One Thing Leads to a Lover (Love and Let Spy #2) - Susanna Craig Page 0,15

she offered.

“That won’t be necessary. If you’ll just—”

At last he thrust out his hand, but she shook her head and her other hand joined the first in wringing what life was left from his mangled spectacles. The moonlight made a sort of halo of her loosely arranged hair. “I can guess why you’re here. But I—I haven’t got it.”

For a moment, he wondered whether the blow to the back of the head had indeed knocked him senseless. He hadn’t the faintest notion what she meant, and it was only after the passage of an awkward silence that he recalled why he’d come to Bartlett House to begin with. His heart began to pound with such fury he felt certain she must be able to hear it hammering against his ribs.

“The book, do you mean? You haven’t got the book?”

Her teeth, small and pearly white, came out to gnaw at her lower lip, and she first nodded, then shook her head. “You see, I sat down earlier this evening to send you a note about it, but I really couldn’t figure out from your card, Mr.—Rook, is it? Or—or perhaps Crow? I’m really not very good with birds… If it had been a bee, then maybe—the boys are doing a project on bees, you know. Well, no, of course you don’t know. Anyway, it seemed awfully rude to address you by the wrong name, so I—”

“It’s none of those, your ladyship,” he spoke across her. “The bird on my card, that is.” Unbelievably, he found himself fighting down a laugh. Had he gone stark raving mad? Or had she? “It’s a magpie. A sort of…nickname, if you will.”

Her answering giggle did nothing to reassure him about the state of his mind—or hers. “A magpie, you say?” She seemed to have decided to carry on as if this were an ordinary conversation. “I suppose I should have guessed it eventually. Although…those are the birds attracted to anything shiny, aren’t they? Whereas you seem rather…”

Rather what?

She reminded him of a bird herself, chattering nervously, pecking aimlessly at the twigs of words and phrases but never quite weaving them in a whole thought. Rocking forward with an uneasy step, she held out his spectacles, and he took them, curling his fingers around the ruined frames. The metal was still warm from her hand, and he would have been tempted to tighten his grip to capture that sensation if not for the prickle of broken glass. “Well, as you yourself said, I really don’t know who you are.” She rocked back, knotting the fingers of her empty hands. A pause, heavier and more serious than any that had preceded it. “Who are you?”

He narrowed his gaze, just enough to bring her features into sharper focus. “If I answer that question, Lady Kingston, how can you be sure I’m telling the truth?”

As she swallowed, a bit of white fabric at the base of her throat—her nightdress, he supposed, otherwise hidden beneath the heavy brocade dressing gown—slipped in and out of view. He wondered what had kept her from sleep. The book? Or something else? “Well, I—I suppose I can’t.” Once more, she looked him up and down. “But I suspect you aren’t a shop clerk.”

That earned her a slight, and slightly wry, smile. “Well spotted, Lady Kingston. I am not a shop clerk. But you are better off without that book here, anywhere near you or your sons.”

Her brow furrowed. “My…sons? But it’s just a—a—I think I should warn you that Mrs. Trout, our cook, tried to make a few of the recipes from it, and she said the proportions were all wrong. You said it was priceless, but I don’t understand how a cookbook with bad recipes can be—oh.” In the pause, a slight breeze stirred the scents of the flowers, and her frown deepened. “It’s not a cookbook, is it?”

For years he had trained, practicing the best ways to interact with innocent civilians and learning how to withstand expert interrogation. Nothing had prepared him for this conversation. Lady Kingston was the most unexpected combination of scatter-brained and sharp-witted he’d ever met. He’d already given her his codename. Now he hardly knew whether it was right or wrong to tell her, “No.”

“I…see. Well, Lord Dulsworthy took it,” she explained after a moment. “He said he would return it to Porter’s on his way home.”

Langley knew if it had arrived at the bookshop this evening, he would have heard the news already. Lady Kingston too seemed