by Shana Galen
“As Agent Wolf, you have been a great asset to your country and this organization. God knows no other operative has your gift for strategy. When your country needed you, you answered the call. But I think it time you explored other avenues of interest.”
Adrian clenched his jaw. “I see.”
“Your king and your country are eternally grateful for your services. If you had not already been granted a knighthood for your bravery and sacrifice, we would bestow one on you—secretly, of course. But, as it stands, we have no choice but to retire you.”
“I’m thirty-five,” Adrian said, his voice a cold whisper. “That’s a bit young for retirement.”
“Yes. Well…” Melbourne cleared his throat, and Adrian tapped his fingers impatiently. He knew exactly what his friend was telling him. He had known this day would come eventually. But that didn’t mean he would go without a fight. That didn’t mean he would make this easy or painless for Melbourne.
Melbourne straightened. “What about parliament? You hold a seat in the House of Lords.”
“Parliament?” Adrian’s his lip curled. “It’s a gaggle of self-important idiots who, rather than take any action, stand about listening to themselves speak.”
“What about a hobby then? Gardening?”
Adrian gave him a pained expression.
“Golf?”
Adrian sighed. Loudly.
“Poetry?”
Adrian flashed him a warning glance, and Melbourne shrugged. “Listen, Adrian, I know how much the Barbican group has meant to you. I know why you need it.”
Adrian’s chest tightened, but he didn’t speak. Didn’t move.
“But you’ve done your duty—more than your duty. Whatever demons you’re still fighting, let them go. Your father—”
“Don’t.” It was the one word Adrian could manage without choking. Even so, his voice was strangled, the word garbled. “Don’t,” he said again.
“Fine.” Melbourne rose. “But like it or not, you’ll hear my advice—stop being a martyr, and start living your own life. As Wolf, you invented a thousand identities for yourself, but I don’t think you know the first thing about Adrian Galloway. Who are you, Adrian?”
Adrian opened his mouth, but Melbourne hurried on. “Other than a spy for the Barbican group.”
Adrian closed his mouth again.
“And what about that pretty wife of yours?” Melbourne rounded his desk and moved toward the door behind Adrian. “In the last year, you’ve been away more than you’ve been home. Now might be a good time to start a family. A couple of hale and hearty boys running about the house would be good for you—both of you. You’ll soon see there’s more to life than missions.” Melbourne opened the door, and the empty hallway beyond yawned at Adrian.
He rose. “About Bonaparte—”
“Go home to your wife,” Melbourne continued before taking Adrian’s shoulder and guiding him through the door.
No fool, Adrian knew this battle—though not the war—was over.
The door closed with an echoing thud, and Adrian stood in the deserted hall and stared at the stone walls. This wasn’t the end. He wouldn’t give in that easily. He couldn’t—no matter what Melbourne said. There was so much still left to do, to prove. In the meantime…
Adrian sighed.
His wife. Even the thought of Sophia caused a flicker of pain. A couple of hale and hearty boys, Melbourne had said. They had tried that.
He’d married Sophia because he was the eldest son, and he was expected to marry and produce heirs. She was from a good family, and his mother and stepfather had encouraged—very well, practically insisted on—the match. Adrian hadn’t argued.
He knew his duty and figured he could have done worse. He had better things to do than waste time at balls and soirees flirting with females. Things like saving his country.
Sophia wasn’t the kind of woman to demand attention or interfere with his work. Even when he was courting her, she never asked intrusive questions and never complained at his long absences.
More importantly, she never mentioned his father.
He was already working for the Foreign Office, taking the most dangerous assignments in order to prove himself to Melbourne and the leaders of the Barbican group.
Then, just a day after the lavish wedding, he’d been asked to lead a very dangerous mission. His success would mean an invitation to join the Barbican group—work he considered far more important than any wife or marriage.
At precisely the time Adrian would have spent hours in seclusion with his wife, coming to know her intimately—perhaps even falling in love with her—he’d been in France, doing surveillance from a cold, austere garret.
