Her throat worked, her cheeks paling. “Very.”
“Good. Let’s begin with your name. Your true name.”
“It’s Pandora,” she said.
At least she hadn’t lied about that.
“But Hudson wasn’t the name I was born with,” she added in quiet tones.
Anger surged; he tamped it down. “What is your real surname?” he said coldly.
Her lashes lowered, fluttered against her creamy skin. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t play games with me,” he warned. “What do you mean you don’t bloody know?”
“I mean I don’t know who my parents were.” Her bosom rose and fell; her eyes met his. “I was born a bastard. At the orphanage where I was raised, they told me my mother was a prostitute, and I was an unfortunate consequence of her profession. She left me there when I was a month old; I have no memory of her. Apparently, she told them she’d named me Pandora because I brought her a world of trouble.” She paused. “They gave me the surname Smith at the orphanage because no one knew who my father was.”
Shock percolated through Marcus. Of all the explanations he’d been expecting, it hadn’t been this. He stared at his wife—the very image of a fashionable lady—and couldn’t reconcile it with the past she’d just revealed. She was illegitimate… had been abandoned to an orphanage? Before he could recover, she went on.
“By the time I was ten, I was making my living as a flower girl in Covent Garden. No, that’s not precisely true.” Her lips pressed together before she said, “I sold flowers, but most of my earnings came from being a pickpocket.”
Witnessing what he had as an officer, Marcus didn’t think he could be struck speechless. Yet there he was. All capacity for speech… gone.
“I was rather good at it. Small hands, quick reflexes.” Her lips tipped up, but it wasn’t a smile. “Stealing kept my belly full, gave me a roof over my head at night. It wasn’t the easiest life, but it wasn’t the worst. Then I met Octavian.”
Marcus’ hands clenched the edge of the desk. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what was coming next. Didn’t like the quiver she was clearly trying to hide in her voice, the shadows gathering in her eyes.
“He was a spymaster for the Crown. He’d chanced to see me at work, and apparently I impressed him with my skills, my ability,”—her voice caught ever so slightly—“to survive. He offered me a way out of the gutter: a position on his team.”
“You wereten,” Marcus bit out.
“Close to eleven. And definitely,” she said, her tone flat, “wise beyond my years.”
“What business did this Octavian bounder have for a young girl?”
“At first, I mostly observed and ran errands. But Octavian was grooming me for bigger things. Given that he was a spymaster and bachelor, he couldn’t look after me. So he put me under the care of a couple named Harry and Flora Hudson.”
Her supposed parents, the in-laws Marcus had never met. The ones who’d apparently died and left her in a boarding school abroad.
Grimly, Marcus said, “The Hudsons were spies as well?”
She nodded. “Harry was an agent—and since Flora was devoted to her husband and refused to leave his side, she became one, too. Their good blood and Harry’s interest in archaeology provided the perfect cover for their espionage work. I traveled with them, and they trained me, raised me as their own. I owe them everything.” Her ivory throat rippled, her voice emerging in a whisper. “Harry was killed not long after Waterloo. A carriage accident. He’d fought so hard for peace and didn’t live long enough to enjoy it. After that, Flora lost the will to go on.”
Marcus’ chest clenched at the sheen in Pandora’s eyes. He couldn’t deny that she had been through much—so much that he could scarcely fathom it. At the same time, fury surged that she’d kept this—all of it—from him. That she hadn’t trusted him… that she’d betrayed the trust that he, like a great bloody fool, had given toherwithout reservation.
The galling truth was that he was weak where she was concerned. Even now, as she laid out the ignominious facts, the countless lies she’d told him, he had the inconceivable desire to take her into his arms. To tell her everything would be all right. To protect the vulnerability he’d sensed in her from the start.
He quelled the instinct and went to the window, putting distance between them. Staring out into the autumn garden, he tried to absorb some of its calm. The gilded serenity that was a universe away from his own seething turmoil.
“How long were you a spy?” he said.
“When I turned thirteen, Octavian judged me ready for missions. He gave me the code name Pompeia. I worked for him until just before I met you at the Pilkington Ball.” A hesitation. “Do you remember it?”
Of course he bloody did.
“Did you engineer that meeting?” he said curtly. “Was our marriage a part of your new disguise? A way to get out of the spy business?”
“No.Marcus,” she said, her syllables quivering, “please believe this, if nothing else: I fell in love with you from the first moment we met. I gave up espionagebecauseof you. Everything I did was because I loved you so much and knew that you’d never love me back as Pandora Smith. I had to make myself a better woman for you—”
