The Heiress's Deception (Sinful Brides Book 4)

by Christi Caldwell

His reservation did not come from the stench of vinegar and Cook’s dinner gone wrong that filled his office.

  Rather, it came from the same intuition that had saved his arse too many times for a cat to live through—and the spectacles. It was also the young woman’s spectacles. The ones that had slipped free of her shaking fingers and now lay forgotten at her feet.

  The woman was weak. More than a foot smaller than his own six feet, five inches, her cloak hung big on her, giving her the look of a child playing dress-up. However, it was not her diminutive size that gave him leave to question her courage. Calum had known children who’d demonstrated a courage some grown men didn’t possess and knew better than to form opinions from a person’s size or gender alone. This one, however, stood trembling and silent, just as she’d been since he’d faced her.

  He flicked his gaze over her once more, verifying that he wasn’t incorrect in his supposition.

  She recoiled. That hideous bonnet, with its long brim sides of lace fabric plastered to her cheeks, obscured her face, but he’d wager his shares of the club that terror lined the woman’s features.

  No, she wouldn’t last a sennight. And then he’d be precisely where he was now—without a damned bookkeeper for the ever-changing club he’d been attempting to put back together since Ryker had left. This particular meeting had already gone on—he glanced across to the dinanderie-faced marble clock on his sideboard—ten minutes too many. At the waif’s unending silence, Calum looked hopelessly past her to Adair.

  The other man held his arms up and shook his head.

  Calum silently pressed him.

  Adair jabbed a finger in his direction. “You,” he mouthed.

  Oh, bloody hell. Calum had never envied Ryker for being the majority holder of the club, but neither had he truly appreciated just all the tasks he’d so effortlessly undertaken.

  “I wish you all the best,” Calum said, letting her down as easily as possible. He returned his attention to the damned ledgers. It wasn’t that Mrs. Webster hadn’t been capable with the books. She had. She had also deuced awful handwriting that made a man’s eyes ache. Calum attended those columns. It did not escape his heightened senses, however, that neither Adair’s nor the late-to-interview-bookkeeper’s footsteps had marked their movement out.

  “Y-you wish me the best?”

  Her breathless hesitancy there only solidified Calum’s previous opinion and confirmed his decision.

  He scrubbed a hand over his chin and forced himself back around to confront the confounded woman. “Indeed.” For he wasn’t a heartless bastard. He again motioned to Adair, who took several quick steps forward.

  The young woman spoke, bringing his brother to a sudden, jerky stop. “I—I’ve come for the post—”

  “It was an interview, and you failed to come for the intended meeting,” he interrupted, growing impatient. Her tones spoke of a person who’d not grown up in the streets of St. Giles, and though Calum appreciated better than anyone the desperation that came in being without work, he also knew that if one’s security rested on meeting the Devil at dawn, one arrived an hour early. He opened his mouth to order her out . . . but made the mistake of looking at her hands.

  Those small, still quaking, heavily ink-stained fingers she wrung together. That telling gesture spoke volumes about her anxiety. He winced, hating that this particular task fell to him.

  Goddamn it. So, this was why Ryker had always been best served as the head. Tamping down a string of curses, Calum jerked his chin once. Adair instantly dropped the worn valise in his hand and marched out. He closed the door behind him with a soft click.

  That faint sound seemed to penetrate the young woman’s reverie, for she wheeled around. Coming over, Calum rescued the forgotten wire-rimmed frames. His nose twitched with the pungent odor that clung to her. At long last, Mrs. Swindell glanced away from the door. She gasped and then tripped over herself in her haste to get away from him.

  He grimaced. “Are you afraid, Mrs. Swindell?” he asked pointedly. Surely, she didn’t believe she could ever hope to have any post in his club if she was driven to terror just by his presence alone?

  The woman took another staggering step backward. Again, her frenetic movements and palpable fear served as a pointed reminder why she was better off not wasting either of their time.

  “Sh-should I be, Mr. Dabney?” her whisper-soft question barely reached his ears.

