The Lady Who Loved Him

by Christi Caldwell

  He forced a grin. “Your Grace, as beautiful as ever.” Married when Leo had been just a boy, after the duke’s first wife was tragically murdered by an enemy of the state, the second Duchess of Aubrey had the same vivaciousness of those years past.

  The duchess snorted. “Your Grace?”

  “Aunt Elsie,” he amended.

  Releasing his palms, she hurried to close the door. “I learned long ago that any visitor to arrive after midnight can only represent trouble. And when it is my rogue of a nephew… who hasn’t even bothered to shed his cloak? Doubly so.”

  Leo followed her gaze to the layered wool cloak he still wore. With numb fingers, he fiddled with the clasp and shrugged out of the garment.

  “Now,” his aunt started. Taking the cloak from him, she folded it over her arm. “Why don’t you tell us what’s sent you here so frantic?” A slip of a woman at barely five feet, the duke’s diminutive wife had all the markings of a great field commander.

  His uncle lifted an ivory sheet of vellum. “I gather your late-night arrival is a product of this urgent note I received from Higgins.”

  Stalking across the room, he took the page from the duke’s fingers.

  Leo scraped his gaze over the words there.

  Your Grace,

  There is a matter of urgency that requires an immediate meeting. It is in reference to the most recent discussed business. Please send word as to when you have time to meet with Rowley and myself.

  ~Higgins

  “Nothing good is ever behind late-night appointments,” his uncle put in.

  No, there wasn’t. His stomach sank. Gossip moved faster than a conflagration through a dry field. Absent of his usual flippant reply, he stared blankly at the inked words that marked the beginning of the end of his work.

  The duke looked past his shoulder. “Will you allow us a moment, my love?”

  Setting Leo’s cloak on the nearby sofa, the duchess swept over. Leaning up on her tiptoes, she brushed her mouth over her husband’s. The happy-after-all-these-years couple’s soft exchange carried over to Leo’s ears. “Do go gentle on him,” she whispered, tugging at his shirtfront. “You were once very much like him.”

  “And you loved me for it,” his uncle murmured, dropping a kiss on her mouth.

  “I loved you more when you were reformed,” she said dryly.

  Disquieted by the intimate display, Leo looked away while husband and wife continued their hushed discussion.

  His own parents had hated each other with a vicious ferocity. Even having witnessed the closeness between his aunt and uncle, he’d never been comfortable with those tender exchanges. Love had destroyed his mother and, as such, he’d be a fool to ever trust himself to any weakening emotion. His work had given him strength and made him immune to those sentiments.

  And now I’ve lost it all…

  His fingers tightened reflexively about the page in his hand, wrinkling Higgins’ note at the corner.

  “Leo.” He snapped his head up as his aunt came over to buss him on the cheek. “Listen to your uncle,” she murmured with far more affection than he’d ever deserved. “His advice is usually sound.” She shot a wink in her husband’s direction.

  “Aunt Elsie.”

  As soon as she had gone, the duke marched over to the sideboard. Grabbing a snifter, he poured two glasses. The clink of crystal touching crystal and the steady stream of liquid, usually calming, had no effect.

  “Here,” his uncle said gruffly, with one glass extended.

  “I thought you did not approve of my drinking,” he challenged, accepting the offering.

  “I do not approve of your overindulging. But there are times that call for spirits. I suspect this is one?”

  With shaking fingers, Leo set down his untouched brandy.

  His uncle paused, giving him a cursory search. “That bad?”

  Leo swiped his hands over his face. “Worse,” he muttered. He swiftly dropped his arms back to his sides. “But only because of appearances,” he began, going on the immediate defensive.

  “And we both know from,” the duke gave him a pointed look, “our experience that appearances are oftentimes all that matter.”

  It was the first lesson given to him when he’d been presented by his uncle to the then leader of the organization. They’d enlisted Leo’s services on behalf of the Crown when he was a pup at university, tasking him with the role of dissolute rake. How effortlessly he’d filled it. But then, he’d always been black to the core.

