Page 43 of One Thing Leads to a Lover

With exaggerated slowness, she carried the drink back to the desk and leaned against its solid bulk. “No luncheon. No dessert. No French brandy.” She lifted the glass to her mouth, let the liquor’s warmth coat her lips, licked it away. “Haven’t you any vices at all?”

By the flickering candlelight, she watched his throat bob in a hard swallow. “Vices? I’m sure I do. Let me see…” He mirrored her easy posture, propping himself against the ledge, crossing his feet at the ankle. “I drink entirely too much coffee, for one. I don’t sleep particularly well, you see. Haven’t for years—though perhaps the coffee is as much the cause of that problem as it is a solution for it.”

“I daresay I could make a similar confession.” She smiled around the tumbler’s edge. “Lately, something has been interfering with my sleep as well.”

His brows rose above the rim of his spectacles.

After another moment, he carefully passed the palm of his free hand over the light of the nearby candle. Almost, but not quite, touching the flame. “I deliberately seek out adventure, excitement, danger. A more serious vice, certainly.” And a warning? When her lips parted to form a retort, he shook his head. “Pray do not try to convince me it is one we also share.”

For just a moment, she doubted herself. Perhaps she ought not to have come tonight.

But no. She had made up her mind. She knew what she wanted from him—and she thought she knew how to get it.

She lifted one shoulder, set the tumbler on the desk beside her. “Well, I am here with you, at your…invitation, shall we call it?”

He pushed his spectacles into their proper place and looked from her to the liquor cabinet and back again. “I believe I underestimated you, your ladyship. Nevertheless, I’m certain it would be a better use of your time to take a solitary stroll through the garden.”

“There’s a chill in the air tonight.”

“Then fetch a shawl.”

“Skitter off like a good little mousie, glad of my narrow escape, you mean?” She straightened. “Seems rather a hollow victory for the brilliant…what am I to call you, now? Magpie? Major Stanhope? Sir La—?”

With a catlike spring, he closed the distance between them, his hard body almost pinning her to the desk. “Not that.”

His sharp denial, the way he bit off each word, reminded her of the way Philip sounded when he had a scraped knee he was determined not to let her probe—“don’t touch!”—but which nonetheless required tending.

Resolutely, she continued. “Why did you lie to my mother?”

“Did I?” He tore his spectacles from his face and tossed them onto the desk. They slid across the polished wood, stopping when they struck the crystal tumbler with a quiet clink. His darkened eyes searched hers. Nothing between them now.

Her heart pounded, though not with fear. “Yes. You denied being…” The name was on the tip of her tongue, but she hesitated, not worried about how he would react if she said it, but wary of her fascination with his volatility. “The man of whom she’d read in the papers.”

“Go on. A woman like you doubtless craves the feel of a title on her tongue. All right, then,” he conceded when she shook her head. “Yes, I’m Sir Langley Stanhope, K.B. Does that string of letters invest a fellow with sufficient pomp and ceremony to suit a countess?” He lowered his lips to her ear, and she shivered as his hot breath skated over her skin. “Were you relieved to discover that the man you’re passing off as your sons’ tutor is in fact a gentleman?”

Closer still, his body, his breath, until every inch of her was aware of every inch of him. He nipped her earlobe with his teeth, and to her shock, a moan of surrender rose in her throat. “Or…” Another nip, this time along her neck, sent a shudder of longing through her. “Were you disappointed to think I might not be a rogue after all?”

When still she did not answer, he soothed the sting of the bite with a flick of his tongue that made her go weak at the knees. “Ah, well, don’ fret yerself, luv,” he reassured her in a coarse accent, like nothing she’d ever heard. “I kin still play rough, since it’s clear as it pleases ye.”

She struggled to bring her ragged breathing under control. “That’s not your voice.”

“Are you quite certain, ma’am?” Those words, still whispered dangerously close to her ear, might have belonged to the foppish aristocrat at the theater.

“Stop it.” Her head spun at this dizzying display of his strange gift. “Who are you, really? Just—just tell me the truth.”

“The truth, your ladyship?” A bitter laugh gusted from chest, but after a moment, he obligingly levered his body away from hers, snatching up the tumbler and draining its meager contents as he threw himself backward, into the desk chair. “Nobody knows who the hell I am.”

Freed of his weight, his touch, she considered taking his earlier advice and leaving. Yet he exerted an inexplicable pull, like the cold moon drawing the warm tide.

In another moment she found herself perched on the edge of the massive desk, her left leg almost resting against his. “I don’t…understand. You’re an intelligence officer.” With uncertain fingertips, she plucked at her skirt. “If there’s some mystery, couldn’t you—clever as you obviously are, and with all the resources at your disposal—couldn’t you…solve it?”

“Who’s to say I’d want to?” His gaze shifted to a point beyond the desk, where the shadows of the room grew deeper, out of reach of the candles he’d lit. Whatever it was he seemed primed to tell her, she was no longer certain she wished to hear.

Still, she did not leave.

“I can’t tell you where I was born,” he began, in that distant voice she did not recognize, “or who was responsible for bringing me into the world. Is Langley my mother’s name? My father’s? The word stenciled on the side of the butcher’s crate in which I was found?” His shrug of apparent indifference pinched her heart. “My first memories are of the alleyways around Newgate, begging, stealing. Whatever it took to get a mouthful of bread.”

She flinched at his almost emotionless retelling of his childhood. This was no mere scrape, to be healed with a jar of salve and a pat on the head, but a wound, deep and bloody.