  Calum sighed. “I suggest you sit,” he said somberly, and the diminutive woman lurched past him, quickly settling her shaking form in the seat.

  He started over to her chair.

  She shrank into the folds, darting her head left and right. Odd, she’d the look of one contemplating escape, and yet she’d fight him still for the post of bookkeeper. Wordlessly, he held out her spectacles.

  Mrs. Swindell hesitated, then grabbed them from him. She swiftly buried them and her hands in the brown woolen cloak hanging from her frame. Covered in scars and larger than most men, he’d grown accustomed to most men and women avoiding his gaze.

  Calum claimed the spot behind his desk. As a young man of the streets who’d had to stab, steal, and kill in order to survive, he’d once been a street tough deserving of the ruthless reputation he’d received. Since he and his siblings had secured a home and built a fortune inside the Hell and Sin, however, Calum had—with the exception of the nightmares that sometimes gripped him—put that way of life behind him.

  Though he’d developed a healthy cautiousness of all people, he was also able to distinguish those deserving of his hatred from everyone else. After all, he’d once been on the receiving end of a ruthless cruelty that had seen him in Newgate and nearly hanged. Being the recipient of a person’s fears didn’t make one stronger. It didn’t make one a leader. It just highlighted the inherent weakness in a person.

  To set the young woman at ease, Calum layered his hands on the arms of his chair, and in a nonthreatening manner, he settled back in his seat. “I don’t intend to hurt you,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Mrs. Swindell froze in her seat. What caused a woman such as her fear?

  Then, with trembling fingers, she untied the faded satin ribbons of her bonnet and pushed it back.

  At first glance there was nothing remotely pretty about the woman seated opposite him. The midnight-black shade of her hair stood in startling contrast to her skin, highlighting the paleness of her gaunt cheeks. No, with her pert nose, dusted with freckles, and her slightly disproportionate lips, she was hardly one who’d ever be considered any kind of beauty. And yet . . . the saucer-size brown eyes staring intently back at him held him, momentarily frozen and silent. Her full lower lip trembled, and she captured the flesh between her slightly angled front teeth.

  Reminding him all over again just why she’d never hold a post inside his club. Hiring women given to fits of tears and terror had failed them twice before. He’d not waste any more of the club’s time with another cowering one.

  “I cannot hire you,” he said bluntly, getting back to the matter at hand. Many depended on him. Hiring the wrong staff would be a failing to those very people and the security they relied upon.

  She wet her lips.

  “The men and women who work in my club are strong,” Calum said with the same blunt directness he’d give to any family member or employee. Whether she was fearful of him or not, he had neither the time nor inclination to dance around truths. “They have to be,” he explained. “When we’ve hired anyone who demonstrated signs of wavering, those employees invariably failed.” Weak employees and high turnover resulted in disorder at the club, slower service, and weaker profits. A man couldn’t save men, women, and children who’d been starving on the streets without those precious coins. “I would be doing you”—he gestured her way—“and myself a disservice if I wasted either of our time with an interview, when we both know you’ll never belong here.” Her fine, cultured tones were proof enough of that.

  As if to punctuate the end of their meeting
, a knock sounded at the door. “Enter,” he called out, grateful for an official end to the interview.

  The guard, MacTavish, who’d shifted over to Adair’s previous role of sweeping the club, entered. “Lord T—” MacTavish slid his gaze over to the woman intently studying their exchange. “Patron caught cheating, my lord. Dealing from the bottom of the pile.”

  Desperate lords attempting to fleece the club was a familiar, and for it, welcome trouble. Calum would far rather deal with those mundane gaming hell woes than the peril they’d known over the years from the rival establishment and gang members.

  Calum nodded. The cowering woman seated before him momentarily forgotten, he called out orders for MacTavish. This end of the work was familiar. Comfortable. Turning away Mrs. Swindell? Well, that was an altogether different matter.

  And damned if he didn’t feel like hell for being the one to turn out the waiflike woman with desperation in her eyes.

  Her mind racing at the same rapid beat as her pulse, Eve studied the man before her . . . this man who for a fleeting while had been the only friend she’d had.

