Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

“It could be worse. He could have attacked . . . elsewhere.” She fell back on the bed, sputtering into laughter.

“I was thinking that.” He twisted free from her and detached the kitten, paw by paw, till he held it up by the scruff of the neck. He stood with it, magnificently naked, hugely erect, looking frustrated. He and the cat glared at one another, man to cat, cat to man. “A Baldoni watch cat. I should have expected this.”

She giggled like a schoolgirl. “A gray cat. Un gatto grigio.”

“I hated that nickname.” He gave a grin. “I’ll evict him.” He held the cat against his chest, stroking its head with one finger, and padded over to the door to undo the protections she’d placed there and put the intruder out.

Because she laughs at me, Pax thought. Because she’s never had a lover who gave a damn about her. Because we both may die soon. Because she’s beautiful.

I have to make this good for her.

Cami curled on the bed, biting her knuckles to keep laughter inside. Her breasts were pebbled up. The lithe, strong muscles of her thighs shook in fine tremors, thrusting a little toward him. Wanting. Ready.

He’d known the mechanics of this. He hadn’t known how he’d feel when he threw himself into this maelstrom and let it pull him under.

“If I don’t have you soon, I’m going to die,” he said.

“Come between my legs.” She opened her arms to him. Opened her knees. “Now.”

“Now,” he agreed. “Before Fate calls up hellhounds and vultures as well as cats.”

She drew him down to her. It wasn’t so complicated. Not when he wanted her this much. There, at the center, she was slick. She pressed against his hand when he stroked her hair aside.

When he entered, she rose to meet his cock. More than meet him, she thrust herself against him. He was inside her and she was smooth and beautiful, warm as rose madder. She closed around him and closed tight.

With everything he was, he drove into her. Again. Again.

Hard, he drove into her, felt her thrust back to him. Return everything he gave. Delight in it, need it, glory in it. All her strength answered to his.

She sobbed in a way that was also laughing. Her fingers clawed into him and she groaned deep in her throat. She tightened everywhere around him. Her entire body stiffened and thrashed hard, suddenly, once, twice, again, again.

The pleasure was like exploding everywhere, helplessly. He was in time, barely, to withdraw from her and spend against her thigh.

She shuddered one last time and softened under him and he collapsed on her, sucking in air. It smelled like lovemaking.

Men didn’t talk about this part, about holding a woman afterward, both of you plastered together, damp everywhere, your bodies somehow melting into each other.

I’ll keep you alive, Cami. I swear it.

He said, “I’m glad one of us wasn’t a virgin.”

The blankets and sheets were everywhere, but he laid his hand on one and pulled it up to drag over both of them. There didn’t seem to be any more hidden animals.

Cami lay perfectly limp. When he pulled her in next to him, she poured into the space like water. His cock stirred. Soon they’d make love again.

She opened her eyes. “What did you say about virgins?”

“Not anymore,” he said.

In the early hours of the morning, when the Crocodile tavern in Covent Garden was filled with petty tradesmen and laborers on their way to work, William Doyle took his ease at a narrow table in the dark corner, engaged in quiet conversation, eating breakfast, collecting information. He wore a leather vest and plain shirt, and around his neck, a Belcher neckerchief. Anyone glancing in his direction would assume he transported wagonloads of bricks for a living or sold cattle at Smithfield Market or, if they got a closer look, that he routinely committed theft with violence.

The young man across from him might have served in a draper’s shop or sold expensive gloves or pounded Latin into the heads of reluctant schoolboys. He was, in fact, a freelance seller of secrets. A collector of errors in judgment. An entrepreneur in other men’s moral failings. A blackmailer, in season.

“I need to know by tonight. Noon is better,” Doyle said.

“You give me very little time.”

“Nobody has any time,” Doyle said. “Give me hints, rumors, a whisper . . . anything.”

“I make no promises.”

“Do what you can.” Doyle slid a folded banknote across the table. It was covered smoothly and instantly by a slender, well-kept hand. The younger man rose from his bench and left like an amiable snake setting off to swallow barn rats.

At the tavern door he brushed past Bernardo Baldoni, entering.

Bernardo stepped to one side and stood with his back to the window, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, giving Doyle a long moment to look him over. Then he threaded his way around two tables to the shadowy corner behind the bar.

He sat on the bench recently vacated and set his hands in plain view. Bernardo was not a large or imposing man. He looked even less so when sitting across from the mass of muscle that was William Doyle. He said, “Mr. Doyle,” and it was a statement, not a question.

Doyle frowned. “I know you.”

“We met once, ten years ago, in Paris, over cards. I was a corn factor from Marseilles. You were a German count.”

Neutrality settled over Doyle’s ugly face. “Right.”

“The card game was at the Palais Royal. The play was high. We were both cheating.”

“That’s ordinary enough. Cheating.” Doyle took up his mug and drank ale, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and waited.

“So I thought. Until I noticed you were cheating to lose.”

“Looked that way, did it?”

“I sensed a complicated scheme in play, and it was not one of my own, so I withdrew with all prudent speed. Paris was full of political plots and plans at that time. Most of them ended badly for someone.”

“Still true,” Doyle said amiably.

“There was a murder in that club that night. A political murder. I was sufficiently intrigued that I made inquiries and discovered who you are.”

“Did you, now?”

