by Carrie Lofty
His gaze stayed, but it did not rest. She could feel his attention like a touch. His expression shifted. Apparently all that searching and probing led to a conclusion, but his features did not soften. If anything, he appeared even harder. He unfurled those big hands, shook them as if to return the blood to his fingers, and turned away from everyone. Beneath his fine white shirt, the taut line of his back seemed hewn of iron.
Briefly, he stood at the lone, wide window and looked out to the darkening sky. Gray shadows and the blue light of a fading afternoon competed for dominance over his strong brow and sharp cheekbones. Only then did Polly notice the coat he should have been wearing, tossed over the back of his chair. Her rebel mind insisted on playing out that moment. How had his body moved as he shed an encumbering layer of civility? Even now, poised in that tense moment, she admired how the revealing cotton stretched between his shoulders. Her gaze followed where twin shirttails disappeared into the snug waistband of his trousers.
She shut her eyes. Not that closing them would stem the rush of images. She feared what her mind would conjure come nighttime. Although she secretly led the union in her father’s stead, she was still a young woman in the presence of a stranger who fired her blood. He was the master of Christie Textiles. Her adversary, if not her outright enemy. But he was also a precious novelty in her tiny world: a strong, handsome, intelligent gentleman.
“I want all of you out,” he said at last. His odd American accent, so low and rough, invaded her darkness.
Polly opened her eyes on a shiver, oddly disappointed that their introduction was already at an end. She had hoped to glean much more about his character.
“Pardon, sir?” asked Constable Andrews.
Mr. Christie swiveled away from the window. “Out of my office. I’m going to chat with Miss Gowan.”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re doing,” Livingstone snarled. “She bats her green eyes and wraps every Calton man around her finger.”
“You are radically out of place by speaking to me in such a tone. I’m no Calton man, Mr. Livingstone, and I’ll manage just fine.” At another bare syllable of protest, Mr. Christie strode around his desk. Polly shrank back, out of his way and nearer to Agnes, as he went straight for his target. He stabbed an angry finger against Livingstone’s sternum. “I don’t want to see you in my building ever again. If you interfere with business that relates to Christie Textiles, I will have you arrested for trespassing and harassment.”
“The law doesn’t work for you.”
A callous smile shaped Mr. Christie’s firm, wide mouth. Polly hadn’t been able to imagine him smiling, and that cold expression did little to help. It was too . . . calculating. “No, I suspect the law works for the highest bidder. I will ensure they’re well compensated for putting you in your place. Get out.”
Raw hatred flickered through the overseer’s eyes, but Mr. Christie stood his ground. His big fists were back, curled and primed for a fight. Polly covered her mouth with unsteady fingers. To see Livingstone get his comeuppance at the hands of this new master would be the making of her wildest fantasies.
Hit him, she found herself chanting. Hit him.
But the coward didn’t give him a chance. Livingstone took a step back, his expression still twisting around powerless fury. “I won’t forget this.”
“I should hope not,” he said. “Now, Constables, keep the other workers in the clerk’s office down the hall. I’ll meet with them later.”
After Agnes and the various men filed out, Mr. Christie shut the door behind them. The tension around his shoulders and neck had eased. Truly, he had been ready to brawl. Only now did his body relax, having won the round with words and threats. She released a breath laced with an esteem he didn’t yet deserve.
Once again, Polly found herself pinned by his unerring attention. “Sit,” he said.
“I’d rather stand.”
“I suspect you’d argue with the door if the mood suited you.”
She said nothing, so as not to prove him right. Instead she lifted her eyes. Challenge them, her father had always instructed. Men never expect a direct challenge from a woman.
“Why me?” she asked.
“Because you know more about that explosion than the rest of them combined.”
Polly scowled. “I don’t know a bloody thing. Had I been by the south wall, I could’ve been killed today.”
“Instead you’re here in my office, and we’re going to have a conversation. Union, business, sabotage—the topics shouldn’t come as a surprise.”
