“We’ve only the mutton sausage, and the gentlemen ate half already.” His wife glowered, swathed from skinny neck to knee in dull cambric. “Nothing else came today but them and the eggs, and I’ll be saving those for breakfast.”

“Mutton sausage will do splendidly.” Kitty moved toward the woman, away from the fire and the large man.

“Didn’t expect the Quality to be taking up with us tonight,” Mrs. Milch muttered in a damp voice.

“Don’t have anything on hand.”

Kitty followed her and Emily up the stairs. But at the top she could not help glancing back. Lord Blackwood watched her. No grin lit his face now, only a glint behind the indolence of something cold and sharp.

That night three years ago his warm, dark eyes had glimmered with that steel. Across a dimly lit ballroom he had looked at her as he did now, and that was all she had needed to redirect the course of her life.

For three years Kitty had wondered if her imagination had invented that hard gleam to serve her own need at the time. Now she knew.

Chapter 3

“Katherine Savege is here.” Leam scraped the razor along his chin. “And Lady Emily Vale.”

“Lady Katherine, the unwed exquisite?” Yale lounged in the chamber’s single wooden chair, playing a guinea between his fingers. Back and forth, gold flickered in the thin morning light filtering through the window. Nothing wasted. The game improved agility.

“The very one. Haut société. Political. She frequents the Countess of March’s salon,” and through friends at that salon six months earlier, she had sealed a treasonous lord’s fate.

“Beauty and intelligence.” Yale’s gaze remained on the coin. “But the latter would not interest the cretin Earl of Blackwood.”

“Her mother plays cards.”

“Ah. More to the point.”

“Lady Katherine has a number of close acquaintances on the Board of Admiralty in particular.”

With a flick of his wrist, the Welshman pocketed the coin. “Not our business, then.”

“Not any longer.” Cold metal swished along Leam’s skin. Soap dropped to the cloth below, laden with the past. “Deuced inconvenient, though.”

“Then why are you shaving?”

Leam drew the linen from about his neck and swiped it across his clean cheeks and chin. He ran his hand along the smooth skin. By God, it felt good to be civilized again.

“It was on the schedule,” unlike this detour that kept him from Alvamoor where he should be by now. Damn Jin for changing their rendezvous from Bristol to Liverpool. If it weren’t for the snow, Leam would have left it to Yale and washed his hands of the Falcon Club’s business once and for all.

“Who is Lady Emily?”

Leam knotted his cravat. “Less than a fortnight off the job and already losing your edge? You were introduced to her at Pembroke’s ball last spring.”

Yale’s face sobered. “Athena?”

“She goes by Marie Antoine now, apparently.”

The Welshman stood and headed for the door. “Well, I shall be off and away before les belles bestir themselves for breakfast.”

“Two feet of snow on the ground.” If Leam could bear to abuse his animals so, he would saddle his horse and take Bella and Hermes to the road without delay. But he could not. He was well trapped hundreds of miles from where he ought to be two days hence. “Where do you expect to go?”

“I shall dig a trench to the dock, purloin a punt, and once at the river’s mouth cast mine eyes to the sea in search of a tardy privateer.”

“Wyn.”

“Leam?”

“Behave yourself.”

The younger man bowed with a flourish. Save for snowy linens, he wore all black, his single honest affectation. “As ever, my lord.”

Leam tugged his coat over his shoulders, leaving it unbuttoned. Trapped in an inn with a pair of ladies who moved in the highest circles, he could not yet fully divest himself of the court jester; his public persona was too well-known. At home there would be fewer encounters with the existence he had led for half a decade. There he could dress and behave as he pleased. He would not go to Edinburgh. He had no reason to see others, and sufficient work on his estate to keep him there. He had neglected it for too long already, and not only the estate.

He slipped a knife into the slit sewn into his sleeve at the wrist. Company had followed on the road the previous day. But each time they stopped to water the horses, the path had been empty and no one caught them up. Someone was following at a discreet distance.

The inn’s ground floor was no more than a rustic ale room, set now for breakfast. Sounds stirred in the kitchen behind a door, the clinking of dishes and the continuous limp scold of the innkeeper’s wife to her lord and master. The aroma of coffee tinted the fire-warmed air.

