Irresistible Read Free Page B

able to ascertain just what form those atrocities were to take, although he did not doubt that he soon would.
    It was his job, after all, and he was good at it.
    Then an urgent message had arrived via the usual channels: Through a disastrous breach in security at the War Office, his identity, along with the identities of several other British operatives working clandestinely in France, had been uncovered. The acquisition of such information would be a major coup for the beleaguered French and a disaster of equal proportion for the British. According to Hugh's source, the possessor of that information had not yet had a chance to reveal any details to the enemy other than the fact that he possessed it. The would-be informant was now in hiding in England, waiting to be plucked under cover of darkness from a certain Sussex beach and conveyed to France, where he would turn over the information to the interested parties for a fat fee. If the informant was not silenced in time, Hugh's usefulness as a British spy would be over; his life would be over too, should the French catch him before he could get out of their country. There were roughly a dozen like himself whose lives and jobs were imperiled by the leak.
    His mission: to intercept the traitor at the point of rendezvous, recover the information, then interrogate and subsequently rid the world of his prisoner.
    In the forty-eight hours since the matter had been laid before him, he had ridden ventre à terre from Paris to Dieppe, boarded a leaky three-masted schooner under the command of a loyal privateer, crossed the storm-tossed English Channel, and gotten to the rendezvous point in time.
    Only to find himself in the heroic position of abetting in the brutal bludgeoning of a woman.
    He should have turned down the job. The tumble from his horse should have warned him. Indeed, it had, but he had thick-headedly refused to heed that warning. He could blame no one but himself, then, for subsequent events. From the outset, one thing after another had gone wrong. First, of course, there were his damned ribs. They ached like a sore tooth when they weren't outright stabbing him, rendering him as ill tempered as Prinny when his corset pinched or, as a nice alternative when he rebelled against their rule, doubling him over with pain. Then there was the fact that it had rained from the moment he had left Paris. A cold, pouring rain, driven by high winds, that had turned the roads to quagmires and the fields to impassable swamps. On horseback as he'd been, there had been no respite from it. Raindrops had found their way beneath the turned-up collar of his greatcoat in a steady stream and wilted the once-curly brim of his beaver until it drooped soddenly around his ears. His disapproving companion, plain James Harris before they had gone to France and now (because of an excruciating French accent) known to all and sundry as his mute manservant Etienne, was another source of annoyance, and one moreover whose presence was almost as unwelcome as the rain. But, as James had opened the door to the bearer of the ill tidings and, by dint of sly listening at a closed portal, been privy to the lot, there had been no dissuading him from coming, short of murder, which Hugh, sneakily fond of the annoying fellow as he was, was loath to do. Finally, the privateer's crew had been alarmingly undisciplined, the sea had been rough, and— the coup de grâce— a message had been waiting for him on board identifying the traitor as a woman. To whit, one Sophy Towbridge, a London high-flyer who had apparently purloined a packet of letters containing the information, which she hoped to sell, from her benefactor, Lord Archer, an elderly peer who still tottered around the War Office.
    The revelation of his quarry's gender had knocked Hugh back on his heels. He was supposed to interrogate and kill a woman ? Hildebrand hadn't told him that. But then, Hildebrand was a master at keeping certain select facts to himself