Page 19 of A Lady’s Handbook of Espionage

Callahan stared out at the water. The sky hung low and heavy, the fog rendering everything in shades of grey.

Grey water. Grey sky. Grey mood.

He lit a cigarette, watching the ember flare orange.

Isabel knew how to get under his skin; that was the real problem. The woman had a talent for finding the soft places, the weak spots. She reminded him too much of himself.

He took a deep drag, letting smoke fill his lungs.

Sex was just business for him. Always had been. After his mother died when he was eight – after Whelan took him in and told him he had to work or starve – he’d learned what bodies were worth. What they could buy.

Food.

Shelter.

Protection.

Joining the Home Office was supposed to give him back some control, but every scar he earned told the same story: survival had a price, and you paid for it with flesh.

He never fucked for pleasure. He fucked because it was useful, because it got him things he needed.

Hong Kong changed that.

Callahan saw Isabel across that crowded room and just . . . wanted. No angle, no mission. Just her mouth, her hands, her body beneath his, the way he’d imagined after New York and Athens. Wondering if she’d be the first woman he actually enjoyed.

When she ran, she took something of him with her. Something he didn’t know he could lose. Maybe that’s why he couldn’t forgive her; she’d pulled that raw need from him, then treated him like another mark.

“Shit,” he muttered, flicking his cigarette into the water.

He shouldn’t have left her chained up in his cabin, but he was tired of being used.

“Mr Callahan!”

Christ.

Biting back a groan, he turned to greet the approaching couple.

Emma Dumont walked towards him on the arm of her earl, a pleasant smile on her face. Kent, in contrast, was the very image of an aloof aristocrat – except when he glanced at his future bride. Then his features thawed into something like awe.

These Dumont women really did bring men to their knees.

“Lord Kent,” he said in greeting. “Miss Dumont. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Have you seen Isabel?” Emma asked. “She wasn’t in her cabin.”

“I haven’t seen her since dinner. Perhaps she’s in the ship’s library?”

The earl frowned. “At this hour?”

Shit.

Callahan scrambled for a plausible lie. Something vague. Something that didn’t sound like “chained naked to my bed.”

“Hmm. Maybe taking in the sea air, then,” he offered, the picture of innocence. “You know how your sister gets when she’s confined for too long.”

She fixed him with a stare. “Alone? Days after nearly dying at the hands of an international crime syndicate?”

He could practically feel his bollocks trying to crawl up into his body cavity. There it was. That same relentless pursuit he knew so well from interrogations, from watching a mark, waiting for that telltale flinch. He’d just never expected to have it turned on him with such ruthless precision.

“Ah. Upon further consideration, I may have expanded the parameters of Miss Dumont’s confinement.”

Chin up, shoulders back. The quintessential agent, unshakable, immovable—

“I see.” Emma’s gaze could have drilled holes through a lesser man’s skull. “And what necessitated these expanded parameters ?”

Shite. Shit, shit, fecking shite.

“One can never be too thorough with security. Your sister has proven quite slippery in the past. It’s for her safety that I’ve taken extra precautions.”

Miss Dumont gave him the most unimpressed expression he’d ever had the misfortune to encounter. One he was beginning to suspect was a Dumont family trait.

“Mr Callahan. Perhaps you’d be so kind as to answer me plainly. Where is my sister?”

Callahan shot a helpless look at Kent, silently imploring the earl to rein in his diminutive fiancée before she eviscerated him and left his entrails for the herring gulls. But the earl merely stared back. The bastard was probably enjoying watching him squirm.

“She’s in his cabin,” Kent said. “Cuffed, I’d wager.”

Of course, he fucking knew. Callahan thought of the reverent way he touched Miss Dumont, the quiet devotion in every look.

He’d probably seen that same savage need reflected in Callahan’s eyes when he looked at Isabel: the animal snarl, the white-knuckled restraint.

The need to see her kneeling at his feet, wrists crossed at the small of her back, waiting for him to choke her on his—

“She’s resting,” Callahan said, shaking off his wayward thoughts. “Quite comfortably, I assure you.”

Emma’s lips pursed, but she said nothing.

After what could only be called a silent threat to send him to the very depths of hell if anything happened to her sister, she turned on her heel and walked away.

Kent cast one last glance over his shoulder as he followed, his own look promising unpleasantness.

Message received on both accounts.

Well. No sense dawdling above deck when he had a naked thief below. Of course, there was no telling what mood he’d find her in after leaving her to stew for hours.

