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“He won’t,” said Nate grimly. “Dixon is a rat. He won’t come out.”

She shrugged. “I don’t expect him to. I merely said it would make things easier, and thought it worth trying. I have learned never to trust in that happening, though.”

He stepped over Hurst’s supine figure and leaned down to take hold of the man’s shoulders. “What did you plan to do with him, after you knocked him out?”

“What you are doing,” she said, sorting through the various things she had taken from Hurst’s pockets. “Take him over there, onto the grass.”

Nate closed his mouth into a thin line, but did as she said, although none too gently. Angelique followed, slipping something from Hurst’s things into the valley between her breasts. “What did you find?” he asked.

“His latchkey.” She went down on one knee over her victim and unbuttoned his trousers, then tugged them down a few inches. She pulled Hurst’s shirt out and undid the lower buttons of his waistcoat. Nate caught on to what she was doing and helped, roughing up Hurst’s clothing in a few efficient moves, grinding dirt onto the knees of his trousers and slipping one shoe off. Angelique returned some of Hurst’s pocket contents to their places, then just scattered the rest on the ground.

“He knows your name,” Nate said as he dusted off his hands. “You invited him to call on us. How will you explain this?”

She just gave him a look as she hiked up her skirt. To Nate’s astonishment, she had quite a large dagger strapped to the side of one thigh. He had expected there was a weapon on her body somewhere, but he hadn’t expected to see it on her slim leg, the leather sheath buckled right over the ribbon of her garter. She drew the dagger with a soft hiss, and pulled up a section of her skirt hem. The dagger made a clean rent, slicing through the magenta silk with hardly a whisper of resistance. She tore it the rest of the way, then stuffed the long strip of cloth into Hurst’s lax hand, closing his fingers around it.

Nate watched her in mingled awe and alarm. This was the woman he had thought incapable of doing what was required. He had feared he would have to look out for her. He had suspected… But now he realized that he had fallen for her appearance just as Hurst had—not so literally, but just as completely. For all that he had seen the steely determination in her, he had also felt her tremble in his arms after Barings accosted her in these very same gardens just one night before. That had spooked her and exposed a deep vulnerability within her, and he had been filled with protective rage on her behalf, ready to cut out Barings’s liver. He told himself that she might be a spy, but she was still a woman at heart.

Then tonight she coldly lured Hurst out here, discovered what she wanted to know, knocked him out, and was now setting him up to wake with a blinding headache and no memory of the debauchery he appeared to have enjoyed. Nate was surprised, unnerved, and deeply, deeply impressed.

“Will that do?” she murmured as he watched in silence. She circled the unconscious man, pausing to pick up the rock and place it strategically near his head. “What will make him believe…? Ah.” She ran one finger across her lips, then smeared the lip paint across one side of Hurst’s mouth. She gave Nate a glance simmering with mischief. “Pull down his trousers some more.”

Nate’s eyes narrowed, but he knelt and did it. She leaned down and rubbed another bit of lip color across Hurst’s lower abdomen, just inches from the man’s groin.

Nate sat frozen on his haunches, staring at the pink streak across Davis Hurst’s skin. In the normal course of things, there was one principal way a woman’s lip color would end up there on a man’s belly. It was brilliant, though devious, and it sent all the blood in his body flooding to his own groin. God almighty—just the thought of her deep pink lips closing around his flesh was making him hard, while she was calmly wiping the color from her fingers with the hem of her ruined gown.

Carefully he climbed to his feet. He should be glad they had learned something useful; he should be glad they had confirmed a link to Jacob Dixon. He should be relieved that Angelique hadn’t been injured, and that they were about to walk away from Hurst with no outcry and little chance he would seek them out again. But all he could see was that pink streak, moist and warm from her lips.

“Let’s go,” she said quietly. She saw him staring down at Hurst. “He will be fine,” she added with a trace of impatience.

Hurst would wake thinking he’d had her luscious lips around him. Nate swallowed. His pulse beat like a drum in his ears. Hurst would be more than fine, aside from a brutal headache. Nate, on the other hand…

“Right,” he muttered, and turned on his heel to follow her out of Vauxhall.

Chapter Fourteen

Nate said little on the carriage ride home, but Angelique could feel the tension humming off him, and wondered what had set him off. Surely his manly pride couldn’t be that offended, that she hadn’t needed his help. He was the one who had said he wouldn’t be saving her pretty little neck, as she recalled. She stole a glance at him, tempted to remind him of that, but changed her mind when she saw his face, hard and set in the waxing and waning light from streetlamps they passed.

She turned to look out her window. Dealing with Davis Hurst, no matter how unpleasant, had restored her equilibrium after the disastrous encounter with Barings. That caught her unaware, unsettled her and upset her. Tonight she had regained her composure, never dropped her guard, and succeeded as much as was possible. Nate was probably right that Dixon would never come to them under any pretext, but she knew where Hurst lived and she had his key. A discreet search of his home would probably provide all the information they needed to find Dixon. If Nate were in a better mood, she would do it tonight, while Hurst was still lying unconscious in Vauxhall. Perhaps she still could, if Nate closed himself in his room to sulk.

She darted another glance at him. He didn’t seem a sulker, but one never knew with men.

“What would you have done,” he said suddenly, when they were only a street or two away from the house, “if he hadn’t gone down so easily?”

“Easily?” She snorted. No sulking, but a patronizing scolding. Men and their pride. “You think I do not know where to strike a man to make him fall?”

“I didn’t say that,” he said, staring straight ahead. His hand, resting on his thigh, was curled into a white-knuckled fist. “I asked what you would have done if he hadn’t fallen senseless at once?”

“I would have hit him again.”

Slowly he turned to face her. Something hot and dangerous burned in his eyes. “He outweighed you by five stone. Don’t even tell me you would have had time to get out your knife if he suspected you were trying to kill him—which is not an unreasonable assumption for a man to make, when struck in the head with a large rock.”

Angelique sighed. “I know what I am doing. Did the plan not work?”

“It might not have!”

“But it did!” she lashed out scornfully. “You appear to think I have never done anything dangerous before. This is not the first time I have been charged with getting something from a man like Hurst. Unlike you, I am not on an adventure for revenge or gallantry. This is my profession, sir.”

He seemed to be having difficulty mastering his breathing. “Then you are accustomed to fucking men to achieve your purpose.”