“Dead?” Tristan halted on the pavement and met her gaze. The green expanse of the park lay across the street. “Dead how?”

She didn’t misunderstand, but grimaced. “I don’t know—all I do know is that he’s dead.”

Henrietta tugged; Tristan checked, then led both females across the street. Henrietta’s huge and shaggy form, her gaping jaws filled with sharp teeth, gave him a perfect excuse to avoid the fashionable area thronging with matrons and their daughters; he turned the questing hound toward the more leafy and overgrown region beyond the western end of Rotten Row.

That area was all but deserted.

Leonora didn’t wait for his next question. “The letter I received yesterday was from the solicitor in Harrogate who acted for Carruthers and oversaw his estate. He informed me of Carruthers’s demise, but said he couldn’t otherwise help with my query. He suggested that Carruthers’s nephew, who inherited all Carruthers’s journals and so on, might be able to shed some light on the matter—the solicitor was aware that Carruthers and Cedric had corresponded a great deal in the months prior to Cedric’s death.”

“Did this solicitor mention exactly when Carruthers died?”

“Not exactly. All he said was that Carruthers died some months after Cedric, but that he’d been ill for some time before.” Leonora paused, then added, “There’s no mention in the letters Carruthers sent to Cedric of any illness, but they might not have been that close.”

“Indeed. This nephew—do we have his name and direction?”

“No.” Her grimace was frustration incarnate. “The solicitor advised that he’d forwarded my letter to the nephew in York, but that was all he said.”

“Hmm.” Looking down, Tristan walked on, assessing, extrapolating.

Leonora glanced at him. “It’s the most interesting piece of information we’ve found yet—the most likely, indeed, the only possible link to something that might be what Mountford seeks. There’s nothing specific in Carruthers’s letters to Cedric, other than oblique references to something they were working on—no details at all. But we need to pursue it, don’t you think?”

He looked up, met her eyes, nodded. “I’ll get someone on it tomorrow.”

She frowned. “Where? In Harrogate?”

“And York. Once we have the name and direction, there’s no reason to wait to pay this nephew a visit.”

His only regret was that he couldn’t do so personally. Traveling to Yorkshire would mean leaving Leonora beyond his reach; he could surround her with guards, yet no amount of organized protection would be sufficient to reassure him of her safety, not until Mountford, whoever he was, was caught.

They’d been strolling, neither slowly nor briskly, towed along in Henrietta’s wake. He realized Leonora was studying him, a rather odd look on her face.

“What?”

She pressed her lips together, her eyes on his, then she shook her head, looked away. “You.”

He waited, then prompted, “What about me?”

“You knew enough to realize someone had taken an impression of a key. You waited for a burglar and closed with him without turning a hair. You can pick locks. Assessing premises for their ability to withstand intruders is something you’ve done before. You got access to special records from the Registry, records others wouldn’t even know existed. With a wave of your hand”—she demonstrated—“you can have men watching my street. You dress like a navvy and frequent the docks, then change into an earl—one who somehow always knows where I’ll be, one with exemplary knowledge of our hostesses’ houses.

“And now, just like that, you’ll arrange for people to go hunting for information in Harrogate and York.” She pinned him with an intent but intrigued look. “You’re the oddest ex-soldier-cum-earl I’ve ever met.”

He held her gaze for a long moment, then murmured, “I wasn’t your average soldier.”

She nodded, looking ahead once more. “So I gathered. You were a major in the Guards—a soldier of Devil Cynster’s type—”

“No.” He waited until she met his gaze. “I—”

He broke off. The moment had come sooner than he’d anticipated. A rush of thoughts jostled through his mind, the most prominent being how a woman who’d been jilted by one soldier would feel about being lied to by another. Perhaps not quite lied to, but would she see the difference? His instincts were all for keeping her in the dark, for keeping his dangerous past and his equally dangerous propensities from her. For keeping her in sublime ignorance of that side of his life, and all it said of his character.

Her eyes on his face, she continued slowly strolling, head tilting as she studied him. And waited.

He drew breath, softly said, “I wasn’t like Devil Cynster, either.”

Leonora looked into his eyes; what she saw there she couldn’t interpret. “What sort of soldier were you, then?”

