Page 44 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.