He crossed the room. The thinning rug swallowed the sounds of his footsteps. The solid wall of his body pressed into her space. Polly did her best to keep away from him while giving no ground. Her throat closed. She found nowhere to look but toward the little thatch of hair that poked up from his open shirtfront.
After a hard swallow, she found her voice again. “I don’t know anything.”
“I don’t believe you.” Mr. Christie’s hazel eyes narrowed. For a moment, so near, they shared the same air. Polly was almost dizzy from the unexpected intimacy. “But if you’d rather, we can let the subject drop.”
Relief swept through her lungs like the scent of flowering hedges. Unexpected. Sweet. She rubbed her sore arm. “I’d like that, yes.”
He bit his back teeth together. Muscles bunched along his jaw. For a moment, he actually looked pained. Then an expression of firm resolve hardened his sharp features once more. A resolved warrior in half a business suit. “Then you have a choice, Miss Gowan. You can stay here with me and talk, or I can give you back to Livingstone. He won’t stand up to a man, but I have no doubt what he’s capable of doing to a woman.”
“You’d give me over to that beast, even suspecting what he might do to me? What kind of monster are you?”
Alex needed to back away. He needed to, or he would touch Polly Gowan. For the past fifteen minutes, he’d fought that urge as he had rarely fought any battle. Not to caress her or seduce her. No, he just wanted to prove she was real. Like a tiny, angry valkyrie, she was almost mythic in her strength and the righteous burn in her bright green eyes. Her accent was as strong and unfamiliar as that of any Glaswegian, an exotic brogue with its oddly clipped consonants, but she added an impish brightness.
Alex gripped the edge of his desk, with yet another war brewing behind his breastbone. He was honorable in his heart and soul—a quality that in many ways had been the making of him. Threats were nearly too much to stomach, especially against a woman. The alternative, however, included losing his business to an unidentified saboteur and handing Edmund over to Josiah Todd.
That would never happen.
He had no doubt Livingstone was a beast. In fact, it was from Josiah Todd that he had learned to identify such a covetous, proprietary look. The brutal overseer believed, for some reason, that Polly was his to manipulate. And maybe worse. Just as Alex’s father-in-law had believed Mamie was his. In every way. Forever.
She would have been, had not Alex intervened.
Yet had he ever desired a woman with such swift, infuriating speed? Polly Gowan had been in Alex’s office for only a quarter hour. Still, he was compelled. Fascinated. Drawn to her. The reaction was so fierce as to remind him of his long years of celibacy—throughout his marriage almost entirely, and certainly since Mamie’s passing. Despite his body’s aching insistence, however, he wasn’t in the habit of drooling after every pretty new female. Polly appeared infinitely resilient, as if she could take the full force of a man’s desires, and demand as much in return.
“I’m no monster,” he said as evenly as he could manage. “After all, I am giving you a choice.”
“It’s no choice, and you know it. Out on the street, he practically pulled off my arm. When that wasn’t enough, he kicked me in the gut. Take those facts and choke on them.”
Alex stilled. “He kicked you?”
“What does it matter to you? Still ready to toss me to him?”
No, he
thought bitterly. More like he regretted not popping the man’s jaw when he’d had the chance. “You’ll be the one to decide, as I said.”
Polly swept that fiercely red hair back from her temples, her hands quick and agitated. “And here I’d almost thought you gallant.”
“Gallant?”
“For standing up to him that way. No one ever does.”
“And now?”
“I take it back.”
“Can you take back a thought? I don’t think so.” He leaned against the desk and crossed his arms, well clear of temptation. “You thought I was gallant. The idea was there. It existed in your mind. Now you’ve altered that thought by adding new data. Happens all the time. For example, I thought you were beautiful.”
She pulled her chin back on a quick intake of air. Alex hid a smile as he watched the words sink in, like water quenching dry summer soil. Her lips parted. She touched her hair again, and then dropped her hands.
