One Thing Leads to a Lover (Love and Let Spy #2) - Susanna Craig Page 0,42

the softening effect of his short-sightedness, as most everything and everyone did.

Now, however, he could see that she required no such help. Her skin was as flawless, her features as delicate, as they had first appeared to be. This morning, she wore her golden brown hair in a style somewhere between the easy looseness of their first meeting and the elegant arrangement of last night. The weight of its honeyed coils gave a saucy tilt to her chin. He liked it.

The skirts of her blue and cream striped gown swayed, summoning him like a bell. Trotting up the steps, he closed the remaining gap between them, expecting a chiding, questioning look from her dark eyes, or a series of fumbling questions from her lips.

He got nothing, not even a glance, as she droned on in a voice that hardly seemed her own, the sort of rehearsed speech about architecture and paintings he might have expected from the housekeeper of a grand country house frequently tasked with showing the place to visitors and hoping for a perquisite at the end of the tour.

When they reached the stairway to the fourth floor, some of the house’s grandeur fell away. The steps were narrower, uncarpeted, steep. And they opened not onto a landing but right into the schoolroom itself, a sparsely furnished but pleasantly light-filled space.

At a large worktable sat the two boys he’d caught only a glimpse of on his first visit to Bartlett House. One dark head, one fair, both bent over some joint project spread out in front of them.

“Blue paint, please,” the darker-haired one said.

“I’m using it,” was the reply. “Have the brown.”

“We’re meant to be drawing rivers. They can’t all look like great sludge-filled worms.”

“The Thames does—ow! Why’d you hit me?”

Less a hit than nudge, really, the dark-haired one having realized the two of them were being observed and pushing quickly to his feet. The elder, Langley guessed, though he was slighter of build. The young earl.

“Mama?” the lad asked uncertainly, his dark-eyed gaze reserved entirely for Langley.

“Oh, Mama,” the other said, eagerly scraping back his chair, “you’re back. Would you kindly tell Jamie he needn’t—ow!”

An elbow this time, and considerably sharper. “Hush, Pip,” the elder pushed past barely parted lips. “Turn around.”

Pip—Master Philip Bartlett—did as he’d been bid, though not without a scowl for his brother, the force of which caught Langley too as it passed. “Who’re you?”

“Boys,” Lady Kingston tightly reprimanded her sons. “This is Mr. Stanhope. He’s…” A frown darted across her forehead and she glanced questioningly toward him. “He’s…”

She was uncertain how far he meant to carry his performance, he realized. Not wanting to say too much.

For just a moment, he hesitated too. His first priority was finding the codebook, but he wanted to protect Lady Kingston and her family in the process. In order to do so, he’d presented himself in disguise. Could he be who he’d said he was below and still fulfill the rest of his mission?

“I’m your new tutor,” he supplied, inclining his head at the boys.

“Tutor?” Philip looked and sounded scandalized. “Why on earth should we need a—”

“Yes, Mama,” young Kingston spoke over his brother, his demeanor more polite, perhaps, but his demand no less urgent. “Why?”

“Change is sometimes desirable,” she reassured them, though Langley did not think any of them—Lady Kingston included—believed it.

She stepped closer to the table and laid an arm around either set of shoulders, turning the boys back toward their work and shaking her head. “I can see, however, that your drawing lesson is still urgently needed. Philip, if you’ll carry the box,” she said, nodding her head toward a small crate of wooden shapes, the sort used to teach angles and shading, light and shadow, “and Jamie, if you’ll fetch paper and pencils, we’ll repair to the library and work there. Mr. Stanhope will need time to settle in.”

“And after luncheon?” young Kingston queried.

“The bees, of course,” she said, which drew smiles from both boys. “We mustn’t abandon the project now. Tomorrow, I think, will be soon enough for Mr. Stanhope to begin his educational duties.”

She looked toward him but did not quite meet his gaze, and her grip on the boys’ shoulders tightened almost imperceptibly. Clearly, she was not ready to relinquish them, not ready to entrust them to him.

“I am entirely at your disposal, Lady Kingston,” he said, deliberately echoing what he’d told Dulsworthy in the library. It wasn’t quite true, of course. He rather suspected General Scott would have something to