Free The Lure of the Moonflower by Lauren Willig Page B

lifted her face defiantly to his. “Does the idea of wearing a blue-and-white coat bother you so?” she said coolly, and Jack might have believed it, but for the brittleness of her stand, the watchfulness of her eyes. “You’ve turned your coat often enough.”
    “Perhaps I have.” Jack waited a moment before adding, “But the coat I wore was always my own. I never pretended to wear any nation’s colors.”
    A shadow passed over the Pink Carnation’s clear gray eyes. “It’s only another disguise.”
    “No.” Jack’s own vehemence surprised him. But as little as he could explain it, he felt it deep in his bones. Perhaps it came of being a soldier’s brat. He’d grown up among soldiers, men who took pride in their colors. “It’s a symbol—a pledge.”
    Somewhere in the distance the bells were tolling, calling the monks to compline. Everyone had beliefs, training, unquestioned assumptions that cut deep, so deep they were scarcely aware of them themselves until challenged.
    Jack took a stab in the dark. “Would you genuflect at a Roman mass or take their host? Honestly, now.”
    He watched as the Pink Carnation pressed her lips together, duty warring with conscience. With dignity, she said, “If it were necessary.”
    Like the seasoned campaigner he was, Jack pressed his advantage. “But you would feel the lie of it. And it would diminish you.”
    He ought to have felt triumphant. He had won his point. He could tell from her moment’s hesitation, from the quick flicker of her lashes.
    But he didn’t. He felt as he had as a boy, fighting with his sister Kat over a toy horse. He had shoved her. He wasn’t supposed to, but she had angered him and he had. Kat was three years older, and knew just how to get under his skin, to taunt him into bad behavior. So he had elbowed her. And he had been left holding the toy horse, with a sick feeling at the pit of his stomach, wishing it back in Kat’s hands and himself anyone but who he was.
    Maybe it was the way the Pink Carnation was looking at him, as though all of humanity were standing on her shoulders. “I do what I have to do, Mr. Reid. As do you.”
    “That sounds like a warning.”
    The Carnation smiled wryly. “Call it instead a reminder. If your conscience will not sit with a blue coat, would you pose as my batman? You need wear no garment but your own.”
    That wasn’t the real problem, and they both knew it. He might be wearing his own coat, but he would be following her orders, playing the game her way. The idea of deliberately placing himself in the middle of the French force felt about as attractive as closing his eyes and plunging his bare fist into a nest of kraits.
    He could refuse to go—but this woman represented Wickham, and Wickham was paying the bills.
    He could argue; he could insist upon guidelines—no unnecessary risks, no heroics—but what would that be? Nothing but words.
    She had him over a barrel and he knew it.
    The Pink Carnation was watching him, her expression carefully blank. “Can you be ready by noon tomorrow?”
    Noon, afternoon, what difference did it make when one went to the gallows? Jack shrugged into his jacket, pulling his hat down over his horsehair wig.
    “It’s your funeral, princess.”
    He just hoped it wouldn’t be his own.

Chapter Five
    J ane’s plan hit a snag almost at once.
    The Pink Carnation wasn’t used to her plans hitting snags. Snags were for other people, people who didn’t do their research. But all the research in the world couldn’t produce a boat where there was none. When they arrived at the docks, they found the wharf a confusion of French soldiers.
    “We’re all in the same boat. That is, without a boat,” a friendly captain told Jane cheerfully. He seemed very young to be a captain, very young and very raw. His own troop, making for Villa Franco, was already in formation, ready to march. “Everything’s been taken by reinforcements bound for Abrantes. You may have to wait a bit,