“Thought?”
Such uncertainty in her voice. Perhaps her position in the union and among the mill workers had stripped her femininity. With a rare flash of intuition, he suspected that men would desire her without truly appreciating her singular beauty. Her pretty, sprightly features and bewitching red hair were obvious enough. Although her mud-brown gown’s boxy shape and worn fabric did much to conceal her physique, she had lush breasts, a neat little waist, and hips designed to be palmed by a man’s eager hands.
Something inside him, buried deep, surged to wakefulness. He didn’t feel like himself. He was rougher, somehow. His temper was stretched and frayed. He would’ve brawled in his office had Livingstone done so much as scratch an itch.
“Yes, I thought that,” he said tightly. “But then I learned you could’ve been part of this plan to destroy my factory. I’m sorry to say such knowledge has tempered my opinion.”
“Fickle man,” she said with a huff.
“No more than you deeming me a monster rather than gallant.”
Her lips curled in disgust. “That’s because your behavior changed. The same cannot be said about my appearance.”
“Well, you have me there.”
“Such a gentleman.”
Although Alex could not say as much—nor could he indulge in the smile her waspish tongue inspired—she was even lovelier now. Indignation, fury, and maybe embarrassment had flushed cheeks already colored with abundant freckles. Eyes the color of bright spring grass snapped. A habit of chewing her bottom lip had made it both fuller and pinker. She tempted him to dark places with nothing more than a cagey sideways glance.
Beyond her disconcerting effect on his control, Polly Gowan was priceless. He certainly wasn’t going to give her to a brute like Livingstone, but she wasn’t leaving his office until she accepted her new role in his life. Research alone had been unsuccessful in finding a way past the locked door of secrecy that protected the Calton textile union.
She would be his key.
“Time’s up.” Quicker than Polly could react, he wrapped an arm around her lower back and shoved her none too gently toward the office door. He’d meant to keep her from further injury after hearing how Livingstone had abused her. Now he was forced to intensify his threat. He pulled her hip to hip with one hand and reached for the doorknob with the other.
He was touching her. And she was very, very real.
“Out there with him, Miss Gowan, or in here with me.”
“I won’t! Throw me to that wolf if you must, but I’m not talking to you.”
Alex only gripped tighter, despite how his throat had closed and his lungs ached. “What is so bloody hard about talking?” he said past gritted teeth. “Sharing information, for God’s sake. You act like I’m already prepared to dismantle the whole system, when you don’t know a damn thing about me.”
“Such language. I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you.”
Alex cringed inwardly. When was the last time he’d cursed at all, let alone at a young woman? Very rarely before that afternoon.
Polly tilted her chin. “But the fact remains that you’re a master. Jesus knows you’ll use anything I say against us.”
He stopped her at the open doorway. The hands at her waist were not caressing. No. Just holding her in place. She looked ready to dart for the Highlands.
“So that’s been the way of it?”
“Don’t play dumb,” she snapped. “I know you’re not.”
She crossed her arms beneath her breasts, dragging him back to thoughts he had no history of indulging—the weight of her flesh in his hands, the heft and the softness. He smiled softly, simply enjoying the strong, unexpected buzz of anticipation. Her gaze caught on his mouth before darting away.
“There’s only so much a man can learn from books,” he said at last.
He pulled her aside and shut the door. Although he had been the one to place her in danger, he enjoyed the flush of relief on her freckled cheeks and the deep breath she exhaled. Good Christ, he really had been alone too long if such manipulations aroused him.
But she didn’t thank him. She didn’t even back away. Had she known he was bluffing? He traced the fast beat of her pulse where it throbbed along her neck. Maybe he’d made an impression after all. She certainly had turned him inside out, and so quickly, too.
“Well, I see that you have plenty of books, Mr. Christie. Good luck, then. Perhaps a little more reading will do the trick while the rest of us load bricks, fix looms, and start again.” She pushed away and sauntered toward the door.
