One Thing Leads to a Lover (Love and Let Spy #2) - Susanna Craig Page 0,12

and finally carried out the front door of Bartlett House.

She could feel the mask of her good spirits slipping as the door closed behind him. Over a book? What utter foolishness!

Her mother ascribed her suddenly somber mood to a far different cause.

“Do not fret, my dear,” she said, picking up Amanda’s hand and patting the back of it consolingly. “The day will come soon enough when you need never be parted from Lord Dulsworthy again.”

Amanda’s mouth dropped open, and a gurgle escaped from her throat—whether a failed laugh or a strangled scream, even she could not be certain.

Mind your step.

She covered her lips with the fingertips of her other hand and coughed discreetly. “Pardon me, Mama. I’ll just go check on the boys.”

She slipped away before her mother could say anything more. But she did not go in search of her sons. She went to her sitting room, perched on the chair in front of the writing desk and, after sucking in a deep breath, fished in her bodice for the stranger’s calling card.

The rectangle of paper was no longer cool and stiff, but warm and slightly softened, the cream-colored paper now bent in a shape that echoed the gentle curve of her not especially ample breast.

She smoothed the card on the blotter.

A message here will always reach me, Lady Kingston.

Where was “here”? The direction on the card might as well have been in quite some other part of the globe. She certainly did not recognize it.

Nonetheless, she drew a sheet of paper toward her, uncorked her ink bottle, and dipped her pen.

Dear

Pausing, she brushed the tip of the feather across her lips, studying the stark engraving of the bird. Quite well versed in apiology, thanks to the boys’ bee project, but no expert in ornithology, she tipped her head to the side and squinted at the image on the card. It could be some sort of crow. Or maybe a raven? Better to be general, if she was not certain. But no one wanted to get a note addressed to Dear Mr. Middling-Sized Sort of Carrion Bird…

Dear Sir,

I regret

Her regrets were numerous, and at the moment, most of them revolved around allowing Lord Dulsworthy to continue imagining he could have any place in her affections. But a stranger would not care about that.

She twirled the quill between her thumb and fingers. Dusk was starting to settle over the garden. A message here will always reach me, he had said. But she hated to send Lewis out at this hour, hated to think of disturbing the gentleman when the bookshop would soon be closed.

I regret not retrieving the book for you earlier today, she thought of writing.

But it would not be the truth. She had wanted some excuse to prolong the little adventure of the book—and what a very little adventure it was! The gentleman would laugh to know the leaps of her wild imagination, and all over a cookery book that, according to Mrs. Hepplewythe, wasn’t even any good.

Absently, she laid the pen in the tray and picked up the card, running the pad of her thumb over the printing and around the edges of the engraved bird, flicking meditatively at one corner of the stiff paper with her fingernail. Hard to believe the stranger had given it to her just that afternoon.

But as only a few hours had passed since his visit…surely the note could wait until morning?

She sent a furtive glance around the room, as if she expected to find someone spying from the folds of the drapery or the embossed scrolls on the wallpaper, laughing at her reluctance to be done with the matter of the mysterious book.

Then, with a private smile, she slipped the stranger’s card back into her bodice.

Chapter 3

Colonel Millrose had sent other agents to keep watch at the bookshop, in case the volume was returned. Hopkins’s whereabouts were still unknown. Langley was supposed to be catching a decent night’s sleep, for once.

But even in the darkness, he could not shut out the memory of the despair, the anger, the distrust on the faces of his fellow officers when he had finally forced himself to go into the workroom and confess that he had failed to retrieve the codebook.

At last he dragged himself from the bed, still fully clothed in his shopkeeper’s garb, splashed cold water on his face, and donned his spectacles. In the corridor, a pale yellow seam of light gleamed beneath the workroom door. He knew it must be very