Page 73 of Every Rogue Has His Charm

Zebadiah’s chest puffed, just a little, and Helen smiled. “Well,” she said, with a determined look at the other three, “it makes a fitting end, given all the other parties you’ve hosted on his behalf.”

The breath left her husband’s lungs in a sputtering cough. Lady Stanhope glanced uncertainly toward her husband, whose eyes glittered behind his silver-rimmed spectacles. “Why, Mrs. Scott,” he said mildly, amusement tugging at the corner of his mouth, “I haven’t the faintest notion what you mean.”

“I’d be shocked if you did.” Helen plucked up a glass of crisp white wine from a nearby table and handed it to Zebby. “Otherwise, you would not be one of my husband’s best agents.” She turned toward Lady Stanhope. “Your sons are both at Cambridge, are they not? I hope now that the war is over, you will be able to enjoy having the house more to yourself.”

One of Lady Stanhope’s slender hands fluttered up to rest over her husband’s heart. “I think we will, yes. Thank you, Mrs. Scott.”

Once he had recovered, Zebby nodded to the Stanhopes and tightened his hold on Helen’s arm to draw her on. He’d been sipping carefully at the glass of wine, but once they were apart from the others, he tossed back the remainder as if in need of fortification. “About the Stanhopes’ house parties, my dear. What on earth made you imagine—?”

“That you were behind them?” she supplied lightly. “Oh, it was really a matter of simple observation. The gossip pages were always the most rumpled parts of the newspaper, and as I had never paid them much mind, I realized it must have been you who was carefully poring over the latest on-dits. Once I started reading them regularly, I began to notice a pattern: an arrest for sedition or something like it inevitably followed one of Lady Stanhope’s grand house parties.”

“Why, that could be mere coincidence.”

“If one believed in such things,” she agreed with a teasing laugh, knowing that her husband held no stock in chance.

He opened his mouth to retort, but before he could speak, they were divided by a brown-and-white spaniel racing between their legs, its leash trailing behind. They sprang apart just in time to make room for the little boy of about four who came next, a piece of cake clutched in one hand, not so much running after the dog as running away from his elder sister, who was just a few steps behind, shouting, “Thomas Eleazor Sutherland, when I catch you, I’ll—”

“Ah. A perfectly timed interruption,” Zebby said when the trio had passed. A hand on Helen’s elbow, he made a beeline for a plump, brown-haired woman seated beside a tree with another spaniel in her lap. “I know you will wish to make the acquaintance of Lady Magnus, my dear. It is she whom you must thank for the early copies of all those Robin Ratliff books you so enjoy.”

“How lovely to meet you, ma’am,” the woman said, tucking the dog under one arm as she rose and extended ink-stained fingers to Helen. “But a few books can never make up for the debt of gratitude I owe your husband. He was kind enough to send Lord Magnus to me in Scotland, where I was working as Mr. Ratliff’s secretary.”

They were joined by a gentleman with curling brown hair and laughing wrinkles at the corners of his hazel eyes. “You make it sound as if I arrived gift wrapped, my dear.” He had the runaway dog’s leash in one hand, and the shoulder of the cake-besmeared boy in the other. The girl, perhaps six, looked on triumphantly.

“Magnus was one of mine, before he inherited his title,” Zebadiah explained. “Of course I had no way of knowing—”

“Yes, yes. Another of your remarkable coincidences, I’m sure,” the gentleman said, “insisting I return to Balisaig where the woman I’d loved and lost just happened to have taken up residence.” He bowed. “A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Scott.”

“Likewise.”

“I’m Tommy,” piped up the boy, which earned him another frown from his sister.

“You were supposed to be keeping an eye on the dogs,” the girl announced. “I found him hiding beneath the cake table, Mama.”

“Don’t tattle, Theodora,” Lady Magnus told her. “As for you, young man, no more sweets—for you or the dogs.” Hardly had that edict left her lips when the spaniel in her arms squirmed free to lick cake crumbs from the boy’s face, making them all laugh.

Lord Magnus handed both leashes to his daughter, who dutifully took her brother’s sticky palm in her own and led the three troublemakers away. Zebadiah shook Lord Magnus’s hand. “I’m honored you would come all this way.”

“We wouldn’t have missed it. And the trip gave Lady Magnus a chance to take care of some business at Persephone Press.”

“So you still work for Mr. Ratliff, then?” Helen asked.

Lord Magnus answered in a pleasant Scottish burr, “Indeed, Ratliff would be nothing without her.” Helen thought she saw him wink at his wife out of the corner of one eye.

Just then a tinkling chime sounded, and they all turned to discover Sir Langley tapping a goblet with a silver spoon to call them all together beneath the shade of a canopy.

With a nod to Lord and Lady Magnus, Helen gently steered her husband back in the direction from whence they’d come.

“A ceremony, my dear? Really?”

“Only a toast.”

As they walked to join the others and the crowd of former intelligence officers parted to make way for them to pass, he said to her in a low voice, “Do you honestly fancy that all these men are somehow still in my service?”

“In their own ways, yes. And some of their wives too.”

“Now really, I must protest—”

Helen tipped her chin toward another couple, a woman with short golden locks and a handsome, dark-haired man. “I also took note that tales of the scandalous thief Lady Sterling disappeared from those same gossip columns around the same time our butler informed me that Lord Sterling—Captain Addison, that is—paid a late-night visit to our house with the young woman who is now his wife.”