Bloody hell.
He’d known from the instant she’d sneaked into his residence and put demands to him that Chloe would be trouble.
He could not, however, have predicted just how much.
“Leo,” she said calmly, rising to her feet, maintaining a hold on his damned ledger.
His fury spiked. Nay, not solely his fury… panic and desperation.
What has she done? The question peeled around every corner of his mind.
He seethed. “You were ordered never to come in here.”
She held his ledgers up. “You lied.”
God, she was breathtaking in her bravery and resolve. Any other time, he’d have admired her for that showing.
“Quiet.” He glanced back at the door. His staff had all been carefully selected by the Brethren, but that still did not mean speaking freely was safe.
Chloe jutted her chin out. “You are not in dun territory.” He winced. “You are outrageously wealthy. Of course,” she breathed. “It all makes sense. It is why you allowed me control of my dowry, and you have that bronze piece that any man truly in debt would have sold off long ago.”
His mind swirled under her rapid ramblings as his panic mounted, staggering in its intensity.
His wife smiled, that pleased little expression that indicated pride at what she’d pieced together. And then it faded as she contemplated him. “It all begs the question, however, of why? Why do you go to such great lengths to present yourself as someone other than who you are?”
A loud ringing filled his ears as she raised the most dangerous question that not a soul before her had dared ask.
“I’m not discussing this with you,” he bit out. “You violated the terms of the contract.”
“With good reason. I have every right to know the state of our finances.” She jutted her chin at a defiant angle. “And the secrets you carry.”
Those five words sucked the air from his lungs and all life from the room.
“Who are you, Leo Dunlop?” she murmured, drifting closer.
He had to send her away. He’d realized as much when pieces had slid into place at White’s. Her discovery here only confirmed the urgency with which he needed to separate himself from this woman.
Agony pierced him like a thousand dull knives being plunged into his chest. Oh, God, he didn’t want to send her away. And yet, she couldn’t stay. Not with what she’d uncovered. And not with what she was so very close to discovering—that his life had, in fact, largely been a lie crafted so he might carry out his work for the Home Office.
He snapped.
“You had no right,” he thundered, slamming his fists down hard on the surface of his desk. The ledgers and his wife both jumped. Fury pumping through his veins, he surged toward her. “You had no right,” he repeated on a furious whisper.
He took her by the shoulders and gave her a firm shake. “There are no secrets,” he hissed. “Do you hear me? There are no secrets!”
With a cry, Chloe stumbled out of his arms. Terror bled from her eyes and spilled from her slender frame.
Good, she should be afraid. Mayhap then she’d allow him to keep the walls resurrected between them. Mayhap then she could be safe. Only, why did he want to carve out his own heart for daring to scare her as he was?
Chloe was bold, fearless, and courageous above anyone he knew… and he’d reduced her to this trembling, pale-faced shadow of herself.
Leo dragged a hand through his hair. “Say nothing about what you’ve learned here.”
She shook her head. “You want me to let my family to continue to malign you and worry after me—”
“I don’t give a bloody damn on Sunday what your family believes or does not believe,” he bellowed.
Chloe recoiled, holding his ledger close to her chest in a terrified embrace. He expected her to run, wanted her to so he could begin trying to set this all to rights.
Leo stalked over and, with crisp, angry movements, stacked the pile of books at his desk. He stuffed them back inside the secret panel. “Only you would know how to pick a damned lock.” He belatedly recalled the copy she still held. Leo glanced back. “My book, madam,” he snapped, holding out a hand.
Again, Chloe jumped and released the copy into his hand.
As he organized the pile and slid the lock back into place, he dug deep for calm and order of his thoughts.
So she’d discovered he had an appreciation for literature and healthy finances. Such discoveries revealed nothing about his work for the Brethren. Calmed by that, Leo slowly unfurled to his full height.
Chloe edged away from him, placing his high-backed chair between them as a barrier.
The muscles along his jaw went taut. Good, she feared him.
Why did that feel like the emptiest of victories?
“I prefer my finances a secret,” he began, feeding her yet another lie. “So that the creditors I’m indebted to don’t all come a’calling. So the mistresses I broke it off with who didn’t receive so much as a parting gift aren’t prodding me for baubles.”
She worried at her lower lip. “I don’t believe you.”
Of course she didn’t.
“You’re not who you seem,” she persisted. “I’ve always believed that. And then I received this…”
His senses on heightened alert, Leo fixed on her slender fingers as they dug around the front of her gown. She withdrew a small, folded sheet.
