Beauty and the Spy

by Julie Anne Long

Genres: Historical Romance; Regency Romance; Royalty Romance

Synopsis

When a sly London belle and His Majesty's best spy cross paths, sparks fly in this sensual Regency romance of espionage, scandal, and secrets. SHOCKING! London's belle of the ball, Susannah Makepeace, is the last person who should suddenly be stuck in the sleepy village of Barnstable. In town, she would never have seen a man swimming naked in a pond. And she certainly would have resisted the urge to draw every single bit of him in astonishing detail! SIZZLING! Very few people know that Viscount Kit Whitelaw is the best spy in His Majesty's secret service. But his high-flying life has finally banished him from London. Not to worry -- if Susannah's erotic sketches are any indication of her nature, she'll be a delicious stand-in for the thrill of espionage. SCANDALOUS! When odd accidents follow in Susannah's wake, Kit's spy senses start tingling. For what better mystery is there for England's greatest spy than the secrets of the delectable puzzle that is Susannah?

Release date: June 2, 2008

Publisher: Forever

Print pages: 401

Sample

Prologue

1803

Years later, Anna would remember how big the moon had been that night, swollen and slung low like a pregnant woman on the brink of birth. The hard white light of it penetrated the shutters in her bedroom and kept her tossing and turning, and there was too much room in the bed to thrash. For Richard had been to visit, and Richard had left, as he always did, and tonight the bed seemed emptier than ever for it.

She tried soothing herself with thoughts of mundane things: Susannah, just three years old, was getting the last of her teeth, and was fussy and feverish with it. I must tell Richard, Anna thought, so he could exclaim over it and make Susannah giggle, for she loved her papa. She was such a funny little thing, bubbling over with laughter so easily, already exhibiting a taste for luxuries. Yesterday she’d taken one bite from a cake and then handed it back to Anna. “It’s broken, Mama,” she’d said sadly, as though she couldn’t possibly eat something that wasn’t whole.

Then there was Sylvie, four years old now, who was proving to have her mother’s quick tongue and temper and her father’s intelligence. “I’d really rather not,” she’d loftily said to Anna just this morning, when she’d been told to pick up her toys. Anna smiled, remembering. Sylvie would be a . . . challenge. And Sabrina, who leafed through books intently and couldn’t keep her jam-sticky fingers away from the pianoforte; who always seemed to know when her mother was feeling sad, and brought her little offerings, flowers, and leaves. It unnerved Anna, how much Sabrina noticed. Her daughters were miracles, all beautiful, all made of the best of her and Richard. Her love for them frightened her with its exquisite, terrible totality. Like her love for Richard.

Ah, but thinking of Richard would not bring sleep; instead, her senses surged with a hunger that his absences kept honed. His light eyes with the lines raying from the corners, the way her body fit so perfectly against his—he still took her breath away. An arrangement born of economics and necessity—he’d needed a mistress, she’d needed money—had bloomed into a surprising, abiding love. Together they’d built a semblance of family life here in Gorringe, a town, legend had it, named by a duke who’d gone mad searching for a rhyme for “orange.” It appealed to Richard’s perhaps overly developed sense of the absurd and to Anna’s desire for a quiet country home, and it was a mere few hours’ coach ride from London where Richard, a much-beloved member of the House of Commons, spent most of his time.

There had never been talk of marriage; Anna had never expected it, or pressed him for it.

But lately she’d begun to suspect that Richard, having survived battlefields, had grown too accustomed to danger and was no longer capable of living without it. He’d told her over dinner once, while the girls slept, that he suspected one of the country’s most influential politicians, Thaddeus Morley, had amassed his fortune by selling information to the French. And Richard, a patriot to the bone, intended to set out to prove it.

Anna had seen Morley precisely twice, and she had been struck by his stillness and sheer presence—he held himself like a man carrying a grenade in his pocket. The populace thought highly of him; he had risen from humble origins to a position of prominence. Anna knew a little something about what it took to rise so high from humble beginnings. She suspected he was a very dangerous man.

“If anything ever happens to us, Anna . . .” Richard had murmured against her mouth the other night, as his fingers had worked busily at the laces on her dress.

“Hush. Nothing will happen to us, except perhaps some marvelous lovemaking tonight.”

