Free The Mayfair Affair by Tracy Grant Page A

reached the door, he said, "O'Roarke."
    "Yes?" Raoul turned back, gripping the door handle.
    "If they know about Suzette, they probably know about you. Have a care."
    A rare, unironic smile crossed Raoul's face. "I always do, Malcolm. But thank you."

    Suzanne dropped down on her dressing table bench, hugging her arms across her chest. "I'm sorry."
    Malcolm studied his wife. He felt oddly as he had when she'd first stumbled out of the trees in the Cantabrian Mountains, smeared with blood and dirt, eyes bright with determination. "It isn't your fault, Suzette."
    "I didn't say it was." Her voice was steady, but she was hugging herself as though she had a chill.
    "No, but I can tell what you're thinking."
    "Damn it, Malcolm, do you have to read me so well?"
    "Making up for all the things I missed." He dropped down on the bench beside her. "You said it yourself. This was always a risk."
    Her gaze shot to Jessica asleep in her cradle and then to the closed door that led to the night nursery. "We're all at risk, thanks to me."
    "We all wouldn't be here if it weren't for you." He reached for he hand. He wondered sometimes if he would find it harder to forgive her if he we weren't so worried that she wouldn't be able to forgive herself.
    Her fingers tightened round his own, though her hand was cold. "And now Raoul's involved."
    "Given the circumstances, I think it's just as well. Annoying as he can be, I can't deny he's helpful."
    She looked at him, her gaze unexpectedly fragile. "It can't but—"
    "Raise issues? Given everything, we'd be fools to imagine we could avoid him for a month together."
    "Malcolm—"
    He folded her hand between both his own. "I'm doing my best, Suzette. We'd be mad to pretend any of this is going to be easy. But we're managing to make it work. We both know there really isn't any alternative. O'Roarke is so tangled up in both our lives, we're going to have to manage to make it work with him. And even if we avoid him, I don't think either of us could really manage not to think about him."
    "I'm sorry." She drew back a fraction of an inch. "I'm sure I'm the last person you want to talk to about this. I just wish you had someone to talk to."
    He bit back a laugh, trying to imagine confiding in anyone about Raoul O'Roarke. Even David, with whom he had shared secrets from boyhood. Or Harry Davenport, his companion at Waterloo, who had made his own bitter confidences to Malcolm about his past and marriage. "The truth is, I don't know what I think or feel myself when it comes to O'Roarke. If I did know—I don't know that I'd tell you."
    Suzanne inclined her head. The fragile moment was gone. Hard reality had settled in her eyes. "This is going to be a test, isn't it? Of how well we can manage to go on with the truth in the open."
    "We've been managing to go on for three months."
    "But we haven't had an investigation. We haven't been thrown into the world of Carfax and Raoul and the Elsinore League. I always knew we'd have to eventually, but I was hoping it wouldn't be so soon. It's one thing to trust each other planning dinners and writing speeches and taking the children to the park. It's another looking into secrets of people close to us."
    "We've both always been good at meeting a challenge."
    Her smile was bright as armor. "Quite." She pushed a hairpin into the hasty knot she had twisted her hair into when they left for the Brown Bear. "Darling— have you considered that there's one person this new information gives an excellent motive to have killed Trenchard?"
    He didn't pretend to misunderstand or make the instinctive denial he would have three months ago. "Trenchard had just written the letter. You couldn't have known."
    "Unless I learned some other way." She adjusted another hairpin. "Or Trenchard decided to summon me instead."
    "You were in bed with me when Trenchard was killed."
    "I expect I could have slipped out without waking you." She took another pin from a heart-shaped enamel box, a gift from