The Undercover Scoundrel

by Jessica Peterson

  “Is it . . . Are we going to work?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he breathed. “It’s very small in there.”

  “Is it, um, as it should be?”

  He closed his eyes, lips curling into a pained half grin. “You’re perfect.”

  She tried not to recoil as pressure mounted between her legs. She felt herself stretching. Her pleasure was edged with pain.

  “Caroline,” he said. He was looking at her now, eyes wide with concern. “Tell me how you’re feeling, all right?”

  “I’m all right.”

  He guided himself farther against her, using his fingers to keep her open to him. He moved his hips, pressing into her. He pressed harder, sucking in a breath as the first bit of him entered her.

  The pleasant throb between her legs heightened to burning discomfort. Her eyes smarted. Henry was saying her name but she told him to keep going, and he did. Slowly he slid into her wet warmth; they both paused when he met the barrier inside her. He looked at her. She nodded, overwhelmed by the sting, by the sense of fullness he brought her.

  I’m all right, Henry. Keep going.

  He inhaled through his nose, and then he bucked his hips. In a single heartbeat, he sank to the hilt. A sound escaped Caroline’s lips, something between a cry and a whimper.

  He was bent over her then, taking her cry into his mouth as he set his forearms on either side of her head, surrounding her. His body was wound tightly; she could tell he wanted to move between her legs, but he waited.

  He gritted his teeth.

  The sting began to subside, her pleasure—her heart—rising in its place. Oh, this felt lovely. A little full. But lovely.

  Her hips began to circle against him, asking for more. Henry let out the breath he’d been holding and gently rocked his hips, withdrawing, entering again. Their skin, damp with sweat, slid and stuck.

  She surrendered.

  She surrendered to the pounding beat of her passion. To the heavy weight of her love for him.

  She surrendered to Henry.

  They moved against each other ardently, lost in a whirl of pain and limbs and pleasure. Her hands moved over his shoulders, marveling at the roping and bunching of his back muscles as he worked between her legs. His lips trailed over her jaw and throat.

  He slowed, suddenly, and then his eyes fluttered shut; he stilled and she could feel his cock pulse inside her.

  “Christ,” he said when the pulsing subsided. His lips fluttered over her eyelashes. “I’m sorry, Caroline, I didn’t mean . . . I meant to be more careful, but you felt so good, I couldn’t stop. I wanted to stop.”

  “I didn’t want you to stop,” she whispered. “I don’t want you to ever stop.”

  Slowly he withdrew from inside her; she felt his seed seeping warmly from between her legs.

  He cursed again when he looked down at the shirt beneath her.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Blood,” he replied, mouth drawn into a line as he used the shirt to clean her. “A lot of it. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Caroline flexed her stiff legs. She felt very sore between them. “All right. Sore. A little sore.”

  He crumpled the shirt between his hands and tossed it to the ground. He tugged the coverlet aside, holding it open for her. “Here, lie down. I’ll get a towel.”

  She crawled between the bedclothes, smiling as she drew them up to her nose. They smelled like him. Like her husband.

  He returned from the washstand with a damp towel, climbing into bed beside her. Thankfully he was still naked as the day he was born; he pressed his body against hers as he coaxed her legs apart, pressing the towel between them. It felt blessedly cool.

  “I love you, Caroline,” he murmured in her ear, nicking the lobe with his teeth. She felt him smiling against her skin. “Wife.”

  She smiled, too, a wide, irrepressible thing she felt in every corner of her being. Despite everything—despite how it appeared, her ten-thousand-pound dowry and his lack of position—despite their youth, their parents’ disapproval . . . despite all that, she knew this was where she was meant to be.

  Caroline loved him. She felt loved by him. And wasn’t that the end of everything?

  Henry spun her around and tugged her against the hardened mass of his body, her back to his front. He pulled the sheets over their heads and she, giggling, yielded to his hands as he took her body again and again and again, until the sun burned away the darkness.