He laughed a little, applied his lips to her neck. “If anything happens to us,” he insisted, “I want the girls to have the miniatures of you. Promise me.” He’d commissioned three exquisite miniatures of her, brought them with him during this all too short visit.

“Of me? Why not of their handsome father?”

“Of you, my love. Of their beautiful mother.” He’d had her stays undone by then, and then his hands had covered her breasts—

Bam, bam, bam.

Anna shot upright, her heart clogging her throat. Someone was throwing a fist against the door downstairs.

In one motion she swept from her bed and thrust her arms through the sleeves of her robe; her trembling hands tried once, twice, three times before she finally managed to touch a light to a candle. Cupping the tiny flame with her hand, she moved into the hall. Susannah was whimpering, startled awake; Anna heard the whimpers become choking sobs.

The maid, a girl with eyes and a mouth too sultry for her own good, stood at the top of the stairs, dark hair spilling like two shadows down the front of her, hands twisting anxiously in her nightdress. She’d come highly recommended from the agency, and yet she’d proved nearly as hapless as she was handsome.

“Please go see to Susannah.” Anna was amazed to hear her voice emerge so gently. The girl jerked as though shaken from a trance, then glided into the nursery. Anna heard murmuring, heard Susannah’s sobs taper off into hiccups.

Somehow Anna’s bare feet found each stair without stumbling, and then she was at the door. She threw the bolts and opened it.

A man stood heaving before her, hunched with exhaustion, breath bursting from him in harsh white puffs; a thick scarf coiled around his neck and a heavy overcoat protected him from the weather. Behind him Anna saw the dark outline of a coach against the star-spattered night; two spent horses bent their heads in their traces.

The man straightened: the white glare of the moon showed her the long nose, kind eyes, and small, ironic mouth of James Makepeace, Richard’s friend from London. The whole of his message was written on his features.

“It’s Richard.” She said it before he could, as if doing so would somehow protect her from the blow.

“I’m so sorry, Anna.” His voice was still a rasp, but it ached with truth.

Her chin went up. The deepest cuts, she knew, brought a blessed numbness before the agony set in. “How?”

“Murdered.” He spat the word out, like the foul thing it was. “And Anna . . .” He paused, preparing her, it seemed. “They’re coming to arrest you for it.”

The words sank through her skin, cold as death.

“But . . . that’s . . . madness.” Her own voice came faintly to her through a burgeoning fear.

“I know, Anna. I know.” Impatience and desperation rushed his words. “It’s impossible. But witnesses claim to have seen you arguing with him at his town house yesterday; others have sworn they saw you leaving it shortly before he was . . . found. You can be certain clues will be discovered that point to you, as well. If he’s gone this far, I’m sure he’ll be thorough.”

No word had ever sounded more bitterly ironic than that last one.

“Morley,” she breathed. “It was Morley.”

James’s silence confirmed this. Then he made a strange, wild little sound. Almost a laugh.

Anna jumped at the crunch of approaching hooves and wheels, and the flame of her candle leaped tall, nearly flickering out. In that instant, Anna saw silvery tracks shining below James Makepeace’s eyes.

His low, curt voice cut through her numbness. “The hackney you hear approaching is one I hired for you. Anna, please—you need to leave now. They know to look for you here. Take it anywhere but London—I’ve paid the driver well enough not to ask questions. But don’t tell him your name, for God’s sake.”

“How . . . how was he . . .” She stopped, shook her head; she didn’t want to know how Richard had been killed. She wanted to picture him in life, not death. “The girls—”

“I’ll take them. I’ll make sure they’re cared for until . . . until it’s safe for you to return, Anna. You’ve my vow.”

“But I can’t . . . they’re . . . they’re so small . . .” Such futile words, and not really what she meant to say. Richard is dead.

James Makepeace seized her cold, cold hand in his gloved fingers and squeezed it hard. She sensed that he wanted to shake her instead. “Anna . . . listen to me:a woman with three children . . . you’d be dangerously conspicuous. They’ll find you, and who knows then what will become of the girls? You’re a brilliant scapegoat; the public will tear you to pieces. I swear to you if there was some other way . . .” He threw a quick glance over his shoulder, turned back to her, and she could see him struggling for patience.

