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“Our information? As in you and others? You and some other partner?”

“As in the Foreign Office.”

“And how do you get that information?”

“Remember, Em, there are things I can’t tell you.” As soon as he spoke, she tensed in his hold.

“Lynley, we’re almost home. You can let me go now.”

His body protested. He was enjoying her weight against him. She seemed unaware of the nature of the contact, or the thinness of the barriers of silk and wool and linen and propriety between them. Her breath reached him, smelling of sugar and oranges. She had let down her guard, not through a waltz as Lynley had planned, but through talk about the case. There was a lesson there, his brain said. Pay attention. His body, meanwhile, said, Kiss her.

He tried a compromise. “You did good spy work tonight, Em.”

“What’s next, do you think?”

“This,” he said, and he kissed her. And realized that he had been wanting to do so for some time. In the carriage after the opera when she’d pushed him away, on the sofa in the drawing room when she’d discovered that he was a spy, in the carriage after their escape from the prison when he had wanted to strip off her black gown, and now, and in between, whenever he’d thought of her. He didn’t know what she would say next, but her mouth intrigued him.

He had only a moment. In the back of his brain, he knew the coachman was bringing the horses to a stop. The footman, however weary he might be, would jump down to open the door.

But under his mouth hers softened and opened. She kissed with ardor and inexperience, and something more elusive, something he hadn’t felt before.

He was trying to name that rare element in her kiss and at the same time thinking there were still too many garments between them, when she broke away from the kiss and pushed against his chest. He let her slide off of him and kept her from falling.

The carriage stopped, rocking and settling into stillness, while Lynley’s body throbbed in protest. His blood raced on in his veins.

He had always had contempt for his uncle’s weakness in the face of temptation. His uncle had been a man whose eye followed every exposed bosom, whose hands had reached to grab every swaying hip that passed. Lynley had believed himself immune to the temptations of coarse abundance. He had not realized that something else, something very different, something one could not squeeze and hold and press oneself against, could yet provoke strong desire, something made of wit and sharpness and fierce independence.

Beside him on the bench she righted herself in a furious rustle of garments. He reminded himself that neither of them wanted marriage. Their engagement was a cover. He might enjoy the temptation, but he must not give in to it. The door opened, and he climbed down to help her alight. Instead of taking his hand, she slapped the pair of gloves into it and descended without his assistance.

“I assume you’ll want to begin looking for Clive Walhouse as soon as possible.”

“Tomorrow.”

“You mean today.” She lifted one dark brow. “I do have one piece of further information for you.”

Chapter Seventeen

The husband hunter must be under no illusion that the path to happiness is perfectly straight and smooth, for it is a shifting path made of the smallest grains of human experience—our feelings. Varied, changeable, and passing in rapid succession, they are the most difficult to fix in our minds. Who among us remembers at the end of a carriage ride precisely how we were rattled, shaken, and jolted along the way? Both the husband hunter and the gentleman who appears interested in her may mistake or misread their feelings through inattention or distraction. A dangerous moment arises in the growth of a sincere attachment, when one or the other first realizes the true nature of his or her feelings with no certainty that those feelings are returned.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Lynley tossed the pair of York gloves onto Goldsworthy’s desk. He’d slept until one, and now late afternoon light streaked through the room’s shutters, making a slanting pattern across the floor. The big desk stood in the shadows at the back of the room, its surface illuminated by a single lamp. Goldsworthy looked up from the usual pile of scattered papers.

“Do we have concrete evidence that Walhouse left the country?” Lynley asked.

Goldsworthy took up the gloves. “Strong signs, lad. He took his passport and emptied his bank account. No one has seen him in weeks.”

“Those gloves suggest a different story.” Lynley sat opposite the big man.

Goldsworthy raised one brow. “What story?”

“It turns out Archer was supposed to give the gloves to Walhouse.”

“Are you sure?”

Lynley nodded and explained that Archer had given the gloves to Allegra Walhouse to give to her brother. He omitted Emily’s role in acquiring the gloves.

Goldsworthy regarded him from under craggy russet brows. “And Miss Walhouse gave you the gloves?”