“Of course she did! What lady wouldn’t, in such circumstances? The bounder didn’t want to marry her—he’d found a better billet.”

Gertie’s fondness for Leonora rang in her voice, colored her distress. Impulsively, he patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry—I’ll go and rescue her.”

But he wasn’t going to make Whorton into a martyr in the process. Aside from all else, he was damned glad the bounder hadn’t married Leonora.

Eyes on the trio, he tacked through the crowd. He’d just been handed a vital piece of the jigsaw of Leonora and her attitude to marriage, but he couldn’t yet spare the time to stop, consider, jiggle, and see exactly how it fitted, nor what it would tell him.

He came up beside Leonora; she glanced up at him, smiled.

“Ah—there you are.”

Taking her hand, he raised it briefly to his lips, then placed it on his sleeve as was his habit. Her brows lifted faintly, in resignation, then she turned to the others. “Allow me to introduce you.”

She did; he heard with a jolt that the other lady was Whorton’s wife. His polite mask in place, he returned the greetings.

Mrs. Whorton smiled sweetly at him. “As I was saying, it’s proved quite an effort to organize our sons’ schooling…”

To his definite surprise, he found himself listening to a discussion of where to send the Whorton brats for their education. Leonora gave her opinion from her experience with Jeremy; Whorton quite clearly intended giving her advice due consideration.

Contrary to Gertie’s supposition, Whorton made no attempt to attach Leonora, nor to evoke any long-ago sympathies.

Tristan watched Leonora closely, but could detect nothing beyond her customary serene confidence, her usual effortless social grace.

She wasn’t a particularly good actress; her temper was too definite. Whatever her feelings over Whorton had been, they were no longer strong enough to raise her pulse. It beat steadily beneath his fingers; she was truly unperturbed.

Even discussing children who, had things been different, might have been hers.

He suddenly wondered how she felt about children, realized he’d been taking her views vis à vis his heir for granted.

Wondered if she was already carrying his child.

His gut clenched; a wave of possessiveness flowed over him. He didn’t so much as flutter an eyelash, yet Leonora glanced at him, a faint frown—one of questioning concern—in her eyes.

The sight saved him. He smiled easily; she blinked, searched his eyes, then turned back to Mrs. Whorton’s chatter.

Finally, the musicians tuned up. He seized the moment to part from the Whortons; he led Leonora directly to the floor.

Drew her into his arms, whirled her into the waltz.

Only then focused on her face, on the long-suffering look in her eyes.

He blinked, raised a brow.

“I realize you military men are accustomed to acting with dispatch, but within the ton’s ballrooms, it’s customary to ask a lady if she wishes to dance.”

He met her gaze. After a moment, said, “My apologies.”

She waited, then raised her brows high. “Aren’t you going to ask me?”

“No. We’re already waltzing—asking you is redundant. And you might refuse.”

She blinked at him, then smiled, clearly amused. “I must try that sometime.”

“Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because you won’t like what happens.”

She held his gaze, then sighed exaggeratedly. “You’re going to have to work on your social skills. This dog-in-the-manger attitude won’t do.”

“I know. Believe me, I’m working on a solution. Your help would be appreciated.”

She narrowed her eyes, then tipped up her nose and looked away. Feigning temper because he’d had the last word.

He swung her into a sweeping turn, and thought of the other little matter, a pertinent and possibly urgent matter, he now had to address.

Military men. Her memories of Whorton, no matter how ancient and buried, could not have been happy ones—and she almost certainly classed him and the captain as men of the same stamp.






Chapter Thirteen

“Excellent!” Leonora looked up as Tristan walked in. Quickly tidying her escritoire, she shut it and rose. “We can walk in the park with Henrietta, and I can tell you my news.”

Tristan raised a brow at her, but obediently held the door and followed her back out into the hall. She’d told him last night that she’d received quite a few replies from Cedric’s acquaintances; she’d asked him to call to discuss them—she’d made no mention of walking her hound.

He helped her into her pelisse, then shrugged on his greatcoat; the wind was chilly, whipping through the streets. Clouds hid the sun, but the day was dry enough. A footman arrived with Henrietta straining on a leash. Tristan fixed the hound with a warning glance, then took the leash.

Leonora led the way out. “The park is only a few streets away.”

“I trust,” Tristan said, following her down the garden path, “that you’ve been exercising with your dog?”

She shot him a glance. “If by that you mean to ask have I been strolling the streets without her, no. But it’s definitely restricting. The sooner we lay Mountford by the heels, the better.”

Bustling forward, she swung open the gate, held it while he and Henrietta passed through, then swung it shut.

He caught her hand, trapped her gaze as he wound her arm in his. “So cut line.” Holding her beside him, he let Henrietta tow them in the direction of the park. “What have you learned?”

She drew breath, settled her arm in his, looked ahead. “I’d had great hopes of A. J. Carruthers—Cedric had communicated most frequently with Carruthers in the last few years. However, I didn’t receive any reply from Yorkshire, where Carruthers lived, until yesterday. Before that, however, over the previous days, I received three replies from other herbalists, all scattered about the country. All three wrote that they believed Cedric had been working on some special formula, but none of them knew any details. Each of them, however, suggested I contact A. J. Carruthers, as they understood Cedric had been working most closely with Carruthers.”

“Three independent replies, all believing Carruthers would know more?”

