Seducing the Spy (4 page)

It was if the devil himself had devised the perfect earthly torture for Lady Alicia Lawrence.

"Now how will I occupy myself when I get to hell?" she muttered under her breath.

Then he obviously took his first good look at her and stepped back. Oh, bother. She'd not covered her face. Alicia stifled a moment of regret that such a man was not seeing her at her best and raised her chin, defying him to view her in all her allergic-bedaubed vividness.

He blinked twice, then bowed. "Lady Alicia, I am happy to find you at home."

Alicia folded her arms and scratched idly at a bothersome patch on her elbow. "Of course I'm at home. I already informed you that I have no plans. Ever."

"Er, yes. Well." He straightened and gazed at her for a long moment. "You are wellborn, you have an education, yet you do not seem to know the slightest of the social graces."

Alicia tilted her head. "Oh, I know them. I simply don't bother to use them." She turned and walked away, leaving him standing in the open doorway. She was already seated by the meager fire in the parlor when he found her. She looked up briefly when he entered. "Are you still here?"

Stanton reined in his irritation with an effort. Obviously, there was something wrong with the woman, possibly even something that was not her fault. One had only to look at her to see that. What a sight—she was positively scaly! Delusional, certainly. He'd just discovered that her background was peppered with such things. He should find her pitiable, not irritating.

It irritated him that he could not pity her.

She sighed and flopped back in the chair. Folding her hands over her stomach, she gazed up at him with half-lidded eyes. "I'm very tired today. State your business or go away."

He found it difficult to tear his eyes away. She was idly scratching her belly through her gown—appallingly rude to be sure, yet his attention was caught by the way the fabric was stretched against her figure. If he was not mistaken, the woman was carved like a statue of a Greek goddess beneath her reptilian scales!

Discomfort seized him. He shut his eyes. He was not here to eye her curves. He was here to get to the bottom of this conspiracy madness. "Why are you weary?" he heard himself ask.

Wait—that wasn't what he'd meant to say at all. Damn his curiosity. It had a life of its own sometimes.

She leaned her head back and shut her eyes. "I'm weary because it is three bloody miles to your house from here and I was not feeling well to start."

Stanton blinked. "You
walked
three miles? From Mayfair?"

She opened her eyes. "No. However did you pass your mathematics courses in school? I walked six miles—three to Mayfair and three back. I would count it on my fingers for you, but I have only five." She shut her eyes again. "I shouldn't be at all surprised if you possessed one extra on each hand, however. Something must have been holding you back from your studies."

Stanton was not accustomed to being mocked. In fact, he had very little experience with it at all. It was most unpleasant, yet curiously stimulating. He could quite honestly say, if he were asked, that he was not bored.

The woman sighed and stretched, right in front of him. "I'm bored. Go away."

Stanton had not been asked to sit and he had the feeling that he never would, should he stand there until he was white-haired. So he sat, for possibly the first time in his life, uninvited. "Lady Alicia, you came to me with a wild story about overhearing a conspiracy—"

She grunted. She actually grunted. Distracted, Stanton lost his train of thought. Then he shook off his revolted fascination and found the thread again. "You give me the sketchiest of details and then you turn right around and walk out of my house. It took me hours to track you down. No one seemed to know what happened to you after—" He halted. Perhaps that was best not mentioned.

Her eyes flew open. "After I whored myself to a simpleton stablehand, you mean?"

"I do not mean to offend—"

"Oh, bother. Of course you mean to offend! Why else bring it up? It didn't work, for it was a pathetic effort indeed. Your mother must be proud to have a son so thoroughly mannerly that he cannot insult even when he tries." She pushed herself wearily to her feet. She staggered slightly and Stanton swiftly rose to help her. She snatched her elbow from his helping hand. "Don't touch me. It only makes it worse."

"Makes what worse?"

She widened her eyes at him. "Goodness, six-fingered and nearsighted. No wonder you live alone." She turned her face back to the fire. "I'm ill, you cretin. My head is pounding, my throat is on fire, and if you don't leave now I'm planning to vomit on your boots."

