Spy Fall

Spy Fall

Chapter 1

DORSET, ENGLAND—1802

Death was not what Lord Cosmo Dunsmore had anticipated.

He hadn’t expected the agent of darkness to snatch him from a Dorset cornfield at dawn. But this was fitting, once he thought about it, given the extent of last evening’s debauchery. Flat on his back, the cool dew of the grass seeping through the thin linen of his shirt, he peered up at the apparition. He’d assumed Hades would wear black, or red maybe, the color of vice. Instead, the vision descended from the sky in a billowing cloud of white, a smoky outline against the gray light of dawn.

“Good God,” he mumbled to himself. “The demon is female.” And with the longest legs he’d ever seen. He got an excellent look, because the stems were clad in close-fitting buckskin breeches. Surely, a seraph such as that couldn’t emerge from the dregs of hell.

On top of that, she approached from the wrong direction. Conventional wisdom suggested that the devil resided far south of here. She floated closer, white cloth flapping behind her. Perhaps it was Persephone come to drag him to his fiery fate. A man could do worse. Blinking away the blurriness, he wondered how much he had imbibed the night before. Ballocks. He must still be foxed out of his head to be seeing spirits in broad daylight.

He knuckled his eyes and blinked several more times, the insides of his lids burning. But there she still was, falling from the sky. Funny, he’d always surmised that angels floated on a cloud of serenity. This one must have lost the function of her wings, given the way she plummeted toward earth. She was close enough to the ground now that he could hear the wind whistling through her feathers. Odd-looking appendages they were. Poufs of white that looked like misshapen clouds, not the butterfly-shaped apparatus one would expect.

Pushing to his feet, he walked toward where it appeared she would land for a better look, but his angel seemed to jerk off course, racing right for him. Before his drink-addled brain could react, swathes of silk enveloped his head and blinded him, throwing him off balance. Something slammed against his body, knocking the breath from his chest, swiping his already-wobbly feet out from under him.

For a few moments, he saw swirls of black, which was closer to what he’d imagined would occur when the end came. Regaining his senses, he found himself flat on his back. Again. Only this time he was tangled up with lush female flesh, and the scent of lemon and cloves. Heaven or hell, this afterlife business wasn’t going to be as unpleasant as he’d anticipated.

“Parbleu! Are you so stupide that you try to collide with me?” God’s messenger spoke French-accented English. She let loose a string of obscenities no angel would utter. “Idiot. You could have killed us both.”

She pronounced the word killed as keeled. Charming. He couldn’t see her face, couldn’t see anything, really, beyond the white fabric enshrouding them both, but he didn’t need to see the sprite to comprehend the depth of her aggravation. Perhaps the Almighty had sent her for some saint in the village, like Vicar Payne or his do-gooding wife, and the angel grasped the colossal nature of her mistake by having found him instead.

Still spewing epithets in French, she kicked, trying to free her ensnared legs. The heel of one of her boots hit a particularly sensitive spot on his person, prompting him to unleash a few choice words of his own in the King’s English. He forced himself to breathe through the pain spearing his groin. She’d kicked him with such precision that he’d probably sport a lobcock for the rest of his life. Or, God forbid, depending on how this all turned out, throughout eternity. Many would find that a fitting punishment for an unrepentant scoundrel like him. Yet the severe distress emanating from his manly parts was oddly reassuring. It suggested he still moved among mortals, unless one experienced physical agony in the afterlife.

Maybe he was in hell after all.

“Get up, idiot.” She struggled to sit up through the tangle of cloth and cable entwining them. He couldn’t tell where he was, or where she was, or which way was up.

Something soft and rounded bumped up against his cheek, and straddled his head. His angel was sitting on his face. Smiling, he curved his hands around the delightful swells of her bottom.

Perhaps heaven was what one wanted it to be.