Leonora nodded. “Precisely. Unfortunately, however, A. J. Carruthers is dead.”

“Dead?” Tristan halted on the pavement and met her gaze. The green expanse of the park lay across the street. “Dead how?”

She didn’t misunderstand, but grimaced. “I don’t know—all I do know is that he’s dead.”

Henrietta tugged; Tristan checked, then led both females across the street. Henrietta’s huge and shaggy form, her gaping jaws filled with sharp teeth, gave him a perfect excuse to avoid the fashionable area thronging with matrons and their daughters; he turned the questing hound toward the more leafy and overgrown region beyond the western end of Rotten Row.

That area was all but deserted.

Leonora didn’t wait for his next question. “The letter I received yesterday was from the solicitor in Harrogate who acted for Carruthers and oversaw his estate. He informed me of Carruthers’s demise, but said he couldn’t otherwise help with my query. He suggested that Carruthers’s nephew, who inherited all Carruthers’s journals and so on, might be able to shed some light on the matter—the solicitor was aware that Carruthers and Cedric had corresponded a great deal in the months prior to Cedric’s death.”

“Did this solicitor mention exactly when Carruthers died?”

“Not exactly. All he said was that Carruthers died some months after Cedric, but that he’d been ill for some time before.” Leonora paused, then added, “There’s no mention in the letters Carruthers sent to Cedric of any illness, but they might not have been that close.”

“Indeed. This nephew—do we have his name and direction?”

“No.” Her grimace was frustration incarnate. “The solicitor advised that he’d forwarded my letter to the nephew in York, but that was all he said.”

“Hmm.” Looking down, Tristan walked on, assessing, extrapolating.

Leonora glanced at him. “It’s the most interesting piece of information we’ve found yet—the most likely, indeed, the only possible link to something that might be what Mountford seeks. There’s nothing specific in Carruthers’s letters to Cedric, other than oblique references to something they were working on—no details at all. But we need to pursue it, don’t you think?”

He looked up, met her eyes, nodded. “I’ll get someone on it tomorrow.”

She frowned. “Where? In Harrogate?”

“And York. Once we have the name and direction, there’s no reason to wait to pay this nephew a visit.”

His only regret was that he couldn’t do so personally. Traveling to Yorkshire would mean leaving Leonora beyond his reach; he could surround her with guards, yet no amount of organized protection would be sufficient to reassure him of her safety, not until Mountford, whoever he was, was caught.

They’d been strolling, neither slowly nor briskly, towed along in Henrietta’s wake. He realized Leonora was studying him, a rather odd look on her face.

“What?”

She pressed her lips together, her eyes on his, then she shook her head, looked away. “You.”

He waited, then prompted, “What about me?”

“You knew enough to realize someone had taken an impression of a key. You waited for a burglar and closed with him without turning a hair. You can pick locks. Assessing premises for their ability to withstand intruders is something you’ve done before. You got access to special records from the Registry, records others wouldn’t even know existed. With a wave of your hand”—she demonstrated—“you can have men watching my street. You dress like a navvy and frequent the docks, then change into an earl—one who somehow always knows where I’ll be, one with exemplary knowledge of our hostesses’ houses.

“And now, just like that, you’ll arrange for people to go hunting for information in Harrogate and York.” She pinned him with an intent but intrigued look. “You’re the oddest ex-soldier-cum-earl I’ve ever met.”

He held her gaze for a long moment, then murmured, “I wasn’t your average soldier.”

She nodded, looking ahead once more. “So I gathered. You were a major in the Guards—a soldier of Devil Cynster’s type—”

“No.” He waited until she met his gaze. “I—”

He broke off. The moment had come sooner than he’d anticipated. A rush of thoughts jostled through his mind, the most prominent being how a woman who’d been jilted by one soldier would feel about being lied to by another. Perhaps not quite lied to, but would she see the difference? His instincts were all for keeping her in the dark, for keeping his dangerous past and his equally dangerous propensities from her. For keeping her in sublime ignorance of that side of his life, and all it said of his character.

Her eyes on his face, she continued slowly strolling, head tilting as she studied him. And waited.

He drew breath, softly said, “I wasn’t like Devil Cynster, either.”

Leonora looked into his eyes; what she saw there she couldn’t interpret. “What sort of soldier were you, then?”

The answer, she knew, held a vital key to understanding who the man beside her truly was.

His lips twisted wryly. “If you could get access to my record, it would say I joined the army at twenty and rose to the rank of major in the Guards. It would give you a regiment, but if you checked with soldiers in that regiment, you’d discover few knew me, that I hadn’t been sighted since shortly after I first joined.”

“So what sort of regiment were you in? Not the cavalry.”

“No. Not the infantry, either, nor the artillery.”

“You said you’d been at Waterloo.”

“I was.” He held her gaze. “I was on the battlefield, but not with our troops.” He watched her eyes widen, then quietly added, “I was behind enemy lines.”

She blinked, then stared at him, thoroughly intrigued. “You were a spy?”

He grimaced lightly, looked ahead. “An agent working in an unofficial capacity for His Majesty’s government.”

A host of impressions swamped her—observations that suddenly made sense, other things that were no longer so mysterious—yet she was far more interested in what the revelation meant, what it said of him. “It must have been terribly lonely, as well as being horrendously dangerous.”

Tristan glanced at her; that wasn’t what he’d expected her to say, to think of. His mind ranged back, over the years…he nodded. “Often.”