"You never told me how you came to hear of this conspiracy."

She closed her eyes and leaned her head carefully against the back of her chair. "You never asked."

She would try the patience of a stone. Stanton forced himself to harden. "How did you come to hear of this conspiracy, then?"

"While I was vomiting."

Stone. Cold, hard, impervious stone. "And where did this take place?"

She wrinkled her brow, thinking. "The majority of it took place in my bedchamber. Then, when I could not bear the chamber pot any longer, I took it to the privy."

What an outlandish idea. "Why did you not have your maid take it to the privy?"

Her eyes opened. "Ask Millie to go out in the dark when she can scarcely see her way in full daylight? Nor is Millie my maid. At one time she was my governess, then my companion, but I do not employ her now. I support her. She had nowhere else to go when I was shunned. Even if her professional reputation had survived the ruination of mine, she is too infirm to begin again."

So she was at least responsible to her dependants, which was the first intimation that there was anything admirable about the creature.

While he regarded her silently, she rubbed at a crumbling bit of paste on her nose. It fell, leaving the tip of her nose ludicrously bare, pink in the midst of the white mask. He had the sudden image of a white cat, glaring at him through mystical green eyes. All she needed was the whiskers.

He probably ought not to look too closely. He might find them.

"So, you took the noisome pot to your privy…"

She wrinkled her nose. More dried paste drifted to the floor. "Not to my privy. I took it down the alley to the public house. I thought they might not notice a bit more filth in theirs."

A highborn lady, in her nightdress no doubt, weak and ill, stumbling about the rear yard of that rowdy public house he'd seen on the street corner? "Are you completely without sense? You could have been killed, or worse!"

The green cat eyes regarded him calmly. "Worse than killed? Are you sure there is such a thing?"

Stanton did not relent. "Yes, there is. A lady's virtue is beyond price."

"You're boring me again." She stood. "Go away."

Stanton stood as well, automatic in his manners. She laughed. "You'd make a proper puppet." She turned that eerie green gaze on him once more. "I wonder who would be powerful enough to pull your strings?"

There was no such person on earth, but this strange woman had no need to know that. Stanton bowed. "If you wish me to leave, I must." He straightened. "I will return tomorrow."

She blinked. "Truly? You will keep returning and returning, all this inconvenient way, until you know the entire story?"

He nodded. "Precisely."

"And your poor coachman, sitting out there in this horrid weather? What of him? What of the valet who must clean the filth from your boots and the laundress who must brush the mud from your trousers?"

Stanton nodded slowly. It seemed he had found the lady's weakness. She cared overmuch for those being vastly overpaid to serve him. "Do not forget the horses, forced to stand in the chill and wet, and the grooms who must rake the mud from their coats—"

One crusted brow rose. "Don't overdo," she said caustically.

Stanton knew when to stop. He bowed silently and waited. He wished he could read her expression. Then again, remembering her blotched and scaling features, perhaps not.

"Oh, sit down, you bothersome bulldog!" She flopped back down into her own chair. "If you'll shut it for five entire minutes in a row, I shall tell you everything as it occurred." She pointed at him. "No questions until I'm done."

He nodded again and returned to his own seat. If he could learn all she knew now, he might never be forced to put himself in this revolting person's company again.

«
^
»

Across from Stanton in the tattered parlor, Lady Alicia Lawrence sighed.

"I ate strawberry preserves. Sometimes I discover that a food I was once able to enjoy will suddenly cease to agree with me ever after. Thus with the strawberries. I knew after four bites that such was the case."

Stanton could read her rue even through the clay.

"They were rather large bites. I ought not to have been so gluttonous, but it had been so long—" She shook her head. Fragments of oatmeal went flying. "I induced vomiting at once, hoping to stem the damage. Once begun, I was not able to stop."

What sort of lady discussed such things with a strange gentleman?

This sort of lady, he soon discovered. He was treated to a blow-by-blow account of her encounter with the deadly strawberries, and soon knew more than he ever wanted to know about such illness.