Sauntered . . . as if he would let her go.
He caught up with her, easily, eagerly. He’d found another reason to touch her. With his hand trapping her wrist, he turned her to face him. During the initial fracas, he hadn’t given thought to his state of undress. Now he could think of nothing else. His cravat gone. Her mouth so close to his bare skin.
Alex channeled his surprising, almost overwhelming need. He was a good man, but the pressure building in his veins knew no limits.
“You don’t seem to understand,” he ground out. “You’ll tell me what you know and do everything I ask.”
She raised her free hand, perhaps to strike him, but he caught that, too. They stood body to body in the middle of his office. Alex stifled the rough breath that would’ve given away his arousal.
“If you don’t,” he continued, “I’ll do worse than threaten you with the likes of Livingstone. You have a job you’d like to keep, yes?”
“Ha!” The fury was back in her eyes, pure and cold—the most provocative shade of green he’d ever seen. “You need a woman of my experience more than I need your company’s name on my pay packet.”
“And who else would hire you? A woman with your reputation? It would be a very easy thing to turn the other masters against you. You’re already a prime suspect.”
“You fit in with them seamlessly. It’s in your nature. You sit behind a desk when the rest of us break our backs and little girls of only four years put in a full day’s work.”
Something made him protest. Gamblers would’ve railed at him for tipping his hand, but at that moment, as Polly Gowan vibrated with anger, he could not be the ogre she believed. He released her wrists and resisted the urge to apologize for the red marks he’d left there. “I’m not like every master,” he said softly.
“Now, that you’ll have to prove.”
As if standing outside of himself, he bridged the scant distance between their faces and touched a lock of her fiery hair. Silken. Alluring like nothing he’d ever known.
She stiffened. Her full mouth flattened into a sharp line. “But you are like every other man. May I go?”
“Yes,” he said with an exhale. From somewhere deep inside, he found his resolve once more. “I must question the others.”
“And what about the factory? I’m not so optimistic as to hope we won’t be held accountable for our weekly quotas, even working among shambles.”
“We’ll discuss it tomorrow, Miss Gowan. I’ll be ther
e for the first shift.”
Three
How bad is it, girl?” Da asked.
Polly exhaled from where she finished the last of the washing up. Her da sat at the tiny dining room table. Ma had settled into a chair nearest the fire, with a sack of lacework in her lap. She would continue to knit until she made her first mistake, perhaps knotting a strand of the delicate floss or dropping a stitch. On some nights that meant she stayed up later than anyone.
Heath and Wallace, Polly’s younger brothers, had already snuggled into their pallets. They arose so early to work the docks. Their young bodies needed all the sleep they could manage, and more food than their combined wages could afford.
The thought of food tightened Polly’s stomach, but there was no more to be had. Ma had eaten even less. Complaining would be a disrespectful waste of breath. She focused instead on the crisis at hand. A grumbling belly was nothing to the troubles they faced.
“Except for Mary Worth’s crushed hand, there were no terribly bad injuries. A few burns and nicks, and men who’ll have trouble breathing for a few days. It could’ve been so much worse. We’ll take up a collection for the wounded at our next assembly.”
That was another reminder to stem her scant complaints. For the most part, they had been very lucky.
Da chuckled softly. “There’s my lass. Always people first. And the mill?”
Her cheeks heated at her father’s understated compliment. “Any building can be repaired. Why wouldn’t I think of the people who can’t be replaced? The masters may think we’re as interchangeable as belts on a generator’s engine, but I refuse to.”
“Mrs. Gowan, I do believe we’ve raised this girl right.”
“No thanks to you,” Ma teased.
Da’s brief bout of coughing cut their banter in two. Thankfully it didn’t last long. Looking on his withered features and crooked back pinched Polly’s heart. The disease in his lungs was very bad. No one could breathe cotton strands for so long and emerge from the mills unscathed.
Some facts were unavoidable, and more painful for it.