Miles was in no mood for it. Not this morning. Lawrence Cowgill had been gone for three days straight , leaving nothing behind in his desk but a notebook marked with a series of meaningless dates. In his absence, Miles had been forced to assign the paper’s famous gossip column to another of his reporters. A poor salve on a potentially fatal wound, but it was either that or go to press without it. The latter hadn’t been an option. Like it or not, the majority of the Courant’s dwindling circulation was owing to that cursed column.

They couldn’t afford to lose any more subscribers. They’d already lost too many as it was. In the aftermath of Miles’s series of articles exposing the treachery of once-revered politician Viscount Compton, many in society had closed ranks against the paper, no doubt frightened that they’d be targeted next—exposed and ruined by one of the Courant’s notoriously ruthless exposés.

It was only the gossip column that kept the fashionable public coming back. Without Cowgill to write it, the paper stood to lose a fortune. No one else was in possession of the secret sources that enabled him to deliver such unusually incisive tittle-tattle.

And now this.

Another disappointment, albeit one disguised in a rather beguiling package.

Miles ran a hand over the side of his face, wishing like the devil he’d followed his instincts and gone to Miss Corvus’s Academy himself. Instead, he’d wasted months engaged in correspondence with a woman he had foolishly assumed was an antiquated spinster.

But she wasn’t.

Antiquated, that is.

With her flaxen blond hair, heart-shaped face, and graceful figure, Miss Trewlove had more in common with an angel than she did with his admittedly narrow preconception of a schoolteacher.

A sultry angel, at that.

Her hooded, long-lashed gray eyes had a deceptively sleepy quality to them. Like a tigress drowsing in the sun, as languorous as she was lethal. The effect was intensified by the elegant curve of her high cheekbones, and the voluptuous fullness of her lush, Cupid’s-bow lips.

“It’s a personal calculation,” she replied to him. “Every girl has a different set of strengths. A head for mathematics, for example. Or an aptitude for writing, or a skill for sport.”

“Sport,” Miles repeated. “Such as hunting down corrupt lords like Viscount Compton?”

Miss Trewlove lifted her winged brows. They were thick and arched, a shade darker than her hair. “You presume the Academy is connected to his downfall?”

“I more than presume it. Miss Corvus’s name came up often during my investigations. Or rather, the name she went by at the time she was connected to Lord Compton, some two decades ago.”

Miss Trewlove noticeably did not refute that connection. “A man has done wrong and has finally been punished for it. What benefit can there be in violating his victim’s privacy—whomever that victim might be?”