  A hoarse chuckle pulled from his throat. How miserably full circle his life had come.

  The duke motioned to the leather sofa. “Is there something amusing in all of this? If so, I’d prefer we begin there.”

  Claiming the chair opposite his uncle, Leo leaned forward, his palms up. “I was caught in a compromising position this evening,” he said without preamble. Hardly the first time.

  It was a testament to Leo’s rottenness that his admission earned not even a slight crack in his uncle’s stony countenance. “A lady?” the duke put to him in guarded tones.

  “An innocent one.” With a silken expanse of thigh he’d have liked to continue exploring. Leo winced. “I was exiting Lord Waterson’s office with the information on his upcoming meeting schedules and found her in the hall.”

  A vein pulsed at the corner of his uncle’s eye. “You were caught,” he said bluntly.

  “I was nearly caught,” he felt compelled to point out. “The lady injured herself.” Leo proceeded through a quick account of the damning event. He took particular care to omit the fact that he’d very nearly had the lady’s mouth under his… or that, with his world ratcheting down about him, he hungered for a taste of her, still.

  When he’d finished, his uncle frowned. Saying nothing for a long while, he sipped at his drink. “You returned to help the lady, then?”

  He nodded once. “Yes,” he said tightly. He braced for a stream of questions about the out-of-character move on his part… that did not come.

  His uncle finished his drink. “Who was the lady?”

  “Lady Chloe Edgerton.”

  Whether the duke knew anything of or about the spirited minx, he gave no outward indication. Questions—irrelevant ones—hovered on Leo’s lips about the lady’s identity. How did a woman with her generous hips and luminescent blue eyes come to be unwed after six Seasons? But then, no one ever said members of the peerage had brains betwixt their ears.

  With a resigned sigh that sent Leo’s panic spiraling, his uncle set aside his glass. “Higgins was clear.”

  “It was not my fault,” Leo barked, jumping up, hating the childishness of his rebuttal.

  “You’ve ruined a young lady’s reputation, Leo,” the duke chided. “What do you think Higgins will say, given his warnings earlier today?”

  He gnashed his teeth. “And this from the same men who tasked me with leading a life of debauchery?”

  All the color leached from his uncle’s cheeks.

  Leo slammed a fist into his open palm. “You and Higgins and Rowley, you all lecture me for the life I’ve lived.” Mindful that even as the duke’s servants were mostly former members of the Brethren, privacy was sacrosanct, he dropped his voice to a furious whisper. “The truth is, you encouraged my lifestyle, and now you’ll play the roles of offended, proper gentlemen, disgusted with what I am?” It was what he’d always been. His father had seen the blackness in his soul.

  His uncle climbed to his feet. “I’ll not debate morality with you, Leo. I ceased trying long ago.”

  Leo had spent his life believing himself immune to the world’s ill opinion. So why did his neck go hot at the resignation in his uncle’s tone?

  “There is the matter of the ruined lady.” And with that pronouncement, the duke started for his desk.

  Briefly motionless, Leo jumped into movement. He positioned himself in front of his uncle, halting him in his tracks. “Th-the ruined lady?” he sputtered. “What of my bloody career?”

>   Smiling sadly, his uncle caught his right shoulder. “Since you were trained in your role, I marveled at you, Leo. How could the book-minded boy I’d so loved, with an impish grin and infectious spirit, so artfully don the façade you did? How did the world not see it?” he pondered, more to himself. “As your uncle, I was proud. As a former agent, with a not dissimilar role, I was in awe. But somewhere along the way, Leo, you became that man.” A paroxysm contorted the duke’s rugged features, with the faintest wrinkles beginning to appear as a mark to his age. “Until I no longer recognized you.” Giving his shoulder a light squeeze, his uncle released him. The duke stepped around Leo, moved behind his desk, and sat.

  There was an air of finality, a resignation, that held Leo frozen to the floor, incapable of movement.

  The duke drew open his desk drawer and, taking out a piece of paper, reached for his pen.

  “What are you doing?” Leo whispered in awed disbelief.

