"Well, yes, actually, I would. I have this thing about guns, you see. I don't mind them, precisely. They're good for some purposes, I suppose-hunting and the like. But I don't particularly enjoy having them pointed at me, and-"
"Quiet!"
She shut her mouth.
Blake studied her for several moments. Something about her wasn't right. Carlotta De Leon was Spanish... well, half-Spanish at least, and this girl looked English through and through. Her hair couldn't be called blond, but it was definitely a light shade of brown, and even in the dark night he could see that her eyes were a clear bluish-green.
Not to mention her voice, which was tinged with the pommy accents of the British elite.
But he'd seen her sneaking out of Oliver Prewitt's house. In the dead of night. With all the servants dismissed. She had to be Carlotta De Leon. There was no other explanation.
Blake-and the War Office, which didn't precisely employ him but did give him orders and the occasional bank draft-had been after Oliver Prewitt for nearly six months now. The local authorities had known for some time that Prewitt was smuggling goods to and from France, but it was only recently that they had begun to suspect mat he was allowing Napoleonic spies to use his small boat to carry secret diplomatic messages along with his usual cargo of brandy and silk. Since Prewitt's boat sailed from a little cove on the southern coast between Portsmouth and Bournemouth, the War Office hadn't originally paid much attention to him. Most spies made their crossings from Kent, which was much closer to France. Prewitt's seemingly inconvenient location had made for an excellent ruse, and the War Office feared that Napoleon's forces had been using him for their most delicate messages. One month ago they had discovered that Prewitt's contact was one Carlotta De Leon-half-Spanish, half-English, and one hundred percent deadly.