The Dangerous Mr Ryder. Louise Allen

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