Highland Heat 2 - All The King's Men by Chera Zade Page B

in apprehension. He could easily have me clasped in chains for treason; now might not be time to press my luck.  
    I sullenly slipped back into bed beside him, keeping as close to the edge of the mattress as I could get. He was undeterred by my obvious anger. “You are extraordinarily lovely, do you know that?” he asked, brushing a tendril of red hair from my eyes. “Even when you’re scowling like a child whose had her sweets snatched away.”
    “I’m not a child,” I snapped.
    “You’re behaving like one,” he said, with only a wee bit of censure. “I did not force you to become my mistress, after all. I very clearly laid out the conditions of our arrangement. I told you exactly what I expect from you. Exactly what to expect from me. I have kept to my end of the bargain in every particular, have I not?”
    He had, at that. He let me want for nothing. I merely had to point to a bauble and he would make a gift of it for me. Dresses, bonnets, combs, gloves. There was very little he denied me in, or out, of his bed. But it hadn’t been the promise of enrichment that had lured me there. “ Why did you plant a false book for me to find?” I asked, seething, still wondering where he must have hidden the real one. “Just to torment me?”
    The major sighed. “Isn’t it obvious that I want to teach you?”
    “Teach me what?”
    “Spycraft and oh , so many other things…”
    My mouth fell slightly agape. “ Spycraft ?”
    “Surely you’ve deduced, by now, that the services I render the crown are not of an ordinary nature…”
    What I had deduced was that there were many things about him that made no sense. He had the bearing of nobility, but no title. He spent more lavishly than someone might on a soldier’s salary. He had a very vague notion of morality, a suspicious lack of anxiety about all sexual matters, and was entirely too dashing for an Englishman.  
    Suddenly, my hopes soared.  
    My God, were we actually allies ?  
    I lowered my voice to a pitifully hopeful whisper. “Are you saying that you’re a foreign agent? Are you a Frenchman secretly working against the English for Charles Stuart?”
    He looked as pained as if I had run him through with a sword. “I would never betray crown and country. Much more importantly, I’m not a Frenchman!”  
    He said this with all the affront only an Englishman could bring to bear, and my hopes were entirely dashed. “Then I don’t understand. If you’re not a spy—”
    “Yes, continue with that thought. If I am not a spy against the English, and I’m obviously not pretending to be a Scotsman for the English, then what must I be?”
    “A spymaster ,” I breathed.  
    “Very good,” he said, with an audible smooch to my nose. “You can learn the craft from me. I find it rather gratifying to teach you…” He then smiled as if delighted that I had come to the correct conclusion, dipping his head to press a hot kiss on my bare shoulder.
    As always, his mouth ignited a fire beneath my skin, but my stomach went cold with horrified understanding. He recruited and trained spies in Scotland. And he thought he was recruiting and training me !  
    But I would never betray the Jacobites. My chest heaving with offense, I said, “I fear you have misjudged me completely.”
    “Have I?” he asked, slowly, wickedly, nibbling his way up my neck to growl in my ear. “Oh, I don’t think I have. I think you’re a brave, adventurous sensualist who has been sorely neglected and overlooked by the very countrymen to whom she’s so fiercely loyal…”
    That struck a nerve at the core of me. My father had never seen me as fit for more than a nursemaid to care for him in his dotage. My brothers dismissed me as the little sister who kept the kitchen at the tavern. And the fierce highland warrior I had wanted to marry abandoned me at the first obstacle to our love.  
    But that didn’t mean I would betray them.  
    “You can’t turn me,” I insisted, even as I