Chapter One

       Late May 1820

      ‘English pigs!’

      The wrought-iron bars rattled again as another hailstorm of stale breadcrumbs hit him squarely in the face. She might well be a traitor and a termagant, but Lady Jessamine Fane’s aim was reliably accurate.

      ‘I’m sorry, my lord. Had we known she was stockpiling her rations to use as weapons we would have relieved her of them.’

      Lord Peter Flint dusted the latest baked embellishments from his lapels and smiled tightly. ‘Pay it no mind, Captain. This is an unusual situation for all of us.’ It wasn’t every day that a Royal Navy frigate became a floating prison for one inmate and a female one at that. Nor did he, in the usual run of things, find himself the reluctant gaoler of one, tasked with dragging her foul-mouthed and fiery carcass back to London. A job that he was now prepared to concede might not be as simple as he had first thought. Lady Jessamine did not strike him as one who would go meekly. Or even quietly. The blasted woman had been hurling abuse at them for the better part of half an hour. Hell, she’d been yelling from the moment he boarded the ship and they had set sail an hour ago. A constant tirade of pithy, imaginative and noisy invective issued alongside the flying food from her nest in the shadows.

      ‘Can we bring some more lanterns down here?’

      The brig was unnecessarily dark and forbidding, the heavy, windowless timbers of the hull creaking as they rocked on the tide. Her collection of missiles would be more easily avoided with the addition of some light and he wanted to know exactly what and whom he was dealing with and, no matter what she had done, it seemed a tad cruel to keep her in the dark.

      Flint was yet to see her face properly. It was buried in a ratty tangle of dark curls. All he could properly ascertain was despite her strength she was small, judging from the petite size of the grubby hands which gesticulated wildly in a Gallic fashion. Yet her surprisingly sultry French-accented voice and impressive repertoire of insults suggested she was no girl. Not much of a lady either, but then what had he expected?

      Lady Jessamine might have once been the daughter of an English earl, but a decade had passed since she had been ripped out of her British life by her traitorous French mother. A mother who had fled England to live openly in sin with her French lover. The Comte de Saint-Aubin-de-Scellon had been one of Napoleon’s biggest supporters. He was still one of his most loyal supporters, if their intelligence was to be believed, and the lynchpin of the French side of the smuggling ring they were yet to destroy. In view of her bohemian and scandalous upbringing, her lack of morals hardly came as a shock. Nor did the treason. As the Comte had had more of a hand in Lady Jessamine’s upbringing than her own father, it was hardly a surprise that her allegiance was staunchly with the enemy.

      Like mother, like daughter.

      Except the loud-mouthed Jessamine had done more than share a bed with the enemy. If the mounting evidence was to be believed, she had committed all manner of atrocities which had seen good men die. Men he considered friends as well as comrades in arms. Once she had served her purpose and spilled her secrets she would likely hang. And rightly so. All Flint had to do was deliver her to Lord Fennimore, the courts and the lawyer Hadleigh and then he would be shot of her and her foul temper.

      Above him, he listened to the sounds of the huge canvas sails snapping in the wind and knew the next few days would not be pleasant despite their fast speed. Aside from this ocean journey, he would then have to spend days stuck in a coach with her. It couldn’t be helped. He was between missions and the rest of the King’s Elite were either in the thick of it or on honeymoon. His friend and fellow spy Jake Warriner had been the first to fall into the parson’s trap, something which still came as a shock considering Jake had always been a committed and cheerful rake determinedly averse to settling down. He had been closely followed by Seb Leatham, who had gone and married an effervescent incomparable despite his painful shyness around women. As both friends had been working on the same mission to catch exactly the same smugglers as Flint, their sudden and unexpected plummet into marital bliss was a worry. Two good men down. A state Flint wanted no part of.

      Not this side of fifty at least. Perhaps when he was older and beginning to creak he might welcome the presence of a wife. And then again perhaps not. Merely considering it made him frown.

      It wasn’t so much the institution of marriage he took issue with, rather the inevitable tribulations which came along with it. As the youngest of six children, five of whom were female, he’d had quite enough feminine machinations, hysterics and interfering nosiness to last a lifetime. He’d been hen-pecked, mollycoddled and driven to the furthest limits of his sanity for his first twenty years. Those scars still ran deep. Too deep to plunge headlong into marriage any time soon. Women were born conditioned to find ways to control and confound the men they cohabited with. A fact he understood only too well.

      He loved all his high-strung sisters dearly, was hugely proud and protective of them in equal measure, but also spent a great deal