Will unlocked the hidden door and led her up the two flights of stairs to the outermost room of his linked apartments. He settled her in an antique tapestried chair by the fire and removed the blindfold.

Everything in the room was just as he’d left it. He stirred up the fire where jugs of water stood waiting to be warmed for the bath. A great copper tub stood next to a bench piled with fragrant towels. He lit a branch of candles on the cabinet by the bed. Ah, he did enjoy that bed.

“Are we still in London?” she asked, looking at the bed.

“In its depths. You’re safe here for the moment.” He put a kettle on the hob for tea. She would need warming and something to counteract the drug’s effects. He took hold of chair arms and leaned over her. “What did they give you to drink in the brothel?”

“Some chocolate.”

“Breathe on me.”

“What?”

“Let me smell your breath.”

She leaned back in the chair. “You’re not serious.”

“I am. I’ll be able to tell what drug they gave you.”

“Oh.” She stopped straining away from him. After a moment, she opened her mouth like a singer and exhaled.

He almost groaned as the huff of warm, sweet breath reached him. “Opium and satirio.”

“What is that?”

“A wild orchid, something to make you most receptive to a man’s attentions. Drink as much tea as you can. And eat. You’ll find bread and cheese by the bed.”

She glanced at it again. “Are you perhaps a sultan?”

He laughed as he spooned leaves into a pot. “No sultan.”

He knelt and took her hands in his, chafing them lightly. “I take it that it was not your plan to end up as a prize auction item this evening.”

“Of course not.”

He laughed at the look of offended intelligence in those brown eyes. “What went wrong?”

“Guy Leary. He was not … I did not expect to have to deal with him.”

“Whatever your business there, send a man to deal with Leary.”

“I can’t.” Her face was solemn. “I have to go back.”

He pulled her to her feet and dragged her over to stand in front of a cheval glass by the enormous bed. “Then I suggest that you change and wash the paint off your breasts before you attempt to pass unnoticed through London’s streets.”

Their eyes met in the glass, hers shocked and wide, his frankly hungry, with no concealing disguise. He pulled the cords from her wrists, tossed her a towel, and turned away.