When presented with sharing a residence with his new wife or fleeing as fast as his legs could carry him, Leo chose the latter.
Since his uncle had ushered him into an existence where he served the Crown, sparing him from further abuse at his now-dead sire’s hands, Leo had resolved to be the best at what he did. When the Brethren had ordered him to transform himself from the pathetically weak scholar he’d been into a hardened rake whose womanizing and drinking were such to rival Bacchus, he’d done so.
And through the havoc of the past two days, he’d found a diversion where he always had—in his work for the Brethren.
Or he attempted to.
Seated in his offices at Aldenham Lodge on the fringe of London, Leo stared at the files opened before him. Just as he’d been staring for the better part of the hour.
He tapped the tip of his pen in a staccato beat on the corner of the folder, reading and re-reading the information contained within.
The Cato Event
Initial Opinion—a product of the London Irish community and trade societies; a scheme concocted by merchants and commoners.
The Cover—a scheme crafted by members of the peerage, in effort to see through the passage of the Six Acts.
Evidence:
It was too damned obvious. With a sound of frustration escaping him, he tossed down his pen, the thick file muffling the thwack of his quill. Despite his earliest opinions, it could not be so easy as proper gents bent on controlling legislation. It was always about money and power… always about what a man could get…
Think… think…
He dug his fingertips into his temples. It was futile. Just as it had been since he’d fled his household.
Oh, Leo had been forced into the role of a liar since his days at Oxford, but he was at least truthful enough to acknowledge his flight to the Brethren offices and his distractedness now had more to do with the minx who’d come undone in his arms ten hours ago.
Each case consumed him. His investigations drove him. No detail went ignored.
Until now.
Chloe’s visage flitted forward, teasing, challenging, tempting, as she’d been since their first meeting.
“Bloody hell. Enough,” he muttered, gouging his temples with his fingertips, wanting to rid his thoughts of her, drive back whatever pull had him so entranced.
Only once had he made the mistake of believing he could have both a devoted wife and eventual family… and keep his role as a spy for the Brethren.
One youthful misstep had nearly cost him the latter.
It was a mistake he’d never make again.
From that point on, he’d become precisely what his uncle and the Brethren wished him to be. Nor had he ever had a single regret after that. Any vulnerability was perilous, be it the mewling sentiments of love or the affections of a woman.
Leo bedded women. He reveled in the release he found in their arms.
After he was sated and his lover well-pleasured, he didn’t give another thought to her.
Which was what made the whole of these last ten hours so fucking confusing. For when he’d brought Chloe, his bride, with her lists and logic to a release that still left her cries of surrender pealing in his ears, he’d not thought of his own pleasure. His own sexual gratification hadn’t been the ultimate urge that had compelled him, but rather the satisfaction of seeing her come undone.
Reaching back, Leo gripped his neck and rubbed at the sore muscles there. After riding at a breakneck speed for his offices off Watling Street and spending hours bent over his work, he was tired to the core and in dire need of a hot bath. A hot bath, a brandy, and the clever massages he’d received from beauties in the Orient. Those sessions where the soreness was dissipated with an expert touch and then, afterward, dissolved by a hot, violent round of lovemaking.
Except, when he thought of bedding just any faceless, nameless woman, it was his wife’s face that slid forward.
With a groan, he lowered his head and knocked it silently against his desktop.
A knock sounded on his office door.
Leo jerked his head up. “Enter,” he barked, welcoming the distraction.
His clerk, Lathan Holman, a bespectacled, tall, gaunt youth very much an image of the weak pup Leo had been a lifetime ago, ducked his head inside. “Is there anything you require, my lord?” He was also endlessly devoted after Leo had coordinated the young man’s placement with the Brethren. If Leo sneezed from one end of the establishment, Holman would be there with a kerchief and a blessing.
“A drink,” he muttered, and the boy sprang forward. “A woman.”
That brought Holman up short. A fiery blush suffused the clerk’s pale cheeks. “Uh… I…” Apparently, Leo had determined the one task the boy was unwilling and unable to carry out. “I-I’ll s-see to it, my lord,” he stammered, breaking for the doorway and then stopping. “Or should I fetch your drink first?” He feinted left, toward the sideboard. “Or would you rather I see to the…” Holman’s large Adam’s apple bobbed. “To the…”
“It is fine, Holman,” Leo mumbled under his breath and shoved to his feet. “I was jesting.” There was only one lady he wanted. And it was a wholly foreign concept for him, a man who’d eased himself in the body of the nearest, most eager, and inventive woman.
Registering the absolute still to descend, Leo paused in his journey to the sideboard and glanced back.
A pair of crimson brows lifted above the spectacles. “A… jest, my lord? But you don’t—” Holman immediately went tight-lipped.
His neck hot, Leo hurried the remaining distance to the bottles of fine French brandy and Irish whiskey. “Did you need me?” he asked impatiently.
