A Wicked Lord at the Wedding Read Online Free PDF Page B

served in some covert intelligence capacity.
    He’d chosen not to elaborate on this flattering misperception.
    In darker reality, after Sebastien had been wounded in Spain, incapacitated in spirit longer than body, he’d been handed the ignominious honor of hatching insurgent plots at strategic French ports. While the soldiers in his regiment had gone on to glory at Waterloo, Sebastien had been relegated to the taverns of Le Havre or Honfleur, intercepting messages between barmaids and lusty patrons that only occasionally bore significance.
    His superiors thought they’d enacted a kind deception. He was no longer fit for the battlefield. Hemight easily hold a rifle and shoot it. He just hadn’t recovered enough to reliably make out who he was firing at, a considerable liability for a frontline infantry officer. He could, however, commit necessary evils and leave no trace.
    He delivered payments and caught war criminals. He offered bribes.
    Sometimes he started riots. He discovered he still harbored the Boscastle talent for hell-raising. Every so often he would make a double agent permanently disappear, and not always in a pleasant manner.
    The price he’d paid to regain his pride was not anything he intended to reveal to Eleanor.
    She was disillusioned enough by the way he’d treated her without giving her more reason to mistrust him.
    Still, who would have guessed that his neglected wife would have sought a secret life of her own? That he would return, not to the light-hearted English girl who had whispered on her wedding day that she couldn’t survive without him, but to an adventuress who had not only survived in his absence but who had thrived?
    A wife who had become a private agent in subterfuge to the Duchess of Wellington?
    He had come back with every intention of becoming the husband Eleanor thought she had married. But clearly his beloved had filled the void he had left with mischief of her own.
    What a crafty revenge.
    He’d wanted her to miss him. To forgive andbecome his wife again. Instead, they had become competitors.
    He stood on the steps until the ducal carriage swept her from his view. How the deuce could he impress her now? Should he run after her like a besotted fool and demand she return?
    He glanced around. An assembly of street vendors stood on the corner gawking at him.
    “Go away,” he said grumpily, turning to the house.
    His courtship of Eleanor had been take-no-prisoners passionate, an officer who had fallen in love with a surgeon’s daughter in Spain and chased her between battles with merciless determination.
    But he’d been a nitwit to assume that having won her once, she would belong to him forever.
    He had expected he would have to start all over again. To prove he would not disappear from her life this time.
    He had been looking forward to wooing his own wife.
    But what he had not anticipated, and what became startlingly evident in the following three months, was that he not only had to prove himself a better husband, he also had to prove to Eleanor which of them was the better man.

Chapter Four
L ONDON
O CTOBER 1816
    Eleanor’s voice, playfully scolding, brought him back to his present dilemma, the masquerade.
    “You
aren’t
paying attention,” she whispered, pursing her lips. “You haven’t heard anything I’ve been saying.”
    “Of course I have,” he lied.
    He stared at her mouth. He wasn’t really listening to her now. He had as much desire to chat as he did to dance.
    His senses, too long deprived, begged for relief. He had barely touched her since his return, and he was as primed as a pair of dueling pistols. He’d waited for any encouragement to bed his beautiful wife.
    He pretended to appear attentive. He even inclined his head to act as if his life depended on her next words. For a final taunting interval the dance brought her against him. He had missed the sensual fragrance of her skin, the warm pleasures it invited. No matter how grim his assignments had