“How wonderful. Please relay my congratulations.”
“You’ll have a chance to offer them in person soon, I hope.”
“Oh, I doubt I’ll have that pleasure.”
He chuckled into his porter. “I don’t.”
Oh, dear. This was an unforeseen complication. Charlotte had been hoping to put a swift end to the lover mystery and nip any gossip in the bud. The last thing she needed was Piers’s own brother spreading tales of an impending engagement.
“Did Piers . . .” Drat. “Did Lord Granville say something to you? Surely he didn’t give you any indication that—”
“Other than the fact that he just happens to be having luncheon alone with you, in a coaching inn in Nottingham, on very same day I happen to be traveling through? He must have wished for the two of us to become acquainted.”
Feeling frantic, she whispered, “Lord Rafe, please. Don’t misunderstand. There was—”
“An incident.”
“Yes. This is all mere coincidence.”
“If you know my brother, and it seems you do, you understand this much.” He raised an eyebrow. “With Piers, there’s no such thing as coincidence.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I saw the way he looked at you. For God’s sake, he teased you. Piers doesn’t tease.”
Strange that he would say that, since Piers had been teasing her since their first meeting. And what did he mean, no such thing as coincidence?
“He likes you,” Lord Rafe said.
“No, he doesn’t.”
“So it’s love, then?”
“No.”
Charlotte didn’t have time to argue further. Piers returned from settling the bill.
He didn’t take his seat but instead offered Charlotte assistance in standing. “Miss Highwood, I suspect the carriage will have returned for us by now.”
“And my stagecoach will be leaving, too.” Lord Rafe gave his brother a clap on the shoulder and slid Charlotte a look. “Bring her around to the castle when your schedule allows. We’ll ready a room.”
Chapter Nine
As he bid his brother farewell and they left the inn, Piers hoped Charlotte had lost interest in pelting him with questions.
“Let’s have it,” she said. “What’s your big secret?”
He scowled at the pavement to disguise the hitch in his step. “Secret? What makes you believe there’s any secret?”
“Meeting Lord Rafe just now.”
He silently cursed. Rafe was one of only a few people who knew Piers’s true role with the Foreign Office—and even so, they avoided discussing detail. If his brother had given something away . . .
“Did Rafe say something to you?”
“Nothing specific, if that’s your concern. It was all in the way he treated me. As if I’d be the latest member in an exclusive club of people who comprehend the real Piers Brandon. So what’s the secret handshake? What is it you’re not telling me?”
Good Lord. What had he done, becoming involved with this woman? Everything was a puzzle to her. A knot that needed untangling. Meanwhile, whenever he was near her, his own powers of discernment and dissembling went promptly to hell. He blurted out old family secrets. He let her stroke his hair. He dragged her behind window seat curtains and held her close.
If she were an enemy agent, this problem would have been so much easier to solve. He wouldn’t have needed to marry her. He could have had her captured, or killed, or exiled to Corsica. Come to think of it, perhaps that last was still an option.
If only Nottinghamshire weren’t landlocked.
“It must have something to do with that time you spent overseas,” she mused.
“I worked as a diplomat for the Foreign Office. You know that already.”
“And I’ve been wondering about it ever since. I knew there was something more to you. What kind of diplomat picks locks and kisses like a rake?”
“This diplomat, apparently.”
She gave a theatrical sigh. “If you won’t tell me, I’ll be forced to guess.”
He gave her a firm silence. Which she interpreted as an invitation. Because of course she did.
“Let’s see. You ran an illicit gaming hell in the glittering Vienna underground. Half the Habsbergs owe you their fortunes.”
“I’ve no interest in collecting fortunes. I have my own.”
“Burglary, then.”
He recoiled at the suggestion. “I’ve even less interest in petty theft.”
“It wouldn’t have to be petty theft. It could be significant theft, performed for a good reason. Let’s see . . . You liberated priceless works of art from the homes of French aristocrats, saving them from certain destruction at the hands of revolutionaries.”
“Wrong again.”
“If not art, then . . . secrets? Ah, I have it. You were an international spy, completing dashing missions and foiling assassination plots under the guise of a diplomacy career.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
She stopped dead in the lane. “Oh my goodness. Oh my word. That’s it.”
“That’s—”
“That is it. That’s the truth. You were a spy.” Her eyebrows soared, and she clapped both hands over her mouth, squealing into them.
Damn it.
He took her by the elbow, steering her out of the lane and pulling her into a dark, narrow alleyway.
“I tell you, I am not—”
“Don’t bother lying to me. I’ve learned how to tell when you do.” She raised her hand to his face. “Your left eyebrow. It wrinkles every time.”
“I,” he said, ignoring her touch by sheer force of will, “am not a former international spy. There, did it wrinkle?”
“No,” she said, disappointed.
Piers relaxed. “Well, then.”
“So you’re not a former spy.” After a brief pause, she gasped. “You’re an active spy.”
Jesus Christ.
She gave him a light punch on the shoulder. “Oh, well done, you. And you have the world believing you’re just a boring, stuffy, proper lord? No wonder your brother looked like a cat who’d swallowed the goldfish. This is tremendous, Piers.”
Tremendous?
This was decidedly not tremendous. This was a grave problem. And, quite possibly, the end of his career.