A Spy's Guide to Seduction

Book 3: Husband Hunters

by Kate Moore

Genres: Historical Fiction; Regency Romance

Synopsis

An independent lady is accidentally betrothed to a spy with a mysterious past in this Regency gem from beloved, award-winning author Kate Moore. A volume of tips for the marriage-minded brought them together, but their sweeping adventure will change all the rules of engagement . . .
 
When her desperate mother sends her The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London, outspoken Emily Radstock rails against the slim book of manners, boldly declaring that she should wed the first “imbecile” she meets and be done with the matter. Too bad Sir Ajax Lynley overhears her outrageous proposal and holds her to it. But he’s no dullard—he’s a wily government agent who needs the cover of a beautiful fiancé to pursue a deadly enemy. To resist his charms, Emily turns to the guide she disdains—and does exactly the opposite. Dress fashionably? She enshrouds herself in black crepe. Be demure? She steps into danger and faces down criminals alongside her “intended” . . . whose thrilling seduction may be anything but a charade.
 
Praise for Kate Moore’s previous novels
 
“Moore writes with a lyrical beauty that will leave no heart untouched.” —RT Book Reviews
 
“Fans will hope for more of Moore’s sinful delights to come.” —Library Journal (starred review)
 
“Moore skillfully whets readers’ appetites . . .” —Booklist

Release date: March 12, 2019

Publisher: Lyrical Press

Print pages: 304

Sample

Chapter One

Of all the gentlemen in London, the attractive rogue poses the greatest danger to the husband hunter’s happiness.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Lady Emily Radstock accepted a greeting from her sister’s butler, Gittings, and handed him her coat, gloves, and bonnet. She dispensed with Gittings’s attempt to precede her up the stairs to the drawing room. He mumbled something as she bounded past him with her package under her arm. She assured him she did not need to be announced. Gittings was sixty if he was a day, and Emily was in a hurry.

As she threw open the drawing room door, her younger sister Rosalind, sitting at her needlework, her stocking feet on a blue velvet ottoman, looked up with a start.

“Where is she?” Emily demanded. The door closed behind her.

“Hello, Em. Where is who?” Rosalind held up a delicate white gown no bigger than a tea towel.

“Mother,” said Emily. She strode across the room to stand before her sister, looking down. Rosalind, six years younger than Emily, and rosy and round with her first pregnancy, made a strikingly domestic appearance.

“Oh, Mother’s gone to Grandmama’s.”

Emily sank onto the sofa opposite her sister. “Of all the cowardly dodges. She knows she’s safe from me there.”

“What’s she done?” Rosalind asked, lowering the white garment to her lap.

“This!” said Emily, tossing the package she carried onto the small gateleg table next to Rosalind. The package made a satisfying slap against the polished wood.

Rosalind regarded it warily. “She’s offended you with a brown paper package tied up in string.”

“No. Yes. Come to think of it, I am offended by the brown paper and the string, her idea of being discreet before the servants.”

“Em, you must enlighten me. I’m growing more confused by the minute.”

“Sorry, Roz. Were you napping?” Emily realized that half the drapery over the tall windows had been drawn to shadow the far end of the room, where Rosalind had stationed the spectacular camel-backed sofa their mother had given her. Upholstered in a deep green and peony-patterned damask, the large sofa had been turned to face away from the delicate blues and golds of the room’s main seating arrangement.

“No, I drew the drapery because—”

“How are you?” Emily leaned forward, looking closely at her sister.

“Quite well really. A great many of the discomforts have passed, and the terrible fatigue. That’s why Mother thought she could go to Grandmama, who really does need her more than I do at the moment. And I have Philip,” she said brightly.

“Is Phil much help?” Emily asked. “I didn’t know husbands were.”

“He is.” Rosalind smiled in what Emily thought was a rather dreamy way for a married woman about to bear a child. “But you came to tell me what’s upset you.”

“Husbands. Or rather my lack of one and what mother chose to do about it. As if it were her problem. Open the package, Roz, you’ll see.”

“You know what’s inside, Em?”

“I do. Open it.”

Rosalind put aside her needlework and took up the little package, untying the string and pulling off the paper. She glanced at Emily and read the title on a small blue volume. “The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London?”

