Yes, they would suit, he thought, watching her with a sort of possessive wonderment. Neither one of them knew a damn thing about marriage, or even love. But they both confronted challenges resourcefully and resiliently, and they both would cherish the bloody hell out of every moment, knowing how precious and few they truly were. They would make love like animals, and face challenges like warriors.
He didn’t feel he had the right to ask her yet to make a promise to him until he’d settled things with Brundage.
But they both understood that promise was already implicit. They were made for each other.
Aurelie was mute with awe for a time after they reboarded the mail coach. The frighteningly swift, skillful way in which Hawkes had seized the upper hand and maneuvered the circumstance in their favor when five soldiers were staring them down was clearly a glimpse of him acting in his professional capacity. It was rather extraordinary. She felt proud and unsettled—and, quite frankly, aroused. She hadn’t realized until she’d met Hawkes that competence could be so unutterably thrilling.
He seemed to understand people swiftly and thoroughly, and this underscored for her how very much he knew of the world and how very little she did. And yet he never condescended to her.
He needed what she had to give, and the opposite was true as well. She wanted to bring him peace. She longed to make him happy.
They were the qualities he brought to bear as a lover, too: The ferocity, and insight. And a vulnerability she sensed he’d likely never shown another person. There was, improbably, an innocence in it. They were both new to real love.
She understood, too, how terrifying and implacable an enemy he would be—and how coldly tenacious. And at this she knew another thrill, a colder one at knowing the man who had inflicted such grave harm on both of them would soon be at Hawkes’s mercy.
Before they’d boarded the mail coach that morning, he’d told her about the astonishing way in which the two of them were going to return to The Grand Palace on the Thames. He’d arranged this with Captain Hardy before he’d departed.
It apparently all depended on whether a ribbon was tied to the hook upon which the light was hung. And despite everything, she was rather looking forward to it.
A harrowing few moments ensued after they bid a fondish farewell to the Farquhars, who urged them to visit. There was a bit of a wait for a hack, during which Aurelie felt exposed and tensed every time she caught a snatch of the color red out of the corner of her eye, lest more soldiers appear. Hawkes’s composure never wavered.
But he’d noticed Aurelie watching, somewhat wistfully, as the Farquhars departed.
“We’ll have friends,” he told her, quietly. With a sort of wry conviction.
We’ll.She smiled up at him. Those three wordsvividly conjured a future that lay on the other side of this day.
He smiled back at her, thrust out a hand, and a hack rolled to a halt, and they were away again.
Nearly thirty minutes later, at half past two o’clock in the afternoon, Aurelie and Hawkes emerged from a wardrobe in the room on the first floor of The Grand Palace on the Thames.
Hawkes had instructed the hack driver who had delivered them to the entrance of the livery stables to bring Aurelie’s trunk to The Grand Palace on the Thames within the next hour, since it was simply logistically impossible to drop it down a hatch in a horse stall and maneuver through a tunnel that still smelled vaguely of a very singular blend of tobacco.
Hawkes had managed to employ one of the local, usually inebriated men that he had met and bribed earlier to knock on the door of The Grand Palace on the Thames to alert Hardy to his return with a code word he and Hardy had agreed upon earlier—“Gargoyle”—so the floor of the wardrobe was cleared for them.
Aurelie, her heart thundering, had silently followed his lead, as though in a terrifying and exhilarating dream.
And before he turned the knob of the door to emerge into the hallway of The Grand Palace on the Thames, Hawkes pulled Aurelie into his arms and kissed her as hungrily as if it were the first, or last, time.
They held on to each other, and both were imagining a time where they could linger together behind a locked door for hours, if they so chose.
“I’ll return in a few hours,” he told her gruffly, confidently.
With a certain resolve, he finally turned the doorknob. They emerged into the hallway, where they startled Dot bearing a tray. She stared at them, at first dumbstruck, then puzzled.
And then comprehension set in, along with delight.
“Welcome back!” she said brightly, finally. “Will you be in for dinner?”
The next person on the scene, almost at once, was Captain Hardy.
“Lady Aurelie,” Captain Hardy said gently, “would you be so kind as to join my wife and Mrs. Durand in the sitting room? They will be delighted and relieved to see that you have returned safely. I must speak to Mr. Hawkes on a matter of some urgency.”
It was Captain Hardy’s gracious way of saying he needed a word alone with Hawkes. Immediately.
Her heart gave a painful thud. She turned to Hawkes.
He nodded subtly, and his eyes were so tender and bracing she thought her heart would simply crack from the simultaneous worry and joy.