One Thing Leads to a Lover (Love and Let Spy #2) - Susanna Craig Page 0,6

up with a black and white picture of a bird. Long-tailed and sharp-beaked. And beside it, a direction that did not belong to Porter’s bookshop.

Mind your step, Amanda. Mind your step.

What exactly had she stumbled into this time?

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing,” she scolded herself aloud and tried to shake off her foolishness. So she’d been given the wrong book. So the man who’d been tasked with exchanging it for the right one carried an unusual card. Her imagination was running away with her.

The sooner the mistake with the packages was resolved, the better. Lord Dulsworthy was waiting below to take her driving, and he would be wondering what had become of her.

She picked up the book and tucked it behind one of the mountains of pillows on the bed. Jamie wouldn’t pry, but Philip might, and she did so want it to be a surprise. Then she turned toward the door to her sitting room, intending to lay the card on her escritoire, where she would sit down in the morning and write the note that would put an end to the matter.

Only the thought of her mother’s curiosity, sharp as the edges of the stranger’s mysterious calling card, gave her pause. After a quick glance around, she tucked it into her shift. It lay against her skin, cool and crisp.

As she crossed back to the bellpull to summon her maid, the corners of the card pricked her with every movement, yet she did not remove it from her bodice. Would Martha spy it there when she helped her change into a fresh gown?

If she did, then the snagged coverlet would be something to distract her with. The girl had an eye for detail and a knack with needle and thread.

This afternoon, she must keep her promise to go driving with dear, old George. But tomorrow evening, once the cookbook had been returned and quiet once more hung over the house like a pall, then Amanda would be at leisure to lie in her bed beneath the freshly mended coverlet, to trace the embossing on the stranger’s card, and to embroider the memory of this little interlude to her heart’s content.

Chapter 2

With the stairs of Bartlett House pitching downward before him, Major Langley Stanhope paused to pinch the bridge of his nose between his thumb and first finger. He did not swear, though a few colorful phrases sprang to mind, remnants of a youth spent in quite another part of London than the wide, tree-lined streets of Mayfair.

Not that he’d failed in his mission. Not yet.

But he had expected to count it an easy victory.

Certainly it ought to have been. He’d wondered, at first, why General Scott had sent him. Anyone in Scott’s service of highly trained intelligence officers could have been called upon to retrieve the package Lieutenant Hopkins had been forced to abandon in a moment of desperation. Nothing about the assignment suggested, even now, the need to involve the man once accounted Scott’s best agent.

Then again, Scott’s best agent was leaving without getting what he’d come for.

Langley fished in his breast pocket for his spectacles and carefully threaded them over his ears. The green smudges of trees sharpened into individual leaves fluttering and rustling in the afternoon breeze. He could even spot the cracks and joints in the elegant stone facades surrounding him, if he chose to look.

He would have liked to have seen Lady Kingston as clearly, to have had more than an impression of dark eyes surrounded by a frowsy halo of golden-brown hair. To have been able to judge her reaction to his request by the expression on her face.

But the spectacles were noteworthy. An identifying feature. So he often went without them in public, went without his uniform, too, without anything that might easily distinguish him from a hundred other gentlemen, tallish but not too tall, with brown hair and eyes, who dressed respectably enough but far from the first stare of fashion.

In the flurry following the news of Hopkins’s predicament, there had been no time to plan a cover story more thorough than “shop clerk.” No time to compile a dossier about the woman who, through sheer happenstance, now possessed some of the most valuable information in England. Langley hadn’t expected to need either one.

Therefore, he also hadn’t expected the widowed Countess of Kingston to be so young. Hadn’t expected the pair of curious boys she’d hustled out of sight.

Armed with a duplicate copy of the volume she had purchased that morning at