Page 46 of Better Off Wed

But as it turned out, curling an arm around his taut waist and leaning heavily against his side was equally likely to stir up unwanted sensations.

“Bed?” he asked, and it might as well have been last night all over again, so powerful was the physical memory of him pressing her into the mattress with that kiss.

“Sofa,” she answered with a determined shake of her head, only partly to disguise a shiver of longing. “I’m not an invalid.”

“As you wish.” Their thighs brushed on the first slow, careful step. “My dear.”

The last two words were tacked on, a sort of teasing afterthought. So why was she so glad to hear him speak them?

They were a reminder that all of this—the words, the solicitousness, even the kiss—were pieces of a performance. A performance with a specific, and important, goal: to keep Lord Thornton from preying on his housemaids and his children’s governess. Laura’s first sight of Jeremy this morning, his tousled hair and the inky scruff shadowing the sharp angle of his jaw, had almost made her forget.

“So…?” she prompted, hoping that what he had to tell her would be sufficient to distract her from the twinges in her ankle, and elsewhere, as they progressed across the floor. “You’re a spy.”

“That’s not a word to be bandied about lightly,” he cautioned her, his voice low. “Not, in fact, a word I would choose to use at all. I’m a code breaker. Or fancied I was.”

“And Lord Thornton?”

“I’m not sure.” A long pause. “But I’ve seen enough to be suspicious.”

“Of?”

He pressed his lips together, as if deciding whether to say more. “This is dangerous stuff, not some youthful indiscretion or a stolen pocket watch to be lorded over him.” When she only looked at him expectantly, a reluctant sigh shuddered from his lungs. “I believe he may be engaged in treason.”

“Treason?” Despite what Jeremy had said, that seemed like precisely the kind of information Lady Sterling could use.

“Laura.” His voice had lost that thread of humor, as if he knew what she’d been thinking. “I’m sure even the maidservants at Thornton Hall would prefer their master not be found guilty of aiding the French. Because if he is, he’ll be swinging from the end of a rope.”

“But he’s an earl.”

“That can change,” he said as he tossed the crumpled papers on the side table and then helped her to sit down. “For this, he can be stripped of his title, made to face his crimes as a commoner. If I’m right.” Slipping one hand beneath her calf, he matter-of-factly lifted her foot, while with the other he arranged the pillow on the footstool just so. As if, after only two days, caring for her had become a matter of course. As if, last night, care had not given way to something more carnal. “But I cannot—cannot quite—”

“Is this all to do with the misprint in the chess book?” she asked, picking up his notes and smoothing them against her outstretched leg.

“More than one, at least as I remember Stamma’s instructions. I spent most of the night playing out chess moves—in my head,” he hastened to add as he sank into the nearby chair. “And I don’t think they’re misprints.” He nodded toward the papers she held. “But the pattern eludes me. I’ve tried four languages and every algebraic twist I can think of, and still I can’t sort out the meaning of the changes.”

Once more Laura studied the columns of letters and numbers he had written, the cross-outs and question marks. Four languages? Algebra? She had misjudged Jeremy in more ways than she could count. “I always thought coded messages were brief and to the point—a letter, a note on a scrap of paper. It seems an awful lot of trouble to print and bind a whole book, and then—and then just tuck it away on a library shelf? How does that help the French or—or anyone?”

“Both the code and the method of conveyance depend on what sort of information needs to be encrypted,” he explained. “But I suspect what Thornton has in his possession is the cypher, the key that allows a code to be broken.”

She weighed that information against what she already knew. “And the cookbook?”

“The same principles apply.” He tipped his head back against the chair to stare at the ceiling. “I’ve been cudgeling my brains for weeks over that one, though I’m no closer to understanding how it works. And now,” he sighed, “there’s another.”

Thank God for her sore ankle, or she might have given in to the sudden urge to go to him and stroke gentle fingers over his temples and whisper words of reassurance to ease his fatigue. The way a wife might.

He had obviously set aside last night’s intimacies, and she would be well-advised to do the same.

She busied her hands with refolding the notes instead. “And Fitz is…he knew, then, what he’d found? Or rather, what I had found?”

His head moved against the chair’s high back in a sort of nod. “I’d just decoded a message about the theft of a priceless codebook disguised as a French cookbook. He and several other field agents were on the lookout for it.”

“Surely he suspected I wasn’t telling the truth about where I’d got it?”

A shrug. “He might have thought someone was trying to erase their connection to it, or using your aunt as an innocent go-between to pass it off.” At last he lifted his head from the chair and trained his gaze on her, clear and intense despite his fatigue. “Any man who cared for you would want to get it far away as swiftly as possible. The story about taking it to the bookshops was quick thinking on his part.”

“A bargain at fifty pounds,” she said with a wry smile, torn between offering to repay her brother and asking him why, since he’d made up the sum, he hadn’t given her more. Mrs. Croft might’ve had a small fortune. “And I thought it wouldn’t fetch fifty shillings.”

“Why shouldn’t a rare old book fetch a fair price?”