He’d risked his own life for her.

Would it be better to flee without her girls, if there was the slimmest chance to reunite with them later?

Or for her girls to grow up knowing their mother had hung for their father’s murder?

Anna made the only sort of decision one could make in the frantic dark: she gave a quick shallow nod, acquiescing.

James exhaled in relief. “Good. I swear to you, Anna, if I could hide all of you, I would. I just . . . there wasn’t time to make other plans.”

“You’ve risked so much for us already, James. I would never ask it of you. I cannot thank you enough.”

James ducked his head, acknowledging the gratitude he heard in her voice.

“How did you . . . how did you know this?”

He shook his head roughly. “It’s best I not tell you. And forgive me, Anna, but I must ask one more thing: Did Richard say anything, anything to you about where he kept some very important”—he chose his next word with care—“documents?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Richard said he’d found the perfect hiding place for them, a place no one would think to look, particularly Morley. He said it had something to do with ‘Christian virtues.’ Richard was amused by it, actually. Found it ironic.” James’s mouth actually twitched. A grim little attempt at a smile. “Richard was . . . Richard was clever.”

“Oh, yes. Richard was clever.” Anna felt a helpless, selfish rush of anger. When would love become more important to men than glory? How could one woman and three little girls ever compete with the glamour and excitement of capturing a political traitor? The thought itself was probably traitorous. “I’m sorry, he said nothing to me of it.”

They stood facing each other. Frozen on the brink of a life without Richard, and hating to move forward into it.

“I loved him, too, Anna,” James said hoarsely.

Loved. Past tense.

Anna stepped aside to allow him into the house. And then she became a whirlwind in the predawn darkness.

James Makepeace waited while Anna dressed herself in dark mourning, covered herself in a heavy cloak, twisted up her hair, and pulled a shawl around her head. She woke the girls, Susannah and Sylvie and Sabrina, kissed and held their little bodies to her, breathed in their hair, felt the silky skin of their cheeks, murmured quick desperate promises they couldn’t possibly understand. She bundled them with clothes and the miniatures.

Anna gazed down at those miniatures briefly and felt hot furious tears pushing at her eyes. Those miniatures meant he had known, damn him. He had known they were in danger. Had known that something might become of Anna, or of him.

She would love him for all time. She wondered if she would ever forgive him.

“For you,” she said to James, thrusting a simple but very fine diamond necklace into his hands. “It should help with . . . well, it should help the girls.”

James took it without question. Closed his fist over it, as though sealing a bargain.

“How will I . . .”

“Send a letter when you can, Anna, but wait a few months for the uproar to die. Leave the continent if you can; I doubt any place in England will be safe when word spreads. Godspeed.”

And then Anna looked one last time at the house that only hours earlier had been the source of her greatest happiness, her greatest love, her only love.

She prayed for her girls. For Richard. For justice.

James helped her into the hackney. The driver cracked the ribbons over the backs of the horses and the hackney jerked forward and took Anna Holt away.

Chapter One

May 1820

Susannah Makepeace had a new dress, and Douglas was being particularly charming, and together these two things comprised the whole of her happiness.

She sat with her best friends on a low hillside at her father’s country estate, the young ladies scattered like summer blooms over the grass, the young men sprawling as they plucked tiny daisies to make chains. The day was warm, but a frisky breeze snaked around them, lifting the ribbons of bonnets and fluttering the hems of dresses. Douglas cast a furtive eye toward Susannah’s ankles and she drew them quickly under her skirt with a teasing frown. He winked at her. In two weeks’ time, when he was her husband, Douglas would be privy to the sight of every inch of her. The thought made her heart jig a little.

Like the breeze, their conversation meandered: friends and balls and parties were touched on, laughed about, abandoned, taken up again. It was summer after all, or very nearly, and summer was about gaiety. And they were

between London balls. God forbid there should be a lull between entertainments.

“Did you notice how George Percy dances?” Douglas mused. “His arms hang as though they’re inserted on pins, and he rather . . . flails . . . like”—Douglas lurched to his feet—“like this.” He flopped about like a marionette, and everyone laughed.

Behind them, their chaperone Mrs. Dalton tsked in disapproval.

