Chapter 9

Chapter Nine

He’s your best agent. And, regrettably, your most reckless. His past has left him without care.

~Internal communication to Chief Intelligence Officer Browning

H e was nervous. Pacing the room like an expectant father nervous.

“Buck up, mate,” Jasper whispered and knocked aside the curtain, peering into the inky blackness without a true sense of what he was searching for in the night or the woman. With a curse, he stalked to his desk to check his timepiece. The best watch in England, his Bainbridge stated exactly ten minutes had passed since his last review. He’d finally removed it from his pocket after the silver case had grown warm from repeated handling.

Circling the room, he noted the changes to his bedchamber. Fresh flowers—violets, hyacinth, and a slightly wilted bunch he believed were carnations—adorned a once dusty vanity. The scent of linseed oil and lemon rode the air, very faint but very noticeable. An antiquity or two sat on shelves that had been vacant. One vase in particular he rather liked, although he’d no clue where it had come from. He imagined his mattress felt lighter and his sheets crisper, both redolent of a teasing scent as well.

For a retired operative, this was comfort in the extreme.

When he’d been able to bed down on jagged cobbles, a lumpy carriage seat, an uneven floor. An hour of slumber sufficient if that’s what the assignment allowed. He’d waited in a grimy alley outside a public house for two days, maybe three, on the Dublin case without a lick of sleep. And gotten those papers without one drop of blood—many thanks, his own—being spilled.

Jasper sighed and gave his spectacles a nudge, his watch a look. Three minutes.

Striding across the room, he picked up the pretty vase and rolled it between his hands. Halting, he tipped it into the sconce’s light. Coalport was stamped in black letters on the base. Damn , he thought, those are rare pieces. He and Xander Macauley had imported a set just last year and were actively seeking more. A marquess in Mayfair had a fine passion for them.

He’d clearly lost his touch if he didn’t recognize he had a veritable treasure trove of valuables in his home. Spying wasn’t far from thieving, now, was it? Also, he’d gotten soft if he couldn’t wait more than a few hours for a tup. Wasn’t the game of cat and mouse supposed to make the end result better? It always had before because that had been the entirety of it.

But with her, of course, the game wasn’t the game .

Bloody hell, he wanted Cece now .

He didn’t wish to wait. He didn’t need diversions to improve the outcome. Heightened anticipation was inherent. With the others, he’d required a bit of added enticement, a nudge to push him over the cliff. With his youthful fascination, his first love, he’d not required a damned thing. The want for Constance Willoughby—mind, body, soul—was a pulse, a connection running through his veins. A part of him, a feeling and a life force .

Sex was an infinitesimal factor, actually. Not close to the whole bit.

Which was the scariest statement a man could think.

Cross with himself, Jasper shoved the vase on the shelf. He’d sunk so low. He was no longer the kind of man the Crown would demand for challenging projects. They’d use him as a high-styled runner. Put him behind a desk. Confiscate his blade, his pistol, and shove a batch of correspondence in his hand. Like Allen, that waste of an agent who’d been assigned the missing feline cases.

Though he didn’t need a blade or a pistol. There were a hundred ways you could render a person senseless with a cravat. A pair of stockings if nothing else was available. He laughed into his fist. Christ, with his years of training, he didn’t need a weapon .

Frankly, there were many things a man could do with a cravat.

With a jolt of hunger, his gaze sliced to the door, left open a smidge to encourage visitors. Cece was late, possibly not coming. A sensible choice on her part. Completely understandable. Jasper needed to be objective about this mission, a skill never failing him before. He was no prize. Crispin Sinclair, maybe that bloke had a chance with a countess—but Jasper Noble was a wretched bet. He had a well-deserved reputation and had promised the lady nothing but a night or two of passion.

He would leave her without looking back—and she knew it.

Why would she say yes?

Additionally, troubling but true, he carried the desperate sort of manner that comes with a man who’s done things. Vile, regrettable things. It was why he avoided mirrors and freakishly clean shop windows. Others might not know what they were seeing, but he did. When he left Northumberland, he said goodbye to everything, and now here he was, trying to reconnect an amputated limb to a quivering baron’s body.

Which made significant questions zing through his mind.

If the surgery was successful, could he really let her go in five days? Was that rubbish truly his plan after all this? Yearn for the woman for nigh on twenty years only to let her go once he got her back?

Jasper forced his hand between his ribs to contain the tickle in his chest. He hadn’t had a coughing attack necessitating medication in years, nor had he stumbled over his speech in any way that was noticeable, even with a blade pressed to his jugular.

Cece would not reduce him to a trembling boy, by God.

That’s when he heard it. The gentle whisper of a footstep. The creak of aged planks running beneath the corridor’s equally aged carpets. Jasper burst into motion, his boots striking the floor as he swung the door wide.

