The Regency Season: Passionate Promises. Ann Lethbridge

his hands in so much blood he’d become insensitive to death and destruction. He’d become a tool for the use of his country. Of Sceptre in particular. Weeding out spies and traitors without fear or favour. It was his role. His purpose. He needed it or he’d be nothing.

      And now he was to be a husband to a young woman who, while stubborn and reckless, had always seemed to embody what was right and good with the world. The world of youthful hope for the future. A world in which he’d never belonged. She’d always looked at him in a way that made him think she could see right into his darkness. His unworthiness. No wonder she talked of crying off as soon as the dust settled. A kiss in the dark with a dangerous man in the hope of bending him to her will was one thing, but marriage to such a man was a very different matter.

      It was too late for second thoughts.

      Honour required that he offer marriage. Honour required that he see it through no matter what. At least he had that much honour left.

      The glow of the streetlights flickered across her face, her expression changing with each pass of the light so that it was like watching a disjointed progression of thoughts. Thoughts he could only guess at.

      His task was clear. He had to make her want to marry him. Use her passionate nature against her reason. Woo her. Blind her to his faults. Once they were wed, she could do as she pleased.

      He realised his hands had curled into tight fists. Anger. Frustration. Regret. So much emotion, when he usually experienced none. Minette made him feel too much. And feelings hurt. He relaxed his hands, glad of the deep shadows inside the carriage.

      ‘How on earth did you manage to extract an invitation from Lady Craddock?’ Nicky asked her husband. ‘I know she didn’t plan to invite us, because the invitations went out weeks ago and we didn’t receive one.’

      ‘Craddock belongs to my club,’ Gabe said. His teeth flashed white with a smile. ‘I put him in the way of a good investment.’

      ‘I wager Lady Craddock was none too pleased,’ Freddy said. The Craddocks, like Sparshott, were part of his mother’s clique. They and their high-stickler friends saw themselves as the most important in the land because their roots went far back in the annals of England. Above even the royal house of Hanover, which had thrown its full support behind Mooreshead on the occasion of his marriage to a woman who could have been considered an enemy.

      ‘Let us hope she is too well bred to show her displeasure,’ Gabe said, and there was something dangerously protective in his tone. He’d proved before he wouldn’t tolerate any insult to his wife. A word in the right quarters could be very damaging to even the wealthiest family, when power was their preferred form of currency.

      ‘Dommage,’ Minette said. ‘We will dance and talk with our friends. No one will care what the stuffy Craddocks think. Indeed, they will wish they were part of our circle, if they have any sense at all.’

      Nicky laughed.

      Amused despite his better judgement, Freddy mentally shook his head. Spirit. That was the indefinable quality of Minette. The spirit of a goddess of war.

      And that was what made her so damned dangerous.

      * * *

      Freddy didn’t dance. Ever. And everyone knew it.

      Minette wasn’t sure if he didn’t because of his lameness, or because he didn’t want to. His leg, whatever was wrong with it, didn’t stop him from doing anything else, even if he did have a bit of a limp. She’d seen him walk across the deck of a pitching ship without losing his balance or stumbling. She’d seen him play cricket on the lawns at Meak the first summer she’d arrived in England. Then he’d stopped visiting.

      He worked for Sceptre, a secret organisation that carried on the war with Napoleon in the dark world of espionage. She wasn’t supposed to know about it, but she’d been there the day Nicky and Gabe had been carted off to appear before the head of the organisation. To Nicky’s everlasting gratitude, Gabe had been relieved from active duty. Freddy continued to serve. No one said he did, but there could be no other explanation for why he had disappeared from their lives.

      And neither Nicky nor Gabe had ever commented on his absence. It had been as if they had forgotten he existed. Until she’d gone to find him and they’d ended up engaged to be married. She still didn’t quite believe she was betrothed. In some ways it was a dream come true. He was a handsome, if aloof, man to whom she had been instantly attracted. Had he shown interest all those years before, she would have been tempted.

      Tonight, he had encouraged her to dance every dance with any young man who asked, including Granby, who seemed to have recovered from his funk. She was dancing with him now, while her gaze sought out a very different man. A man so cold that sometimes she thought he would chill her to the bone with a look.

      The music came to a close, and Granby walked her back to Nicky, seated among the matrons and chaperones, no doubt having grown tired of standing.

      ‘May I fetch you some refreshment, Miss Rideau? Or you, Lady Mooreshead?’ Granby asked.

      ‘I would love some lemonade,’ Minette answered.

      ‘Not for me,’ Nicky said.

      When the young man was out of hearing, Minette scanned the room. ‘Where is Freddy?’

      ‘He and Gabe went to the card room.’

      Minette frowned. ‘Do you think he gambles as much as everyone says?’

      Nicky sighed. ‘I don’t know. His fortune is vast. I would hate to see him lose at the tables the way so many others have done.’ She glance around and lowered her voice. ‘It may be a front for other activities.’

      Surprise that Nicky would mention such a thing must have shown in her face.

      ‘I don’t want you to think the worst of him,’ Nicky said.

      She didn’t know what to make of him. So often she had felt as if he didn’t like her. At other times she thought he also felt the same wild spark of attraction she did, especially when they kissed. Until he looked at her with that chilly expression. Clearly he was set on this marriage. Except tonight he seemed to be avoiding her. Perhaps he had changed his mind.

      The disappointment that hollowed out a painful space in her chest didn’t make any sense. His changing his mind would make it so much easier to cry off once they found Moreau.

      As if her thoughts had conjured him up, Freddy appeared across the other side of the room, listening to something Gabe was saying, his expression austere, his eyes intense. He looked up and his gaze caught hers. She froze in the intensity of that look, so dark, so cold, until a hint of a smile quirked the corners of his mouth and caused flutters low in her belly.

      ‘There they are,’ Nicky said, and the connection was gone as if it had never existed. Remoteness fell over his expression like a shutter as he and Gabe sauntered over.

      Gabe smiled down at his wife. ‘Are you too tired to dance?’

      ‘Never.’

      He walked her into the set.

      ‘I am surprised to find you not up on the dance floor,’ Freddy said, clearly not caring one way or the other.

      ‘I sat out because I want to know how Nicky was faring.’

      ‘You care for your sister.’

      ‘Of course. She is my family.’

      He looked less than convinced.

      ‘You care for your family, surely?’ Wasn’t that why he undertook deeds society would frown on? To save his country and his family from being crushed beneath the boot of a tyrant?

      ‘It is my duty to care for them.’

      Cold duty. As it was his duty to marry her after they’d been caught in the library. The man seemed to have no heart, no passion. Yet his kisses had been more than passionate. They had been searing.