Page 3 of Better Off Wed

And the show was about to begin.

Under Scott’s watchful eye, Jeremy stumbled toward the desk, a reluctant understudy pushed from the wings. As he leaned over the paper, he thrust his hands behind his back and drew a steadying breath. Not a whiff of tobacco hung on the air.

A quick scan of the densely printed page revealed the item that must have caught General Scott’s notice. The words struck Jeremy with all the subtlety of a swift poke to the eye:

Pandemonium! Sly Lady Sterling has struck again, this time vexing a visit to Vauxhall Gardens for the ordinarily penurious Lord P—, a plump pigeon plucked before he could play.

Scott had dragged him away from his work, all the way across town, to read some prattle about a gentleman who had fallen victim to a pickpocket? Though his upbringing had been sheltered, army life had expanded Jeremy’s vocabulary significantly. He was tempted to let fly with an impressive string of epithets in response.

But he settled for a glare in the general’s direction. He knew exactly why Scott must have sent for him.

The unmistakable beginnings of a smile creased the corners of Scott’s mouth. “Ah. I take it you have heard of the Lady Sterling?”

Who had not? Her scandalous career, seducing gentlemen of rank in order to steal their fortunes, had been fodder for gossips, in both high society and low, for months.

“My sister Julia finds the woman’s exploits amusing and takes it upon herself to keep me apprised.”

Wait until she learned that Lady Sterling had paid a visit to Vauxhall on the same evening they had. Julia had rambled excitedly for hours about that brief encounter with an unfortunate young woman fleeing from some rogue. What would she say to the possibility of a brush with Lady Sterling? She would be convinced their paths must have crossed, despite the crowd and the size of the park. She would speculate endlessly over whether she had been the woman in green or the one in blue. He would never hear the end of it.

Those telltale curves crept higher, into Scott’s cheeks. “An interesting choice of alias for a thief, is it not? Sterling. Hints at excellence, trustworthiness. Purity—of motive, perhaps, if not of method.”

Jeremy’s gaze narrowed further. “I gather you didn’t call me here over a trivial coincidence. Sir.”

With a huff of exertion that sounded suspiciously like a laugh, Scott sat down behind his desk and motioned Jeremy into the chair opposite.

“Like your sister,” Scott said after a moment, “I’ve been following the Lady Sterling’s career with interest. She targets men whom I would call vulnerable in some way. Men with secrets they would like to keep. And while money may be one motivation for her exploits, I suspect it is not all she takes from these men.”

In spite of himself, Jeremy was intrigued by the hypothesis. “She’s gathering information, you mean?”

“Yes. Information that can be used for blackmail. Indeed, she may already be in possession of secrets capable of doing real damage—to the war effort, the King, even the nation. I need to know whose side she is on.” Scott’s fingers had been steepled in a contemplative pose. Now he slid them together and laid his folded hands before him on his desk. The paper beneath them crinkled softly. “So I’m sending you to find her.”

Jeremy, who had been nodding absently as Scott explained his interest in the case, jerked to his feet. “I? But I—I don’t—” He dealt with books and paper, not people. He choked back an outright refusal to follow orders and asked instead, “What am I to do with her if I succeed?”

“When,” Scott corrected, picking up the newspaper and handing it across his desk to Jeremy, as if a gossip column could be mistaken for a set of orders. “And I should think the answer would be obvious, Lord Sterling.”

Jeremy narrowly avoided a shudder of surprise at the use of his title. No one in the army called him that. Occasionally, Jeremy wondered—nay, hoped—the men with whom he worked had forgotten he was also a viscount.

If only he could return to that state of blessed ignorance himself.

At seventeen, he had been unaware that his father had belonged to a so-called cadet branch of one of those grand families with lands, mansions, titles, and the like. Richard Addison, a rector with an antiquarian bent, would have delighted in the discovery, in tracing how the twig of his family tree intersected with the main trunk. But he had died the year before, leaving Jeremy next in line.

For a time, Jeremy had fantasized that the people in London who made determinations about the succession of titles would realize they had inadvertently turned two pages of their well-thumbed guide to the peerage and skipped over some more suitable heir.

His reluctance had only grown with the discovery that he had inherited not just lands and mansions, but also a stack of baize-covered ledgers in which the number at the bottom of the Losses column was always greater than the figure in the column headed Gains. Jeremy—more than usually skilled in arithmetic, well-organized, responsible—had known instantly what those numbers meant: The property was mortgaged; Lord Sterling—he—was heavily in debt.

All his hopes to use the blasted inheritance to benefit his mother and sister, to allow them to live in not just comfort, but luxury, had flown out the window. After four days of quiet rage, Jeremy had set aside his plan to attend Oxford in the next term. By selling off what wasn’t entailed and renting out what he could of the rest, he had scraped together just enough to buy an officer’s commission instead, resigned to setting aside his studies in favor of bullets and bayonets.

But his true nature had eventually brought him to the notice of General Zebadiah Scott, the mastermind behind Britain’s intelligence operation. For the past ten years, Jeremy had turned a gift for mathematics and wordplay into success as a code breaker, fighting enemies made of paper and ink, waging battles entirely of wits.

Until today, he had never had cause to regret the general’s attention.

Now, Jeremy flinched when the paper landed with a thwack across his palm and Scott announced, “I want you to marry her.”

For a moment, silence reigned, and the two men faced one another, impassive, though Jeremy’s heart thudded in his chest, pumping blood to his limbs in an instinctive preparation for flight. After a long moment, he tipped back his head and managed to drag a laugh from his chest. “Marry her. Good one, sir. You almost had me.”

Scott’s smile widened, and his eyes twinkled with something that wasn’t quite—or wasn’t only—amusement. “Did I?” A chuckle. “But of course, my command does not extend quite so far as that, Captain Addison. Though I confess,” he went on, “it was your title that suggested you for the assignment—the, er, coincidence of names, as you put it.” He paused and tilted his head. “You see, I need someone to get close to her. Someone who can encourage her confidences. Find out what she knows—and whether she would be willing to ply her extraordinary gifts on behalf of the Crown.”

As the nature of the mission grew clearer, Jeremy’s fingers curled around the newspaper, wrinkling it past the point of legibility. All this, because Scott wanted the Lady Sterling to turn spy?