  * * *

  It happened the next afternoon. As she was wont to do when in need of solitude and space, Caroline disappeared into the garden. Henry—her husband!—had a habit of sneaking from his father’s house to meet her there besides; she had half a mind to toss him beneath a bush and ravage him soundly, as she promised she would last night.

  She was on her knees, digging at a half-dead holly, when she heard the telltale rustle in a nearby boxwood. Her chest lit up with excitement; she was smiling, hard, when she brushed back her hair and turned toward the noise.

  Only it wasn’t Henry. George Osbourne, Viscount Umberton, heir to the wildly wealthy Earl of Berry, and Henry’s very best friend, emerged from the hedgerow. Caroline’s joy hardened in her throat at the sight of Osbourne’s well-formed, if slight, figure. His face was hard, his dark eyes soft.

  A tendril of panic unfurled inside her belly. She didn’t like that look; something was amiss.

  “My lord,” she said hopefully, as if she might will good news with the tone of her voice. “What an unexpected surprise. Have you . . . er . . . come for tea?”

  Osbourne bowed. “My lady, I am sorry to meet you like this, but I came straightaway.”

  “What?” So much for the soothing tone of voice. “What is it?”

  He wiped the sweat from his thick eyebrow with a trembling thumb. When he spoke his voice was low, hoarse.

  “He’s gone. Henry—Lake—he’s gone. I—” Here Osbourne looked away. “I thought you should know. I understand the two of you have . . . become quite close this summer, and I—”

  The brass-handled garden trowel fell from her gloved hand to the earth with a muted thud of protest. “Gone? Where? But how . . . I don’t understand!”

  Osbourne’s face was tensed with pain as he looked down at her. He swallowed. “Emptied his drawers into a valise—there’s nothing left, and he took the five pounds his older brother was hiding in his pillow. He left a note for his parents, something about duty, and not coming to look for him. He said he wouldn’t come back. Lady Caroline, Henry is gone.”

  Caroline’s vision blurred; tears burned her eyes, and she fell back on her haunches. “Perhaps it’s a mistake,” she said. “A misunderstanding with his father, or maybe it’s a joke, or—or—”

  “I know Henry,” Osbourne said. “He’s gone, Caroline. I don’t know where, and I don’t know why. But he’s gone.”

  She was sobbing then, and George Osbourne fell to his knees beside her and held her to his chest. They sat like that, damp with the heat of one another’s tears, until the garden was tawny with twilight.

  That was the last Caroline heard of Henry Beaton Lake, her husband, before he disappeared from Oxfordshire, from England, from her life.

  Before he disappeared forever.

  One

  Brunswick Castle, Occupied Kingdom of Westphalia

  Winter 1812

  Passing under the grand iron arch of Brunswick Palace’s gates, Henry Lake ducked into the shadows and, with a wince, peeled off his beard and moustache.

  Bloody things itched like the devil; during his audience at the palace he (rather stoically, it must be said) fended off a fit of sneezing when the waxed ends of his moustache lodged themselves in his nostrils. A self-indulgent addition to his disguise, that moustache, but well worth the trouble.

  Henry had got what he came to this g
odforsaken country in a most godforsaken winter for.

  He’d found the French Blue at last.

  Burrowing into an alcove between two buildings, Henry leaned against a wall and closed his eyes. His ragged breath shot from his lips in an opaque cloud as he struggled to catch his breath.

  It was just as he suspected.

  Just as he feared.

  The diamond he’d hunted for ten years was in London.

  Had it already been ten years? Dear God, he was getting old.

  London. He hadn’t set foot in England for more than a decade, and for good reason. She was there. Which meant he couldn’t be.

  He winced at the twist of pain in his chest, that familiar sensation, that old friend who’d accompanied him across the Continent these past years.

  He had no choice; the French Blue was in London, and so to London Henry Lake would go. The diamond was far too precious a bargaining chip to let slip through his fingers. He had to obtain it lest it vanish again, the way it vanished from Paris some twenty years ago at the start of the Revolution.

  He didn’t have much time. No matter the danger his presence in England posed to her, to his family. He’d go, do his duty, and with any luck be back in the thick of things here on the Continent without anyone the wiser.

