“Hard to believe we may have an answer soon,” Kirkland mused. “If he’s actually there and alive, see what must be done to get him out.”
“I’ll leave by the end of the week.” Cassie rose, thinking of the preparations she must make. She felt compelled to add, “Even if by some miracle he’s alive and you can bring him home, he will have changed greatly after all these years.”
Kirkland sighed wearily. “Haven’t we all?”
Paris, May 1803
“Time to wake, my beautiful golden boy,” the husky temptress voice murmured. “My husband will return soon.”
Grey Sommers opened his eyes and smiled lazily at his bedmate. If spying was always this enjoyable, he’d make it a career rather than merely dabbling. “ ‘Boy,’ Camille? I thought I’d proved otherwise.”
She laughed and shook back a tangle of dark hair. “Indeed you did. I must call you my beautiful golden man. Alas, it is time for you to go.”
Grey might have done so if her stroking hand hadn’t become teasing, driving common sense from his head. So far, he’d acquired little information from the luscious Madame Camille Durand, but he had increased his knowledge of the amatory arts.
Her husband was a high official in the Ministry of Justice and Grey had hoped the man might have spoken of secret matters to his wife. In particular, had Durand discussed the Truce of Amiens ending and war resuming again? But Camille had no interest in politics. Her talents lay elsewhere, and he was more than willing to sample them again.
Once more indulging lust led to drowsing off. He awoke when the door slammed open and a furious man stormed in, a pistol in his hand and two armed guards behind him. Camille shrieked and sat up in bed. “Durand!”
Grey slid off the four poster on the side opposite her husband, thinking sickly that this was like a theater farce. But that pistol was all too real.
“Don’t kill him!” Camille begged, her dark hair falling over her breasts. “He is an English milord, and shooting him will cause trouble!”
“An English lord? This must be the foolish Lord Wyndham. I have read the police reports on your movements since your arrival in France. You aren’t much of a spy, boy.” Durand’s thin lips twisted nastily as he cocked the hammer of his pistol. “It no longer matters what the English think.”
Grey straightened to his full height as he recognized that there was not a single damned thing he could do to save his life. His friends would laugh if they knew he met his end naked in the bedchamber of another man’s wife.
No. They wouldn’t laugh.
An eerie calm settled over him. He wondered if all men felt this way when death was inevitable. Lucky that he had a younger brother to inherit the earldom. “I have wronged you, Citoyen Durand.” He was proud of the steadiness of his voice. “No one will deny that you have just cause to shoot me.”
Something shifted in Durand’s dark eyes from murderous rage to cold cruelty. “Oh, no,” he said in a soft voice. “Killing you would be far too merciful.”
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ISBN: 978-1-4201-2794-2
Previously published in mass-market paperback in April 1998 by Topaz, an imprint of Dutton NAL, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Originally published in a somewhat different version in a Signet edition under the title The Rake and the Reformer.
The Rake Page 39