Page 69 of Every Rogue Has His Charm

“So?”

“Spoken like a man,” she tossed back with a sigh of exasperation.

“If there’s a scandal, I know a pretty little stone manor house in the country where we could escape until things blew over.”

His enthusiasm was both boyish and contagious. Still, she hesitated. “We’d be deceiving everyone.”

“Darling, we’re spies. Deception is part of the job. All that matters is that we aren’t deceiving ourselves or each other, about what we want, or how we feel.”

“You might change your mind, decide you do want to settle down after all. You’re young—”

“If you bring up my age one more time, Fanny Drummond, so help me I’ll…”

“You’ll what?” she demanded, lifting her chin.

Wickedness sparked in his eyes as he leaned toward her and whispered something in her ear, something so very wanton she wasn’t even sure it was possible.

Her heart began to pound, and she clenched her thighs against the echo of its erratic pulse in her sex. “That, um…that doesn’t exactly sound like a punishment.”

If she’d thought his eyes wicked before, they were nothing to his smile. “Then imagine how I’d like to reward you for being good.”

She swallowed, suddenly fearful she might melt into a puddle on the spot and trickle away over the edge of the cliff. “All right. I won’t mention that you’re only four and twenty.” One remarkably, enticingly stern brow arced skyward in warning. “I’ll simply ask what will happen if you should grow weary of me, or decide you want something different from our arrangement?”

“If I’m willing to trust you with my life as my partner in espionage, don’t you think you can trust me to tell you how I feel? How’s this, for starters?” He took both of her hands in his, giving her no opportunity to hide from his steady regard. “I’ve known and admired you for some months. I find you amusing and clever and beautiful. And I would like nothing better than a chance to know you even better—and not only in the carnal sense,” he added with a wink.

Nervousness and excitement and uncertainty and joy mingled inside her, rushing out in a trembling laugh. “Oh. That sounds an awful lot like a proposal.” Though admittedly, nothing like the one she’d received almost a decade ago.

“Well, it’s not,” he insisted. “Because experience has taught you that marriage is the opposite of freedom, Fan. And I want no part of making you feel like a prisoner. In fact…” He dropped to one knee in front of her and brought their clasped hands to his heart. “I vow on my honor never to ask you to marry me.”

She laughed again and flushed and tried to tug him to his feet, certain that the scattering of passersby must imagine they were witnessing quite the opposite of what was actually taking place.

“That way,” he went on, rising at her urging and stepping somehow closer still, “if you should one day say, ‘Fitz, will you marry me?’ I’ll know for certain your feelings about the matter have changed. But a proposal of marriage has nothing to do with my feelings for you.”

No one had ever said such marvelous things to her before. Which was to say, no one had ever troubled himself to listen to her before, or to think what it was she would like to hear.

“All right,” she agreed with a breathless nod. “Let’s try.”

He beamed as he looped her arm through his. “Have you a great deal of packing to do?” She could guess by the tone of the question that he hoped to spend the rest of the morning, and perhaps some of the afternoon, in quite another fashion.

“No. But I would dearly love to take a bath.”

“Mmm.” Desire flared in his eyes. “How fortunate, then, that you have a footman so ready and willing to fetch your hot water.”

“And wash any places I can’t reach?” she teased.

“Oh, most assuredly. Along with a few places you can.”

A shiver of anticipation passed through her. She was quite sure the world wasn’t ready for a lady spy and her lover. There would be whispers and probably far worse. At times it might feel as if they were drowning, swimming against the current of society’s rules.

But as together they turned their backs on the channel and began to walk toward their future, she fully believed that love would prove more powerful than the tide.

Chapter 22

Maxim had been to General Zebadiah Scott’s office in the Horse Guards many times in his younger days. But very little had changed in the intervening years. The view of the parade ground from the window did not alter much with the season. Unless Scott’s aide had recently made a clean sweep of things, the desk was always buried beneath a mountain of books and papers. Scott himself still looked like an absentminded grandfather, with his spectacles perched on his forehead and a smear of ink on one sleeve.

Behind that disguise hid the brightest mind Maxim had ever known.

Perhaps the only notable difference to either the room or the man was that no tobacco smoke wreathed his head, though its warm scent still clung to the dark blue drapes. A cursory glance revealed the pipestem peeking from beneath a stack of important-looking documents. Maxim hoped the pipe was unlit.