The Soldier and the Spy--A Gay Regency Romance by Annabelle Greene

Author:Annabelle Greene [Greene, Annabelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Carina Press
Published: 2021-01-14T13:34:54+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

The air of St. Peter’s Church was impossibly draughty after the warm, candlelit corridors of the Society. August slid easily between the statue of an angel and a well-polished tomb, one of the many West London entrances to headquarters, with a shudder that didn’t come entirely from the cold.

His body felt heavy. Slow, dreaming, as if he had left a part of himself in the bed upstairs. Upstairs in Frakes’s arms, forgetting who he was.

He couldn’t forget who he was. He certainly hadn’t been planning to forget. But with Frakes’s arms around him, his thighs pressed against his own, his deep voice whispering how good he felt, how...oh, Lord.

Then had come the questions, the anger, then the general sense of the ridiculous. The most ridiculous thing, of course, being how much he cared about the whole nonsensical business. His guilt had not only grown teeth, it was threatening to eat him alive.

“You fool,” he murmured to himself shakily as he rummaged through his cigar case, pulling out the one that looked the most potent. He would need enough tobacco to fell an ox. “Did you even look for letters?”

Of course he hadn’t looked for letters. He hadn’t looked for anything even remotely incriminating. He had been far too busy being incriminating, doing deeply incriminating things with the man he was meant to be ruining.

With his tinderbox and a good deal of careful manoeuvring, he lit his cigar. A small sin in the great scheme of things, lighting a cigar in church, but a sin all the same. Taking snuff would add more authenticity to his thin veneer of aristocratic manners—there were certainly enough flavours of snuff scattered around headquarters to energise the entire metropolitan population. Cigars were somewhat gauche and definitely fiddly, but sometimes one needed to look at a distant horizon and simply smoke.

He needed to think. He needed to think long and hard about every single terrible choice that had brought him to this point—the agony of two fates, each one full of lies. Telling Frakes everything and suffering the consequences, or telling him nothing. Continuing the deception, each day spent with the captain making it less and less easy to ruin him.

He walked out into the bustling London street the church stood on, puffing on his cigar as he let his mind relax. Let the old, arrogant mastery of himself, the self-possession that had seen him in such good stead with Lord Eustace, slowly take control again.

If only a Starling would come along. It was unutterably strange not seeing the usual array of pinched faces looking at him from street corners. August, wincing at the heavy, fulfilled ache that came from his muscles as he silently turned, eyed the childless landscape with a sinking heart.

He knew he should feel full of regret. He should be weeping, or tearing his hair out, or—or something. Something that meant he was a good man, a kind man, who understood how meaningful the night he had just shared truly was.

All he felt was fear.

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