—and then he’d put Amy’s dress back together and bundle her up in her cloak and behave just as properly as if Miss Gwen was sitting there on the other side of the boat chaperoning them.

As soon as Richard’s fingertips touched the silky skin of Amy’s breast, all resolutions were off. The specter of Miss Gwen splashed forgotten into the water, and all pretense of looking for bruises went the same way. He stroked a sensual semicircle around the top of her left breast, delving down into the shadowy area beneath her chemise. Surely the skin on the other side of her breast couldn’t be nearly as soft. . . . But it could. And so could the pale skin all the way around her other breast. Richard traced a complete circuit around each, just to be sure, then trailed his fingers round again for good measure.

Reluctantly, Richard dragged his hand away from Amy’s torn bodice, savoring the last brush of silky skin against his fingertips. “I don’t think there are any bruises.”

“Then why does it ache?” Amy asked, in such a quintessentially Amy tone of indignation that Richard just had to kiss her.

The kiss began as a spontaneous gesture of affection. It began as a quick smack on the lips. It didn’t end that way. The minute Richard’s lips touched Amy’s, her mouth opened eagerly under his and her arms slid up around his neck. And somehow—Richard wasn’t quite sure how it had happened, and, to be honest, wasn’t wasting that much thought on the matter—rather than sitting next to each other on the bench, Amy had somehow slid sideways, and he was half atop her, one elbow propped against the wood of the bench, the other pushing that blasted cloak of hers out of the way.

“I think what you’re feeling,” Richard murmured, coming up briefly for air, “is”—kiss—“desire. Not”—kiss—“bruises.” Having imparted that educational information, his mouth plunged back down on Amy’s.

Amy gasped as the fabric of the Gentian’s shirt brushed against her bare breasts, sending prickles of feeling along an area already teased to the point of agony. She wrapped her arms tighter around him. Pressing up against him, she kissed him as he had been kissing her, flirting with the tip of his tongue, nibbling the edge of his lips.

Richard made one last attempt to think logically.

“We’re outside,” he panted, tearing his mouth from Amy’s.

Since organs other than Richard’s brain were doing about three-quarters of his thinking for him, it wasn’t the most wholehearted of protests. It had about as much effect as most of him had hoped it would. None.

Amy smiled dreamily up at him, lifting a hand to run it along his cheekbones down to his lips. “I know. Have you ever seen so many stars?”

Richard didn’t bother to look up. He didn’t need to. All the stars in the sky shone reflected in the blue depths of Amy’s eyes.

“Shall I fetch you a necklace of them?” he asked tenderly.

Amy’s hand stilled on the Gentian’s cheek. She drew in a sharp breath. “A necklace of stars,” she repeated, her voice unsteady.

Richard’s desire-clogged brain registered alarm. Oh God, what had he said? He hauled himself up on both elbows, ignoring the splinters that plucked at his sleeves.

“Is something wrong?”

Beneath him, Amy’s hair spread in a dark fan. It rippled around her pale face as she slowly shook her head.

“No . . .” Her glazed eyes snapped back into focus, glowing with joy. “No. Everything’s absolutely right.”

“Um, that’s good,” Richard ventured, but he was cut off somewhere around “goo” as Amy flung her arms around his neck and began showering his face with clumsy if exuberant kisses. She kissed his forehead, his cheekbone, the edge of his ear, the rim of his mask (that was clearly an accident), the corner of his lip, the curve of his chin (another accident), and the tip of his nose (which Richard thought might have been intentional, but couldn’t be sure).

What had he said? Richard wished he remembered so that he could say it again, if this was going to be the reaction. But he was too busy enjoying the outcome—in this case, Amy trailing somewhat better-aimed kisses along his ear and his throat—to think too deeply about it. Richard groaned happily and plunged his hands into the lavender-scented mass of Amy’s hair.

