One Thing Leads to a Lover (Love and Let Spy #2) - Susanna Craig Page 0,62

tone, “as a tutor you must know that what one may teach, pupils sadly do not always learn.”

“Then one must modify the instruction to suit the student,” Langley countered, trying hard not to think of last night.

“With no sparring partner of my own skill, it has been difficult to demonstrate proper technique.” Jacobs’s small, dark eyes traveled assessingly over Langley. “I would invite you to engage in a little bout, sir. For demonstrative purposes. But alas, you are not properly attired.”

Langley did not need to see either the flash of enthusiasm in the boys’ faces at the idea, or the wave of disappointment that followed the observation about his clothes, to know how to answer the fencing master’s challenge. Wordlessly, he slipped off his coat and tossed it onto the seat of the chair from which he had risen. “I’ll make do,” he said, unbuttoning the cuffs of his sleeves and rolling them over his forearms in precise folds.

Kingston hurried to his side. “You may use my foil, sir,” he said, proffering the weapon on both palms.

Langley took the sword from him, tested its heft and balance with a few experimental flicks of his wrist. “Thank you.”

Jacobs removed his own foil from a long case that had been tucked away beneath a sofa. Langley observed the other man’s technique as he warmed up: sound enough, but prone to the same sort of extraneousness he’d noted in the boys’ movements. At last he nodded to Philip to indicate he was ready.

“En garde,” Philip almost shouted in his eagerness. Both men raised their arms. “Allez!”

“In fencing,” Langley explained, as he easily parried Jacobs’s first thrust, the blades singing as they slid along one another, “your most important weapon is your mind. Like a chess match. Even in a defensive pose,” he said, shifting his weight onto his back foot, “you must always be anticipating, watching for an opening. The tide can turn in an instant.”

The fencing master stumbled as Langley lunged, driving him backward. “Any sign of weakness becomes an opportunity for attack,” Jacobs agreed, trying to disguise his misstep as deliberate. “It may also be a trap, into which an unwary opponent may fall.”

The boys rewarded each maneuver with cheers and gasps. Philip, who still had his foil, occasionally attempted to imitate a clever move, demanding of his brother, “Did you see that?”

In truth, though, the men’s blades were little more than a blur. Despite the bout having been billed as instructive for the boys, it was almost immediately clear that Jacobs intended to clear his honor with the challenge.

Besides that, he was soon too out of breath to pretend to teach.

Langley was not surprised to discover himself more fit than the fencing master, who must rarely or never have had to defend against actual, life-threatening attacks. Nevertheless, even with Jacobs’s ripostes limited to the fencing variety, it was no easy victory. The man had an appetite for violence far beyond what his flourishes and his feeble instruction of the boys suggested.

Back and forth they moved, their footwork more intricate than the most complex country dance. Jacobs had the first hit, but Langley took the second and would have been ready after several scoreless minutes to call the match a draw, when the young earl shouted, “Look, Mama!”

For just a fraction of a second, Langley’s attention shifted from his opponent to the figure in the doorway. Jacobs, his face contorted in a rictus of triumph, seized the moment and lunged.

Chapter 12

Amanda shrieked—then immediately chided herself for her foolishness.

She understood that Langley was in no real danger, no matter the fierceness of Mr. Jacobs’s expression. First, because the foils were blunted and could inflict no wound more serious than a welt.

And second, because she had been watching silently from the threshold for several moments before Jamie had spotted her. She knew almost nothing about the sport, but even she could tell that Langley was the more skilled fencer of the two.

She rather suspected that her first glimpse of him today would have brought memories of last night rushing back to the forefront of her mind, no matter how he looked or what he had been doing.

But the sight of him now—his shirt slightly damp with sweat, sleeves rolled up to reveal corded forearms dusted with dark hair, the flex of muscles in his back, his legs, his buttocks as he…thrust (it was, after all, the technical term; she knew at least that much) again and again—made the remembered pleasures of that hour