“The British Service remains impenetrable. Your Military Intelligence is less so.”

“I’ve been told that.”

Bernardo motioned the barmaid closer and ordered coffee. “The military are a great trial to us all.”

The two men sat, measuring each other, till the woman returned to swipe at a patch of table with her apron and slap down a mug.

When she was gone again, out of earshot, Doyle said, “The coffee’s a mistake.”

Bernardo sipped. Grimaced. “So it is.” He set it carefully aside. “A reminder that I am among the English. No other nation would call this coffee.”

“We’re an imaginative race,” Doyle said.

Bernardo leaned back in his chair. For a while they watched the other patrons of the Crocodile eat and drink. The tavern collected a mixed bag of workmen connected with the theater, laborers, market vendors, and women of various degrees of respectability.

Bernardo said, “You may know who I am.”

Doyle made no comment.

“So.” Bernardo turned a hand palm up. “I am Bernardo Baldoni, brother to Cesare Baldoni.” He paused. “I see that you knew.”

Doyle didn’t acknowledge that but didn’t deny it, either.

“I have come to deliver a message to the British Service.” Bernardo’s voice became less genial. “You take an interest in the woman called Camille Leyland. This must cease.”

“Why?” The single blunt word from Doyle.

“She is ours. She is Baldoni. She is my great-niece.”

Doyle closed his eyes. “I see.” A minute passed in silence. “Tell me she isn’t also Cesare Baldoni’s great-niece.”

“She is his granddaughter. His only granddaughter. I think it is best that the British Service know this.”

“Hell.”

“She is also Ernesto Targioni’s granddaughter. Add to this that she is Scipione Zito’s first cousin and closest blood relative. You know what he is. I have not even begun to list the families she is tied to by blood and marriage across Tuscany. The Minutoli. The Scribanos . . .”

“In short, related to everybody but the pope.”

“There is a distant connection to—”

“Damn.”

“As I say, you should know this.”

Doyle hissed out a long breath of impatience. “What the devil was a Baldoni child—that Baldoni child—doing unprotected, getting scooped up by the Police Secrète and put in the Coach House? Why the hell weren’t you keeping watch on her?”

“Disorder beyond belief, and one man’s unforgivable villainy. It is a family matter.” Bernardo set the tips of his fingers together and looked down at them. “It is the family matter of several important families, in fact.”

“And again, I have to say damn it to hell.”

“You have an understanding of the politics of Tuscany. Cesare declared there would be no vendetta with the Targioni. We all assiduously covered over that ugliness. Now, unless it is seen that my niece is most abundantly cared for and happy, the old scandal will emerge into daylight.”

Doyle closed his eyes and pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. “Accompanied by a certain amount of bloodshed.”

“It is Tuscany,” Bernardo said. “And it is family.”

“The bloodshed happening in French territory, when our peace treaty with France is shaky as hell. It’s going to look like England’s making trouble on purpose.”

Bernardo said, almost apologetically, “You are not the only one who finds this a difficult situation. You see the implications, do you not?”

“I see the implications.”

“For the Baldoni, for all the old Tuscan families of power, she is a lit candle tossed into a powder magazine.”

“Which the French will blame on us.”

“The small blessing of this day is that my great-niece is under my roof again, instead of in a British prison, accused of spying for the French. Or dead at British hands.”

Doyle looked past him, at a blank spot on the plaster wall. “We wouldn’t kill her.”

“Of course your Service would not,” Bernardo said. “Perhaps the blundering Military Intelligence of England also would not. But I am Tuscan and Florentine and we scent intrigue in the lightest breeze. No one in Italy will believe she spent ten years in England and the British Service did not know who she was. If my great-niece trips over a stone, or is struck by lightning in Hyde Park, or walks in the rain and catches pneumonia, the English will be blamed. That one death will drive the great families of Tuscany into the arms of Napoleon.”

“We’ll have to keep her alive, then, won’t we?”

“With the aid of various saints. Con l’aiuto dei santi.”

The two men looked at each other for a time.

Doyle picked up his mug. “I’d suggest the ale in this establishment, but I imagine you don’t drink it. Has she told you what she’s doing tomorrow?”

“She goes to face Il Mercante di Tenebre. I do not stand in her way. Baldoni women have always fought. She honors us when she goes to face that beast.”

“But it would be best if she didn’t get herself killed on English soil.”

“Very much so. Your Mr. Paxton is in my kitchen, where the coffee is somewhat better than this,” he tapped his cup, “plotting to keep her alive.” He pursed his lips and continued, “It has occurred to us that Mr. Paxton may present a solution to another problem.”

Doyle waited. It was impossible to know if he suspected what was coming.

Bernardo said, “My Sara is heiress to inheritances in two great families—possibly the Zitos as well. She will have also the dowry of her grandmother, who was Maria Vezzoni . . .”

“There is just no end to this, is there?” said Doyle, looking sour.

“She must marry, and soon, to a family who will not cause troubles with this great inheritance. Someone tied to neither the French nor the Austrians. It has occurred to us that an Englishman may be the solution to our problems.”

Doyle didn’t give anything away on his face. “It might.”

“I will not force my Sara—Cami, as I must call her—into anything distasteful to her. Not with the least feather of persuasion. But she seems fond of your agent Paxton. He spent last night in her bed.”