"Thus I found myself by the privy of the White Sow when I heard voices approaching. As you might imagine, I thought it wise to hide myself. There were three men—I saw them silhouetted against the pub lanterns, although I could not see their faces. One of them lighted a cigar but the other two did not. I thought they were merely having a smoke and settled myself for a wait of only a few minutes. I was rather weakened and I feared I would give myself away by stumbling in the dark."

He watched her tell her story with a growing sense of unease. She spoke simply and convincingly, though her story was outrageous.

Her delivery was not the problem, nor was he particularly disturbed by the story so far. What bothered him was the fact that he felt entirely blind… or perhaps "numb" was a better word.

He couldn't tell.

Truth or falsehood, fact or fiction, he could always tell… until now.

It would be easy to blame the crusting paste that coated her features, but he'd seen worse. In the past, men had lied to him while covered in mud, blood and even coal dust, yet Stanton had effortlessly perceived the truth written on their faces.

What sort of creature was she, to defy the ability that had brought kings to their knees? Her immunity to his talent did one thing that, if she had realized it, might have alarmed her considerably. He was now completely and totally focused upon her, like a hawk upon a rabbit.

As she went on, she told the story logically and with good detail. "Two of the men sounded well educated, one with distinctly highborn tones. That alone was surprising, at an establishment like the White Sow. The others didn't actually say 'my lord' but one could almost hear it in their pauses. The third still possessed a hint of Cockney, as if he were perhaps of the servant class. Without preamble, they began to discuss something I thought was a business plan. They spoke of

'arrangements' and 'schedules' and 'delivery.' I listened with only half an ear, for I was feeling more ill by the moment."

Her story was going to grow stomach-churning again, he just knew it. He was already regretting his large breakfast.

Fortunately, she went on without detailing her digestion further. "It was only when someone mentioned the Prince Regent that I realized what I was hearing," she explained.

Every fiber of Stanton's being was on full alert now.

"They spoke of Lord Cross's house party and of the Prince Regent's expected appearance there. There was speculation on how His Highness tends to dismiss his guard at such events and how one might take advantage of such moments to get close."

Now Stanton was doubly concerned. If what she said was the truth, the Prince Regent was in terrible danger.

If what she said was true.

Bloody hell. His instinct had never failed him before—yet it failed him now when faced with a potential disaster! He could not swallow this—this affront to his reliability. Admittedly, a lifetime of having the upper hand made such a humbling moment go down doubly ill.

Yet what truth could there be here? The girl was a known liar. She resided here in this rat hole, in a ruin of her own making, bored and doubtless resentful. Only someone desperate for attention and notoriety would have done what she did five years ago—and that desperation was merely erupting again, only this time she was trying to drag him into it.

That was another thing… why him? Her reasoning that he had proved himself to be open-minded was plausible enough. God knew he'd exercised the greatest breadth of his own tolerance when his very worthwhile cousin Jane had decided to wed that worthless, Jack-of-all-crimes gambler, Ethan Damont.

So to the outside world, Stanton probably did seem to exemplify the height of social tolerance—and who better to turn to when one was an outcast, exiled by one's own unseemly tendencies?

It wasn't true of course. Not only was Stanton not tolerant of such misbehavior, he was harshly judgmental of even the smallest weavings of untruth. He'd grown up in a house of lies, existing within such a morass of heaving untruth and secrets that he'd sworn never to believe anything he could not prove with his own observation.

However, he could hardly explain that to this woman. She was gazing at him now, waiting for his response to her story.

Damn. He would love to dismiss this insane creature, to get up and leave this hovel without a single doubt that this was merely a pathetic attempt to regain something of Society's regard…

But he couldn't. As long as there was some shred of possibility that she told the truth, he would be remiss in his duty if he did not investigate thoroughly.

He was never remiss in his duty.

"They spoke of another man with great respect. 'Monsieur' was how they referred to him. Apparently, Monsieur is ready to implement a plan that has been brewing for some time. I was listening very hard by that time, you can be sure." She stopped and coughed dryly.