Only to find a boy of the trembling variety he wished to avoid standing on the threshold.

“Sir,” Josiah whispered and gave his nose a good scrubbing with his fist.

Jasper took one look at the lad’s beaten pose, his bare toes curling in on themselves—not to mention the sniffles arriving every other second—to understand this was a post-nightmare stopover.

It was not the visit he’d been hoping for.

Nonetheless, he wasn’t about to send the lad away like his father had when he’d shown up at his door. Going to his knee so they were eye to eye, he tipped Josiah’s chin until his watery brown gaze flowed into view. “Let me guess. You’re looking for a bite to eat, and you can’t remember the way to the kitchen.”

Josiah paused mid sniffle, his lips parting, the nightmare temporarily forgotten. “A wee nibble might be nice.”

“I think I can help.” Jasper beckoned him into the chamber.

“But,” Josiah said, glancing over his shoulder, “the kitchen is that way.”

Jasper crossed to the sideboard and proceeded to fill a small plate with wee nibbles and a tumbler with a wee dram. “Indeed, it is, laddie, but I keep a modest supply of food here. Bread and cheese, some crackers. An apple or orange when I can get decent ones from the market or one of my shipping partners.”

Josiah followed him to the sideboard and popped up on his toes, glancing with interest at the food being assembled on the plate. “Ain’t you—” He halted as if he’d uttered a foul word . “Aren’t you afraid of vermin getting at it?”

“You sprinkle a spot of vinegar around and no vermin.”

Josiah’s eyes widened. “Truly? ”

“An old rookery trick. I swear it works. In the event you’re ever concealing sweets in your bedchamber, which I am not saying you should.”

Josiah sneaked a cracker off the plate and bit into it. “Larks.”

Jasper collected information as rapidly as he would have as an emissary. The boy had been raised in a rough environment. His bearing spoke of self-protection, his accent of the stews. It was a wonder Cece had taken him in when he’d shown up on her doorstep. Society wasn’t welcoming to the poor and vanquished—and countesses weren’t known for being kind to bastard ragamuffins of their late husbands. Only his countess, it seemed.

Jasper wished this illuminating fact didn’t make him fall a little in love with her.

He really did.

Starting to hand over the laden plate, he changed his mind after seeing how small the boy’s hands were. He couldn’t have been more than five or six at most. “Here, before the fire, Jos. You have your nibble, I’ll have my drink, then we’ll go to sleep with full bellies and serene minds. I say that’s as good a plan as any.”

They settled before the hearth, the dance of a blaze Jasper had made sure was built to last for hours sending amber light across them. Sadly, this wasn’t the romantic setting he’d been hoping for. But it was calming, nonetheless.

Jasper leaned against a chaise, stretching his legs out before him. He hid a smile behind his glass when Josiah mirrored his pose, tucking his scrawny shoulder against him. Children scared him in an elemental way, being the brutally candid beings they were, but he respected them for it. “I keep food stuff in my bedchamber because I often have trouble sleeping and…”

Hearing the truth glide from his lips, Jasper frowned and tossed back a slug of remarkably excellent whisky. He should know because it was his. And Tobias Streeter’s and Xander Macauley’s. Stunned, he stared into the glass, wondering why he’d slipped into honest territory.

“Night terrors,” Josiah whispered around the crackers he’d shoved in his mouth. “I get ‘em, too.”

“Night terrors,” Jasper repeated, never having heard the expression. One that was quite accurate for his state when he woke after dreams of the past.

“Me mum called ‘em that.” He pushed a piece of Cheshire cheese in his mouth and chewed as if it was his last morsel. “My first mum, that is. I’d wake with them something awful or so she told me. I don’t much remember. About her or the visions.”

“I had them when I was a boy, too. At least I think I did.” In his childhood, he’d snapped out of sleep with his chest aching so badly he’d believed he wasn’t going to take another breath. Asthma did that to a person, and if that wasn’t terror, he didn’t know what was. His father’s advice had always been the same. Go to sleep, Crispin. Be a man. Unfortunately, his mother was long gone, and there was no one like Cece to step in to offer so much as a moment’s comfort.

Josiah slowed enough to swallow, then took a fistful of bread, and devoured it. For a slip of a boy, his appetite was impressive. “Girls are fragile and monsters are strong, so I came to your door. Your frown would be terrifying enough to scare them away.”

Jasper filched a cracker off the plate while there was something left. “Monsters?”

Josiah hummed around a sliver of cheese. “Like the wicked one under my bed.”

“Ah,” Jasper murmured, chewing, beginning to perceive the situation. “I see.”

“It’s real,” Josiah said, a hint of defensiveness entering his voice. He straightened his slump against the chaise and thrust out his chest. “It is.”