“Oh, come now, Mrs. Dalton, you must admit it’s a little funny,” Douglas cajoled, which earned him a hmmph and a reluctant, tight-lipped smile from the matron, who was the latest in a series of Susannah’s paid companions. She drove her needle back into her sampler, no doubt stitching something meant to be inspiring but that always sounded admonishing instead, such as THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH. Susannah often felt that Mrs. Dalton’s samplers were a silent attempt to rein her in. You’ll have to try harder than that, Mrs. Dalton, Susannah thought cheekily. Susannah Makepeace hadn’t become the belle of the season because she was meek. Nor, for that matter, was meekness the reason Douglas Caswell, heir to a marquis, had proposed to her.

Amelia Henfrey, Susannah’s best friend, clapped her hands together in sudden inspiration. “You’re so funny, Douglas! Now do Mr. Erskine!”

Susannah cast a sharp glance at Amelia, wondering if she was flirting. Amelia had a head full of golden curls and blue eyes very nearly the size of dinner plates, both of which had been the subject of any number of amateur odes this season. She did a surreptitious count of the flounces on Amelia’s dress, and was a little mollified to discover that it featured only one, while her own new dress boasted three.

As for her own eyes—to Susannah’s knowledge, no poems had been written about them. They were hazel, a kaleidoscope of greens and golds that, Douglas had once declared in an ardent moment, “fair dizzied” him. He claimed her eyes had mesmerized him into proposing, that she’d given him no choice in the matter, really. Douglas could be very clever that way, which was part of the reason she loved him.

Amelia, despite the golden curls and limpid eyes, wasn’t engaged to anyone at all. But as they were both heiresses, Susannah silently and magnanimously allowed that Amelia would likely make a match as spectacular as her own.

And besides, Amelia is good, Susannah conceded. She never said an unkind thing, she had a smile for everyone, she never misbehaved. While I am . . .

Not wicked, precisely, she confessed to herself. But not good, either. She charmed and sparkled and said witty things, but she knew very well she was being charming and sparkling and witty while she was doing it, which felt somehow wrong. She was often plagued with an indefinable restlessness, an ache really, that beautiful dresses and nonstop gaiety couldn’t fully assuage. And she frequently secretly suffered from envy and entertained observations that she dared share with no one, since she was certain they would do nothing to add to her popularity.

She had one of those thoughts now: Amelia is dull.

She batted it away. Amelia was her best friend, for heaven’s sake. Susannah reached for her sketchbook and began quickly charcoaling in the stand of trees at the edge of the park in an attempt to distract herself from any more heretical thoughts.

“Erskine?” Douglas was rubbing his chin in thought at Amelia’s suggestion. “The chap who laughs too loud at everything, bends double when he does it?”

“Remember how foxed he was at Pemberton’s ball?” Henry Clayson, one of the sprawling lads, contributed lazily.

“Pemberton’s ball? Was that where I wore my blue satin?” Amelia categorized all of the events in her life by what she wore during them.

“Yes,” Susannah confirmed, because, quite frankly, so did Susannah. “And where I wore the silk with the matching—”

“Tell me we aren’t now discussing ball gowns,” Henry Clayson groused.

Susannah playfully tossed a daisy at him. “Let’s discuss horses, then. Have you seen my new mare, Henry?”

Douglas sat down proprietarily next to her, a silent message to Henry Clayson: She might toss daisies at you, but she belongs to me. Susannah smiled to herself.

“Susannah’s father is forever buying her new everything,” Amelia said wistfully. “My father buys one new gown and tells me I’m in grave danger of being spoiled. And my mother never can persuade him to loosen the purse strings.”

And there it was, that unwelcome little tightening in Susannah’s chest: envy. It seemed extraordinary to envy the fact that Amelia’s father refused to buy her things. It was just that . . . well, Susannah’s mother had died so long ago and James Makepeace had left the rearing of his daughter in the hands of governesses and housekeepers and redoubtable matrons like Mrs. Dalton, who were charged with ensuring that Susannah acquired a full complement of ladylike accomplishments. Susannah could play the pianoforte and sing; she could draw and paint better than passably; she could certainly dance; she could sew. And miraculously, she’d escaped becoming too spoiled and willful, primarily because it had always seemed more effort than it was worth to seriously misbehave.