  Besides, London was an enormous city. She was but one of thousands, hundreds of thousands of bodies occupying that soggy spot beside the Thames. No, he wouldn’t see her. Definitely not. He was an agent of His Majesty’s most esteemed Alien Office for God’s sake; disguise, disappearance, and dashing were his trade. If he wanted to avoid detection, he could.

  Only when it came to her, he didn’t trust himself.

  Tucking the remains of his disguise into his pocket, he limped through the blustery twilight. He drew a sharp breath; lately the bone-deep ache in his leg had heightened to a white-hot, searing sting. Even as he welcomed the pain, on cold nights like this he had a mind to swallow a pint of bourbon and cut the damned thing off. Weren’t peg-legged pirates all the rage in novels these days?

  Over the years, Lake found work to be the only antidote to his rising pain, and so as he limped, he let loose his thoughts. He’d suspected the Princess of Wales was in possession of the diamond from the moment his hunt for the missing crown jewels of France began. His suspicion proved correct, as his suspicions were often wont to do.

  Her Majesty’s father, that wily bastard Karl Wilhelm, Duke of Brunswick, was dead, but his jeweler was not. In fact he was making quite a heap off his lusty French occupiers here in Germany, who admired jewels almost as much as they admired themselves.

  A heap he would indubitably forfeit, should his French clients learn he played them for fools as an agent of his former master’s son, the exiled Black Duke.

  It didn’t take much: a bottle of wine, a threat of blackmail, and an hour later Henry squeezed the information from Karl Wilhelm’s jeweler like juice from a lemon.

  And he was one goddamned juicy lemon.

  The jeweler didn’t know how, exactly, Karl Wilhelm came to own a fifty-carat blue diamond. A diamond that once graced the royal breasts of French kings. But he did know Karl passed it to his daughter, the Princess of Wales, after he’d had the jeweler reshape the French Blue to fool Napoleon’s agents.

  All that was left to do was ply the French Blue from the princess’s grasp. Doubtless she was holding the gem hostage from her buffoon of a husband. But perhaps with the right words, a bit of flattery, the jewel might be coaxed from her treasure chest.

  Henry shrugged his chin into the collar of his coat, ears ringing with cold, and turned down an alley. Usually a smelly cesspit, tonight it appeared clean, quaint even, thanks to a downy blanket of snow that glittered in the light streaming from the tavern window.

  Henry paused, checking the leather strap of his eye patch. Not for the first time he was glad he had only one eye. It eased the pain, the velvety blackness that enveloped what had been his right eye; the blind spot that hid from him half the world, and half his body. The half that hurt.

  He didn’t deserve to be whole. Not after what he’d done to her.

  Patrons near the front of the tavern glanced up at the bitter gust that accompanied Lake into the tavern. They all looked familiar, and quite drunk. Good, very good; he and Moon might have a conversation without fear of it leaving this room.

  Making his way to a table near the fire, Lake winked at the tall, reedy woman wiping a mug behind the counter.

  “Ah, Brunhilde! You are looking well today.”

  Brunhilde harrumphed, a loud, throaty sound. “Wink at me again and I’ll break your balls.”

  “Such an elegant flower you are! How I do love the women in this country. Might I request a mug of your best beer, and a crust of bread?”

  “Out of bread, and the beer is piss.”

  “Well, then. I shall take some of the piss if you please, Brunhilde.”

  Brunhilde harrumphed again. Henry took a seat across from a conspicuously square-jawed woman and took off his hat with a sigh.

  “Too much?” the woman asked in French.

  “Tell me, Mr. Moon, are you trying to look like a man dressed as a woman on purpose?”

  Moon blinked. “No.”

  “Then yes, I’m afraid it is too much.”

  “Blast! The wig alone took me two weeks to make.”

  “I shall not inquire as to where you obtained so much hair.”

  “Better if you don’t.”

  “Excellent.” Lake leaned back as Brunhilde dropped a mug on the table before him, beer slopping onto his lap. “Now that that’s settled, we might get down to business.”