  When he’d turned about moments—hours—a lifetime—ago and squarely faced her, Eve had nearly been bowled over by the truth of his existence. In her mind and in her frequent nightmares, Calum was still the boy who’d visited her family’s mews, the boy who’d been bleeding, snarling, and cursing her as he’d been dragged off to Newgate their last night together. That same boy she’d considered herself a little in love with as a girl, so hopelessly fascinated by his strength and resilience. As a form of self-torture, she’d relegated him in her mind to the role of unaged fourteen-year-old, frozen in time. Only he hadn’t died. He’d survived and grown into a bear of a man.

  And he has no idea who I am . . . Even with the hatred that had burned from his eyes seventeen years earlier, she’d been just a girl. Why should he remember her?

  Because in going to Gerald, you betrayed him, and he nearly died for it . . .

  While he conversed with the man, MacTavish, she used his distractedness as an opportunity to study him. As a boy, he’d been strong. Taller than both her brothers, and more terrifying for the glint in his brown eyes. It had taken, however, just one meeting to see that even snapping and snarling, he was very much like the stray pup she’d used to sneak down and feed.

  Almost seventeen years later, there was a raw primitiveness to him that sent her heart into a quick double-time rhythm. Time had lent muscle, height, and strength to him. Broad of shoulders, and easily a half a foot taller than he was when they’d last met, he had the look of that all-powerful Zeus, doling out decisions and rulings for the mere mortals who set foot inside his world.

  Only, his world was not the cold, dank streets of London, or Night’s now aged and barren stall. It was the Hell and Sin. A successful gaming hell that had seen lesser men bankrupt.

  Men like Eve’s wastrel brother.

  It was no doubt fate’s ultimate vindication that they’d lost a large portion of their fortune to the man Gerald had hauled off by a constable. And perhaps she was the disloyal sister her brother had always professed her to be, for she found a palpable elation in Calum’s rise and Gerald’s fall. Calum had survived. Eve touched her gaze on every corner of his office, taking in the elegant surroundings that exuded fortune and strength. Nay, he’d thrived. He’d taken ash and turned it into an empire.

  Whereas she would hide, counting down the days until she inherited funds left her by her father. There was no honor in how the peerage lived . . . and she was included in their shameful masses.

  And now you sit before the very friend you once betrayed, seeking sanctuary. Guilt stuck painfully in her conscience. For, God help her, she was that selfish that she’d fight Calum for the post of bookkeeper anyway. Because when presented with the option of betraying him once again, in order to save herself, the need to survive burned strong with a life force.

  Shame made it difficult for her to draw a proper breath.

  “Tell Adair I’ll be down shortly to deal with the situation.”

  The other man nodded, then hastily backed out of the room. He closed the door in his wake, again leaving her and Calum alone.

  “If you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Swindell?” Calum pardoned, climbing to his feet. “I’ve matters to attend.”

  Eve remained in her chair. Fiddling with the bonnet given her by Kit, she found a soothing comfort in the article. Once again, she searched Calum’s stoic, rugged features for a hint of knowing. The hard jaw, crooked nose, and sharp cheeks may as well have been carved of stone. Then, to him she’d been a child and he on the cusp of manhood. He’d not truly seen her—not in the way she’d secretly pined for him as a girl. “I understand your initial . . . opinion of me wasn’t a favorable one,” she began, then promptly grimaced. If only he knew how very on target he’d been. Just not for the reasons he suspected. “And given my failure to come ’round and accept the post, the conclusion you arrived at is not unmerited.”

  “Mrs. Swindell,” he said impatiently, shifting on his feet, “the position was never yours sight unseen. Nothing more than an interview awaited you here five days ago.”

  Eve frowned. When her father was alive and healthy, matters of business had been left to both Mr. Barry and his man-of-affairs. Her brother Gerald had never bothered with those important dealings. How peculiar to find a man who not only oversaw his affairs but conducted his own interviews. “Then interview me now,” she said, setting the bonnet down on her lap. She folded her hands primly before her. “I am ready now.” Because the alternative was to return to Gerald’s townhouse, where only ruin awaited.

