Within minutes Wyn saddled Galahad and set off on the road to London.
Chapter 24
“Ah. Beauty and wit in one small chamber. It’s good to be back in London.”
Standing before a filing cabinet, Lady Constance Read whirled about, her vibrant blue eyes wide.
“Wyn! You have returned.” She thrust out her hand and he bowed over it. Her smile that turned intelligent men to blithering idiots glowed.
“If I had known you would be the first lady I saw when I returned to town, I would have returned quicker.” He’d been disappointed in the first call he paid. At Savege’s house the butler informed him that Diantha was expected to be out for some hours yet. So he had come here to the Secret Office to find what he could.
Constance squeezed his hand and laughed. “You are a rogue, but you hide it well behind lovely flattery, as always.” Her gaze flickered up and down him. “You look remarkably good. Where have you been?”
He bowed. “I am honored, madam.”
“And . . . ?” She turned back to the filing cabinet. Daughter of a duke, Constance was received everywhere. She used this popularity in her work for the Falcon Club. “Where . . . ?”
“I went to see a man about a horse. But I suspect you know that already.”
“I am still jealous Colin assigned the task to you. Is Lady Priscilla as beautiful as they say?”
“More so. Our august secretaire would have sent you, I suspect, if he thought you enjoyed cards, brandy, and scantily clad working girls.”
“I see. But you retrieved her successfully, it seems, without too much distraction.” She threw him a glance of mild interest.
Wyn wasn’t fooled. Golden-haired, voluptuous, and an heiress, she was any man’s fantasy. But years ago he had learned that Constance Read’s reasons for joining the Falcon Club—and remaining in it after her cousin, Leam, quit—were none he wished to explore.
“Were you that jealous of me, Con?” He wandered to the desk in the modest whitewashed chamber. Sparely furnished, with a single portrait of the old king on the wall and one barred window, the Secret Office looked nothing out of the ordinary. But within filing drawers that lined the walls were stored every letter from every informant in the British Empire that had ever reached London successfully. Most of that correspondence had never been read. “Would you have liked the assignment yourself, or are you busy here with more interesting business?”
“Oh, this is nothing.” She shuffled through the file before her. “It was only that you were absent for so long. It should not have taken you over a month to retrieve a horse and deliver her to the duke.” Her gaze passed over the papers, but unfocused. “Really, Wyn—”
“Dear Constance, why don’t you put that down and ask me what you wish to ask me? Then we might move past it and speak of more pleasant matters.”
She pursed her full lips and peered at him closely. “You did not go directly from the house party to Yarmouth.”
“Do you know, you are especially beautiful when you are piqued. Would that I could pique you more often.”
“How do you imagine I learned of this most unusual detour of yours?”
He sat back against the desk. “I am as ignorant as the next man. Unless, of course, the next man is Colin Gray.” He crossed his arms. “What have you two been up to?”
She met his gaze for a long moment. Then she sat down in the office’s single chair and draped a hand airily over her brow. “I cannot tell you. If I did, then I would have to kill you and that would ruin my gown, bloodstains being what they are.”
He tsked. “It is far too lovely a gown for such abuse, s’truth.”
She dropped her hand, her face now devoid of play. “Wyn, I was concerned about you. I am still concerned. You have been so little in touch with us for too long, even when you are here in town. And even with Leam. Will you remain in London for a time?”
His friends imagined him hell-bent on self-destruction, and perhaps he had been when last he’d seen them. But no longer.
“Colin is about to dismiss me from the club, you know.”
“I don’t think so. When you did not return immediately he would not send anyone to find you. He said you would appear when you wished and that I should trust you. He has great faith in you.”
“He did not send anyone after me because he wishes to discover whether Lady Justice truly knows my identity.”
“You heard about that already?”
“I have been back in town at least three hours, my dear.”
She shrugged. “Believe what you will about Colin’s motives. But I know you will believe that this past fortnight since Leam came to town he has been in a perfect stew. I think it’s about you, but he won’t say.”
“The poet is all dramatic anguish when he wishes to impose his notions of rectitude upon another.”
Her laughter filled the little room with music. Then abruptly her amusement faded.
“Why were you gone so long, Wyn? Is Leam displeased with you for a particular reason?”
“If you wish to know your cousin’s feelings on the matter, I recommend you apply to him, my dear. Now, as much as I am delighted to again be in your company, I have a task to accomplish this afternoon and few hours in which to do so.”
She stood and came to his side, bringing with her the scent of white roses. Her bosom brushed his sleeve. “I am happy to see you,” she said softly.
“Constance, your sweet seduction will not stir me into unwarranted disclosures,” he said without looking at her. “I am better at this game than you.” With all but one dimpled girl. His friends did not recognize him because he had become, in fact, unrecognizable, guided by his mind as always but now no longer ruled by it. And . . . he liked it this way.
“You are heartless.” Constance leaned her cheek upon his shoulder. “I adore you.”
“I am eternally yours.”
“You never were,” she said sweetly. “And now I think you never shall be.”
He swiveled to her. “What precisely am I intended to gather from that?” he drawled while the heart he supposedly lacked beat a quick tempo.
“Only that Colin has a letter for you to read. But I shall leave that to him.” She went to the door. “If you depart from London again without telling me, I vow I will send someone after you. Or perhaps I will simply follow you myself. Colin has confined my work to town, but if you cross me again in this manner I will become a wandering hunter like you, and like my cousin and Jin used to be. I vow it.”
“Your vow is my bond. Now, leave, dearest lady.”
The door clicked shut. He drew the bolt and returned to the file resting atop the drawer. At the top a clerk had scrawled Davina Lucas Carlyle, Baroness. He opened the file and read.
“You made it all up?” Diantha sat behind a potted plant in a corner of an enormous ballroom bursting with guests from its cascading entry stairs to its beveled terrace doors. An orchestra’s bright notes leaped into the air, the murmurs and laughter of conversation mingling with the wafting aromas of perfumes and colognes, champagne and melting beeswax.
Teresa sat beside her on another embroidered gilt chair, her short, flaming curls sparkling with tiny pearls laced into a white net that matched her snowy white gown. She nodded somberly.
Diantha shook her head. “I imagined some of it embellishment.” And she had discovered that some of it was enormous understatement. “But . . . everything?”
Teresa’s eyes were pretty round lily pads. “Not everything,” she allowed. “Annie told me stories of her amorous escapades with footmen and stable hands.” Her fingers tangled together on her lap. “I merely told those escapades to you as though they had happened to me.”
Diantha felt astoundingly ill. Regret had nothing to do with it. “But why would you do such a thing?”
