Free Sebastian's Lady Spy by Sharon Cullen Page A

were doing.”
    She raised a brow. “Oh? Like you tell me what you’re doing? Like you told me where you were going the other night in your hired hack, looking like the worst sort of reprobate pirate?”
    His eyes narrowed. “You followed me.” His voice was low and deadly, but it did not scare her. She’d been in far worse situations, and she had finely honed instincts, and those instincts told her that she was safe with Sebastian.
    She raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t think I would find out?”
    “Damn it, Gabrielle. You simply must follow orders.”
    “I must?” Both eyebrows went up this time.
    He growled something unintelligible. She’d cracked through. He was at least showing some sort of emotion.
    “Relax,
amico,
I did not follow you.” She smiled. “But your neighbors need to trim back their shrubbery.”
    “You hid in the shrubbery and
spied
on me?”
    She shrugged. “What would you have preferred? That I hide in the bushes and spy on you or that I follow you? I can do either.”
    He leaned forward and it took everything in her to remain calm, not to rear back in the face of his overriding anger and not to close her eyes and breathe in his scent. Sandalwood mixed with something she had never been able to identify. It threw her back to Venice so fast that her mind spun.
    “You will not follow me,” he growled. “If I don’t bring you with me, it’s because it isn’t safe for you.”
    “You are operating under the wrongful assumption that this is my first mission. It’s not. I’ve been to dangerous places before. Many times. I know how to handle myself. I know what I’m doing.”
    If only he knew that she’d lived the first dozen years of her life in the most dangerous place in London. Sitting in his neighbor’s bushes was the least dangerous thing she’d done in a long while. For heaven’s sake, attending two balls in one night was more dangerous than that. Sitting in this carriage alone with him and fighting the need to close the distance between them was far more dangerous than a bunch of prickly bushes.
    The anger, tightly coiled inside him, didn’t seem to abate. “Nevertheless, I decide where you go.”
    “No, Sebastian, you don’t. You don’t demand. You don’t give orders. We work together and decide together who does what. Now, you tell me what you learned last night, and I’ll tell you what I learned.”
    The silence was so deafening that she could almost hear his blood boiling. In the dim carriage, she could see his jaw clench and could feel the heat of his anger emanating off him. He was sprawled in the opposite seat with his legs spread and his knees mere inches from hers. Once he had been sprawled just so in a chair, and she had climbed into his lap and ridden him hard. The thought made her wet between the legs. The urge to raise her skirts and do the same in the swaying coach was almost overwhelming. She needed some of his iron control, because her lust for this man was coming nearly uncontrollable.
    “I went to The Coxswain,” he said into the silence.
    Gabrielle breathed out, relieved. He hadn’t noticed that her body was liquid fire and that she wanted him so badly, she could whimper.
    “Not good enough,” she said. “If we’re to share information, we will share everything.”
    He sighed, clearly exasperated. “I didn’t learn anything.”
    “I highly doubt that was all that happened.”
    “Fine,” he said between clenched teeth. “I dropped some hints that I might be a Jacobite sympathizer. One particular…gentleman nibbled at the bait and offered to meet me this morning at St. Ethelreda’s with information.”
    While her body was still overheated, her mind was now fully engaged on the conversation. “Let me guess: When you arrived your contact was dead.”
    Sebastian pinned her with those cool blue eyes. “How did you know?”
    “What happened?”
    “How did you know?” he repeated, his tone harsh.
    “I was in Buttons Coffee House and heard