Reluctantly, she stepped aside.
Mr. North swept in. His keen eyes missed nothing. He touched that assessing gaze on every part of the room. As though he searched for a hint that his kingdom had been somehow set askew. And then he focused on her.
Verity felt the blush stealing up her chest and neck, and then setting her face awash in color. “Thank you for the garments,” she said lamely. “I’m ready to take my leave.”
“Close the door, