Page 44 of One Thing Leads to a Lover

And he was not the sort of man to welcome a display of pity, she could guess. Carefully, she shifted her weight onto one hip, so that her knee fell softly against his, a silent reminder he wasn’t alone now.

What sort of reaction she had expected to her movement, she couldn’t say. But not what followed: his strong, warm palm settled on her calf, absently caressing its curve through the thin silk of her gown and stocking. His gaze, his thoughts were still far away. She wasn’t even certain he realized he’d done it.

“The last pocket I ever picked—well, almost,” he corrected himself with a sort of laugh, “I’ve lifted a few valuables since then, I suppose—belonged to General Zebadiah Scott. Colonel Scott, at the time. Being sharper than most men, he caught me in the act of relieving him of both watch and chain.” A slight smile lifted one corner of Langley’s mouth. “I’d have had a few of those mother-of-pearl buttons off his waistcoat, too, if he hadn’t—” The smile deepened, but he shook his head. “He caught my wrist and said, ‘I shouldn’t do that if I were you, lad.’

“I—I tossed his words back in his face, intending to mock him. But I managed to catch his voice, his accent…well, it was a knack I had, imitating people. It surprised him. Almost seemed to…to delight him. He tipped his head to the side and said, ‘What’s your name, boy?’

“‘Magpie, ye daft nob,’ I told him. It was what the other street urchins called me, because I had a sharp eye for shiny things. That amused him too. He repeated it two or three times before asking my Christian name. I hardly knew what he meant by that, but eventually I came up with Langley.

“‘Well, Langley,’ he said, taking me by the elbow, ‘why don’t you come with me?’

“That meant prison, I figured. The hangman’s noose. I tried to run, but his grip was firm.” As Langley spoke, his fingers curled more tightly around her leg, almost to the point of discomfort. She did not pull away.

“He tried to tell me I had naught to fear from him. And I told him…” He tipped the glass to his lips again, searching out the last drops. “I told him a chap in my line liked to feel a jolt of fear now and then. How else was I to know I was still alive?”

The desire for danger that was so new and forbidden to her—he’d carried it with him all his life.

“Well, at that, he got a strange look in his eye and said…” A slow movement of Langley’s head followed, not quite a shake. “I don’t remember what he said in reply.”

The first untruth he’d told her tonight. She hesitated to call it a lie. She didn’t think he’d meant to do it. Perhaps he didn’t want to remember.

“He bundled me off down the street, into his carriage, all the way to his house. Scrubbed the dirt from my face and my neck with his own hands, he did.” The very rhythms of his speech changed as he slipped between the boy he had been and the man he’d become. “He and his good wife tried their best to make me less feral, though it was a thankless task. Eventually he told me I was going to live with some friends of his, who had a grand big house, practically in the country, he said, but sadly no children to share it with. My first real home. I was—oh, younger than Philip, certainly,” he said, and she jerked in surprise at the mention of her son, so certain she was that he had temporarily forgotten her existence.

Absently, his hand smoothed up and down her leg, intending, she supposed, to soothe away her skittishness, though the heat of his touch produced quite another reaction, burning through her veins with the sinful liquid warmth of a whole tumbler-full of contraband French brandy.

“The Stanhopes were an elderly couple—or so it seemed to me at the ripe old age of seven or eight. Good people, whose goodness I rewarded by running away…oh, a dozen times at least. Usually with a sack full of their silver bits and bobs, candlesticks and the like. Any man of sense would have let me go, or at least tried to beat the impulse out of me. Benjamin Stanhope gave me his name. Sent me to Rugby when I outstripped his teaching. To Oxford after that. And bought my first commission, too. Sent me back to General Scott at the last, I suppose you might say. Sometimes I wonder whether it wasn’t always the plan between them.”

With a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sigh, he thumped the tumbler onto the desk. “And that, your ladyship,” he finished, giving the fleshiest part of her calf a squeeze before releasing her to set both hands on the arms of the chair as if preparing to rise, “is the mostly true tale of how I came to be Major Langley Stanhope, intelligence officer and master mimic known as the Magpie.”

He had skated over a great number of incidents, she felt sure, as well as a promotion or two. But she dared just one question. “And the matter of the knighthood?”

At that, he stood so abruptly, she nearly lost her balance. “A mistake. A misunderstanding on His Majesty’s part.”

“Surely you would not have me believe you so modest as to deny your own heroism?” she said lightly, doubting even as she spoke the words whether it was wise to tease him just now.

“If I’ve ever done anything worthy of being called a hero,” he demurred, shaking his head, “it certainly was not on the occasion in question.” Then another bitter laugh huffed from his chest. “I’m sure old Ben would have liked to hear me called Sir Langley Stanhope, all the same.”

“He’s gone?”

“A little more than three years ago.”

About the same time she had lost her husband, Amanda noted with a strange pang of something like sympathy, though their pain had sprung from such different sources.

“Sophia went first, of a fever. Ben died a few weeks later, of a broken heart—and now I’m spouting sentimental nonsense, aren’t I?”

Slowly, she slid from her perch on the edge of the desk and stepped closer to him, laying a hand on his arm. “No.”

His gaze settled on the place where she touched him. “You’re a smart woman,” he said softly. “And a lady. Surely that story was sordid enough to send you scampering away?”

Her fingers curled tighter, pale against the dark wool of his coat. She made no move to go.

“Amanda.” More plea than warning. Oh, yes. He wanted her.

And she wanted him. Surely a discreet widow might take a lover? There was no great scandal in that.

Well…some scandal.

Recalling her mother’s endless cautions and reprimands, Amanda feared scandal might be part of the appeal.