The Dangerous Mr Ryder

I am too used to courtiers, too used to velvets and satins and posturing politicians and officials. Even the officers wear uniforms that speak more of the ballroom than the battlefield. This man looks dangerous, feels dangerous. And the biggest danger was, Eva realised, dragging her gaze away from his body to concentrate on the movement of the picklock, that she found him exciting to be with. Infuriating, insolent, casual and peremptory—and exciting.

It was something she had been wary of, these two years of widowhood, letting herself get close to another man, allowing the chill of her lonely bed to drive her into some rash liaison. You overheard too many people sniggering behind their hands as they recounted the tale of yet another widow of high rank taking a lover. It was risky, demeaning and ruinous to the reputation, for the secret always seemed to get out and, of course, it was inevitably the woman who was the butt of the jokes and the object of censure.

This feeling of arousal, this sense of hazard, was simply due to the shock of Jack Ryder’s eruption into her life and the stress of her worries for the past weeks. Everything was heightened, from her fear, her anxiety, to her sensual instincts. That was all it was, all it could ever be.

‘Got it.’ The lock clicked and the door swung open. Inside was a room laid out as a drawing office, with two desks on one side, a wide, high table in the middle and two drawing slopes with stools on the other side. Along the back of the room was a range of chests fitted with wide drawers.

‘Not a scrap of paper.’ Jack pulled open the desk drawers. ‘Empty except for pens and ink and rulers.’

Together they went to stand in front of the chests. Eva reached out a hand and touched the dark wood, noticing how heavily the piece was made. ‘Look at the locks. I have never seen anything like that before.’

‘Neither have I, and I will tell you now, I cannot pick these.’ Jack straightened up from a minute inspection of the locks, each made of steel, with double keyholes and strange rods and bars on its surface.

‘We will just have to smash the chests, then,’ Eva said robustly. ‘There are fire axes in all the rooms. Look, here.’ She lifted the axe from the corner where it stood next to a pail of water and swung it experimentally. It was heavy.

‘If I do that, then there is no hiding the fact that we have been here.’ Jack leaned back against the chest, folded his arms and regarded her steadily.

‘Of course.’ That much was obvious.

‘When Prince Antoine discovers your disappearance from the castle he may give chase, he may not. It is unlikely to be a matter of such desperate urgency to him that he will throw great resources into the pursuit. But if he links your disappearance with a raid on his secret laboratory, he is going to tear the countryside apart to find you.’

‘But we must find the proof of what is going on.’ Eva knew she was frowning in puzzlement. Was he really asking her if she would put her personal safety before her duty?

‘We have enough to confirm that Prince Antoine is experimenting with explosives. My orders are to get you back safely, not to engage in espionage.’

‘Are you telling me that you will walk away from this?’ Eva demanded.

‘No, I am asking you whether you want to. It is your life. It is your son waiting in England.’

Eva found the axe was still dangling from her hand. She propped it against the nearest chest while she tried to sort through her thoughts. Jack was offering her the choice, as he would to another man. He was not trying to hide the dangers from her. He wasn’t happy about it, but she was here inside the factory with him because he was prepared to listen to her ideas.

‘If there is a risk that some weapon that might aid him falls into Napoleon’s hands, then I would never forgive myself,’ she said, meeting the cool grey eyes. ‘I married a ruler of a country, albeit a small one. This goes with the territory.’ And she knew that if her life was at risk, then so was Jack’s—at greater risk, in truth, because she was coming to realise that if Antoine wanted her, he would have to go through Jack to get to her.

His lips curved in a smile that held admiration and a certain wry acceptance that she had just raised the odds stacked against them and that the counters she was pushing on to the gaming table represented both their lives. He held out his hand for the axe. ‘Right, let’s get started.’