But that was the very root of her envy: though Susannah had grown up in a beautiful house surrounded by beautiful things, she would have traded most of it—well, perhaps not her new mare, but maybe the pianoforte and a few pelisses—if her father had seemed to care even a little about how much she spent on clothing. Or, frankly, about what she did at all. Oh, he’d been pleased enough about her engagement to Douglas, as any sane father would. But he was so seldom home—his antiquities-importing business often took him away—and she rather suspected her father considered her part of the furnishings. He . . . maintained her the way he did the big clock in the library or his best musket. He was as distant and impersonal—and as necessary to her well-being—as the sun.

And so whenever Amelia and Douglas and her other friends spoke of their parents, Susannah felt a tiny clutch of panic. This talk of parents was a language she could never hope to share with them.

All Susannah had of her mother was a fuzzy memory— of being awakened in the middle of the night amidst frantic whispers and movement, of a woman’s dark hair and dark eyes and soothing voice—and one tangible thing—a miniature portrait of a beautiful woman: curls, large pale eyes with a bit of a tilt to them, a soft, generous mouth, cheekbones delicately etched. Susannah’s own face. On the back, written in a neat, swift hand, were the words: FOR SUSANNAH FAITH, HER MOTHER ANNA. The miniature was the only image of her anywhere in the house.

When Susannah was small, she’d wanted to keep the miniature on her night table, but her father had gently asked that she keep it in a drawer, out of sight. Susannah had decided then that her mother’s death had shattered her father’s heart so completely that any reminder of her— including his daughter—pained him.

But just last week she’d found him in her bedroom, holding that miniature in his hand. Susannah’s breath had suspended; the hope had been piercing: perhaps they’d finally speak of her mother . . . perhaps, little by little, her father’s heart would thaw, and they would become close, and then he would complain about how much she spent on pelisses.

But then she noticed he was looking at the back of the miniature. And he’d murmured “Of course.” Not “Alas!” or “Oh, me!”, which would have seemed more appropriate for someone with an irreparably broken heart, but “Of course.” And those two low words had thrummed with a peculiar excitement. They had, in fact, sounded rather like “Eureka!”

James had looked up then, and Susannah watched a startling desolation skip across his features.

“I beg your pardon, my dear.” And with that, he’d drifted out of her room.

Douglas leaned over her now to reach for the sketch-book. The sun had turned the back of his neck golden, and Susannah was sorely tempted to run her finger along the crisply cut line of his dark hair. Soon I can touch every bit of him. She wondered what sort of message Mrs. Dalton would have stitched if she’d known that particular sentiment. But the thought made the tightness in Susannah’s chest ease; surely being the wife of a marquis-to-be would make envy and restlessness a thing of the past.

Douglas suddenly paused his sketchbook-leafing and frowned, shading his eyes with his head. “I say, Susannah, isn’t that your housekeeper coming this way? At rather a fast clip?”

Mrs. Brown, a large woman who typically moved as if every step required careful deliberation, was indeed taking the green so quickly she’d gripped her skirts to free her ankles.

Later Susannah would remember how, little by little, everyone went very still, transfixed, as though the housekeeper’s mission was apparent in her exposed ankles.

And as Mrs. Brown’s grim face came into view, Susannah slowly rose to her feet, her heart beating swiftly and unevenly.

She knew before Mrs. Brown spoke the words.

The earl’s pen continued to fly across the bottom of a sheet of foolscap when Kit appeared in his office doorway. “Good morning, Christopher.” His tone was abstracted. “Please sit down.”

If Kit hadn’t already known the summons from his father meant trouble, the “Christopher” would have confirmed it. He settled resignedly—and a little gingerly, since he’d been out very, very late the night before, and it was very, very early now—into the tall chair situated in front of . . . the prow of his father’s desk. The thought amused him. It was a bloody great ship of a desk, of oak so polished the earl could watch himself at his daily activities: Thinking profound thoughts. Affecting the course of history with signature.

Berating his son.

For the life of him, however, Kit could not come up with a reason for this particular summons.

“Good morning, sir.”