The answer, she knew, held a vital key to understanding who the man beside her truly was.

His lips twisted wryly. “If you could get access to my record, it would say I joined the army at twenty and rose to the rank of major in the Guards. It would give you a regiment, but if you checked with soldiers in that regiment, you’d discover few knew me, that I hadn’t been sighted since shortly after I first joined.”

“So what sort of regiment were you in? Not the cavalry.”

“No. Not the infantry, either, nor the artillery.”

“You said you’d been at Waterloo.”

“I was.” He held her gaze. “I was on the battlefield, but not with our troops.” He watched her eyes widen, then quietly added, “I was behind enemy lines.”

She blinked, then stared at him, thoroughly intrigued. “You were a spy?”

He grimaced lightly, looked ahead. “An agent working in an unofficial capacity for His Majesty’s government.”

A host of impressions swamped her—observations that suddenly made sense, other things that were no longer so mysterious—yet she was far more interested in what the revelation meant, what it said of him. “It must have been terribly lonely, as well as being horrendously dangerous.”

Tristan glanced at her; that wasn’t what he’d expected her to say, to think of. His mind ranged back, over the years…he nodded. “Often.”

He waited for more, for all the predictable questions. None came. They’d slowed; impatient, Henrietta woofed and tugged. He and Leonora exchanged a glance, then she smiled, tightened her hold on his arm and they stepped out more briskly, circling back toward the streets of Belgravia.

She had a pensive expression on her face, faraway and distant, yet not troubled, not irritated, not concerned. When she felt his gaze, she glanced at him, met his eyes, then smiled and looked ahead.

They crossed the thoroughfare and paced down the street, then turned into Montrose Place. Reaching her gate, he swung it wide, ushered her through, then followed her in. She was waiting to link her arm in his; she was still deep in thought.

He stopped before the steps. “I’ll leave you here.”

She glanced up at him, then inclined her head and reached for Henrietta’s lead. She met his gaze; her eyes were a startling blue. “Thank you.”

Those periwinkle blue eyes said she was speaking of much more than his help with Henrietta.

He nodded, thrust his hands into his pockets. “I’ll have someone on their way to York tonight. I believe you’ll be attending Lady Manivers’ rout?”

Her lips lifted. “Indeed.”

“I’ll see you there.”

Her eyes held his for a moment, then she inclined her head. “Until then.”

She turned away. He watched her go inside, waited until the door shut, then turned and walked away.

Dealing with Tristan, Leonora decided, had become unbelievably complicated.

It was the following morning; she lolled in her bed and stared at the sunbeams making patterns on the ceiling. And tried to sort out what, exactly, was going on between them. Between Tristan Wemyss, ex-spy, ex–unofficial agent of His Majesty’s government, and her.

She’d thought she’d known, but day by day, night by night, he kept…not so much changing as revealing greater and ever more intriguing depths. Facets of his character that she’d never imagined he might possess, aspects she found deeply appealing.

Last night…all had progressed as it usually did. She’d tried, not too hard, admittedly—she’d been distracted by all she’d learned that afternoon—but she nevertheless had made an effort to hold to a celibate line. He’d seemed even more determined, more ruthless than usual in storming her position—and taking her.

He’d whisked her off to a secluded room, one draped in shadows. There, on a daybed, he’d taught her to ride him—even now, just thinking of those moments made her blush. Remembered sensation sent warmth washing through her. The muscles in her thighs now ached, yet in that position she’d been better able to appreciate how much pleasure she gave him. How much sensual delight he took in her body. For the first time in all their interactions, she’d taken the lead, experimented, and gloried in her ability to pleasure him.

Addictive. Enthralling. Deeply satisfying.

That, however, had been the least of the revelations the evening had brought.

When, finally slumped in his arms, heated and replete, she’d nipped his shoulder and told him she liked the sort of soldier he was, he’d sent one hard palm stroking slowly, pensively, down her spine, then said, “I’m not like Whorton, I promise you.”

She’d blinked, then struggled up onto her elbows to frown down into his face. “You’re not anything like Mark.” Her mind had been groggy; the rock-hard, tanned, scarred body beneath her was nothing like what she’d ever imagined Mark’s might be, and as for the man within it…