Her eyes widened and her nose turned a raspberry red, but she made it through the fiery drink with nothing more than a delicate cough. She handed her empty glass back to him. “Quite bracing.”
“Indeed.” He cocked his head to the side to assess the damage. “Another?”
She shook her head. “I believe I am sufficiently numbed.”
Envy rolled through Sebastian. What he wouldn’t give to be relieved of the constant carousel of disturbing thoughts and images. “About five years ago, your husband came to my attention. Many spoke highly of him. Praised his intellect, ambition, and sense of morality. I spent the next year gathering intelligence on him, checking his connections and finances, monitoring his political leanings, and evaluating his mental stamina.”
“Mental stamina?” she asked. “How do you evaluate such a thing?”
Sebastian hesitated but could not come up with a valid reason not to elaborate. “By placing obstacles in his path and then observing his reactions.”
Her eyebrows rose. “You can’t be serious.”
“Why is that?” he asked. “To be a successful agent of the Nexus, one must prove oneself capable of logical thought while under incredible pressure.”
“Sounds insidious.”
“Yet necessary.”
“I shall have to take your word for it.” She rubbed her hands down her skirts. “Jeffrey passed your little test, I take it.”
“More than passed it, he excelled at that particular stage of the recruitment process.”
“How many stages are there to becoming an agent?”
He rolled his shoulders and rested his forearms on the back of the chair next to hers. Being able to discuss his work with her felt good. Oddly liberating and unexpectedly intimate. His gaze wandered over the soft lines of her face. “As many as it takes for us to know.”
***
Catherine caught Sebastian’s slow perusal of her features and felt an answering jolt in the vicinity of her chest. She angled her body more fully toward him. “Know what?”
“That the individual is trustworthy.” He pushed away from the chair back and prowled around the side, his luminous gaze locked with hers. “That he is English to the core.” He stopped in front of her. “That he has a good chance of survival.”
She swallowed back her trepidation. There was something about this side of him that intrigued her beyond bearing. His tactics were calculating, merciless. Some would even call them cold and unfeeling. But Catherine saw also their brilliance and a deeper, more underlying quality that drove him to these brutal lengths. He cared—about England and his agents.
“What is it exactly that they must survive, my lord?”
“A power-hungry dictator who wishes the world to bow at his Corsican feet,” Sebastian said. “At present, Napoleon Bonaparte’s most desperate wish is to destroy France’s longtime enemy, England. How will he do this? By closing the continent to British trade, thus destroying us without the mess of bloodshed.”
Everything Cochran had told her was a lie. Everything. The Nexus was organized to protect English shores against a French invasion, not to invite them in. And Jeffrey had been in league with the Nexus, not investigating them. Shame filled her heart.
“How could I have been so stupid?”
He sent her a sharp look. “There’s nothing stupid about believing in the purity of another’s heart. Unfortunately, there are those who would take advantage of such goodness.”
Catherine could barely breathe around the constriction in her throat. “When did Jeffrey become a member?”
He stopped before her, and she felt the same sense of being overwhelmed as she did all those days ago in London. This time, however, she better understood the man behind the cool facade. Knew the hero within. The masked vulnerability without. He lowered himself in front of her.
“Sebastian, what of your knee?”
“All the pressure is on my good one. Do not worry, mama hen.”
Her lips twitched. “You were saying?”
“About four years ago.” He readjusted his weight. “We discussed his inclusion during my last visit to Showbury.”
“During the Harrison house party?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
She couldn’t hold his gaze. “A guess.”
“A very good one.” Bending forward, he gripped the arms of her chair. “What brought you to that conclusion?”
Her chest seemed to cave in, pressing against her lungs. She forced herself to face him again. “It was my last glimpse of the man I married. All the times I saw him between then and his death, he was nothing more than an actor playing a part. Badly.”
The warmth that had been building behind his steel-gray eyes extinguished, and his supple lips compressed into a thin, resolute line. With one glance, she knew he regretted the consequences of his