Brushing her hair back from her face, he leaned over to return the attentions, bracing his right elbow on the seat next to Amy. At least, he meant to brace his elbow next to Amy. Richard flailed for a moment as his body teetered on the edge of the bench, Amy’s arms around his neck acting as a counterweight keeping him steady. Until, that was, Amy popped up to press a particularly exuberant kiss on his ear.

Ka-thunk!

They landed with a thud on the floor next to the bench, Amy sprawled on top of Richard. The boat careened back and forth as though they were on the high seas in a midwinter tempest, rather than on the Seine on a clear spring night. Since Amy was perched on his rib cage, Richard was having somewhat more difficulty breathing than she was. But, given the view afforded by her gaping bodice, Richard had no inclination to complain.

Little trickles of water frothed up over the edge of the boat, and the boatman spat a curse. “Amants!” He made the word lovers sound like the rankest of insults.

“Amy, amas, amants . . .” Richard chuckled, holding a squirming Amy by the hips as she tried to wiggle off of him.

“Don’t you mean, amo, amas, amat?” Amy giggled the conjugation of the Latin verb “to love.”

“I like my version better,” murmured Richard, nipping her ear.

Amy pushed at the Purple Gentian’s chest with both hands, as she attempted to lever herself up. The boat rocked dangerously.

“I think you’d better stay here,” he whispered, running a hand under her tumbled skirts to capture an ankle. “It’s safer.”

“For whom?” gasped Amy, as the Purple Gentian’s hand rose higher, sliding from her boot-top, following her silk stocking up along the curve of her calf and knee, pausing to toy with the ribbons of her garter. Amy jumped as his finger brushed along the bare skin of her thigh.

“For the boatman, of course.” The Gentian grinned. “Less chance of us capsizing.”

“Oh. I don’t know if that’s—” began Amy, only it came out as, “Iwa wo wo iwa,” because the Purple Gentian made up for the shortcomings in his argument by twining his free hand in Amy’s hair and making sure Amy couldn’t argue back.

Long moments later, he grinned at a breathless Amy. “I thought you’d see it my way.”

All Amy could see were stars, hundreds of stars, thousands of stars, dancing along the backs of her eyelids as he pulled her mouth back down to his, his lips moving on hers as velvet soft as the dark night. Their tongues twined together, warm and sweet. Amy swam in a dizzying wine-dark sea of sensation as the Purple Gentian’s lips moved on hers and his knowing fingers teased the soft skin of her thigh. Was the boat swaying, or was she? Blindly, she slid her hands up under the Gentian’s shirt, the ribbed muscles of his chest the only thing solid and sure in a wildly swaying universe. A dusting of hair tickled her fingertips.

Sensation after sensation assaulted Amy, the brush of hair across her palms and the moist thrust of the Gentian’s tongue. The Gentian’s fingers rubbed up against the fabric of her linen drawers, creating an odd tension that made Amy wiggle and arch towards him. The Gentian released her mouth and lifted his head to capture a ripe pink nipple in his lips. Amy drew back in surprise, but the Gentian refused to be dislodged, sucking and licking and tugging, until the fingers she had raised to his head to try to push him away were twined in the hair under his hood, pulling his mouth closer.

“Oh,” she gasped. The Gentian didn’t reply; his mouth was full.

An even louder “oh!” escaped her as the Gentian’s fingers discovered the slit in her drawers and slid up into her liquid warmth, stroking, searching. . . . Amy cried out as a tremor of pleasure shot through her. Without withdrawing his intimate touch, the Gentian rolled them over so that she lay beneath him, blinking up at him with eyes dark with desire.

“I thought you’d like that,” the Gentian murmured against her lips, before sliding his tongue into her ready mouth.

Moving her hips in restless circles against his fingers, Amy made wordlessly clear to him how much she liked it. She clutched at his shoulders as shivers ran through her that weren’t shivers at all but little lightning jolts of intense pleasure. And then the storm itself broke, dispelling all the tension in her body as torrents of indescribable feeling thundered through her. It swept through her like a shower of shooting stars, touching every nerve in her body with celestial fire.

It was the most wonderful night of her life.

It was about to become the most awful night of his.