“There you are, darling. Please, come and protect me from Lord Cameron’s threats. You know what I told you about the Mackenzies.”

Cameron turned to see the last person he expected: a tall, black-haired young man with the dusky skin and dark eyes of a southern Italian. Cameron thought he vaguely recognized him from the stage. Opera, perhaps.

“Apologize to the lady,” the Italian said. His accent was very slight, his English good. “I know she was your lover, but that is finished now.”

“I agree,” Cameron said. “It is finished. Phyllida, who the devil is this?”

“None of your business,” Phyllida said crisply. “He is here to see that I don’t get cheated.” She turned back to the Italian. “Darling, did you bring the letters?”

Cameron closed his fist around the money, not about to let Phyllida take it until she gave over the precious documents. The Italian reached into his pocket and brought out a stack of folded papers.

“Is that all of them?” Cameron eyed them. “Ainsley said there were six.”

“It is all.” The man held them out at arm’s length. “You can trust the signora to deal fairly.”

Fairly? Phyllida? Either the man was a good liar, or Phyllida had well and truly beguiled him.

Cameron reached for the letters. The Italian held them back. “You give her the payment, first.”

Like hell. “Let’s do this at the same time, shall we?”

The man gave a cool nod. He held out the letters again, and Cameron let the wad of money dangle from his fingers. Phyllida snatched the cash, and Cameron took the letters from the Italian man’s grasp.

Phyllida ran her thumb over the corner of the banknotes. “Thank you, Cameron. I hope I never see you again.”

Cameron unfolded the first letter. “Wait,” he said sternly. “Neither of you are leaving until I know that I have them all.”

“I’ve told you . . .”

The Italian held up his hand. “No. Let him look. The treacherous always must believe that others play treachery against them.”

Definitely opera. The man’s speeches came straight from them. Cameron seated himself on a scrolled iron bench and scanned the first page.

“You’re not going to read all of them, are you?” Phyllida said in exasperation.

Cameron didn’t answer. He would damn well read every word of them to make sure he had the letters in their entirety, no pages missing with which Phyllida could blackmail Ainsley later. Cam hadn’t lied to Ainsley when he’d said he had no interest in the letters, but he’d never promised he wouldn’t actually read them. He needed to, for her own good.

They were love letters without doubt. The lady addressed them to “My most beloved Friend,” and then the paper flowed with overblown adjectives and flowery phrases that sang of this friend’s manly physique, his prowess, his stamina.

In spite of this, Cameron could see that the writer had an excellent grasp of vocabulary and poetry, if in an overly sentimental style. The first letter eased from this poesy into a breezy, newsy epistle and then back out again to the flowery phrases. She’d signed it, “Ever your loving, Mrs. Brown.”

Mrs. Brown.

Oh, bloody hell.

Cameron opened the second letter and found it to be much like the first, noting the writer’s references in the middle of the letter to “trying children” and other such domestic issues. But these were the domestic issues of a palace, the trying children princes and princesses of this realm and rulers of others.

He finally understood Ainsley’s secretiveness and furtive concern. The nameless friend she’d been trying so desperately to protect was the Queen of England.

“It’s scandalous, isn’t it?” Phyllida said when he folded the last one. “She ought to be ashamed of herself.”

“Did you make any copies of these?” Cameron asked her. What a weapon Phyllida could have made of them, and yet she’d demanded, in retrospect, so little. Something was off.

“Why should I?” Phyllida shrugged. “I’m not interested in the queen’s rather pathetic fantasies.”

Cameron rose and stuffed the letters into his pocket. “These letters could utterly humiliate the queen, and you’re ransoming them to me for fifteen hundred guineas?”

“Very generous of you too. Enough for a start, I think.”

“A start of what?”

Phyllida laughed, and for the first time since he’d met her, Cameron saw the hardness depart from her. “To leave my husband, of course.” She slid her hand through the crook of the Italian’s arm. “Thank you, Giorgio. Shall we?”

Giorgio. Now Cameron recognized him. He was Giorgio Prario, a tenor who had recently taken London by storm. Isabella had hosted a soiree to help launch his career, one of those little gatherings that Isabella loved and Cameron avoided like the plague.

Prario regarded Cameron with deep brown eyes and a proud tilt to his head before he drew Phyllida away. Phyllida had her claws into him all right, poor sod.

Cameron watched them walk away, Phyllida swaying into the body of the large man. Phyllida Chase, who loved her comfort and social position above everything else, was ready to throw it all away to run off with a young opera singer. The world was becoming a strange place.

Still more bizarrely, Cameron was becoming more and more entangled with the young lady in red who crashed through the palm fronds next to him, breathless and pink- faced.