A Lady's Secret Weapon Page 0,2

active anthill.

Once Lord Somerton appointed him Chief of the Nexus, Ethan would never again have to fend off insects, sit on the hard ground, or warm a woman’s bed for the sole purpose of coaxing information from her. Of course, not being in the field meant long hours behind a desk, reading mounds of reports, and attending meeting after meeting. He wasn’t sure which would be worse—the ants or the paperwork.

One niggling thought caused his pulse to jump. He didn’t know his competition for the job. The Nexus was so shrouded in secrecy that one agent could be dancing with another and not even know it. He knew the identities of only two agents. Others he suspected, but it wasn’t as though he could work the question into a conversation. What would he say? Hello, I’m an agent with the Nexus. My specialty is seducing information from women and retrieving prisoners of war. What’s yours? And when the person looked at him with a blank stare, it’s not as if he could enlighten them. Never heard of the Nexus? We’re a secret section of the Foreign Office attempting to prevent Napoleon from taking over the world. Like to join us?

At that precise moment, a larger, more inquisitive ant raced along his inner thigh, heading straight for his groin. He flicked it off, the movement jarring his too-large pilfered hat, so that it now blocked his view of the boys’ home. He swiped his hand across his forehead, pushing his hat back into position. The moment he could see again, he noticed a child emerging from the lower-level servant’s entrance of the Abbingale Home for Displaced and Gifted Boys, also known as the Home or Abbingale. The boy, perhaps seven or eight years old, scrambled up the stairs to street level, then took off.

Ethan raised a half-empty bottle of gin to his lips while he followed the boy’s zigzag progress down White Horse Lane. Once the child disappeared into the crowd, Ethan turned back to the boys’ home and continued to mentally catalog every rippling curtain, passing silhouette, inquiring vendor. He noted anything and everything of possible interest and would sort through the morass tonight.

As soon as he understood Abbingale’s daily operation, he would make plans to penetrate the home, search for Giles Clarke, and extract him. He had never heard of the boy until a sennight ago, when his dying mother had begged the Nexus to rescue her son. And so they would, even though settling domestic issues was not one of the agency’s objectives.

The Nexus’s main purpose was more far-reaching. Some would say far more important than saving a single child. Operating under the auspice of the Alien Office, a little-known section of the Foreign Office, Nexus secret service agents worked tirelessly to prevent Napoleon Bonaparte from breaching England’s shores.

He would see to the boy’s safety—assuming he was inside Abbingale—and then return to discover why a murdered Nexus agent mentioned Abbingale Home in one of his last coded messages.

A black carriage, with a driver in front and two footmen hanging onto the back, rolled to a halt outside Abbingale. Ethan’s senses perked up, even while his body slouched farther into its uncomfortable pose. The footmen jumped down, one running to help his employer alight and the other to rap on the door.

Through the carriage window, Ethan glimpsed two feminine profiles before their shadowy figures slipped out of sight. They reappeared a few seconds later, ascending the front steps. The women were opposites in every way. One stood several inches above the other, with dark hair, square shoulders, and clothes stylish enough to grace any ton drawing room, while the shorter blond wore more sedate clothing and clutched a notebook to her chest.

The door swung open, and the women strode inside. Ethan’s gaze shifted to the bewigged footmen, who appeared, from this distance, to be a perfectly matched pair. Handsome, too. Bravo, he thought. Accomplishing such a difficult feat assured their mistress a place of envy amongst the hostesses of her set. Why the wealthy put so much stock into something of so little consequence, Ethan didn’t know. But then again, he had once spent an entire sennight searching for a matching pair of bays to complement his new phaeton.

When the footmen put their heads together in conversation, Ethan slung his knapsack over his shoulder and rolled to his feet. He paused to draw hard on his gin bottle before toddling across the cobbles toward them in an uneven line.