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“What makes you idle then? No one needs you on the other side?”

He shook his head. “I’ve been given a commission to get something relevant to the latest case.” He liked using big words to describe the jobs they gave him.

She shot him a suspicious glance. “So you can get yourself knocked senseless again?”

He shook his head. “Not a chance with this assignment. You could go with me.”

“Go with you? The places you go? Hah!”

“Not this time. You would have to dress as a lady, if you wanted to come.”

“As if I don’t always.” She gave a haughty toss of her head that set the curls bouncing.

He concealed a grin at having riled her. With her eye for detail, she always dressed like the real ladies he knew—his friends’ wives, Cleo Jones and Helen Jones, and the grandest lady of them all, the Marchioness of Daventry. Miranda just never talked the way those ladies did; no she sounded more like the women of Bread Street where he’d spent his early days.

“You think I want to be seen with you?” He noted that she hadn’t turned him down yet.

“You might. I’ve been asked to go around to some booksellers.”

“Booksellers?”

“For a book.”

He could almost hear her calculating little brain spinning, like a turnspit dog racing to keep the roast from burning. She’d be thinking of the great bookshops—Hatchard’s and Lackington’s—and he’d take her to those places first, and hope that they wouldn’t need to comb the rubbishy bins outside the used book dealers on Holywell Street. He didn’t want to take her to his old haunts.

“What sort of book could possibly help solve a case?” His Miranda didn’t lack for wits.

“You won’t believe it.” He pulled the newspaper with Lord Hazelwood’s scrawl from inside his coat. He felt foolish even reading the title to her. He cleared his throat. “The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London.”

She shot him a skeptical glance. “You’re bamming me. How is such a book to help one of our gentlemen catch a spy?”

He pushed off the counter. He admired her brains, but he didn’t want her getting too smart on him. “They think the book contains a code, like that Spanish bank note I showed you last spring.”

“They?” she asked. “Whose case is it?” She put aside her needlework and slid from her stool. “It’s Lord Hazelwood’s new case, isn’t it?” Her eyes lit up.

He nodded, momentarily distracted by the effect of her quick movement on her bosom.

“Of course I’ll go with you. When do we go?” She bounced a little on her toes, and a very distracting motion ensued. Nate’s privy member, not his brain, took note.

“Tomorrow morning.” He swallowed hard. He’d won and lost simultaneously. He’d have hours of time with her while she thought about her viscount. It was full dark and bitterly cold when he passed from the back of the shop to the club again.

* * * *

Clive Walhouse leaned against the gold-flocked wall of a discreet gaming establishment in Cleveland Row admiring Lady Pamela Ravenhurst as she placed her bets at the faro table. The eager gleam in Lady Pamela’s violet eyes and the candlelight gilding the half moons of her breasts rising from the dark blue velvet of her gown stirred his cock to a pleasant state of anticipation. He had no trouble imagining how Pamela’s capacity for losing herself in play would translate into wanton abandonment in bed, or even in the closed carriage, which would convey them from the club later in the evening.

She played recklessly, as she did when her marital frustrations were driving her. At nineteen she had married a man fifteen years her senior, whose interest in the minutiae of foreign policy was profound enough to close all of Argus’s famed one hundred eyes. Clive had heard it said in the Foreign Office that Ravenhurst slept more often with his red dispatch box than with his wife. Nevertheless, in seven years of marriage Lady Pamela had produced three credible replicas of her husband and was now apparently free to pursue her own interests. Clive would be her first, her liberator from the toils of the marriage bed.

He raised a glass of the house’s very tolerable claret in a silent toast. He owed it all to his father’s dead cousin George Fawkener. Rest in peace, cousin.

A stir at the door of the card room drew his gaze from Pamela’s charms. Clive’s friends, Lutrell and Archer, had arrived with Count Malikov and the usual group of young blades that surrounded the Russian émigré. Lutrell and Archer headed straight for Clive while Malikov, ever attentive to the ladies, bowed over the hand of the club’s hostess in her purple gown and turban.

“Walhouse, you sly dog,” Archer began. “I thought you were out of the game, up to your frayed collars in debt.”

Clive came away from the wall and shook his friends’ hands. “Never count the Walhouses out, my friends. We always come about.” He signaled a waiter to bring the drinks tray.

“Must have been a very rich cousin who popped off, Walhouse.” Lutrell accepted a glass from the waiter. “I saw your esteemed pater in Tattersall’s Thursday dropping his blunt on a pair of showy grays.”

“A baron must be seen to live like a baron, my friends.” Clive tipped his glass to theirs. It was his father’s chief principle of money management. Theodore Walhouse, Baron Strayde—Teddy to his friends—had run through his own inheritance long before Clive was out of short coats, and had subsequently worked his way through his wife’s fortune as well.