Page 4 of A Spy’s Guide to Seduction

Lynley returned to the spy club by midafternoon. Under the scaffolding and flapping canvas of supposed renovations was the concealed entrance to a fine old building. He supposed that he’d passed the place often enough without giving it a second thought. And he had never guessed there was an entrance through a fashionable chemist’s shop around the corner.

Nate Wilde, the youth Lynley had abducted while playing highwayman—or rescued, really, from the traitor Radcliffe’s trigger-happy stagecoach guards—was there to greet him and take his hat and coat. Wilde still had his arm in a sling, but cheerfully managed his duties as the club’s major domo with assistance from the beautiful daughter of the spies’ tailor.

“Coffee, sir?”

Lynley nodded. He found the club to his liking. He could stroll into the quiet, well-appointed coffee room at any hour of the day or night and find a degree of comfort and privacy not readily available even in some of the finest houses. He liked the simplicity of the room with its velvet curtains and high white ceiling, and its substantial but plain mantel, nothing ornate, and no paintings of saints or martyrs. A man could think his own thoughts here without interference or rebuke. He sank down on one of the room’s long couches, shed his boots and settled himself, his feet toward the fire. He did his best thinking lying down, and he had some thinking to do about his strategy for approaching Lady Emily Radstock’s father, Lord Candover.

If Lynley had any complaint to make about the club, it was that as yet he had done no spying. But that would change tonight, if the afternoon’s interviews went successfully. His betrothal would provide the cover story his employer demanded.

According to the briefing he’d received from Goldsworthy, the club spymaster, a spy was loose in London society, who had in his or her possession, letters of the most sensitive nature between the Persian shah and his son and chief commander, at the very moment when a misstep in sensitive negotiations taking place in the East could plunge England into a war in defense of Persia.

Lynley was to be the newest weapon in the war the Foreign Office waged at home against those who would betray English secrets to Russian agents. Whoever had acquired the shah’s papers would be eager to get them into Russian hands for a profit, and the old way of doing so through Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe’s stagecoach line had now ended. So the man or woman with the papers must be desperate.

Lynley was impatient to begin the work. He had managed to extract some useful information about Emily Radstock’s family from Phil while they considered the merits of a pair of horses that Mudford wanted to sell. Like most men of fashion, Mudford bought his horses for their showy appearance, and then blamed them for equine vices more likely due to mishandling than to flaws in their temperament. In promoting Phil’s purchase, Lynley would be doing the horses a favor.

Wilde returned with the coffee and stirred the fire to crackling life. Lynley sat up and poured himself a generous cup. One thing Phil had mentioned stuck in his brain. Emily Radstock had written letters to the Times.

“Wilde, do you have any recent issues of the Times?”

“Of course, sir. Shall I collect them for you?”

When Lynley nodded, the youth disappeared to find the club’s copies of the Times, Lynley had no doubt. Lynley wanted to see one of those letters. Phil’s information did not quite explain how a beautiful young woman from a well-connected aristocratic family had reached the age of twenty-eight, almost -nine, without marrying, especially when there was nothing in Emily’s appearance or her father’s bank account to put off potential suitors. Lynley had gathered from the overheard conversation with her sister, that Emily was of an outspoken and independent nature, but he did not detect vanity or petulance, the usual defects of character to which a striking beauty might be prey.

Lynley thought he could persuade her father to agree to the match. Though his title was undistinguished, his fortune was large. His estate at Lyndale Abbey was a decent property. Furthermore, if he read the situation right, Lady Emily’s mother at least believed her daughter had diminished prospects for marriage at her age, and therefore a pair of shrewd parents might not question his sudden suit too closely.

Persuading Emily herself that their betrothal, however sudden and of whatever duration they chose to make it, was to her advantage—that was the challenge. He knew nothing of her experience with men, but he guessed that something a man had done made Emily Radstock resolve to accept the first “imbecile” she met.

Phil seemed to think that there had been an attachment to which the family had objected. In any case, Lynley needed to act. His sense of Emily Radstock told him that she did not like to be vulnerable, and he didn’t want to give her any time to arm herself against him. He had a ring that would serve his purpose, and a card of invitation procured by Goldsworthy to a gathering that could prove a good spy-hunting ground.

If he could get his ring on Emily Radstock’s finger, he could begin tonight.

* * * *

The second time Emily Radstock met Ajax Lynley was no less unsettling than the first. In her mother’s rather passé Egyptian drawing room, his height and ease of manner gave Emily a sense of an adult invading the nursery, towering over the child-sized furnishings, hobbyhorses, and toy houses. The sheer size of him stopped her brain for a moment. Emily never felt small. She was no Cinderella whose tiny foot captured a prince. She had her father’s feet, and fit as comfortably in his shoes as in her own.

She offered tea, which Lynley declined. He did not look any less sure of himself, but she would give him a way out in case he’d done some thinking over the intervening hours. She had read three chapters of the little book since their last meeting, but when he’d been announced, she’d had only a few minutes to apply its principles in reverse.

“I trust you’ve thought the better of your...idea since this morning.”

“Not at all,” he said with grating good cheer.

She wished he would sit. He was not perfectly handsome. If one looked closely, one saw a flaw in his mouth, a quirk in his upper lip on the left side, so his lips did not close completely. A thin thread of a white scar slanted across the place.

“What could you possibly mean by accepting me? You are not, I presume, an imbecile?”

He shook his head. “No one has ever accused me of lacking intelligence. I will follow your lead in setting a date for our nuptials. But we need a story to tell the world—how we met and wooed, fell in love and plighted our troth.”

“We could say that you eavesdropped on a private conversation and took advantage of an unguarded remark.”

He went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “If you are an advocate for truthfulness, we can say that we met through your sister and Phil. Your visits to support your sister as she prepares for the birth of her child, and my visits to consult with Phil about the purchase of a new pair of horses, inevitably threw us together. And love”—he made a brief circle in the air with one lean, strong hand—“ensued.”

“Ensued?” Emily fell back against the couch cushions, lifting a hand to her brow. “Oh, the romance of it all! I don’t know whether to take up my fan or my smelling salts.”

He leaned one elbow on the low mantel. It wasn’t low at all except to him. “Ah, it is, I fear, all too common a story, is it not? Lovers meeting in the midst of their families, left alone because no one imagines such a meeting has the power to stir the soul?”

“You don’t write fiction, do you?” Emily asked, straightening back up.

“No.” He sat down opposite her. “You would prefer a more romantic story? I could figure as a dashing hero who swept in to rescue you from some peril—coaching accident on an icy road? Footpads outside the theater? Wild bull in a field?—and within moments of our meeting we discovered how ardently we both admire the same poets.”