When he’d come home, his town house had felt little different. But two months into his marriage, he’d been inducted into the Barbican group.
He’d tried to be a good husband when he was home, and for a time they’d been happy.
Expectant.
But mostly there had been pain and disappointment. He’d never expected his marriage would be a love match. Loyalty, honor, sacrifice for king and country—those meant more to him than any woman.
And, unlike his father, he would never allow himself to forget it.
But he had allowed his marriage to unravel. At this point, he couldn’t say where Sophia was or what she was doing. He couldn’t even remember what she looked like.
No. That wasn’t true.
He remembered all too well.
Adrian began to walk, frowning as he stepped out of the nondescript building housing the secretary’s office and into the bright summer sunshine on Pall Mall.
Perhaps Melbourne was right. Perhaps he could use this holiday—he refused to think of it as a retirement—to repair his fractured union. They might even try for a child again.
Adrian made his way down Piccadilly then turned onto Berkeley Street, nodding to a gentleman from his club. Adrian needed something to distract him for a week or so, until he could find a way to convince Melbourne he was still indispensable. Adrian didn’t even think he’d need to convince Melbourne. The leader of the Barbican group would come to him, no doubt.
Until then he would spend time with Sophia and concentrate on beginning the family he’d always wanted. But how to broach the topic of children with Sophia? She’d closed the subject and her bedroom door to him a year ago—or was it two? He shook his head. It had been some time since he’d shared her bed.
Quite some time.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want her. Despite her huge glasses, severe hairstyle, and high-necked gowns, he knew she was a lush, tempting woman. She might try to hide her beauty, but he knew her with her wild chestnut curls tossed over a pillow, her red lips parted, her dark eyes drowsy with pleasure.
His body tensed as the images, each one more wanton than the last, flooded him. Need, like a fire, licked at him. Perhaps this was why he avoided his wife.
Adrian had thought of acquiring a mistress, but infidelity always seemed a sordid business to him. His father had taught him that and taught him well.
Adrian turned onto Charles Street, and after passing The Running Footman tavern, his elegant town house came into view. The sight robbed him of most of his resolve.
Perhaps the subject of children was too bold a start. It might be better to begin with the basics.
A simple conversation, for example. They might discuss the weather or the… price of corn. The idea wasn’t promising, but it was a step up from their usual good morning, excuse me, and good night.
He approached the town house door and took a deep breath. One day he would understand how he could enter a room full of armed men intent upon killing him and not even perspire, while the thought of ten words with his wife made him all but break out in hives.
Adrian gritted his teeth and opened the door.
***
Sophia Galloway caught the lamp just as the small table tumbled over. Unfortunately, she was not quick enough to grasp the Sèvres por
celain plate, and it crashed to the wooden floor, splintering into a hundred pieces.
Norbert, the devil child who’d knocked the table over, erupted into loud screams at the noise, and his mother, who’d been stuffing her face with tea cakes and scones, scowled at Sophia.
“Good lord, Sophia. What are you thinking, putting those dangerous objects in a child’s path?” Cordelia scooped the howling Norbert into her ample arms and patted him absently on the back. “Norbert could have been hurt. There now, sweetheart. Would you like a cake?”
The chubby-cheeked toddler’s tears disappeared in an instant, and he reached eagerly for the sweets.
“Had I known you were coming,” Sophia said, placing the lamp on the drawing-room mantel and righting the table, “I would have moved the items.” And everything else of value.
She adjusted the glasses slipping off her nose and caught sight of Eddie, her sister-in-law’s other demon child, peeking out from under the heavy draperies. Before he could stick a piece of broken porcelain in his mouth, she grabbed him.
Sophia yanked the shard out of his hand, and then he, too, exploded into wails of displeasure. “Sophia!” Cordelia screeched around a mouthful of crumpet, and it was all Sophia could do not to pull the dagger she had hidden in her boot and fling it into her sister-in-law’s chest.