Eva picked up the rough wooden handle, set her teeth and tightened her fingers. ‘No, let me.’ She raised it, her arms aching at the weight, and smashed it into the first lock. Wood splintered and the jolt as the blade hit metal ran up her arm. ‘That is for Fréderic. How dare Antoine try to take what is my son’s? I wish he was here at this moment!’

Chapter Four

Jack reached across and prised Eva’s fingers from around the axe handle. ‘Allow me. I fully appreciate your wish to decapitate your brother-in-law, but I think I may be faster at turning these into firewood.’

She nodded abruptly, letting him take the axe and stepping back, her eyes fixed on the chests with angry intensity. God, that’s a woman with backbone! he told himself as he set to work to hack the locks out of their setting. She should be the Regent, she deserved to be. The way he was addressing her, the approach he had taken to their relationship, was simply because he could not afford for her rank to stand in the way of the mission. It was not through any lack of respect, whatever she might believe.

What the Whitehall officials who had sent him on this mission would say to him embroiling her in breaking and entering and spying, he shuddered to think.

The final lock in the first chest yielded in a mass of splinters and Jack began on the next. Beside him he was aware of Eva pulling open drawers, taking out piles of papers and laying them in order on the big table.

The physical effort of swinging the axe, hacking into the solid wood, made the sore muscles around his ribs where the rope had cut earlier ache savagely. He had not realised the strain his body had been under while he was doing it—the mentally numbing effect of the drop beneath him as he had lowered himself over the battlements was probably enough to account for that.

Jack made himself concentrate on breaking into the chests as fast as possible. There was too much distraction already in this mission to be thinking about bruised ribs. The revelation about the Regent’s health, the positive identification of Prince Antoine as the source of the treachery, the discovery of this factory and its secrets, were all outside his briefing and must be factored into his plans. And the impact that Eva was having on him was entirely unexpected and was going to need more than a change in tactics to neutralise.

He was not surprised to find himself admiring her for her coolness and courage, but he had not expected to find himself lusting after her. And that was what it was, there was no excuse for blinking at it. And it wasn’t just beauty that was having this effect. Jack delivered a final blow to the last chest and began to wrench out the drawers. There was something else—a passion behind those steady brown eyes, an energy and anger concealed under cool grace and dignity. And her body in his arms, the sweet fury of her mouth under his when he had kissed her…

He stepped back as Eva came to lift out the sheets of drawings from the drawers he had just opened. She moved as though in a state reception, but her hair was coming down and her face was flushed from hurrying backwards and forwards in the stuffy room. Her cloak was in a crumpled heap on the floor and she had pushed back the sleeves of her gown to expose strong, slender forearms and fine-boned wrists.

The drawings were already arranged on the table, he saw, as she darted about, brow furrowed in concentration, sorting the latest collection. Jack put down the axe and leaned back against the splintered chest to watch her. He should never have kissed her, of course, although as a ruse in the crisis they had found themselves it, it had worked very well.

The frankness of her kiss when she had stopped fighting him, when the officers had gone, should not have surprised him, either. She had been a married woman, she knew what she was about. From the briefing he had received, if she had taken a lover she had been very discreet about it—he may have been receiving the benefit of several years of chaste frustration.

They had both been under pressure, in danger, and that embrace had been a response as natural as two soldiers going out and getting drunk after a battle—a life-affirming release. It seemed she had dismissed it now, and so should he. Which was easier said than done.

‘Mr Ryder. Have you gone to sleep?’ The tart enquiry was sufficient to dampen any wandering fantasies of unpinning the rest of her coiled conker-brown hair and letting it flow over her shoulders.

‘No, ma’am, merely keeping out of your way until you had finished.’ The meek response had her narrowing her eyes at him, but he kept his face straight and she turned back to the table with nothing more than thinned lips to show her displeasure. Grand Duchess Eva had a knack of ignoring unpleasantness and skimming straight over it—presumably a useful skill in court life. ‘How have you sorted the papers?’

