Jackson’s stomach dropped out. He rearranged his expression into a bored smile. “It was but a passing thought I had.”
“You made it sound quite imperative and time-pressing.”
“What an ear you have,” Jackson grumbled. “And through such a solid door too.”
She didn’t relent. “At least it wasn’t a window this time.”
Roberts passed his tongue over his front teeth, the look in his eye assessing and far too damn familiar.
Jackson curled his fingers into fists to keep from plucking the man’s eyes from his head. “Whatever you’re thinking, Roberts. Don’t.”
The other man shrugged. “A young, fearless woman looks a lot like a young man in dim light.”
“No, Roberts.”
With clear dismissal, Anna turned her body away from Jackson and toward the other man and said, “Your name is Roberts?”
Roberts bowed his head. “Yes, Your Grace.”
“You are an agent for the Home Office.”
Not a question this time.
Roberts answered all the same. “The handsomest one of the bunch.”
“And one of the most skilled.” At his wide eyes, she said, “Your shoulders and arms are well built—a man accustomed to fisticuffs. A lack of facial scars says you take down youropponents quickly, and you hold yourself very still. That requires practice and or training.”
Roberts turned to give Jackson a look: eyes wide, mouth curling up in a reptilian smile.
Bloody hell.
Jackson repeated a third time, “No.”
Roberts pouted. “She’s got an eye.”
“And a mouth,” Jackson said.
“Ears too,Duke,” Anna said, her tone chilly.
“No,” Jackson said for the last time.
Their trio stoodoutside the Hog’s Huff pub three hours later.
The first hour had been nothing short of a shouting match of arguing. The second had been much of the same. And the third, more of the samewhileAnna had been transformed from a lovely duchess with creamy, apricot skin into a rumpled street urchin with dirt on her cheeks and under her nails.
“Don’t rush when you walk,” Jackson said from the alley down from the pub, sure he’d gone insane to let himself be talked into this. But the longer the counterfeiters had to wait for word that the Duke of Grandfellow had been properly silenced, the more likely the gang would send another assassin, with possibly fatal results the next time. Anna wouldn’t be safe until he dealt with these bastards.
“When you enter, go straight to the bar,” Jackson went on. “Take a seat near the end. Give the barkeep your order, but make sure to keep your hat pulled low. If anyone suspects you are a woman, everything will go wrong.”
Anna made a face. “You don’t want me to make a grand show of introducing my real self to a criminal with enunciated, clear, round vowels? If only the lasthourof putting on theseuncomfortable clothes and ridiculous prosthetic hair pieces had given me any clue I am to operatecovertly.”
Roberts chuckled where he stood off to the side but seemed quite taken with the roof architecture when Jackson threw a glare his way.
Anna would be fine. She was quick on her feet. And the brownish hair pieces Jackson had chosen—to more resemble Hobbs’s non-descript coloring—placed at her temples and over her top lipwereconvincing for a young man coming into his first facial hair.
But Jackson’s insides wouldn’t untwist. Having her walk into the pub without him right by her side seemed like folly. She wasn’t trained as an agent. Didn’t know all the risks. Yes, he and Roberts would enter the pub after and remain close by... but there were so many ways this exchange could go wrong.
“If I pass inspection?” Anna waved a hand over her front, the action entirely that of an annoyed woman instead of the gangly adolescent in worsted wool and a ratty cap she was meant to play.
