To Distraction

To Distraction by Stephanie Laurens Page B

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Authors: Stephanie Laurens
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nose, she airily informed him, “I’m going to the folly on the hill. It’s quite a way.”
    He did smile then and stepped closer. “I’ll come with you—you can show me the sights you described yesterday.”
    She narrowed her eyes fractionally, trying to penetrate his amiable mask. He knew perfectly well she didn’t want him with her, but he wanted to walk with her and she had no grounds on which to deny him. She could read nothing of his intentions in his face; what reached her was his determination. Arguing would be futile.
    With a gesture, she turned to the bridge. “It’s this way.”
    He walked beside her in the sunshine. She kept her lipsfirmly shut. Somewhat to her surprise, he made no effort to fill—disrupt—the pleasant silence. Beyond the gurgling stream, the path slowly wended its way up the hill; the grade was gentle enough for her not to need his arm, for which she was devoutly thankful.
    He was matching her stride, a good two feet between them, yet to her irritation that wasn’t separation enough. Enough to deaden his impact on her witless senses.
    That fraught moment on the terrace the previous night, along with his suggestion of a liaison, seemed to have exacerbated the effect of his nearness, leaving her nerves twitching, her senses ruffled, and her distracted.
    Somehow, he’d stirred to life a side of her she hadn’t known existed, not until she’d clapped eyes on him. To her immense annoyance, she was exhibiting all the symptoms of a schoolgirl afflicted with her first infatuation; what truly stung was that she’d never in truth fallen victim in that way, even in the schoolroom. It was lowering to acknowledge that she was infatuated now, at the ripe old age of twenty-five, yet she could hardly ignore the disturbing sensations, the way her nerves skittered and her thoughts scattered…. She felt a horrible urge to start babbling just to distract herself—and wouldn’t that make him smile?
    Lifting her head, she coolly said, “Audrey didn’t say much about your time in the army, other than that you were in the Guards. In which theaters did you see action?”
    When he didn’t immediately reply, she glanced at him. Pacing by her side, he was looking down; she couldn’t read his expression.
    “Initially I was with the Guards, but within a month I was seconded to another arm of the services.” He looked up and met her eyes. “I spent most of the last ten years of the war in Paris.”
    She stared at him. “ Paris? But…”
    Deverell watched her face blank, watched her work out the implications, then she blinked and refocused.
    “You were a spy? ”
    He grimaced, but if she was going to marry him, she needed to know. “The official term is ‘covert operative.’”
    To his relief, far from being horrified, she seemed thoroughly intrigued. “What did you do? Did you ferret out secrets and smuggle them to Whitehall?”
    His lips quirked. “Not often—that wasn’t my brief.” He hesitated, then went on, “Prior to enlisting, quite aside from the usual education—Eton and Oxford—courtesy of my father I had an excellent grounding in business affairs. It was his forte—supply and demand on a national scale. Knowing how to influence transport, and the logistics of moving large quantities of commodities from one side of the world to the other. The family fortune derived from such enterprises.”
    They continued along the path; he grasped her elbow to steady her over an exposed root. “Because of my peculiar knowledge and the fact that I speak fluent French and could pass myself off as, if not French, then from one of France’s far-flung colonies, I was a natural to infiltrate that arm of French business crucially involved in keeping France—the state—afloat.”
    He glanced at her and saw she was truly interested. “For instance, it’s difficult to keep an army supplied with rifles if pig iron doesn’t arrive at the ports that serve the foundries. Disrupting vital cargoes at

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