“You see,” said Emily, “wrapped up as if it were a gift and left for Alice to bring up with my chocolate this morning while Mama has gone off to avoid me.”

“It’s not a gift?” asked Rosalind, turning the pages of the little blue book, her gaze skimming over them.

“A gift?” Emily bounced a little on the sofa. “It’s a notice to vacate. It’s a shove out of the nest. It’s a lit fuse on a bomb.”

Rosalind looked up. “Surely, Mama means nothing of the kind.”

“Doesn’t she? It’s my birthday in three weeks. I’ll be twenty-nine. She considers me past hope, past praying for. Now she’s given me a book for a schoolroom chit.”

“Do you think so? You don’t really want to continue at home, do you? You want an establishment of your own.”

“Of course I do. But it won’t be my establishment, will it? It will belong to some man, and it will be my job to run it for him.”

Rosalind shook her head. “I don’t think marriage...should be seen in exactly that light.”

Emily stared at the rather magnificent painting of a chestnut stallion over the marble hearth. “You know, Roz, I should marry the first imbecile I meet, however brainless or idle he is.”

“Darling, I don’t think you should do anything so desperate.”

The door to the sitting room opened, and a young man of fair, ruddy good looks, entered and stopped with a furrowed brow when he spotted Emily. “Hello, Em,” he said. “I thought...” He looked around the room as if it were a puzzle to be solved.

“Phil, dear?” Rosalind gave him one of her dreamy smiles.

He crossed the room and gave his wife a quick kiss on the cheek. “Roz,” he said, “I’m looking for Lynley. I thought Gittings said he showed him up to you, but now I find Em instead.”

“Oh dear,” said Roz. “I forgot all about Lynley.”

“Where is he then?” Phil asked.

“Right here, old man.” A deep voice came from the shadows, and a tall, dark-haired giant with a lean face, elegantly dressed limbs, and an indolent manner, unfolded himself from behind the camelback sofa. He fixed his gaze on Emily.

“You should have made yourself known, sir.” Emily waited for her hair to catch on fire from the heat of the blush in her cheeks.

The giant moved her way with easy grace. “I think you’ve proposed to me,” he said. “And I accept.”

Emily had been trained all her life not to stare, but nothing could stop her from gaping up into the handsome, amused face staring down at her.

“Shall I put the announcement in the papers?” The giant took her hand in his large warm one, gave it a quick kiss, and turned to her brother-in-law. “At your service, Phil.”

With a bow and a look of supreme satisfaction, he took his leave.

* * * *

Outside the townhouse on George Street, the two men headed south. It was a breezy, end-of-March day that required a man to fix his hat squarely on his head and lean into the wind. They had passed the blustery expanse of Grosvenor Square before Philip Villiers, Lord Woodford, spoke.

“Lynley, you’re not serious about marrying my sister-in-law?”

“What makes you think I’m not serious?” Emily Radstock’s overheard outburst was just the stroke of inspiration Lynley needed. Now that he’d been recruited for the spy club, he had been looking for a way to return to society without actually being available to any of the likely candidates for his hand.

“She’s...on the shelf...been there for years. You have no pressing reason to marry. Have you?”

“Other than the usual reasons you mean—get an heir, have a ready source of carnal embrace, avoid burning in fiery damnation for all eternity?”

Phil halted abruptly at the corner of David and Grosvenor Streets, his face contracted in puzzlement. The chill wind eddied around them. “No, I was thinking of being in love, of finding another person necessary to your happiness.”

“Is that what you did, Phil?” Lynley doubted there was such a thing as one person being necessary to another person’s happiness. Happiness itself was perhaps overrated. Besides, what he needed, what he’d discussed only the previous evening with his new employer, Goldsworthy, the spymaster, was a strategy that enabled him to pass among London’s fashionable elite, looking for whoever was stealing documents from the Foreign Office and selling them to the Russians.

Phil decided to start walking again. “Couldn’t do without Roz.”

