Page 64 of Every Rogue Has His Charm

“Who would do such a thing?” Fanny asked as they approached the physician’s establishment.

But wasn’t it obvious? Fanny herself had said the duke was dangerous. He’d forcibly expelled the duchess’s father from his house, and all but wished him dead. He must have sent his supposed manservant to finish the job.

The question was why—and would the duchess be next?

Chapter 20

At the first gray light of dawn, Maxim awoke to find his wife snuggled against his chest. Sweeping a few strands of hair from her face, he fought the temptation to rouse her with kisses. He still couldn’t get enough of her. But after the night they’d passed, she surely needed her sleep.

The mere memory curved his lips in a wicked smile, but he slid his arm from beneath her neck and eased himself from the bed before he could act on the impulse. After gathering up last night’s wrinkled clothes from the floor, he put them on again. He did not think his mother-in-law would appreciate him barging back into his former bedchamber at this hour for fresh ones.

On restless, silent feet, and with only two backward glances at Caro’s sleeping form, he left the room. All was silent; even the servants seemed not yet to be about their daily tasks. A chill had settled over the house. Well, he could wait to ring for coffee or a fire. He did not want to incommode Mrs. Horn. An excellent housekeeper was worth her weight in gold, and he did not intend to give her any excuse to leave.

He would occupy the time writing letters, arranging certain matters of business. Sellers would be surprised—and not so secretly pleased—by his benevolent turn. But Maxim wanted information first. Details about Brent-Ashby’s debts. Some sense of the character of the man with whom Lady Catherine fancied herself in love, according to Caro. Lady Laughton’s history with her laudanum-laced “tonic.” So he steered his steps toward the drawing room and Caro’s ridiculous little writing desk.

When he saw the faint seam of light beneath the rear door to the drawing room, his first foolish thought was that he had misjudged the hour after all, and one of the maids had already laid a fire. But why start here? He supposed it might have been light from the windows that made the room comparatively bright. Its warmth suggested a flame, though. Perhaps some member of the Brent family had already risen, come down, and lit a candle?

Beside the door that gave on to the forward part of the drawing room, he paused with caution and listened. Not a sound came from within. When he laid a hand on the door, he half expected to find it locked. But the knob turned easily, silently in his hand. Peering through the narrow opening, he focused first on the desk on the far side of the room, where he supposed Lady Catherine might be penning a letter to her gentleman friend.

What he saw instead made so little sense he at first distrusted his eyes.

“Qu’est-ce que tu fais?” he demanded of Leclerc as he burst into the room. The man was seated cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by neat piles of papers from the crate Sellers had sent and Caro had opened. A single wax taper in a candlestick illuminated the circle.

Leclerc looked up, unperturbed, almost unsurprised. “Organizing, sir,” he answered in French, as he laid a letter atop a pile with one hand while reaching into the crate with the other. He made no motion to rise. “Is it not my job to assist you?” He peered at the document he’d fished from the box before deciding where to put it.

Maxim answered by shutting the door behind him and stepping closer. “Mais oui. And yet I would not have thought of giving you such a task.”

“Porquoi?” Leclerc gave a thin smile as he reached into the crate again.

“Because those papers are written in English.”

The young man glanced around him, blinking as if in surprise. “So they are,” he said, his English accented but flawless.

“You can speak English?”

That ridiculous question was answered with the contempt it deserved. “And read it too. Yes, Monsieur le Duc, my command of your tongue is almost as good as yours of mine. It has…how you say?...come in handy over the years.”

“Handy? How so?” Maxim’s mind whirled, trying both to make sense of what he saw before him and to figure out what he must do next.

Leclerc shook his head. “Really, sir, you disappoint me. You were cleverer before you let yourself grow besotted by your wife.”

The joke was on Leclerc—Maxim had been besotted by Caro long before he’d met the man. “You read my papers. You know the real reason I was in France,” he said. “You figured out what I managed to uncover of the French plans and shared it with those who could use it to anticipate the English response.” He took another step closer. “You’re the reason I’m suspected of being a double agent.”

“Oh, very good,” he replied with a nod, though his eyes narrowed. “Although you never made it easy. You are a man who likes to keep his secrets.”

“Is that what you expect to find in there?” Maxim jerked his chin toward the crate. “My secrets?”

“Quite honestly, I assumed the box was merely a—a decoy. Until you made such a fuss when the duchess and her friend peeked inside.”

Maxim muttered a curse beneath his breath. “Why did you insist on coming with me to England?”

“Never before had you delivered your message to your superiors in person, so I could guess that you had discovered something très important. My assignment was to slow your progress, give my fellow agents a chance to sow doubt about whatever story you planned to tell.”

With the dispassionate clarity of a fellow spy, Maxim could sense the truth of Leclerc’s story. “And you decided that the best way to keep me from reporting to London was to drown me?”

“Not at first, no.”

“Not at first…” Anger simmered in Maxim’s gut like a well-stoked fire as he recalled Mrs. Drummond’s suspicions. “Good God. Caro’s illness. You—you—”