His father looked up then, eyebrows aloft at his son’s formal tone, and then he leaned back in his chair to study Kit, twirling his quill between two fingers. Outside his father’s great office window, London went about its business on foot and horseback, in barges and hack—business his father, who oversaw the budget for intelligence affairs and was often the last word on the assignments of His Majesty’s agents, so often indirectly, secretly influenced.

“Just because you think your superior officer is an idiot, Christopher,” the earl began wearily, “doesn’t mean you should call him one.”

Ah, now he remembered.

“But Father, that idi—”

The earl moved his head in the slightest of shakes, and Kit stopped. Truthfully, though he’d thought “Chisholm is an idiot” any number of times, he’d never said the words aloud . . . until last night, apparently. Which was a bloody miracle, really, since Kit had an innate tendency to frankness that only years of militarily honed discipline had managed to keep in check. And frankly, Chisholm was an idiot.

But he was just as appalled as his father that he’d said the word. It must have been all that ale. Well, that, and the brandy. And . . . hadn’t there been whiskey, too? Fragments of last night were returning to him now, out of sequence, but unfortunately all too clear. He recalled that the evening had begun at White’s with a few fellow agents, his best friend John Carr among them. Naturally they had begun drinking, which they seemed to be doing more and more in the five years since the war had ended. It was boredom, he supposed; Kit had become accustomed to living his life at the fine edge of danger, to subtlety and strategy and purpose; life in the wake of war lacked a certain . . . piquancy.

At some point in the evening, his superior officer Chisholm had appeared at White’s, and then . . .

His father idly tapped his quill against the blotter. Tap, tap, tap. The sound echoed in his head like cannonfire. Kit was tempted to lean over and seize the bloody instrument of torture out of his father’s hand and snap it in two.

“Chisholm is not an idiot, Christopher.”

“Of course not, sir,” Kit agreed.

Mercifully, the tapping stopped. A silence.

“He is an ass,” the earl clarified, finally.

“I stand corrected, sir. I should have cleared the word with you first.”

And now his father was struggling not to smile. He sobered again quickly, however, and resumed studying Kit in a way that made him a little apprehensive. And after ten years in service to his country, after dozens of narrow escapes and heroic successes and employing his astonishing aim more times than he preferred to count, very few people could make Kit Whitelaw, Viscount Grantham and heir to the Earl of Westphall, apprehensive. He thought he’d better speak.

“Sir, I know what I said was inexcusable, and I hope you realize it was uncharacteristic—”

The earl snorted. “‘Uncharacteristic?’ Like the incident with Millview?”

Kit paused. There had been an incident with Millview, hadn’t there? Lord Millview. An incident so . . . objectionable . . . the earl had in fact threatened to reassign Kit to a government post in Egypt as a result of it, a potent threat indeed, given Kit’s passion for London. Kit had questioned Millview’s, er . . . parentage.

“I apologized for that,” Kit said stiffly. “We’d all been drinking, you see, and . . . Well, I apologized for that. And I intend to apologize to Chisholm, too.”

“Don’t you think you’ve been doing rather a lot of apologizing lately, Christopher?”

Kit knew better than to attempt to answer a rhetorical question. His father was about to answer it for him, anyway.

“I do,” the earl said. “And you’ve acquired quite a reputation for womanizing, too.”

Have I, really? Part of Kit was impressed. The other part was appalled that he actually had a “reputation,” let alone one with a name.

“Notice, at least, it’s womanizing, sir,” he attempted feebly. “Not womenizing. Just one woman.”

“One woman at a time. And the latest is married.”

“She isn’t!” Kit feigned shock. Though he’d awakened in time for this meeting only because said married countess had been hissing at him to get dressed and leave now, before her husband came home from the bed of his mistress. The countess wasn’t terribly interesting, but she was beautiful, spoiled and difficult, which had made the pursuit, at least, interesting.

The earl ignored this; for some reason, he began marking off a list of sorts with that deuced quill. “You’ve distinguished yourself in battle, Kit. Tap. You saved the life of your commanding officer while you were wounded. Tap. Served bravely and well by all accounts.” Tap.

Kit listened, puzzled. He’d merely been himself on the battlefield and in assignments beyond; none of those t. . .