  The rhythmic tick of the pen striking the desk was inordinately loud. “Arranging the meeting with Higgins,” his uncle directed at the page.

  After all his service, after every brush with death and valuable piece of information gathered, they’d all—his uncle included—simply wash their proverbial hands of him. He shook his head to clear the buzzing in his ears. “That is all you’d say?”

  His uncle paused, the tip of his pen poised above the inkwell. “What would you have me say, Leo?” he asked impatiently, again putting words to that damned page. “I’ve stuck my neck out countless times, when every commanding officer reported to me that they were worried that you’d gone too far with your persona. They were right.”

  They were right.

  His uncle finished writing and then set his pen down.

  Jerking into movement, Leo lunged several steps. “I have never asked you to help me.” Not once when he’d lain bleeding with bruised ribs from a well-placed kick by his father. Not when he’d been locked away without food or water. The offer of work with the Crown had come at his uncle’s request. “Now I am. Help me.” A worthless bounder without any good in his soul, he was not too proud to plead for this… only this.

  “I cannot, Leo,” his uncle said matter-of-factly, sprinkling pounce upon the ink. He blew lightly at that page. “You are my nephew… my godson, but I still have respect for the organization. Higgins was clear.”

  Leo’s throat closed tightly as he struggled to breathe. What am I without the Brethren? He was nothing. He was every last useless rake who’d die one day from too much drink, or with a bullet in his head from some irate husband.

  The duke folded the sheet, and as he reached for his lion seal, the mark of the Brethren, another desperate entreaty pulled from Leo’s lips. “There must be something. I cannot lose this,” he said hoarsely as the older man stamped the page. “Please.”

  It was that single utterance that gave his uncle pause. He set aside the seal, saying nothing.

  His legs giving out under him, Leo sank onto the edge of the leather chair.

  Steepling his fingertips, the duke drummed them together, staring over their tops at Leo. “I don’t know, Leo…”

  “Please,” he repeated. “I am close to solving the Cato Street Conspiracy. There is still much work for me to do. I do not want to be done with the organization.” Where other members married and retired, Leo had been wedded only to the organization. It had earned a fealty and loyalty Leo was incapable of giving to any woman as his uncle had.

  His uncle ceased that silent tapping. “What you’re asking me… is out of my hands.”

  “Fine.” Leo scrambled forward and gripped the edge of the mahogany desk. “Then tell me how I can fix this.”

  A long wisp of air sailed past his uncle’s lips. “I do not know that you can, Leo.” He went silent, his high, noble brow wrinkling as he thought.

  “What?” Leo demanded, searching his eyes over his uncle’s face.

  “It is possible that it would change nothing—”

  “What?” he cut in. He’d sold every corner of his soul over the past twelve years. There was certainly nothing he was not immune to trying if it would benefit him or the Crown.

  “You can marry the lady.”

  Except that.

  He was immune to trying that.

  Leo sank back in his chair. “You are mad,” he breathed.

  “Am I?” His uncle arched a single brow. Then, lifting one finger at a time, he ticked off his points. “You were ordered to maintain some degree of respectability. A wife, a proper lady,” he amended, “will afford you that. Marriage will preserve her reputation.”

  Marriage to Lady Chloe Edgerton. He let his mind wander to thoughts of the delectable minx, in his bed, under him. Desire surged through him.

  And then the implications of the only arrangement that would see her in his bed.

  “Is this some joke?” he snapped. “I’m fighting for my damned career and—”

  “This is no jest, Leo. You were ordered to be respectable. And in less than twelve hours of receiving that command, you failed. Now, the way I see it,” his uncle went on, “you’re left with one of two decisions: accept being turned out of the Brethren, or…” Leo’s palms went moist, and his throat tightened in preparation for that dangling thought. “You convince the world that you’re madly in love with this now-ruined young woman and make yourself finally respectable.”

  Convince the world? He’d have to begin by persuading the lady that there was an ounce of respectability in him and that he’d been wholly transformed by their stolen exchange. As soon as the thought slid in, he discarded it. “Society,” his superiors included, “will believe it was for her dowry.”

