His Spanish Bride by Teresa Grant

spoke English like a native. An educated voice with faint traces of the north country. Vaguely familiar, but Malcolm couldn’t precisely place it.
    “No, I’m acting as his agent.” Malcolm stepped forward in the moonlight, a sign of trust.
    Wariness shot through the cloaked figure’s posture. “That wasn’t the agreement.”
    “I have what you asked for. Are you saying you won’t take it from any hand but Linford’s?”
    The cloaked figure hesitated, as if poised for flight. “You’ve brought it?”
    “As you see.” Malcolm held up the notebook. Carefully aged with a judicious application of water and coffee. “Have you done the same?”
    The figure drew a paper from beneath the folds of his cloak.
    “At this distance I can’t judge if it’s authentic,” Malcolm pointed out.
    “Nor can I.”
    “Then we appear to be at point-non-plus.”
    The figure hesitated again. Malcolm couldn’t see the other man’s expression, but he read calculation in his posture. “Walk closer,” the other man said. “Into the torchlight. Open the book. You can keep hold of it, but I need to see the pages.”
    Malcolm walked forward, the gravel crunching under his evening shoes, to stand in the light of a flambeau. He opened the book, with the ease of one who did not doubt its authenticity. The cloaked man stepped forward. He moved with the ease of a young man. Malcolm tightened his grip on the book as the man approached. The man had enough wit to stand with his face in shadow. “Turn to the third page,” he said.
    Malcolm did so, with a faint sigh of frustration, betokening a man who saw no need for all these precautions. He sensed more than saw the cloaked man scan the page.
    “I knew it. You thought you could cheat me?” The cloaked man spun away and ran down the garden path.
    Malcolm watched him disappear, hoping the lack of obvious pursuit would slow his pace. Suzanne was concealed in the shadows by the garden gate. Malcolm didn’t see her fall into pursuit. But then if she was as skilled as she’d said, he wouldn’t.
    He wondered, for perhaps the hundredth time since their discussion on the window seat this afternoon, if he was the worst kind of fool to be embroiling her in this. She was after all not yet twenty and not a trained agent. But there was something about her that made him forget that, that made him trust her implicitly. And he suspected taking on risks and responsibilities was perhaps the best way to heal the scars of her past.
    He melted into the shadows and moved onto the grass where the gravel wouldn’t crunch under his shoes.
    Nothing stirred in the lamplit shadows as he stepped out the garden gate into the street. A crystal bead sparkled on the ground, alerting him to the direction Suzanne had taken following the cloaked man. He gave a faint smile as he pocketed it. The crystal beads had been their compromise. Suzanne had said she could simply follow the blackmailer and then return to the embassy to report to Malcolm. He had countered that they had no notion how far she’d have to go and where. At least this way he’d only be a few minutes behind.
    The trail of beads led him down broad streets lined with spacious houses similar to the embassy, a courtyard in front, the stables on the ground level, the entresol above where dependants and poor relations often lodged, the main floor where the family lived, the servants’ quarters at the top of the house. Lisbon bore the scars of war, but this part of the city was comparatively untouched. Less than ten minutes’ walk from the embassy, a thrush call alerted him to Suzanne’s presence. He scanned the street and saw her in the shadows of the mouth of an alley.
    He glanced up and down the quiet street and slipped across to her side. “Well?” He looked down at her in the moonlight. The exhilaration of the mission shot through him. And perhaps something more.
    Her eyes were bright with an answering exhilaration. But they also held surprise. “The