“Oh, right. Of course. I’ve copied the notes pertaining to Waterson’s business contracts and…” His detailed accounting rambled on and on.
Leo’s world had turned upside down, and insanity had begun. Grabbing the nearest bottle, he splashed several fingerfuls in a glass, thought better of it, and added another fingerful.
Must you do that?
Chloe’s quiet recrimination as she’d sought to negotiate the terms of their marriage intruded.
Leo stared down into the pale brown contents of his glass.
He answered to no woman. Nor persons, if one wished to be truly precise. His loyalties were reserved for the Brethren.
As such, her barely concealed disappointment and annoyance at his drinking shouldn’t grate. Her words should have rolled off his back, along with every other dark insult that had been hurled at his head over the years. A groan of impatience rumbled up his throat, and he set his glass down hard.
“When I obtain the information, I’ll be sure and deliver it to your offices, my lord,” Holman finished.
Leo creased his brow. What in the blazes? What had the man been saying?
“Married not even a day and hard at work as you always are, I see.”
Oh, bloody hell on Sunday.
His uncle’s booming voice echoed around the room. Blast. He was everywhere. Everywhere that Leo was, rather.
“You,” he groaned, waving off his clerk. The young man dropped a respectful bow for the duke and then hurried around him. Needing liquid comfort, after all, Leo grabbed the glass and carried it to his desk.
Uncle William closed the door behind him. “That’s hardly the warm greeting for a beloved godfather.”
“Don’t you have a beloved wife to see to?”
His uncle arched an eyebrow. “I would ask the same of you.”
“I hardly believe our hasty union constitutes the blissful marriage enjoyed by you and my dear aunt.” Nor was it one he aspired to. As a young man who’d been captivated by an unconventional young lady new to London, he’d allowed himself the fantasy of what his aunt and uncle enjoyed. No longer.
His uncle claimed the seat close to Leo’s desk. “Following your wedding,” he began, setting his cloak on the back of the empty chair, “I met with Rowley and Higgins.”
He stiffened. “Oh?” His pulse accelerated. It was the meeting he should have been thinking of since he’d exchanged the vows that had ended his bachelor state. Not the breathy moans and pleas of the delectable Chloe Edgerton… Tennyson. She was a Tennyson now. “And how did the meeting go?” he asked with feigned disinterest. This time, as he reached for his glass and took a sip, it was liquid fortitude he desperately required.
“Higgins was incredulous.”
Higgins required less swaying. As one of the heads of the organization, he well knew how crucial Leo’s role had been over the years. He’d lull himself into believing the lie. “And Rowley?” he asked, swirling the contents of his drink. That son of a sod.
“He called your hasty marriage the weakest act you’d yet perpetrated.” The hint of a smile ghosted his uncle’s lips. “They want to see you together.”
He stitched his eyebrows into a single line. “How do you propose I explain my relationship to those gentlemen?” Those starchy, proper lords were never the manner of men Leo would keep company with. “She’s too clever to not ask questions about that connection.”
The duke reclined in his seat. “Indeed?”
Leo’s ears fired hot. “Don’t make more of that statement than there is.” The lady, with her retorts and unwitting ability to lay command of her… and his future, had proven herself more intelligent than any woman—of any station—to whom he’d linked himself.
“Hmph.” Do not rise to that bait. His uncle had been more a parent than the man Leo had called Father. He’d always known precisely what to do and say to elicit a reaction. “I said… hmph.”
“I heard you.” Leo downed another quick swallow, grimacing at the fiery burn. He set his glass down hard and grabbed his file.
“Higgins expects you and your clever wife to become a pillar of respectability. Attend ton functions.” Bollocks. “Maintain connections with proper ladies and gentlemen.” This was bad. “Host balls and soirees.”
The thick folder slipped from his hands. “Absolutely not.” Absolutely not for so many reasons. The least of which was that he hated balls. “Chloe despises balls.” It had been one of the remarkable terms set forth that further stirred his intrigue with the peculiar minx.
His uncle laughed. “A lady who despises balls and soirees as much as you do? I do believe you have found your match.” The duke’s amusement faded, and he gave Leo a long once-over. “Furthermore, when was the last time you let another person’s feelings get in the way of what you want or need?”
It had been thirteen years. Thirteen years since another person’s misery had cut him to the core.
Had there been a stinging recrimination there, it would have been easier to take than that pragmatism. And he hated that his uncle’s opinion should still matter when nothing else did.
“It’s not about how the lady feels or what she wants,” he said coolly, reinforcing the walls he’d kept up. “I signed an agreement promising I wouldn’t expect Chloe to attend or host a bloody function. I cannot very well go about asking to alter the terms less than one day into the union.”
“Your dear wife also detests them,” Leo felt inclined to point out, needing to make that unique fact less important… for reasons he didn’t understand. Nor cared to consider.
