Page 93 of The Number of Love
“Is irrelevant.” He used his free hand to brush her hair from her cheek. “Camden is the best pilot we have. He can get me there and back safely.”
“You can’t even be sure there’s a codebook to be found. It could have burned up in the wreckage.”
“Maybe. But I have to try. You know how you hear numbers? I get urges. Impressions. Feelings, maybe, though I know you consider that a curse word.” He grinned, but it only earned him a shake of her head. “This is right.”
A bigger shake of her head. “It doesn’t feel right to me. It feels wrong. Really wrong.”
He tilted his head, let that settle. Was it only his pride that made him want to seek out these answers himself? To get back into the thick of things? No. If it were that, he’d rather scour the streets of London, hunting down this man who didn’t have his grey overcoat anymore. He’d want to stay close to her, to Dot, where he could protect them. Because it made him antsy to think of leaving them here alone when that bloke was still at large and obviously dangerous.
But still that urgency thrummed in his chest. “Can you trust me, Margot? Can you trust that I’m certain? That this is the Lord leading me?”
She made a noise he couldn’t quite classify—a squeak of protest? A whimper?—and gripped his wrist. “I don’t want to lose you. I can’t. I can’t lose anyone else right now.”
He could promise to come home, but she wouldn’t believe him. She would have numbers to prove how many promised it and failed to deliver. And she had a point. There were never any guarantees. Even being sure God wanted him to do this didn’t mean he’d come home safely. Sometimes God’s will meant bullets searing flesh.Death coming too soon. Sometimes God’s will was to let man taste the consequences of his folly and his hatred and his supposed self-sufficiency.
Sometimes God let people die. Let His children break. And then pieced them back together into something new. Something that He could use for His glory instead of theirs.
He nudged her chin up, bent his head down. Caught her lips with his. They tasted as sweet as they had the first time. Were as hesitant and yet as welcoming. He savored each second, lingered one more. And then pulled away. “I need to go and talk with Camden. Why don’t you come and stay with Dot? You shouldn’t go home alone.”
She shook her head. “I’ll stay here. I need to work.”
He sighed, knowing well there’d be no talking her out of it. And it was quite possibly the safest place she could be, so he wouldn’t argue. With a brush of his fingers down her neck, he stepped away. “All right. I’ll let you know before I leave, if there’s time. I don’t know if we’ll have to wait for daylight to take off or not.”
She folded her arms across her middle, the red cardigan hugging her tight. “Drake.”
He paused a step away, lifted his brows.
She couldn’t seem to wrap her lips around whatever it was she wanted to say. She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again. Dragged in a breath. Met his gaze. “Eighteen.” It had the sound of a word pulled by force from her mouth. Strenuous. Weighty.
The word that had bidden her to pray for him. The word that had echoed in her mind on that day so fateful to them both. The number that meant him in her mind.
He smiled and took a step backward. “I love you too.”
And she smiled.
None of the words Das Gespenst knew in any of his five languages was strong enough. He’d managed to grab only his lightweight blue jacket for his shimmy out the window, and it wasn’t nearly enough against the chill. He’d been hunkered down in this alley all blastednight, careful to shrink his frame with a hunch in his back. A cough threatened to attack his lungs after the hours spent in the cold damp.
Blast it all. Whowasthat girl? She was from a genteel family—she shouldn’t have known such moves.
It had been so simple a plan. Give Dorothea Elton a slash across the shoulder to prove himself serious, then grab her and hold the knife to her throat. Demand Margot De Wilde fetch him the codebook the High Command wanted. And then, while she was fetching that—only then, once his assignment was being completed—a sweet taste of revenge.
Elton.
It had seemed so beautifully simple. So perfect, that they were all connected—the universe handing him not only the summation to one of the tasks he’d been sent here to achieve, but revenge as well. A bit of recompense for all this war had taken from him.
He leaned his head back against the brick wall behind him and kept his eyes trained on Dorothea Elton as she made her way inside the Old Building, accompanied by an armed guard. In, no doubt, to be with her friend. Connected. Together. But they couldn’t stay in there forever. They’d emerge, those young women, either together or separately.
He wasn’t out of moves yet. He would get the High Command their blasted codes. He would deliver them a fine target for their bombs.
And he would have his revenge.
29
Margot blinked awake slowly, not quite sure where she was or why there was such a babble around her. Something soft was under her back, something warm tucked around her. But it took an entire six and a half seconds to realize that she was in DID’s office, on the leather sofa he kept against the wall. And the corridors were alive with the thrum of many voices going about their daily tasks.
She sat up, eyes searching for a clock. The last she’d known, Drake and Camden were in a Sopwith, flying across the Channel with the first hint of dawn. And so she’d come in here, sat down, thought to breathe for a minute. She’d tried to pray.
She’d managed only to clench her fingers together and say, “Please. Please.” Would God count that as a prayer? One of the mutterings of the soul that the Spirit made sense of before the Father?