  Calum chuckled, a deep booming laugh that shook his chest, and it was a surprisingly mirthful expression, absent of any wryness or mockery. “I am afraid it does not work like that, Mrs. Swindell.” Given her insolence and his own power over her, she’d expect nothing more than a droll reply from him, instead of this gentle honesty.

  “But why?” she countered, scrambling forward in a flurry of noisy wool skirts. She quickly grabbed her spectacles and bonnet, before they tumbled to the floor. “Why mustn’t it? You are the head proprietor. You are responsible for decision making. You can do whatever you choose.” It was a luxury and power afforded him that she’d never known—and never would, if her brother had his wishes met. In fact, it was a luxury often denied most women. “You are free to do as you please.”

  His smile slipped, ushering in a pitying glimmer in his eyes. She balled her hands, despising that sentiment.

  “Do you know anything about instincts, Mrs. Swindell?” She hesitated, and with that slight pause, he carried on, preventing a reply. “A dog will sometimes meet a man, and with no seeming reason, growl and snarl.”

  Eve puzzled her brow, attempting to follow. Had he just compared her to a dog?

  “We’re not vastly different from a starving dog in the street. If one listens to one’s instincts, one is invariably proven correct.”

  “And you’ve so much experience in being correct?” she countered, the tart rebuttal flying from her lips before she could call it back.

  Another one of those dangerous half grins that tripped up her heart danced on his lips. “I’m not concerned with the number of times I’ve been proven correct, but rather the one time I was proven wrong.”

  Another knock sounded at the door. “Enter.” His booming voice echoed off the walls, and a familiar apprehension gripped her. He’d made up his mind, and this interruption sealed her fate.

  The guard MacTavish stepped inside. “Fight’s broken out on the floor now, Mr. Dabney, over the accusations of cheating. Threats of a duel.”

  He shoved back his chair, and she knew by the fiery glint in his eyes that she’d been relegated to the place of forgotten thoughts. “We are through here, Mrs. Swindell,” he said, coming quickly around his desk. Calum shed his jacket and tossed it aside, displaying the rippling power barely concealed by the fabric of the blanket garment.

  Her pulse sk
ittered another dangerous beat.

  “MacTavish, see to Mrs. Swindell,” he ordered as the guard stepped aside, allowing him by.

  And just like that . . . it was done.

  She stared blankly at the metal clock behind Calum’s desk and, to keep from giving over to fear, fixed on the rhythm of the passing seconds. Now what? Eve pressed her eyes shut. Damn you for letting your own reservations about this place keep you from the security to be found here. She’d allowed her aversion to anything and everything related to those clubs her brother lost monies at to overcome her need for security. After all, what better place would there have been to hide than in this hell? It would be the last place her brother or Lord Flynn would ever suspect. In short, she would have been hiding directly under their noses.

  You fool . . .

  “Ma’am?” the guard’s impatient query cut across her frantic musings and brought her eyes snapping open.

  She couldn’t leave. She—

  Her gaze fell on those books atop Calum’s desk.

  Why do you have to?

  That dangerous whisper slid around her mind. Smoothing her features, she forced a smile into place and stood. “Thank you for your assistance, Mr. MacTavish. If you could gather my valise.” She pointed to the bag at her feet. He followed her gesture. “And my bonnet.” With a spring in her step, she hurried to hand off the article. “I’ll gather the books.” Now, which dratted books? Racing her gaze over the surface of his desk, she settled for all six ledgers. Grunting over the weight of them, she met Mr. MacTavish’s befuddled expression with another grin. “If you’ll lead the way?”

  “Lead the way where?” he blurted, eyeing the valise and bonnet in his hands as though he’d been handed Satan’s scepter.

  “My rooms,” she said as though schooling a child. How am I this calm?

  “Mr. Dabney didn’t mention which ones would be yours.”

  “Oh, no,” she said somberly. “He was concerned with addressing the situation on his floors. Mr. Dabney indicated I would be in the available room farthest from the gaming hell floors.”