  Lake sipped thoughtfully at his beer. Not bad, that; Germans were such snobs about their brews. “The Blue’s just where I thought it’d be. We leave in the morning; the sooner the gem is in our possession, the sooner we can begin to negotiate with our toad-faced friend the emperor.”

  He smiled at the familiar tingle of excitement burning to life at the base of his skull. “Think of it, Moon. You and I could very well save the lives of hundreds, thousands of good British soldiers, soldiers like you and me. Who knows what Old Boney might trade for the diamond? I daresay even his tiny little manhood is on the table.”

  Mr. Moon scratched at his wig. “You haven’t been back home in some time, have you, sir?”

  Lake scoffed. “I hardly remember what England looks like.”

  But he did remember, in startling, painful detail, what she looked like. Dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin like alabaster, the warmth of her body curled into his . . .

  Henry finished his mug in three long, hard pulls, head pulsing at the sudden rush of cold.

  “I say, sir, are you all right?”

  Henry tried not to wince. “Quite.”

  “So, the plan,” Moon said. “We can’t possibly afford to buy the diamond off the princess. Are you going to steal it?”

  “Bah, theft is for amateurs. Besides, she’ll assume her husband did it. I daresay she’d try to stab him.”

  “Surely you’re joking.”

  “Sadly, I am not.” Lake smacked his lips. “No, we won’t thieve the jewel. And we won’t buy it, either.”

  Moon furrowed his brow. “But I don’t understand.”

  “We won’t buy the diamond from Princess Caroline. But someone else will. I’ve got just the man for the job.”

  “One of your agents?”

  “No. The man who gave me this.” Lake pointed to his right eye. “Oh, heavens, Moon, put your eyeballs back in your head. It was an unfortunate accident—storm-tossed seas, falling mainmast, that sort of thing. If it wasn’t for me, he’d be lying in a hundred broken pieces at the bottom of the Channel. Needless to say the man owes me a favor.”

  Moon swallowed. “Several favors, I should hope.”

  “Convincing the Pri
ncess of Wales to sell a prized jewel under false pretenses is a rather large favor, but I am never one to say never.” Lake clapped his hands and rubbed the palms together. “Well, then. As much as I’d love to stay and chat up old Brunhilde, we must be off.”

  Two

  Mayfair, London

  Late Spring 1812

  Fragrant in the best—and worst—of ways, Hyde Park was just as Lady Caroline Townshend, Dowager Countess of Berry, remembered it: achingly lovely, poignantly familiar.

  The springtime sun threw the park’s multicolored charms into stunning relief. Blooms perfumed the warm breeze and almost (though not quite) masked the more earthy smells of manure and mud. The meadows and hedgerows were so violently green her eyes watered; the day’s dying light streamed through the gaps in the trees and pooled in honey-hued stillness beneath their branches.

  For a moment Caroline closed her eyes and inhaled the sensations of this place. She hadn’t been back in over a decade; last time she frequented the park she was seventeen, in town for her first—and last—season. She’d been so lost then, so lonely.

  And now she was lost again.

  Her throat tightened at the rush of memories from that year. In the space of a single summer she’d fallen in love once and married twice; how young she was then, how unprepared for the crushing pleasures and disappointments of womanhood! Even now, so many years later, thinking about him—she could not bear to put a name to her longing—made her heart swell with something so forceful it took her breath away.

  Caroline swallowed, hard. She could not cry. She would not cry, not here, not in Hyde Park, and during the fashionable hour at that; though she was a widow, and thus entitled to live as eccentrically as she wished, spreading gossip was always preferable to being its subject.

  And so Caroline did not cry; she tripped instead.

  “Heavens, Caroline, do mind your step. That’s the third time today!” With a sigh her brother, William, Earl of Harclay, drew her upright by the elbow. Nodding apologetically at a nearby matron, he said, “I’ve half a mind to put you in a pram so that our fellow pedestrians might be spared injury. I thought you’d grown out of your awkwardness.”