Dukes Are Forever (London Steampunk: The Blue Blood Conspiracy #5)(12)
"All the better to worm her way into my trust."
"Well, for someone who's supposedly an enemy agent in your bed, she doesn't appear to have made much progress getting in there."
Malloryn peered down his nose at her. "Have you been examining my sheets every morning?"
Gemma shot him a sweet smile. "I don't have to. I know what a man looks like when he's only had his hand for company for several months."
My God. "We are not ever discussing the contents of my bed." It came out as a faint growl.
"Why not? It might do you some good to get a little action. You've been so tense even Byrnes is tiptoeing around you, and Obsidian—of all people—said you need a good f—"
"Gemma."
She was outright grinning at him. "Prude. It might do you good. Ease a little bit of that pressure. You've been wound tighter than a corkscrew ever since you married her."
"My tension has nothing to do with Adele and everything to do with Balfour."
"Of course." Her drawl contained entire syllables of sarcasm. "It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact your very beautiful wife gets your back up in a way no woman ever has."
"Because I want to throttle her?"
"Because you very clearly want to do more than throttle her, and it drives you crazy. Because you can't control her. Because she challenges you. Because the second you get your hands on her I will place good coin on the fact the results are going to be... explosive."
"If I get wind of even a single bet placed on the outcome of this situation—"
"You won't," she promised. "Get wind of it, that is."
This was what he got for putting together a group of spies. Malloryn pinched the bridge of his nose. There'd been a flurry of wagers about whether he'd even get Adele to the altar or not.
"Don't you have something more important to attend to?" he growled. "Rather than interrogating me about my wife?"
Silence filled the study.
Gemma wet her lips and produced an envelope. "Actually, I was trying to ease my way into this conversation. A letter arrived for you several hours ago."
He stared at it.
The abrupt change in subject was somewhat jarring, which meant Gemma was nervous.
Even before he reached for the letter, an odd sense of foreboding filled him. Gemma had been trained as a child assassin. It was rare to ever see a sign of nerves about her.
He turned the envelope over. "You did an excellent job of replacing the seal. This almost looks untouched."
"That's because it is."
Malloryn looked up, all of his senses coming to high alert. He had few qualms about the state of any personal correspondence that came into this house. If Byrnes wasn't somehow listening in to his conversations, then Gemma was probably rifling through his mail.
His butler, Herbert, made sure to intercept anything of note he wanted to keep private.
"Herbert found it sitting on your desk. None of the other Rogues placed it there, and there's no sign of a break-in. It simply appeared, and we have no idea how it got there."
Flipping one of his knives out of his sleeve, he slid it beneath the seal and plucked the letter out.
Dearest Auvry,
Did you miss me?
It's time to bring this game to an end.
There was no signature.
There didn't have to be.
He knew the handwriting as well as he knew his own, and a chill ran down his spine.
After four tense months, Lord Balfour had finally resurfaced.
"Balfour is back," Malloryn said as he seated himself at the head of the oval table that housed the rest of the Company of Rogues. Ten pairs of eyes looked back at him attentively.
Gemma ruled the team in Malloryn's absence, along with her lover, Obsidian, a dhampir assassin she'd lured from Balfour's side; Liam Kincaid and his wife, Ava, who were a contradiction of brawn and brains; Byrnes and his verwulfen wife, Ingrid, could hunt anything—including vampires; Charlie Todd could pluck the eyes from a man's sockets without him noticing, though his fiancée, Lark, might almost be better than him; Herbert, the butler who'd once been his personal assassin, fussed as he tried to pour tea for the ladies; and there at the end was Jack Fairchild, munitions expert and Malloryn's secret weapon against Balfour.
Most of them had been handpicked by himself; an elite team of blue bloods, verwulfen, and mechs who were at the top of their respective fields. Spies, thieves, bounty hunters, mechanical geniuses, and two Nighthawks who'd spent years tracking criminals and hunting murderers.
Lark was the only Rogue Malloryn hadn't personally vetted, but considering the fact she'd played a large role in rescuing him from Balfour's clutches in Russia, he'd welcomed her to the Company.
Besides, she and Charlie made a dynamic team. He wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
"It's about bloody time," Byrnes said, his eyes lighting up. "As much as I enjoyed the break after Russia, I'm tried of looking over my shoulder and second-guessing every clue I find. Is it Balfour? Or am I just seeing things?"
"The question is," Ingrid growled, "where is he?"
"More importantly, how did he get in?" Kincaid had turned into an overprotective bear of late, since his wife's delicate condition had become common knowledge among the group.