  His uncle grinned. “Then you must make them believe it is not.”

  Leo had a greater likelihood of sprouting wings and flying himself across the Thames. Prior to this moment, he’d expressed public interest in not one lady’s dowry… but two. It didn’t matter his reasons for either… it mattered what the world thought they knew.

  “What is it?” his uncle encouraged.

  “The lady would never believe it.” Where most innocent debutantes and ladies on the verge of spinsterhood would leap at the prospect, built even on a lie of instant love, Lady Chloe Edgerton could never be that woman. “She is far too clever to believe that lie,” he finally said, resigned.

  His uncle’s broad shoulders shook with the force of his mirth.

  “I am so very happy that you find some amusement in all of this,” Leo snapped.

  “Oh, Leo. I wasn’t suggesting you deceive the lady.”

  Leo frowned. “Then what in hell were you suggesting?” What was he still suggesting?

  “You require something from the lady. Respectability. And she needs…” The duke nodded his head expectantly.

  Leo shook his in reply. “I’ve no bloody idea.” The only things he could speak to with a certainty where women were concerned was how to make them scream their release to the heavens. How to understand them? Their wants… their desires outside of bed? “It’d be simpler to bring down a plot to overthrow the king than sort out what she,” or any lady, “desires.”

  Releasing another sigh, his uncle dropped his elbows on the desk, framing that hated note between his arms. “You’ve wheedled secrets and confessions out of some of the most ruthless blackguards the world’s seen. I trust that you can convince a ruined woman that there are some benefits to marriage to you.”

  “None,” he said bluntly. “There is nothing she can gain being married to me.”

  The lady’s bore of a brother had seen it. And the lady herself had, too.

  His uncle snorted. “Then I suggest you find something… before my meeting tomorrow with Higgins.” He shoved back in his seat, his earlier mask of seriousness restored. “At best, I can buy you a day before you’re summoned.”

  “Summoned and then sacked,” Leo muttered. That was the fate awaiting him and hung unfinished but clear in his uncle’s promise.

  “
Not necessarily,” Uncle William interjected.

  His ears pricked up. “What?” he asked, unable to keep the hope from his voice.

  “If I can make a case of your shifting to respectable lord, you can infiltrate unreachable, until now, circles of Society.” Uncle William paused, and his meaning sank slowly into Leo’s head.

  “Waterson,” he said with quiet understanding.

  The older man nodded. “Precisely.”

  Leo’s mind raced. Of course. Why had he not considered it? The same way he’d been tasked with pursuing the respectable Miss Justina Barrett to ferret out any possible connections between her family and the Cato plot was the same way ties to Chloe Edgerton and her family could link him to Waterson—and other Whig members who’d fanatically supported the Six Acts.

  His uncle grinned. “All you need do is…”

  “Make a bid at respectability,” he finished for the other man. Leo glanced past the duke’s shoulder to the enamel bronze clock. One o’clock.

  He had, at best, seven hours before Higgins and Rowley arrived to meet with his uncle. That requested meeting had been given solely as a courtesy for the Duke of Aubrey’s years of service, and his relationship to Leo.

  “What will it be, Leo?” his uncle pressured.

  Christ in hell.

  Exploding to his feet, he stomped over and grabbed his cloak. “I’ll marry the damned chit,” he snapped. Dragging the garment around his shoulders, he fastened it at the throat.

  “Ahh.” Uncle William waggled his eyebrows. “There is still the matter of convincing her. Something tells me you are going to be needing her assent before you secure yourself a bride. Come and see me after your… meeting.”

  With the duke’s laughter trailing after him, Leo stormed from the room.

  Chapter 7

  Any other lady would be softly weeping at the state Chloe found herself in following Lord Waterson’s ball.

  All of Society was talking. The front page of every gossip column she’d demanded sent to her rooms contained her name splashed across the center.

  According to the Gothic tales her sister and mother had so loved over the years and that Chloe had frequently stolen, Chloe should no doubt be self-pitying and bemoaning the uncertain future that awaited her.