Desired Read Free

of the person he was hunting.
    He was still holding her reticule. Behind him, Tess could see a posse of dragoons rounding up a few ragged protesters. There had been a riot that night and the street was littered with rubble and broken spars of wood. The gas lamps were smashed and someone had overturned a carriage. One of the shutters on the Temple of Venus hung off its hinge. Torn newspapers flapped in the wind. It was quiet now. Once the soldiers arrived the mob had faded away as quickly as they had come, and only the faint smell of burning hung on the cold tide of London air.
    Tess shrugged, bringing her gaze back to Rothbury’s impassive face.
    “Why does anyone visit a brothel, Lord Rothbury?” she said lightly. “If you have an imagination, now would be the time to use it.” She arched an ironic brow. “I assume you are questioning me on some authority and not simply because you are impertinently curious about my sex life?”
    Rothbury shifted. “I am here on the authority of the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth,” he said. “There was an illegal political meeting at The Feathers Inn tonight. Do you know anything about it?”
    Tess’s heart bumped erratically. “Do I look like the sort of woman who would know anything about politics, Lord Rothbury?” she said. “I have absolutely no interest in it at all.”
    She saw Rothbury’s teeth gleam as he smiled. “Indeed,” he said. “Then you will have equally little interest in the fact that I am hunting for a number of dangerous criminals including the radical caricaturist known as Jupiter.”
    Fear breathed gooseflesh along Tess’s skin. She was no dangerous criminal. She was a philanthropist and all she wanted was reform. All she had ever worked for was to alleviate the appalling poverty and misery of the poor. But the Home Secretary did not see it that way. He saw the reformers as a threat to public order and a danger that he was set on obliterating forever.
    She swallowed the sawdust in her throat. Not by aflicker of an eyelash could she betray any knowledge of the reformers’ cause, still less that she was intimately involved with it. But under the perceptive gaze of this man she felt her defences stripped naked.
    Pretend. Playact. You have done it before….
    “You are hunting criminals in a brothel?” she said, affecting boredom. “What a singular way to combine business with pleasure, my lord. Have you found any?”
    “Not yet,” Rothbury said. The tone of his voice sent another warning shiver down her spine. She looked at the reticule with its incriminating papers still sitting snugly in the palm of his hand. If he opened that and saw the cartoons…
    “You mentioned Lord Sidmouth,” she said. “I do not recall him. Would I have met him at a ball or a party, perhaps?”
    “I doubt it,” Rothbury said. “Lord Sidmouth is not a man much given to parties.”
    Tess shrugged, as though the conversation was now thoroughly boring her. She glanced towards the door of the brothel, standing open now with light shimmering across the cobbles of Covent Garden Square. “Well, Lord Rothbury,” she said. “Delightful as it is to stand out here in the cold chatting to you, I really am quite exhausted. Worn out, in fact, by my excesses tonight. And I am sure that you have work to do.” She smothered a delicate little yawn, improving on the point. “So if you will hand my reticule over and excuse me, I shall take a carriage home.”
    Rothbury weighed the little bag in one palm and Tess’s breath caught in her throat. She knew that at all costs she had to keep her expression blank. If she grabbed the reticule off him or made it clear in any way that she was protective of the contents, Rothbury would look inside and she would be clapped up in the Tower of London as a political prisoner faster than one could say seditious cartoon.
    “What do you have in here?” Rothbury said.
    “The contents of a lady’s reticule are private only to her,” Tess said.