“I believe you, Jos.” He rocked against Josiah, shoulder to shoulder, an age-old symbol of masculine bonding. “But I also think monsters are sometimes as lonely and scared as little boys. Maybe he wants to protect you. Because I’ve got no children of my own for him to protect, you see, he’s just now showing up. We’ll tell him how much you’d appreciate his guarding over you on the morrow. Maybe leave him a small peace offering, even.”

Josiah pondered this counsel while consuming every scrap of food that remained. Then, he licked his thumb and dabbed up the crumbs. “ Mara says you’re a cheat, and your word is like mist. Here one day, gone the next. A rotten berry in the batch.”

Affronted and amused, Jasper sputtered, whisky catching him at the back of his throat. The coughing fit was short but dramatic enough to have Josiah taking immediate action and slapping him hard on the back.

“I’m fine,” he said, waving the boy away, more breathless than he’d like.

Josiah harrumphed, a trick he’d probably gotten from his sour governess. “Sounds like you’re set to heave up a lung.”

Jasper waited until he knew neither a stutter nor a cough was forthcoming. “Touch of asthma that catches me off guard from time to time.”

This spot of news stopped Josiah in his tracks. His lips parted in shock. “Honest?”

Giving himself a second to assess the situation, Jasper readjusted his spectacles, wondering what Josiah imagined him to be. Or worse, what he’d heard adults whispering about him. Children apparently heard things you didn’t want them to. “I was quite a mess as a boy if you desire the truth of it. My mother also passed away when I was a lad, leaving me with a father who wasn’t, how shall I say it, very sympathetic to a son who stuttered and had a passing relationship with a condition that left him gasping for air at odd moments.”

Josiah patted Jasper’s knee, his compassion everything Jasper hadn’t received as a child. “My father was grand. He wouldn’t have thought to treat me poorly over some silly lung rattle. My mums told me all sorts of wonderful bits about him.”

Jasper glanced into his glass, then took a measured sip. This didn’t match what he knew about the Earl of Edgerly. The man’s rumored proclivities and unjust temper were the main reasons—aside from Jasper’s ill-fated love for the earl’s intended and her penchant for forgery—that he’d put up such a fight against the earl’s marriage to Cece. His father had left him bruised and bloodied when he’d tried to intervene. While Cece’s father, despite them being caught in a compromising situation Jasper had tried to repair with his own proposal, had simply had him removed from the estate by two strapping footmen. Chaps Jasper could have, after a year of training, overpowered without a thought.

“I’m sure he was the kindest of men,” Jasper finally said, in lieu of speaking truthfully about a nob who’d married the woman he’d wanted to. His animosity had no place in the boy’s heart.

Josiah traced a thread in the carpet, hummed a little ditty, and wagged his toes before getting to what was really on his mind. Leaning in, he whispered, “Mara says you were a spider or some such. Them types that hang out in alleys on dark nights getting information.”

Jasper rested back with a sigh. Spider . A slang rookery term for a spy . Come to think of it, he had lingered in many a dark alley seeking information. Suddenly, he wanted to get this Mara into a quiet parlor and advise her to keep her opinions to herself. If the entire bloody town knew what he’d been, however, perhaps he hadn’t been as competent as he’d thought at maintaining his cover. “I had an occupation that I liked and was, for a time, good at. But it was risky and gave me many regrets and still does to this day. Hence, food in my bedchamber and night terrors.”

Josiah yawned and shifted his slender body, propping his cheek on a pillow lying near Jasper’s feet. “Why be sad when someone made you do them?”

Jasper dropped his head to his hand, feeling a tad drowsy himself. “What do you mean?”

Josiah scrubbed his fist across his nose, though his sniffles were long gone. “Like a mum or da, you had people telling you what to do, right?” He shrugged a slim shoulder and snuggled into the blanket Jasper had hoped to wrap Cece in after he divested her of her clothing. “Why feel bad about what you were made to do? I don’t love taking baths, but I have to, so why bother too much about it?”

Jasper lifted his head, his chest expanding with a forgotten breath.

Out of the mouths of babes.

He had been doing his job, every blessed moment. He’d never shown up at anyone’s door unless they asked for it. He’d never used undue force unless he’d had no choice. Moreover, he’d suffered right along with the criminals he’d tracked. A blade had been held to his neck on more than one stellar occasion. A bullet had been removed from his leg. His body was littered with scars showing how hardworking an agent he’d been.

He’d fought for every scrap of success and had nothing to apologize for or grieve over. He’d made a life when the one he’d been handed at birth had chafed. More than chafed, it had pummeled.

The verdict felt final and wondrous. And to think, the insight had come from a lad he’d known but for a week.

As Jasper watched Cece’s darling son slide into slumber, he tried very hard to keep from falling in love once again.