Probably homicidal. The odds of him escaping their little encounter without bodily injury were slim.

Callahan paused outside the cabin door, reaching for the iron-clad control that had seen him through countless missions, innumerable brushes with death and damnation.

Right then. No more stalling.

He stepped into the room. The illumination from the lantern threw stark shadows over the figure splayed on the narrow bed.

Isabel. Asleep.

She twitched and shuddered against the sheets. Perspiration beaded her brow.

“ Non, s’il vous pla?t ,” she mumbled. “Just don’t—”

Callahan crossed the room, his heart slamming against his ribs.

He was unequipped to handle this. Give him a pistol and an enemy to hunt, a code to crack or a mark to shadow – those he could navigate with ruthless efficiency. But Isabel thrashing in his bed, trapped in whatever hell her mind had dragged her to?

It was unfamiliar terrain.

He’d known Favreau was a cruel bastard. The kind who’d break what belonged to him just because he could. Callahan’s eyes traced the silvery lines marking her skin, each one telling him exactly what kind of monster had caged and hunted her.

“ Non. Je serai sage .”

Something twisted in his chest – an emotion he didn’t have a name for.

With a muttered prayer to a god he scarcely believed in, Callahan reached out and let his fingertips graze her temple. The lightest brush, barely there. A tentative foray into gentleness from hands far more accustomed to violence.

Isabel flinched away from his touch.

“Trouble,” he said. Low. Coaxing. “Wake up.”

Another whimper. He’d seen men die, had murdered plenty, been through more pain than most. But this sound? This was killing him.

“Come back to me, little thief.”

Her eyes snapped open, wild with terror, and for a brief moment, he saw everything she’d hidden behind that confident facade. Then the fear was replaced with fury.

“You bastard,” she snarled. “ You left .”

There. Anger was easier than vulnerability with this woman; he could work with it.

He shoved down the softness that had crept in moments before. “What’s wrong?” He smirked. “Don’t like being abandoned? Hurts, doesn’t it?”

She yanked at the cuffs, the metal clanking against the bed frame. “Very clever. Point made. Now unlock these before I kick your teeth in.”

“Hm. No, I don’t think I will. Not yet, anyway.”

Callahan dug in his trouser pockets and fished out his pre-rolled smokes and a book of lucifers. He took his sweet time lighting up and brought the cigarette to his lips.

“Maybe I like you this way,” he said, exhaling a plume of smoke. “You paint quite the picture. Would take a stronger man than I to resist savouring it.”

Isabel’s upper lip curled in a silent snarl. “What next? Some vulgar comment about my mouth and what you’d like to do with it?”

Callahan’s eyes narrowed. He lunged forward, one hand braced beside her head on the mattress.

Isabel went still beneath him, her cheeks pinkening.

“You’d love that, wouldn’t you? If I fucked that infuriating mouth until you choked on my cock.”

That flush swept down her throat. “Would you? Use me so ruthlessly?”

Callahan let his gaze wander down her body. The curve of her breasts, the taut stomach with its silvery scars and bandage, the way her chest rose and fell faster.

“Would you want me to?” he asked.

Her teeth scraped her lower lip, and he nearly groaned. It was so easy for her to make him forget all the reasons he shouldn’t touch her. Want her.

“Uncuff me, and you can use me however you want.”

Even naked and chained, she was negotiating. Trying to gain the upper hand. It was what made her dangerous.

“Business first,” he said.

Callahan pushed off the bed. He took another deep drag of his cigarette, using the precious seconds to regain his composure. To tamp down the urge to pin her to the mattress and see that smart mouth take his cock.

“The Home Office needs intelligence,” he said. “On Favreau and the Syndicate at large. We had a man on the inside of their Moscow arm before he got burned. Used a sanctioned hit as an exit strategy and promptly fucked off to retirement. We’ve been fumbling blind ever since.”

He snagged the chair from the corner and straddled it backwards. “Let’s start with the basics. How does Favreau run his operation?”

The ship rolled with a large wave. Rain pattered against the porthole window.

Finally, she spoke. “His inner circle is hand-picked young, and groomed for absolute loyalty.” The metal cuffs clinked as she shifted. “The desperate ones are his favourites.”

“Orphans?” he asked, thinking of Whelan and his collection of street children.

“No,” she surprised him by saying. “He prefers those with family.”

Isabel’s gaze drifted to the window, watching the dark water slide past the glass. “When you’re alone, you have nothing to lose. But family? Family can be used against you.”

Callahan’s grip tightened on the chair’s back.