One Thing Leads to a Lover (Love and Let Spy #2) - Susanna Craig Page 0,55

narrow escape, you mean?” She straightened. “Seems rather a hollow victory for the brilliant…what am I to call you, now? Magpie? Major Stanhope? Sir La—?”

With a catlike spring, he closed the distance between them, his hard body almost pinning her to the desk. “Not that.”

His sharp denial, the way he bit off each word, reminded her of the way Philip sounded when he had a scraped knee he was determined not to let her probe—“don’t touch!”—but which nonetheless required tending.

Resolutely, she continued. “Why did you lie to my mother?”

“Did I?” He tore his spectacles from his face and tossed them onto the desk. They slid across the polished wood, stopping when they struck the crystal tumbler with a quiet clink. His darkened eyes searched hers. Nothing between them now.

Her heart pounded, though not with fear. “Yes. You denied being…” The name was on the tip of her tongue, but she hesitated, not worried about how he would react if she said it, but wary of her fascination with his volatility. “The man of whom she’d read in the papers.”

“Go on. A woman like you doubtless craves the feel of a title on her tongue. All right, then,” he conceded when she shook her head. “Yes, I’m Sir Langley Stanhope, K.B. Does that string of letters invest a fellow with sufficient pomp and ceremony to suit a countess?” He lowered his lips to her ear, and she shivered as his hot breath skated over her skin. “Were you relieved to discover that the man you’re passing off as your sons’ tutor is in fact a gentleman?”

Closer still, his body, his breath, until every inch of her was aware of every inch of him. He nipped her earlobe with his teeth, and to her shock, a moan of surrender rose in her throat. “Or…” Another nip, this time along her neck, sent a shudder of longing through her. “Were you disappointed to think I might not be a rogue after all?”

When still she did not answer, he soothed the sting of the bite with a flick of his tongue that made her go weak at the knees. “Ah, well, don’ fret yerself, luv,” he reassured her in a coarse accent, like nothing she’d ever heard. “I kin still play rough, since it’s clear as it pleases ye.”

She struggled to bring her ragged breathing under control. “That’s not your voice.”

“Are you quite certain, ma’am?” Those words, still whispered dangerously close to her ear, might have belonged to the foppish aristocrat at the theater.

“Stop it.” Her head spun at this dizzying display of his strange gift. “Who are you, really? Just—just tell me the truth.”

“The truth, your ladyship?” A bitter laugh gusted from chest, but after a moment, he obligingly levered his body away from hers, snatching up the tumbler and draining its meager contents as he threw himself backward, into the desk chair. “Nobody knows who the hell I am.”

Freed of his weight, his touch, she considered taking his earlier advice and leaving. Yet he exerted an inexplicable pull, like the cold moon drawing the warm tide.

In another moment she found herself perched on the edge of the massive desk, her left leg almost resting against his. “I don’t…understand. You’re an intelligence officer.” With uncertain fingertips, she plucked at her skirt. “If there’s some mystery, couldn’t you—clever as you obviously are, and with all the resources at your disposal—couldn’t you…solve it?”

“Who’s to say I’d want to?” His gaze shifted to a point beyond the desk, where the shadows of the room grew deeper, out of reach of the candles he’d lit. Whatever it was he seemed primed to tell her, she was no longer certain she wished to hear.

Still, she did not leave.

“I can’t tell you where I was born,” he began, in that distant voice she did not recognize, “or who was responsible for bringing me into the world. Is Langley my mother’s name? My father’s? The word stenciled on the side of the butcher’s crate in which I was found?” His shrug of apparent indifference pinched her heart. “My first memories are of the alleyways around Newgate, begging, stealing. Whatever it took to get a mouthful of bread.”

She flinched at his almost emotionless retelling of his childhood. This was no mere scrape, to be healed with a jar of salve and a pat on the head, but a wound, deep and bloody.

And he was not the sort of man to welcome a display of pity, she could guess. Carefully, she shifted