by Darcy Burke
“When?” she asked softly. “When did you start thinking that?”
Gareth shook his head. “The moment you stepped out of the carriage a fortnight ago.” She looked at him suspiciously. He nodded. “Oh yes, lightning struck as you stepped out of the carriage. Toppled one of my oldest oaks to the ground, don’t you remember? Split it right down the middle, and the whole thing fell. Much like my heart did when you looked at me.”
“You don’t believe in love at first sight!” she protested. “You said so the other day!”
“No, I don’t, which is why I looked again, and again, and again, until I was quite sure I would go mad from it. I just knew.” He nuzzled her neck, his mouth skimming over her collarbone and up the side of her neck. “When did you start?”
The blush that colored her face, all the way down to her neckline, was brilliant. “Almost as soon. But of course I knew it was wrong—you were betrothed to my sister ...”
“But not any longer.” He paused. “Are you not pleased she’s marrying Blair?”
“Of course I am!”
“Why?”
“Why?” she exclaimed. “Why, because they’re in love!” He raised an eyebrow. “And,” she hesitated only a moment, “and because if you didn’t marry Helen ...” She paused again. “Then you would be free.”
“Yes.”
“And—” She wet her lips. “—and then it wouldn’t be wrong of me to want you.”
“Oh, no,” he answered at once. “That would never be wrong of you. In fact, I was hoping you might keep on wanting me for the rest of your life.”
Later, Cleo told herself she would remember that moment for the rest of her life. The scent of oiled leather and horses, the faint buzz of bees in the shrubbery outside the window, the morning sun slanting across the dusty floor. And Gareth, looking at her as if he had never seen anyone half so wonderful. She couldn’t stop a small smile. “Is that a proposition?”
He laughed. “Proposition? My darling, I’m at an end to propositions. I made my last offer of marriage in a letter addressed to your father. May I make this one myself?” And he sank to one knee as he spoke. Cleo thought she must be goggling at him like a fool. “My darling Cleopatra,” he began, then paused. “Are you truly named for Cleopatra?”
“Yes,” she said dazedly. “And Helen for Helen of Troy. Father has classical fancies.”
“Ah.” He cocked his head to one side. “I wish I’d remembered that sooner.”
“Why?” Cleo still couldn’t quite take in that he was on his knees before her. Even Matthew hadn’t proposed on bended knee; he’d asked her over his shop counter, which had been romantic enough, but nothing like this.
“It would have made things clearer,” he said. “My parents named me Anthony, after all. Anthony never married Helen of Troy.”
She cleared her throat. “He never married Cleopatra, either.”
“This Anthony will,” Gareth declared. “If she’ll have him.”
Cleo gazed down at him, his brooding dark eyes fixed on her, his thick hair still ruffled from their activities in his study. “Shall I roll myself in a rug and have myself delivered to your rooms?”
“Make certain it’s a soft rug,” he retorted, “for I would unroll it before the fire and not let you off it for an hour.”
Cleo pretended to think. “I may have such a rug, in the shop ...”
His eyes ignited. “That sounds like yes.”
This time her smile was wide and unrestrained. “Because it is. A hundred times yes.”
Books By Caroline Linden
The Wagers of Sin
My Once and Future Duke
Scandalous Series
Love and Other Scandals
It Takes a Scandal
All's Fair in Love and Scandal
Love in the Time of Scandal
A Study in Scandal
Six Degrees of Scandal
The Secret of My Seduction
The Truth About the Duke
I Love the Earl
One Night in London
Blame It on Bath
The Way to a Duke's Heart
The Reece Family
What A Gentleman Wants
What A Rogue Desires
A Rake's Guide to Seduction
What A Woman Needs
Anthologies
At the Duke's Wedding
At the Christmas Wedding
Dressed to Kiss
At the Billionaire's Wedding
Short Stories
Like None Other
Written in My Heart
About the Author
Caroline Linden knew from an early age she was a reader, not a writer. She earned a math degree from Harvard University and wrote computer code before turning to fiction. Her books have won the Daphne duMaurier Award, the NJRW Golden Leaf Award, and RWA's RITA Award, and have been translated into seventeen languages around the world. She lives in New England with her family. Find her online at www.carolinelinden.com.
www.carolinelinden.com
I Spy A Duke
Erica Monroe
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
I SPY A DUKE
Copyright © 2015 by Erica Monroe
Excerpt from Beauty and the Rake copyright 2015 by Erica Monroe
Cover design by Teresa Spreckelmeyer, Designs by BMB
Quillfire Publishing
All rights reserved. The author has provided this book for personal use only. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN: 978-0-990-02298-5
For information, address Erica Monroe at http://www.ericamonroe.com.
Dedication
To Eileen R. and Emma L.
Because without you, there would be no book.
And to anyone who’s ever felt like the odds are insurmountable—
This is your fight too.
