Lord Langley Is Back in Town Read Online Free PDF Page A

learned why.
    “You’ve been discovered.” From the shadows, Thomas-William stepped forward, his French accented words a leftover from his childhood spent in the service of a chevalier. That was before George Ellyson, Thomas-William’s former employer and the spymaster who had taught Langley everything he knew about the business, had bought the man off a Paris auction block.
    “Discovered? By whom?” Langley asked, glancing instinctively over his shoulder, even though he knew no one was there.
    Thomas-William was not the most loquacious of fellows, and he answered with the same concise turn of phrase that Ellyson had always favored. “Your paramours.”
    “My what?” Langley asked, slightly confused and stealing a glance at the house. He hadn’t been with a woman in ages, and his infamous conquests—the ones that had given the ton and the European courts enough fodder to keep the gossips happily chattering for years on end—had all taken place on the Continent—not here in London.
    Why, all his former mistresses were happily closeted away, from the turreted courts of St. Petersburg to the minarets of Constantinople, and in a good portion of the capitals in between.
    Then he stole a glance at the house, which was uncharacteristically lit from the ground floor to the attics, as if it were filled with . . .
    “Oh, good God, no!” he groaned. Lord Langley, who’d managed to defy death on enough occasions to frustrate even the devil, wavered with a fear that no man likes to consider. “They” implied more than one. As in several. And all under one roof.
    It was a rake’s worst nightmare.
    “What the hell am I going to do now?” he muttered, plucking off his hat and raking his hand through his hair. “I’ve no place left to go.”
    Thomas-William glanced over his shoulder at the house and shuddered. “I agreed to stay here for Miss Lucy, but no more. Not with that lot.”
    It was then that Langley noticed the battered valise at the man’s feet. “As bad as all that.”
    The fellow nodded. “Best you join me at Clifton’s house in the country. I can hide you there.”
    “No,” Langley said, shaking his head. This was getting to be an old argument between them. Thomas-William thought it best for the baron to stay hidden, out of sight as they worked through who might be to blame for his fall from grace. “I’m done with hiding.”
    “If you go out in the open, you’ll only get yourself killed,” Thomas-William said. More like repeated. “As long as no one truly knows you are here in London—”
    “Well, I think it is rather too late now,” Langley admitted.
    “What did you do?”
    “Went and saw an old friend tonight.”
    Thomas-William groaned. “Who?”
    “Brownie.”
    The older man looked askance. “You did what?”
    “Now before you start lamenting the moment you ever laid eyes on me, I think he knows more than he is letting on,” Langley rushed to say. “He went rather pale when he realized I wasn’t dead. Well, that and I shoved a pistol between his eyes.”
    “I think you will find that a common response,” the man muttered.
    “No, no, not like that. I think he was scared because he knows why I was betrayed.”
    Thomas-William studied him, then shook his head. “Too bad you don’t, my lord. It would be better than baiting the lion in his own den.”
    This is exactly what George Ellyson would have said. For George had always gone on and on about not plunging into a situation without having a plan. Without knowing what you were after.
    But it was rather hard to do that when you didn’t remember anything. And that was the rub. When Langley had been struck in the head that fateful night in Paris, the injury had struck at his memory as well.
    Why he’d been betrayed, who betrayed him, and what he’d been doing in Paris to begin with were all lost. Just fragments and scattered bits in his thoughts, flashes of images, none of which made sense.
    “Have you considered that you