London, 1802. The war is over. The lies have only just begun.
Vivienne de Lisle has spent three years in Paris doing the one thing a well-bred English widow should never do: spying for the Crown. When a message hidden inside a silver hatpin pulls her into the wreckage of a collapsed intelligence network, she barely escapes France with her life — and with secrets that could shatter the fragile peace between England and Napoleon’s France.
Adrian Blackwood is the Foreign Office’s most capable operative, a man who has spent a decade in places he cannot name doing work he cannot describe. He is precise. He is watchful. And he is utterly certain that involving a countess in intelligence work is a catastrophic mistake.
He is wrong about this. He is wrong about several other things as well — though it will take Paris to prove it.
Sent back into France on the cover of a budding romance — a fiction designed to fool Napoleon’s fearsome Minister of Police — Vivienne and Adrian must recover a stolen list of British agents before a traitor silences them both. The streets of Paris grow more dangerous with every passing day. The deception between them grows more complicated. And the line between performance and truth begins to dissolve in ways neither of them planned for.
Then Vivienne discovers that the double agent they are hunting is not in Paris.
He is in London. He is one of their own. And he already knows they have the list.
Perfect for fans of Bridgerton, The Alice Network, and An Ember in the Ashes. The Spy Who Loved a Countess is a sizzling slow-burn historical romance packed with espionage, forbidden desire, enemies-to-lovers tension, and a heroine who carries secrets in her hatpin and a spine of pure steel.
Book One of The Secret Intelligence Series.