But that would only make the children cry louder and probably wake Edward, her husband’s snoring half brother. And so, instead of dispatching Cordelia, as she would have liked, Sophia smoothed her skirts and took a stiff-necked seat in her favorite chair, a Sheraton upholstered in cream satin.
And to think a week ago she’d been Saint: England’s most resourceful, most skilled, most elusive spy. How quickly she’d been reduced to… this.
Wallace, her butler, stepped unobtrusively into the room, and Sophia made a motion toward the shattered Sèvres piece. He nodded. “I’ll send the maid—again, my lady.”
Cordelia had finally quieted both of her children, and now she leveled her gaze on Sophia. “This house is entirely too dangerous,” Cordelia pronounced. “Who puts a table in such a precarious location?”
Tempted as she was to respond with her true feelings, Sophia resisted the urge. Adrian’s family knew her as his meek and docile wife. It was a ruse that had served her well while working for the Barbican group. Who would suspect a mouse like her to live a double life as a secret agent? She had only to keep the pretense going. Surely the Barbican group would have need of her again, and this ridiculous ruse would once again be useful.
“You’re right, Cordelia,” Sophia answered, though she thought it perfectly reasonable to place a lamp table between a couch and chair, where a lamp might actually be needed. “Perhaps you have some ideas on how I might rearrange the furnishings in this room.”
Cordelia puffed up like a bird looking to mate and launched into a litany of helpful suggestions.
Sophia pasted a smile on her face and glanced surreptitiously at the clock on the mantel. Adrian’s family had been here exactly twenty-three minutes. How long was she expected to put up with them?
Not that she had anything better to do now that her career as an operative was at an end. In truth, since she’d arrived home from her failed attempt to apprehend Lucien Ducos, she had done nothing but pace, her mind turning over every possible way she might regain her position. Or any operative position.
She glanced at Norbert and Eddie. Devil children that they were, her heart constricted. She must make the Foreign Office take her back. But how?
The past few days she’d tried every distraction she knew. Usually reading helped, but Adrian’s library contained mostly sermons and biblical treatises. What she’d really wanted was a volume on weaponry. She was a master with a dagger, relatively good with a rapier, but her aim with a pistol might be improved…
Sophia clenched her hands into fists. No thinking of pistols! It would drive her mad.
“And those draperies,” Cordelia was saying. Sophia nodded absently, attempting to ignore Eddie, who stuck his tongue out at her.
To clear her mind of pistols, Sophia had also tried taking an active part in a few of the charitable organizations in which she was supposedly enormously involved. But while the women were kind to her—she was a viscountess, after all—they seemed far more interested in gossip than helping war widows and orphans.
And so she’d ended up staring out her bedroom window for hours on end. The view was depressing, as the garden had been sadly neglected these past years. Perhaps she could try her hand at botany. She’d always been interested in the components of poisons…
Damn! She had to stop thinking about poisons and pistols! Perhaps if she treated this as a temporary assignment, it would be more bearable.
She took a deep breath. She was Sophia Galloway, Lady Smythe, a peeress, a lady of the ton.
She glanced at her sister-in-law, whose life revolved around fashion, nannies, and, of course, tea cakes. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad life. Perhaps she could figure out a way to lace tea cakes with a tasteless poison…
“What are you smiling about, Sophia?” Cordelia asked, her small eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Do my suggestions amuse you?”
Sophia blinked and composed her features. “No, not at all. In fact, I was imagining this room with all of the changes you’ve recommended. The final effect will certainly be charming.”
“Do you really think so?” Cordelia’s brows lifted. “I thought you would object to sealing the fireplace.”
Sophia almost coughed. “Sealing the—? Ah, no, splendid idea. Why is that necessary again?”
“To protect your children, Sophia.” Cordelia spoke as though Sophia were a child, even though, at twenty-eight, Sophia had six years on Cordelia. “Surely you and Lord Smythe would not want your little son or daughter to fall into the fire.”