Prologue
Paris, France, 1798
Sunlight streamed in through the half-moon window in the sickroom, but the cheery brightness did nothing to improve the mood of James Spencer, Duke of Abermont. The placid weather mocked him. On the day that his sister lingered on the last edges of life, rain ought to pour from the heavens, and thunder should roll through the sky in protest of twenty-one-year-old Louisa forsaking her mortal coil.
James sighed. He sat by her bed in the sickroom. Nothing mattered anymore. Not the success of the hundred missions launched since he’d taken over from his father as the head of the Clocktower, a covert organization. Not the slice of his knife across the throat of the enemy agent who had tortured Louisa and left her for dead.
Once, he’d viewed his work as a spy for the Crown as an extension of his natural patriotism. For generations, the Spencer family had been involved with espionage. While other families prided themselves on breeding exceptional sheepdogs or on their award-winning fruit preserve recipe, James and his four sisters had been trained from childhood onward for one purpose alone: to serve as Clocktower agents.
Three sisters, from now on.
No amount of revenge would bring Louisa back. She lay stricken in that bed, propped up on five pillows. Arden, his youngest sister, had managed to clean most of the blood and bile off her pale heart-shaped face. That was nothing compared to the gore beneath the bandaged wound on her right side, or the deep imprints of a whip across her chest.
His breath came in irregular pants as he stood, forcing himself to the side of her bed. It wasn’t right that she’d die here in Paris, without the rest of her family to say goodbye to her. It wasn’t right that she’d die at all.
Anguish constricted his throat as he dipped a clean cloth in the basin and mopped it across her brow. For a second, her feature
s were not contorted in pain. Then sweat pebbled her face, dripping down to the blistering burn mark on her sharp, angular chin. The bastard had used a branding iron on her when she would not answer his questions.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, wiping the cloth across her brow again. “It should have been me they took. Not you. Never you.”
Her eyelids fluttered at the sound of his voice, but did not open. The laudanum in her system left her blessedly sedated. It was better this way. Better than hearing her screams as the doctor attempted to clean her wounds. Better than how she’d looked in that darkened hovel last night, strapped to a table so that she would not move during the butcher’s “interrogation.”
His hand faltered. He pulled back from her, dropping the cloth into the rubbish bin with the other bloodied linens.
“I should never have let you go, Lou.” He used the nickname she’d hated as a child, but had come to embrace in the last few years. “How bloody, bloody stupid am I? I should have known better. Anytime the Talons are involved, it’s a bloodbath. I could have stopped this. I could have saved you.”
The mission had seemed straightforward: capture the spy Nicodème, a rising star in Bonaparte’s cadre of ruthless assassins, the Talons. Nicodème had a known tendre for tall, willowy brunette women.
Send me, Louisa had said. I fit the profile. No one in the Talons has ever seen me. He’ll never suspect my identity.
James had acquiesced, as long as Arden accompanied her.
“As soon as we found out Nicodème wasn’t alone, I should have pulled you.” He’d run mission control from the Duc de Valent’s old mansion, secretly acquired by the Clocktower after the duc’s imprisonment and execution in the September massacres.
He dropped down in the chair again, propping his elbows on his knees, his head cradled in his hands. The same hands Louisa had once grasped with her smaller fingers to tug him along the garden path at their home estate, Abermont House.
The same hands that had sought retribution for Louisa’s torture. Dragged the steel blade of his knife down in a slant across Nicodème’s neck, effectively severing the artery and making him bleed internally.
Her tormentor was dead, but Louisa wouldn’t last the night.
She stirred. Moaned, an indecipherable sound so unlike her usually melodic voice. Louisa was a talented high soprano—her cover in this mission had been an opera singer, another of Nicodème’s weaknesses. God, how he wished she could be again like she’d been last week, practicing the song she’d planned to perform at the concert held by one of Bonaparte’s generals.
Louisa lived life to the fullest—always laughing, always smiling, always finding joy in the moment.
She’d seemed invincible.
She cried out again. The sound lanced through his chest. The laudanum had begun to wear off.
Soon, she’d have no relief from the pain.
He went to the door, opening it and calling for Arden. In a minute, she appeared from the room next door where she’d been conferring with the doctor.
“Lou’s waking,” he said, gesturing for her to follow him inside the room. “She needs another dose.”
Arden stopped him before he could reenter the room. She hesitated, something he had not seen her do in the fifteen years since his father had taken her in as his ward.
“What did the doctor say?” But he already knew the answer. Louisa’s wounds were too severe for her to recover. Yet he asked anyway, as if through the power of his own desperate hopes he could surmount her fate.
Arden’s shoulders slumped as she reached for the door. “We should say our goodbyes.”
The control he’d struggled so hard to maintain shattered, as Louisa’s brittle bones had broken under Nicodème’s cruelty. He could not form words. He could not do anything but stand there in the hall in front of Louisa’s makeshift sickroom, and suck in one breath after another.
