A Spy's Guide to Seduction Read online

  A Spy’s Guide to Seduction

  Books by Kate Moore

  The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

  A Lady’s Guide to Passion and Property

  A Spy’s Guide to Seduction

  Table of Contents

  Books by Kate Moore

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  Teaser Chapter

  About the Author

  A Spy’s Guide to Seduction

  Kate Moore

  LYRICAL PRESS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  LYRICAL PRESS BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2019 by Kate Moore

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  All Kensington titles, imprints, and distributed lines are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotion, premiums, fund-raising, educational, or institutional use.

  Special book excerpts or customized printings can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write or phone the office of the Kensington Sales Manager: Kensington Publishing Corp., 119 West 40th Street, New York, NY 10018. Attn. Sales Department. Phone: 1-800-221-2647.

  Lyrical Press and Lyrical Press logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  First Electronic Edition: March 2019

  ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0178-8 (ebook)

  ISBN-10: 1-5161-0178-2 (ebook)

  First Print Edition: March 2019

  ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0179-5

  ISBN-10: 1-5161-0179-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  To all the Violas and Rosalinds in their doublets and hose

  who ever wanted to strap on a sword, take on the villain,

  solve the mystery, and rescue the hero—

  This one’s for you.

  Acknowledgments

  I acknowledge my debt to Jane Austen without whom I would not have written any of the novels I have so far penned. It has been my aim from the beginning to hold myself to her high standards, though with zero claim to any of her genius. Among those standards was her ideal that her heroines should do only “the most natural, possible, everyday things” as they fall in love. They should call on their neighbors, dine with their families, and care for the people around them. They should be flawed and need to reflect in some mortification on their errors of judgment and resolve to do better. They should fall in love in the midst of imperfect families.

  Nevertheless spies and villains will intrude in my stories in the wake of young men active in the world of the Napoleonic wars and their aftermath. So I hope that should I meet Ms. Austen at some gathering of writers in the hereafter, she will not entirely condemn my imperfect efforts but regard them as she did the work of her nieces Fanny and Anna.

  I owe a further debt to writers like Amor Towles and Dickens, who insist that weather is always part of the story. For the weather in A Spy’s Guide to Seduction, I used diaries and other accounts of actual English weather for the weeks in which the story occurs. By chance it turns out that as I was writing of thunder and lightning in 1826, London in 2018 experienced an extraordinary lightning storm.

  Every detail of the story, including the missing papers, letters between the Persian ruler and his son, depends on research, and where research fails, I turned to friends like writer and horsewoman Laura Moore, and labor and delivery coach, doula Kara Humphreys, both of whom have saved me from error.

  As always everything depends on my husband and children, my patient editor and savvy agent. Thanks to all.

  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 daugh
ter.”

  “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?”