Page 9 of The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Hazelwood leaned forward. “I think that if her father wanted to get a message to her without the idiots in the Foreign Office—”

“Or any spies—”

“—knowing what that message was, he’d send it through his bankers. We all know the Hammersleys are skilled at codes and at getting information across the continent.”

Blackstone nodded. “And you’re going after a second copy of the book—why?”

“For comparison’s sake. I want to know what’s in it, so that when I get my hands on her copy, I can catch what’s been added or altered.”

“What do you think her father is trying to tell her?”

“That depends on how much she already knows.” It would be Hazelwood’s job to find out.

“Her father’s probably trying to tell her to stay out of the spy business and get herself a husband as fast as she can,” observed Clare, setting down his cup.

Hazelwood laughed. “Goldsworthy is working up a list of eligible young men.”

“The girl’s doomed then. Better all the matchmaking mamas of London than Goldsworthy. Does she have family? Does she have money?” Clare was on the girl’s side for sure.

“Little money, I suspect.” Hazelwood turned back to Blackstone. “Your banker wife will know.”

“And Violet will never tell. But you think this Jane Fawkener knows that her father was a government agent and not merely a merchant?”

“No question about that, and she believes she can prove that he’s alive. She seems to have information that differs from the government’s account of things.”

“Then what if someone else gets their hands on the book? The Russians will try.”

“It will be time to break heads and throw bodies down stairwells. I expect you gentlemen are up for whatever it takes.” Hazelwood grinned at his two friends. In the end, they’d be in it together.

* * * *

Nate Wilde passed through the bare garden in the back of the club and entered the rear of the tailor’s shop. A long, narrow hallway led to the front of the shop, which faced a fashionable street and masqueraded as a chemist’s establishment selling gentleman’s toiletries—soaps and brushes, salves and pomades, toothpowders and scents. Though Kirby & Sons was the name on the door, there was no son, only a daughter—Miranda.

From the time he’d come to work at the club, Nate had been unable to resist the chemist’s shop. One day he’d seized the biggest chance of his life to leave behind his childhood in a notorious London rookery, and the next he’d met Miranda Kirby, and discovered how powerful a hold the most insignificant things could have on a man’s mind, things like chestnut curls against a white throat and the swell of a silk-covered bosom.

He closed the rear door behind him. Coming in the back way meant that no shop bell jingled, so Miranda had no warning of his approach. He liked to catch her at her work and tease her about it afterward. She waited on gentlemen who were in awe of her beauty, or she helped her father with the fitting and measuring of the spies for their disguises. Miranda regarded every gentleman who came through the door as a potential husband, a man who could make her a lady, not a shopgirl.

He paused on his side of the crimson velvet curtains that separated the hall from the shop to listen for the presence of a customer. Miranda had a story she liked to tell her gentlemen clients about her French mother as a child escaping from the Revolution in spite of the silver buckles on her shoes. She believed that her mother had named her Miranda like a duke’s daughter in a play to remind her of her lofty origins. Nate was pretty sure that she’d had an Irish mother who’d come to London and got herself in trouble until old Mr. Kirby rescued her.

Still his Miranda was shrewd and alert, so she readily sorted out unlikely candidates for her plan of becoming Lady Somebody, but her shrewdness did not protect her from Hazelwood. The disgraced viscount with his easy charm and laughing eyes appeared to Miranda as hers to claim. To her way of thinking, no lady of his own class wanted him, so he was hers, like some rich cake sent back to the kitchen because the lofty guests had already had their fill.

Yesterday she had been thrilled to hear that Hazelwood’s new assignment meant no more stained and stinking clothes. She had been beside her father as he fitted the viscount for his new clothes.

Nate heard no voices, so he pushed aside the curtain and entered the shop. Miranda looked up from her needlework, something fine and silken with small covered buttons, most likely a waistcoat for Hazelwood. She wore fingerless gloves with a blue woolen shawl draped over her shoulders.

“You could use a brazier of coal,” he observed. He could see his breath in the shop.

“Did you bring one then?”

“Easily managed.”

“No need. I’ll close up soon for tea.”

With a quick pump of his arms, he boosted himself up to sit on the broad marble-topped counter. He wanted to show her that he’d healed from the injury to his collarbone, and he liked to look down at her. She tilted her head when she worked. Her left ear peeked out from her burnished curls, and the slight rounded curve of her breast rose above her lace tucker. Today her skin was very white against the blue wool of the shawl. Usually, he could not detect her scent in the competing odors of the shop—the citrus, bergamot, and lavender of the soaps and pomades, the rosewater of various lotions, and the cloves and cinnamon of toothpowders, or the peppermint of lozenges. But today Miranda was the only warm thing in the shop, and she smelled like the almond milk lotion she used on her skin.

“Make yourself at home, then.”

“I am home.” In the spring, he’d been beaten and tossed for dead by a pair of hired fists in Wapping when he’d come too close to their lair on a case. Since then he’d spent some time away from the club with his grand friends in their fine London houses. The time away was supposed to cure him of his attachment to Miranda. “The shop is club premises, isn’t it?”