“She would have gone no matter what you said,” Arden murmured. So many times had Arden understood him without words.
Yet his sister could not absolve him of this responsibility. He might not have been the one to physically harm Louisa, but he had sentenced her to death the second he’d approved her part in the mission to apprehend Nicodème.
He came back inside the chamber, approaching Louisa’s bedside again. “I didn’t stop her. I didn’t try to stop her. What kind of leader allows his sister to go into the fray?”
“She’s always known her own mind. She wouldn’t have listened, no matter what you’d done.” Arden came up on the other side of the bed, taking Louisa’s hands in hers. “She knew Nicodème was hurting innocent women, and she had to stop him.”
Remembering the stream of Nicodème’s blood down his blade gave him no comfort. “The bastard won’t hurt anyone ever again.”
Louisa stirred. Slowly, her eyes opened and her gaze traveled from side to side.
“I can’t hold on,” she whispered, her raspy voice a far cry from the confidence with which she’d always spoken. “Jim?”
He took her other hand. “I’m right here.”
“Protect them.”
He squeezed her hand. With that one last request, life shuddered out of Louisa. A silent, sad end to the indomitable girl who had blazed through life louder than cannon fire.
He remained by her side. Her body went cold. He held her hand until the servants came to clear out the room, and still he did not let go. Not until Arden tugged him away, forcing him to down a shot of brandy so he could speak again.
Protect them.
Louisa’s last words would become his personal crusade. From this day forward, he vowed he’d protect his agents with his very life. No one else would die because of his mistakes.
It was the only way he knew how to go on.
Chapter 1
Maidstone, Kent, March 1799
On this of all days, James Spencer, code-named Falcon, had even less patience for social niceties than the small amount he usually possessed. Today, he’d give the great majority of his vast family fortune to be on a boat in the Atlantic Ocean, or perhaps in a little villa in the south of Switzerland. Bloody hell, at this point, he'd even accept the stifling heat of India, if it meant he was far away from the confines of Abermont House and everything familiar.
Yet he could go to the ends of the Earth and the memories of Louisa would not stop. Still, a year after her death, the recollections drowned him. Louisa, as she'd been as a child of four, her grubby hands digging through the dirt. A dozen governesses throughout the years could not curb her enthusiasm for nature. Louisa, a debutante during her first Season, wearing a pastel purple gown as she danced at her coming out ball. And lastly, Louisa's beaten and unconscious body, thrown over his shoulder as they escaped from the Talon's lair.
He curled his fist, desperate rage boiling within him as he pictured her mutilated body in the crude sickroom. Heard the pierce of her cries in his ears, then the shallow intake as she inhaled her last breath. He was useless to stop her death. Powerless. Still the fury seethed within him, a crazed, rancorous animal he could not cage.
Three hundred sixty five days had passed, and he remembered every damn detail as though it were yesterday.
In the hall outside his study, the clock chimed nine. Three more hours until this godforsaken day was over. Each minute dragged on interminably, compounded by the weight of his guilt. His blasted responsibility as head of the Clocktower. His failure.
He closed his eyes and breathed in. His office should have smelled like brandy, old papers, and soap from a fresh cleaning by the maids. Instead, his nose pulled in the pungent sweetness of dried blood, combined with the rancor of bile. His stomach lurched, brought on by the haunting smell insinuating itself on his mind once more. He was in Nicodème's dungeon again, as he was every night, but this time he did not need sleep to usher in the horror. This day had been a living nightmare all by itself, an onslaught of memories he could not fight off.
Opening his eyes, he let out a shoulder-s
haking sigh. So much for the attempt at meditation. That had been a suggestion of his eldest sister, Elinor, and a part of him delighted in proving her wrong, even if it was on something as inconsequential as deep breaths not helping to relieve his stress.
As an alternative, he borrowed a tip from his second oldest sister, Korianna, and downed a third of a snifter in one gulp. The burn lit up his throat, a welcome diversion. He drank another third, and then the last. He'd conveniently placed the decanter on the edge of his desk in case of emergencies such as this one. A man had to have priorities, after all, and he now counted brandy very high on that list.
But even brandy was a temporary release. The miracles of spirits could not bring his sister back—no matter how many times he tried. They could not erase the fact that he'd allowed her to go on a suicide mission. His hand clenched around the empty snifter, wondering if the victory of shattering it in his palms would improve his mood.
Protect them.
Louisa's scratchy, pain-drenched voice resonated in his ears. The Clocktower had achieved a seventy-five percent mission success rate in the last year, and there had been no fatalities. He’d protected his fellow agents—but not his family, who should have meant more to him than anyone else.
Under James's leadership, a new era of prosperity appeared to be dawning for their organization. They'd managed to turn a key member of Fouché’s secret police to their advantage, and plant the seeds of rebellion against the First Consul. William Wickham, Under Secretary of State for the Home Department, had personally commended James for his service. The Clocktower was considered a secret sect of Wickham’s Alien Office.