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“Because she’s so sweet and charming and attached to you?”

“Because Clive asked me to, and because whoever tampered with that carriage, did it to get at me, but caused Allegra real harm.”

“How is she?”

“Improving.”

“Clive didn’t ask you to stay longer than the ball?”

“No.”

Hazelwood let her think about that. The best possible outcome would be for her to descend with him now through the sleeping house and let him take her to the room above Kirby’s shop prepared for her. She need only take her guidebook. The government could replace anything she left behind. She would be safe. He held himself still while she thought, though his toes were growing decidedly cold.

She let out a breath. “Surely, Clive doesn’t want the information I have. He’s not a spy.“

“But his friend Malikov most likely is.”

She went back to her thinking, and he tucked his cold hands under his arms. “So Malikov might exert some pressure on Clive to…” Her voice trailed off, puzzled.

“To get information from you.” He didn’t want to admit to his deeper fear that Malikov was planning to abduct her.

The bedclothes rustled around her. “And this is what you came here in the night to my room, against all protocol and decorum and sense, to tell me?”

He felt off-balance. There was no point in admitting anything else. His feelings about her had changed, had grown into a fitting punishment for a man who had in his youth disdained propriety and who now was well-served in loving a woman he could not wed without involving her in his own ruin and disgrace. Such selfish love did not deserve to be called love at all.

“Hazelwood, think,” she said.

He was trying to. “Leave with me now, and I will get you to secure place, where the enemy can’t reach you.”

“And help me prove that my father is alive?”

Was her father alive? Hazelwood doubted it, but if the proof was in that guidebook, he would gladly help her uncover it. Goldsworthy would ask him to betray her again, but Hazelwood could not lose her more than she was already lost to him. The thought cleared his head.

“Of course.”

“Liar. You don’t believe he’s alive.” She spoke without anger or resentment, a reasonable woman stating a fact.

“Alive or dead, your father would want you safe.” That was a truth he could agree on.

“My father would want me to finish the mission. He would want the information he gathered to get into the right hands.”

Hazelwood heard the bedclothes rustle again. A draft of warm air full of the scent of her washed over him. More silken noise, and she struck a light on the bedside table. The glow illuminated her hands and the lace cuffs of her night rail. Her toes peeked from under the hem of the modest gown. The sheet and coverlet had been flung back on the bed exposing the slight depression where her hips had lain. The narrow bed called to him and he turned from it.

She faced him with the book in her hand. “You took it before. Now, I’m giving it to you.”

Extravagant declarations rose to his lips. The book didn’t matter. Goldsworthy didn’t matter. England didn’t matter. The Russians could have the book. They could have the whole of the East for all he cared, its vast deserts, its towering mountains, and its passes to India, if she would come with him.

He steadied himself and swallowed the words clamoring inside him. She would smack him in the head for such sentiment.

“Kiss me,” he said.

She shook the book at him. “Take it.”

“Kiss me first,” he amended. “Put it down, and kiss me.”

“A kiss won’t change my mind.”

“If you’re so sure, you have nothing to lose.”