The Lure of the Moonflower Read Online Free PDF Page A

though she were giving directions to her coachman. And then she began whacking him on the back with her parasol, screaming for help.
    “Right,” Jack said under his breath, and took off. Bloody hell, did she need to hit so hard? “You might be a little less convincing,” he muttered.
    “And ruin the deception?” Amused. The woman sounded amused.
    They were past the mob now, out of the way of the men who had witnessed their little scene. Jack set her down with a thunk, right in a patch of something unmentionable. It did not do wonders for the lilac satin on her slippers.
    “Sorry, princess. I’m not your sedan chair. You can walk the rest of the way.”
    He half expected her to argue, but she cast a look up and down the street and nodded. “Follow me.”
    She knew how to stay in character; Jack had to give her that. She minced along, constantly readjusting her bonnet, fidgeting with the buttons of her pelisse. Jack followed, in the slouch he’d developed in his role as Alarico the drunk, keeping an eye out for pursuers, and trying to figure out what to make of the woman trip-trapping ahead of him, making moues of distaste as she picked her way through the sodden street, her flashing rings practically an invitation to a knife at her throat.
    But there was an alertness to her that suggested her attacker wouldn’t fare well.
    Jack remembered the hard feel of the pistol beneath her stays. That, he realized, explained the fiddling with buttons. And the hat? Jack regarded the woman in front of him with new interest. He’d be willing to wager that there was a stiletto attached to that bunch of feathers on her hat.
    As for those rings, those foolish flashing rings . . . Most would-be assailants would be so dazzled by the gleam of gems on her hands that they wouldn’t notice that those hands were holding a knife until it was too late.
    Grudgingly, Jack had to admit that whoever the woman was, she knew what she was doing.
    Which made her both very intriguing and very, very dangerous.
    The house to which she led him was a private residence. Jack followed her through a gate, across a courtyard, and up a flight of stairs to a narrow iron door. His fingers briefly touched the point of the knife he kept in a sheath at his wrist. The woman might have known the code phrase, but that didn’t mean this wasn’t an ambush. No secret organization was inviolable, no code unbreakable. The woman’s French was impeccable, her clothes Paris-made.
    Which could mean anything or nothing.
    How far did her masquerade go? Jack wondered. Was there a colonel who had her in keeping? It had been done before. Sleeping with the enemy was the surest way of securing information. A man might share with a mistress what he wouldn’t with a friend.
    Jack’s imagination painted a picture of the rooms they were about to enter: lush carpets on the floor, a gilded mirror above a dressing table laden with mysterious creams and powders, a hip bath in one corner, silk draperies falling around a wide bed. The perfect nest for a French colonel’s woman.
    Jack didn’t consider himself prudish or squeamish; a job was a job, and they all got it done as best they could. So why the instinctive feeling of distaste that this woman, this particular woman, might sell her body for information?
    From a reticule that looked too small to contain anything of use, the woman took a heavy key and fitted it into the door.
    It opened onto a spartan room, the walls whitewashed, the only furniture a table, a chair, and a divan that looked as though it doubled as a bed. There was no dressing table, no gilded mirror, no bed draped with curtains.
    “Surely,” said Jack mockingly, “the colonel could afford better.”
    The woman closed the door behind them with a snap. “There is no colonel.”
    Now that they were inside, her movements were brisk and businesslike, with no hint of coquetry. She tossed the key on the table and crossed the room, testing the shutters on the