“Your dear aunt is displeased,” his uncle segued, loosening the clasp at his throat. He removed his cloak and rested it over his arm. “She wants a celebration between our family and Lady Chloe’s.”
Leo scraped a hand through his hair, the noose tightening. “I don’t have time to play at proper husband.” The sole reason he’d entered into marriage with Chloe was so that he could continue his work for the Brethren. He cursed blackly. “It’s more vital I focus on the Cato case. I believe I was wrong in my original supposition—”
“Leo,” his uncle interrupted.
He continued over his uncle. “I think there is more at play here—”
“Leo.”
“My research revealed vast sums that were siphoned to Lord Ellsworth in exchange for—”
“Leo, enough,” Uncle William said firmly. “I’m not here about your assignment. Your role in the Brethren won’t even exist without a legitimate marriage accepted by the leadership.”
That silenced Leo.
“Now, I’ll remind you one last time: The reason you married her was to convince the world—particularly your superiors—that you’d turned from rake to respectable gentleman.” He glanced pointedly at the cluttered desk. “So, I suggest you get on your horse and put the same effort into your marriage that you did creating your façade as a rake.”
“It’s not a façade,” he gritted out. Not a single lord or lady in all of London would ever call him anything less than a scoundrel.
Uncle William leaned over and gripped the sides of the desk. “Then, if you managed to go from bookish scholar to this, I trust you can also fall as easily into the role of honorable husband changed by the influence of a young, respectable lady.” He jumped up with an agility better suited to a man twenty years his junior. “Go home, Leo. That,” he slashed a hand at Leo’s work sprawled out before him, “is dependent on your ruse with Lady Chloe.”
After his uncle had gone, Leo remained in his office.
Go home, the duke had advised.
Yet, he sat rooted to the familiar folds of his leather chair.
Dropping his forehead into his palm, Leo stared blankly at the Earl of Waterson’s name scratched at the center of the page with an enormous question mark alongside it.
“I’m a bloody coward,” he muttered.
“What was that, my lord?” Holman’s query came muffled from the other side of the oak panel.
“Nothing,” he called out. “I don’t require anything else this evening.”
“As you wish, my lord.”
Except…
“Holman,” he called after his clerk. “There is something you can do.” If he had to cede his efforts and energies to his pretend marriage, he could, at the very least, have Holman conduct the most basic forms of research on his behalf.
Eager-eyed, his clerk trotted back over.
Fishing out several pages from his file, Leo turned them over to the younger man’s hands.
Holman’s eyes devoured the sheets the way a child did a puff pastry at dessert. He cradled them close, covetously.
Yes, Leo himself had once been that energized at the hint of a role in any case. A lifetime ago, he’d been that boy. “I want you to look into the financial accounts and business dealings that are in direct contradiction with Lord Liverpool’s Cabinet.” The best way to identify those who’d wish to do away with the prime minister’s Cabinet was to determine who had the most to gain by their absence.
“Yes, my lord.” Holman knocked his heels together. “As you wish. Is there anything else?”
He waved the young man off. “That is all.”
His clerk all but tripped over himself in his haste to be free of Leo’s office.
Snapping closed his file, Leo abandoned all earlier efforts to lose himself in his work. He then confronted, head on, the reason for the tightness in his chest.
His wife.
That morning, when he’d taken her in his arms, Leo’s sole intention had been to silence her. He’d kissed Chloe Edgerton—nay, now Chloe Dunlop—to stop her intimate flow of words about his past.
The moment he’d tasted her, however, his insecurities and annoyances… and clear-headedness had all faded away, to be replaced with a fierce hungering to explore her mouth and then discover all of her.
And that need for her had scared the everlasting hell out of him. So much so that he’d fled to the Brethren estate and shut himself away.
Because Leo was a man who gave pleasure… but also expected it in return. He wasn’t so selfless a lover that his partner’s sexual gratification was enough. Or, he hadn’t been.
But while exploring her tight, hot sheath and feeling her desire for him, all he’d wanted in that instant was for her to come undone because of his touch. Her pleasure had mattered to him more than his own. Not only had he hungered for her release above all else, he’d offered to accompany her to her family.
And he’d gone into hiding because of it. Leo snapped his folders closed and neatly stacked them. As his uncle had properly pointed out, Leo could not hide with his work. Not if he wished to convince Society and his superiors that he was capable of restraint and respectability. No, Leo could not accomplish that essential goal here on the fringes of London. As such, he needed to return home to the wife who terrified him more than any ruthless nemesis he’d faced in his line of work… even more so than the man Leo had called Father.
So why, as he took leave of his office and traded out his mount for a rested stallion, did it feel his return had nothing to do with his work and everything to do with a restive excitement to tangle words—and more—with the woman he’d made his wife?