Sophia stiffened. She should have expected this. She should have prepared a response. Now she was left speechless, mortifying tears welling in her eyes. She blinked them back, her eyes stinging.
“Sophia?” Cordelia was studying her. “Is there something wrong? Or—something you want to tell me?” She clapped her hands together. “Oh, I knew it! You’re expecting.”
“No!” Sophia shook her head emphatically, but it was too late. Cordelia was out of her seat, engulfing Sophia in her arms. Sophia tried to speak, but the sound of voices below interrupted them.
“Ah, there’s the new papa now,” Cordelia gushed.
For once, her husband’s timing was perfect. Sophia needed out of this room before the tears started in earnest. She rose, intending to make certain Wallace showed his lordship into the drawing room. If Adrian so much as thought about avoiding his brother’s family and retreating to his library, Sophia would strangle him.
“Lord Smythe!” Sophia called down the stairs, knowing it was exceedingly gauche to do so and not caring a whit. “My lord, come up to the drawing room. We have visitors.”
She could almost hear his hesitation and could picture the frown on his handsome face. But true to his predictable nature, Adrian started up the stairs. His boots clomped on the marble, and Sophia waited until he came into view.
He glanced up at her, his gray eyes full of his displeasure. “Good afternoon, Lady Smythe.”
“Good afternoon, my lord.”
He reached the landing and raised a brow. “And who are these guests?”
“Your brother and his family. Isn’t it wonderful?”
His expression said the visit was anything but. Still, he continued climbing the steps. To her chagrin, Sophia found herself taking a step back as Adrian came closer. He’d always been a handsome man. Exceedingly handsome. So handsome, in fact, that when they’d first met, he’d all but taken her breath away.
And that was precisely why she shouldn’t have married him. She’d always known she had to marry. No innocent miss could ever hope to secure a place in the Barbican group. But from the first, she’d known Adrian was the wrong man. She had a duty to her c
ountry to keep who she was and what she did a secret. She had vowed never to allow anyone to get close to her, to know her, to suspect what she really was.
Adrian made her want to break that vow. Adrian, with his muscled body and his skilled touch. At times, it took all she possessed to stay away from him.
For so many reasons, life was easier if she avoided him and his bed. Not that he wanted her in his bed. And she could hardly blame him. She’d turned him out of her bedroom, shut the door in his face. He thought he was not welcome. Heaven help her if he ever realized the truth.
And now here he was—her husband—that prime specimen of male magnificence. His short, dark blond hair framed a square face of hard edges and flat planes. He had a slash of eyebrows over those mesmerizing gray eyes, and his Roman nose cut his stark features in two. His lips were full, even when tightened in displeasure, and his jaw was strong and angular. Though he was only an inch or two taller than average, his broad shoulders and wide chest gave him an imposing presence. He looked larger than he was, especially when one noted the way his chest tapered into a slim waist, lean hips, and long legs.
Her pulse sped, and she took a shaky breath.
He reached the top step so that Sophia felt as though he truly did tower over her. She teetered on the line between short and medium height, so she squared her shoulders in an attempt to appear taller. Glancing up at her husband, she waited—almost hoped—to see some flicker of interest in his eyes.
Were his hands clammy at the sight of her? Did his chest feel tight? Did he imagine their bodies naked and entwined?
She stared at his broad chest, traced the stubble on his jaw with her gaze, and met his gray eyes. In them she saw nothing.
Thank God. If he ever looked at her with more than passing interest, her resolve would surely falter. She couldn’t allow that to happen. She couldn’t drop her guard, not even for an instant. She couldn’t go through that pain again. She couldn’t face the hollow nursery, echoing with the keening rock of the empty cradle. The cradle Adrian had made, lovingly and with his own hands. The cradle they had both knelt beside, fingers and gazes linked, long ago when they still touched, still had dreams of happiness.