Lady Emily sat in a chair before the hearth, a book between her hands and a pair of spectacles perched atop the bridge of her nose. She glanced up with an abstracted squint.

“Good morning, my lord.”

“Guid morning, ma’am.”

“Breakfast is to be served shortly. Eggs and little else, I believe.” Brow furrowed, she returned her attention to her page.

Leam went around beneath the stair to the rear foyer. On hooks hung two ladies’ cloaks, his own overcoat, and several others of lesser quality. The exit let onto the yard behind the inn, and Leam had not yet investigated it in the light of day. But danger rarely entered through the front door.

The heavy wooden panel, bloated with damp, stuck. He nudged it with his boot and it jerked open.

Lady Katherine Savege, standing on the tiny covered porch, swung about, slipped, and tumbled forward.

Leam grabbed her up. Her hands clutched his coat sleeves. Her breath hiccupped, sending a cloud of frosty air between them. He scanned her face, a swift perusal of fine features—pert nose, wide mouth, eyes shrouded with thick lashes. She wore neither bonnet nor cap. Her satiny hair, dark like crushed walnut shells and carefully plaited with bejeweled combs, enhanced the perfect cream of her skin.

“Weel, nou, maleddy,” he said slowly. “Mind the ice.”

“I beg your pardon, my lord.” She did not lift her gaze. To his surprise.

Leam did not care for surprises.

Her breaths came rapidly against his chest. Her grip on him slackened and her arms dropped.

“I lost my balance when the door opened. The step is slick, yet I came out only in slippers. I wished to see the depth of the snow.”

“Did ye?”

“I shall be quite careful not be so careless again.” Her voice grew cooler with each utterance. Here was the sort of female with whom Leam had little commerce. Ladies like Katherine Savege held their own counsel and had done him little good in his former labors. But he was no longer an agent of the crown constantly seeking information. He could now do as he pleased, and he held a beautiful woman in his arms.

And despite her unwed state, Lady Katherine was no innocent. Of this he was certain.

“But yer a pretty bundle, lass.”

She stiffened, the effect of which was to flatten her thighs quite nicely to his.

“I am not a bundle. You should have already released me. You do know that, don’t you? Or is what they generally say of you actually true?”

“Aye, yer a bundle, an than some, wi’ that tongue.”

“My tongue is none of your concern. And I am not a lass. I am six-and-twenty. Rather, nearly so, on February twelfth.”

“Nearly? Who woud hae thought it?”

Her lips were a stony line Leam might soften; laughter would sit well upon them. Her remarkably large gray eyes, the color of wistful fall thunderclouds, slowly drew upward beneath a veil of sooty lashes.

“Will I truly be obliged to order you to unhand me, or were you planning on doing so shortly?”

By God, she felt good in his arms, her full breasts pressed against his chest, hips nestled comfortably along his thigh. Remarkably good. Would that the rumors spread about him were true.

Alas, it was largely smoke and mirrors to start the ladies talking. Informing. After that first job in the East Indies, three quarters of the work had been encouraging gossip.

“Eventually,” he said.

“Ah. Finally a word I recognize. Unfortunately, the wrong word.”

Leam couldn’t help chuckling. Her lashes flickered.

“My lord, you are a renowned flirt. But perhaps you are not aware that I am not likewise. Unhand me now.”

He should. He had no desire to. Warm feminine beauty pressing to his body, a cool clever tongue soothing his ear, and a lovely face shaped with intelligence could not be abandoned so abruptly.

“Whit threats will ye level if I dinna, I wonder?”

She tilted up her nose, releasing upon him the full force of her glorious eyes.

“I would not demean myself by leveling threats at a gentleman. But are you one?” Her voice was frosty. But those eyes … they questioned, far beyond her words. And within the thunderclouds, Leam fancied, a song wept.

His chest hollowed.

He released her.

She smoothed her palms over her skirt. Without again looking at him, and without a word, she went into the building.

Leam stood on the porch, boots sunk in snow, heartbeat quick and uneven. His stomach sickened at that sensation in his chest, for so long so alien to him. Clearly, that bit of flirtation had been a mistake.

He would not repeat it.

Kitty willed her racing pulse to slow. She’d never imagined that the removal of facial hair could transform a merely handsome man into…