“And at the time you didn’t consider Emily, your sister-in-law? She must have been available.” And she was beautiful. Lynley had been gut-punched by her beauty when he’d stood up from behind that flowered monstrosity of a couch. She had nothing of her sister’s demure serenity. Her hazel eyes flashed under slashing dark brows, and it had required all his considerable practice in self-containment not to stare at that lush, generous mouth.

Phil shuddered. “Never. She’s well-looking, I’m sure, but there’s something...”

“Bold, energetic, outspoken about her? Something of a termagant?”

“Yes,” said Phil, plainly relieved of the obligation to be tactful about a difficult relation. “She writes letters to the Times,” he confided.

“Not demure and domestic?”

Phil shook his head. “Not at all.”

“That’s what I like. She’ll do.” In truth Lynley had planned to remain hidden and seek the girl out later in a more conventional way, but Phil’s entry into the room had forced his hand, and he was not a man to let an opportunity pass.

“Well, that’s all right then. I think her parents will be pleased. You’ll like the old man.”

“I’ll call on him today.” Lynley clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Shall we see about those horses you’re thinking of buying?”

* * * *

Emily clung to the fragile teacup Roz had shoved into her hands as soon as the gentlemen left. A fragrant, reassuring steam wafted up as she tried to think how she had let a man claim her hand when she had set out with only the firm intention of thwarting her mother’s management of her life. He could not be serious. He must be making a joke. She didn’t like the idea of being a joke. He had not struck her as deficient in understanding, so he must have realized that she didn’t really want to marry. “He won’t actually put an announcement in the paper.”

Roz made no reply.

“He wouldn’t dare,” Emily said.

Roz shook her head. “I think he’ll do just what he says he’ll do. He’s like that, Em.”

“Who is he exactly, and how does he come to be such a friend of Phil’s that he can fall asleep on that sofa and you forget he’s even there?” Emily stared at the offending sofa. It was another instance of their mother insisting on shaping her children’s lives according to her plans. Gentle Roz, now married into a prominent family, was to be a great hostess with a dramatic flair for entertaining. Of course, their mother had tried to take over the decorating of Roz’s new townhouse. Roz had simply thanked their mother and gone on with her own scheme of pale blue and gold decoration.

“He’s Sir Ajax Lynley. He’s a baronet.”

“A baronet, the lowest title in the peerage.” Emily straightened up. “Well then, whatever Mother thinks, Father will put an end to his pretensions to the hand of an earl’s daughter.”

“Do you think so?” Roz had taken up the little book and was turning the pages, stopping to let her eyes pass over a passage here and there.

“No, you’re right. They will wash their hands of me.”

“He is rich, I think.”

“Oh, then they really will wash their hands of me.” Emily’s shoulders slumped again.

“But Em, you said you would marry the first imbecile you met.” Roz put the book down and took up her tea.

“But I didn’t mean him! I didn’t know he was lurking in the shadows behind that wretched sofa, waiting to trap me into marriage.”

“He and Phil have been friends forever. Phil consults Lynley whenever he buys horses from a private party. That’s what they’re doing today, going to look at a pair of...breakdowns, Phil called them.”

Emily couldn’t hold that against Lynley. She had no objection to a man who knew and appreciated horses.

“Em, you should talk to Mother. Tell her you appreciate her...thoughtfulness in giving you the book, but that you’ll find a husband in your own way. I’m sure Lynley will understand if you wish to cry off.”

“Will he?”

“You hardly know each other. There’s been no courtship. If you make your true feelings known...”

“I’ll look like a jilt.”

“But you don’t care, not much anyway, about others’ opinions. You’ve always said that.”

And she wanted to believe it was true, that it didn’t matter one jot to her that people thought her a joke or a jilt. She picked up the little book that Roz had put down, and opened it to the preface. The author proposed to help ladies find lasting happiness in marriage through following her guidance. Emily had no objection to happiness, but what if she studied the advice in the little book and then did the opposite? Wouldn’t she then force her unexpected suitor to withdraw his suit? Isn’t that what Roz had done with their mother? She’d accepted the wretched sofa, and then gone about decorating in the opposite way.

“You know, Roz dear, I think you’re right. I should thank Mother and start reading. Who knows what I may discover from this little blue book?”