Chloe came out from behind his chair.
“What is this?” he demanded as she turned it over. Not bothering to wait for an answer, he unfolded it. Leo’s stomach dropped. Oh, God. He stared blankly at the warning as terror pealed around his ears.
“Who would send me that? And what would they warn you away from, Leo?” She spit out question after question. “Tell me,” she pleaded.
With an animalistic cry, he swept the contents off the surface of his desk, scattering them about. The inkwell crashed in a crystal explosion, spraying shards about his office.
Her entire body recoiled.
“It is not your business,” he cried. He gathered her firmly by the shoulders again, crushing the damning note against the delicate white puff of her sleeve. “Why? Why must you probe?” he shouted. The page slipped in a whispery fall to their feet. “Why?” A keening moan filtered past his lips.
“Stop,” she pleaded, wrenching back, but he tightened his hold.
“Do you want the truth?” he thundered, shaking her harder. “Do you?”
“Yes,” she cried.
“I am an agent for the Home Office.”
It was harder to say who was more stunned by that whispered revelation. His own shock was reflected in the pools of her eyes. “What?”
The question belonged to the both of them, spoken simultaneously from a shaken state.
He shook his head numbly. What? Where? Leo jerked his palms back so abruptly, Chloe tumbled back into his chair.
He flexed his fingers. His throat burned with the need for liquid fortitude. On unsteady legs, he stalked over to his sideboard. Not bothering with a glass, he grabbed the bottle of whiskey that was closest to his fingertips. Yanking the stopper out, he tossed it on the floor, where it bounced around.
Leo took a long swallow.
Chloe’s eyes followed his every move. As the liquor burned a path down his throat, she sank farther and farther into her seat until she sat with her shoulders hunched in a protective posturing.
Lowering his bottle, Leo took a step toward her.
She held her hands up, an entreaty in her gaze.
That fear—of him—struck like a lash upon his soul. Leo dropped to his haunches, the decanter dangling between his fingers. The bottle was a crutch to cling to. Words stuck in his throat, making speech impossible. He swallowed hard and tried again. “I’ve been an agent for a special division within the Home Office since I was just eight and ten.” He finally shared the truth with another soul, the first time in the whole tenure of his service to the Crown. “My role with the agency required I cultivate the persona of a rake.” Leo chuckled, seeing the scared child he’d been. “It was so very easy,” he said softly to himself. “My… father… I wasn’t…”
He closed his eyes as every age-old sense of failure and insecurity battered at him, transforming him back into that stuttering, stammering, pleading boy. Leo forced himself to complete the telling. “I was never the child my father wanted.” There, that much was true. Sharing with her the darkest truth of his existence, however, he still could not bring himself to utter. “My work gave me purpose, and I reveled in every moment of my instruction. Bedding whores, drinking spirits, learning whist and hazard and faro…” How very thrilling it had all been to him, a sheltered scholar.
Chloe wet her lips. “It’s why you set aside your studies… and Lady Daphne?” she ventured, far more clever than could ever be safe.
“The agency had reason to believe I was compromised. I went off to meet with her and break it off…”
“It wasn’t disapproving parents,” she breathed, sliding the puzzle pieces he’d handed her into place. “It was—”
He again nodded. “After we’d made love, I discovered we’d been followed.” And so he’d ended it in the cruelest way possible. “None of that matters. Your silence,” and your safety, “is essential.” Leo grabbed the missive she’d received. “Where did you get this?” he demanded, focusing on the one thing he’d always been able to control—his work.
“I came to the library, and it was resting on the sofa.”
His home had been infiltrated. Impossible. That would have to mean there was someone on his staff, in his midst… nay, worse, within the Brethren who wanted him to abandon his efforts. Something stirred at the back of his mind. The thought proved a dark, unpleasant niggling. An impossibility… and yet… not.
How many men had betrayed the Crown in the past, and how many would in the future?
But why… Why?
Leo struggled to think.
“What is the mission they seek to steer you away from?”
For a moment, he weighed silence. But Chloe knew too much. And with her familial connection to Waterson, she might prove valuable in ways he hadn’t considered. “I had reason to believe the Cato Street Conspiracy, the plan to—”
“I’m familiar with it,” Chloe interrupted.
Despite the horror of all that had unfolded, admiration for this woman rose to the surface. Leo went on to provide the details about his investigation… and her role involved in it.