‘These are drawings of different mechanisms, but I think they all go together.’ She frowned and Jack found his hand lifting to smooth away the little crease between her brows. He jammed his fists in his pockets and came to stand next to her. ‘I have stacked each one with the most recent drawing uppermost; they are all dated.’ Eva pointed to a pile of black-bound notebooks. ‘Those are all figures and calculations. Formulae. They make no sense to me.’

‘To me, neither.’ Jack flicked through the topmost one and turned his attention to the drawings. ‘These are rockets.’

‘Fireworks?’ Eva leaned over close to his side to see and Jack drew in a sharp breath between his teeth. Her body was warm and fragrant and conjured immediate memories of how she had felt in his arms.

‘No, artillery weapons.’ Jack shifted round away from her as though to show what he was talking about. ‘They were invented by Congreve and the British have been using them at sea and on land since about 1805. Napoleon offered a reward for anyone who could invent one for the French army—but they haven’t got them yet. They aren’t very accurate, though.’ He leant over to study the other drawings. ‘See, these are frames and carriages for firing the things—I wonder if they have worked out a way to aim them better?’

‘And the notebooks might be formulae for the explosive powder?’

‘Yes, that could be it. We need to get these back.’ A look which could only be described as smug passed fleetingly over Eva’s face. ‘Ma’am, if you are about to say “I told you so”—’

Her eyes opened wide in hauteur. ‘I would say nothing so vulgar, Mr Ryder. Just how do you suggest we get them all out past Georges?’

‘We don’t. Not all of them.’ Jack picked up a pair of shears and began to cut down the top drawing from each pile, removing every scrap of waste margin. ‘We take the most recent of each of these, the most recent notebook, and we destroy the rest.’

‘The fireplace.’ Eva nodded and began to scoop up the remaining drawings, jamming them into the cold fireplace in the corner of the room. She picked up the notebooks and started to tear the pages out. ‘They’ll burn better loose.’

The half-dozen reduced drawings folded into a neat packet with the notebook. Jack jammed them into the breast of his coat and lit a spill from their lantern. The paper flashed into flame, blackening and falling apart in moments. Jack beat out the ashes with the poker and straightened up, observing, ‘How to make a prince angry in one easy lesson.’

‘Antoine will be beside himself,’ Eva agreed, picking up her cloak and shaking the dust out of it with a moue of distaste. Jack took it and put it around her shoulders. ‘Thank you, Mr Ryder. We had better be off, had we not?’

‘Indeed.’ Jack scanned the floor until he found what he was looking for: a shard of broken metal smaller than his little fingernail. ‘I’ll lock the door behind us.’ It was a matter of moments to flick the lock shut with the pick, then he eased the fragment of metal into the keyhole and tried it again. The fine pick jammed and grated against the foreign body. ‘There, they won’t be able to get the door open, but at first they will simply think the lock is faulty. It might buy us a little time.’

Eva led the way back out into the yard, keeping up a steady flow of polite chitchat that could only have come from years of practice at mind-numbingly tedious parties and diplomatic events. The caretaker came out and stood waiting for them. ‘Ah, there you are, Georges. We are off now; I am sorry to have disturbed you. Is your daughter well? Excellent.’

Jack paused to hand the lantern to the old caretaker and followed his gaze as the Grand Duchess made her way across the cobbled yard with all the dignity and grace of a woman stepping on to the ballroom floor. Her hair was coming down at the back, her face was flushed and there was dust around the hem of her skirt. Her dirty, crumpled cloak looked as though it had been used as a bed by a pair of hounds. It gave him an idea.

‘Thank you.’ Jack pressed a coin into the gnarled hand and lowered his voice. ‘Her Serene Highness can count upon you to be discreet, I am certain.’ The man stared at him, comprehension dawning on his face, then he nodded vigorously.

‘God bless her, monsieur, she deserves someone to care about her.’

Jack let one eyelid droop into a slow wink and sauntered out of the yard in Eva’s wake, the bulge of the documents flattened under his arm.