Chapter Two

The chief task of the husband hunter is one of discernment. Among the many gentlemen she meets, she seeks one who is suitable in heart and mind. As she begins her search, she may imagine that the only man who will suit her is one whose tastes and ideas exactly match her own, who shares equally in her likes and dislikes. Indeed, there is a pleasure in discovering shared tastes and preferences that may blind the husband hunter to the true nature of the suitability she seeks. A common taste for Italian opera and the poet Cowper is no basis for marriage compared with shared principles of integrity and kindness.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Lynley returned to the spy club by midafternoon. Under the scaffolding and flapping canvas of supposed renovations was the concealed entrance to a fine old building. He supposed that he’d passed the place often enough without giving it a second thought. And he had never guessed there was an entrance through a fashionable chemist’s shop around the corner.

Nate Wilde, the youth Lynley had abducted while playing highwayman—or rescued, really, from the traitor Radcliffe’s trigger-happy stagecoach guards—was there to greet him and take his hat and coat. Wilde still had his arm in a sling, but cheerfully managed his duties as the club’s major domo with assistance from the beautiful daughter of the spies’ tailor.

“Coffee, sir?”

Lynley nodded. He found the club to his liking. He could stroll into the quiet, well-appointed coffee room at any hour of the day or night and find a degree of comfort and privacy not readily available even in some of the finest houses. He liked the simplicity of the room with its velvet curtains and high white ceiling, and its substantial but plain mantel, nothing ornate, and no paintings of saints or martyrs. A man could think his own thoughts here without interference or rebuke. He sank down on one of the room’s long couches, shed his boots and settled himself, his feet toward the fire. He did his best thinking lying down, and he had some thinking to do about his strategy for approaching Lady Emily Radstock’s father, Lord Candover.

If Lynley had any complaint to make about the club, it was that as yet he had done no spying. But that would change tonight, if the afternoon’s interviews went successfully. His betrothal would provide the cover story his employer demanded.

According to the briefing he’d received from Goldsworthy, the club spymaster, a spy was loose in London society, who had in his or her possession, letters of the most sensitive nature between the Persian shah and his son and chief commander, at the very moment when a misstep in sensitive negotiations taking place in the East could plunge England into a war in defense of Persia.

Lynley was to be the newest weapon in the war the Foreign Office waged at home against those who would betray English secrets to Russian agents. Whoever had acquired the shah’s papers would be eager to get them into Russian hands for a profit, and the old way of doing so through Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe’s stagecoach line had now ended. So the man or woman with the papers must be desperate.

Lynley was impatient to begin the work. He had managed to extract some useful information about Emily Radstock’s family from Phil while they considered the merits of a pair of horses that Mudford wanted to sell. Like most men of fashion, Mudford bought his horses for their showy appearance, and then blamed them for equine vices more likely due to mishandling than to flaws in their temperament. In promoting Phil’s purchase, Lynley would be doing the horses a favor.

Wilde returned with the coffee and stirred the fire to crackling life. Lynley sat up and poured himself a generous cup. One thing Phil had mentioned stuck in his brain. Emily Radstock had written letters to the Times.

“Wilde, do you have any recent issues of the Times?”

“Of course, sir. Shall I collect them for you?”

When Lynley nodded, the youth disappeared to find the club’s copies of the Times, Lynley had no doubt. Lynley wanted to see one of those letters. Phil’s information did not quite explain how a beautiful young woman from a well-connected aristocratic family had reached the age of twenty-eight, almost -nine, without marrying, especially when there was nothing in Emily’s appearance or her father’s bank account to put off potential suitors. Lynley had gathered from the overheard conversation with her sister, that Emily was of an outspoken and independent nature, but he did not detect vanity or petulance, the usual defects of character to which a striking beauty might be prey.

Lynley thought he could persuade her father to agree to the match. Though his title was undistinguished, his fortune was large. His estate at Lyndale Abbey was a decent property. Furthermore, if he read the situation right, Lady Emily’s mother at least believed her daughter had diminished prospects for marriage at her age, and therefore a pair of shrewd parents might not question his sudden suit too closely.

Persuading Emily herself that their betrothal, however sudden and of whatever duration they chose to make it, was to her advantage—that was the challenge. He knew nothing of her experience. . .