“So you wed me to be closer to Gabriel’s closest friend,” she murmured.
“It was a mutually beneficial goal,” he said gruffly. “My superiors had expressed displeasure with my recklessness.” He cracked his knuckles. “There were rumors that I’d bedded my immediate supervisor’s wife.”
“Rumors.” Chloe ran her eyes over his face. “You did not, then, make her your lover.”
He shook his head. “Any further scandals would have seen me removed from my post.”
Understanding dawned in her eyes. “It is because we were discovered. We were the scandal.”
“My superior was gleeful with the prospect of my being cast out.”
A resentment he’d attributed to the other man’s viper of a wife… and now something more sinister had reared at the back of his mind.
“Another lady would dissolve into a fit of tears at that betrayal,” he noted.
“Ours was a business arrangement from the beginning, Leo. I had my own desires and expectations of a union between us. It would be unfair to resent you for your reasons.”
Did that still hold true? Or had she come to care for him, as he had her?
His palms moistened with his aching need for an answer.
Chloe drifted closer. “You gave your life to the Crown, you gave up the woman you loved. And yet, the men you serve had so little faith in your loyalty,” she murmured, stroking a palm over his cheek. “They wronged you.”
His heart hammered. How did she see feelings he carried? Resentment he’d shared with none?
He shoved her hand back, and his always fearless wife shrank once more from him. “You make presumptions you shouldn’t,” he hissed.
From the corner of his eyes, he caught her inching toward the door.
He stepped into her path, wringing a gasp from her.
Leo caught her chin between his thumb and forefinger, tipping her gaze to meet his.
She winced.
“You think you just get to walk away, madam?” Leo placed his lips along her ear. The hint of jasmine flooded his senses. God, she was a siren, and he was helpless where she was concerned. Held in the grip of frustration, he seethed. “Your life is no longer your own.” And how he hated that for her and loathed himself for stripping that anonymity from her. Nonetheless, he needed to open her eyes to the peril she would forever face. “When you walk outside, an enemy wishing to get to me knows you are there.” Just as they had with the carriage accident. “When you attend a dinner party, the safety of your repast is no longer assured.” With every possible threat he dangled, the color seeped more and more from her cheeks until her eyes stood out, stark, vivid pools of terror within her porcelain-white visage. “Rides in Hyde Park or outings to the modiste… no place is safe.”
I’m going to be ill.
Leo’s stomach roiled, vomit stinging his throat. He abruptly released her, and she tripped over him in her haste to put distance between them. Leo dusted his palms together. “I trust I needn’t stress the importance of your keeping this information to yourself.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Do you think me an empty-headed miss who’d bandy about your role and jeopardize your work?”
“You expect confidence in the lady who sought out my former lover to bring us both peace?” He smiled coldly. “Oh, with your tender heart, one couldn’t say what you’d share, and with whom, to alter people’s opinions of me.”
Say something. Lash out at me. Defend yourself and send me to the devil as I deserve.
Instead, Chloe remained stoically silent.
Leo caressed a palm down her right shoulder, drifting it along her modest décolletage. He wrapped her in a loose embrace. “I expect you to play the role of perfect hostess tomorrow at our soiree, madam. You’ll smile, because I need you smiling. You’ll arrange discussions between me and Waterson and anyone else I require. Are we clear?”
“I don’t break my word,” she retorted with a faint quiver to her voice.
“Get out.” The command whistled past clenched teeth.
And she did what she should have done at their first meeting—she fled.
After she’d gone, Leo stormed over to the door and kicked it closed with the bottom of his boot. The violent force set the frame to shaking.
Bloody hell.
It had been as he’d feared. A risk he’d realized too late—that Chloe would forever be in peril because of his work for the Brethren. He’d sent Daphne Smith away long, long ago. So many years had passed that he’d believed himself sufficiently deadened to feeling anything.
Only to be proven so wholly wrong—with Chloe at risk for that mistake.
He began to pace. All right. So he’d revealed the truth to her. This needn’t be a bad thing. In fact, it had been wrong to keep her in the dark. Not knowing about the work he did and the enemies he had as a result would only see her an unwitting target.
Yes, at least she knew… and could be on alert.
But it did not erase the fact that when this was all said and done, he needed to send her away.
Leo rubbed uselessly at the ache in his chest. He’d believed himself heartless, only to find out that he very much did possess that dangerous organ and that it beat for his wife.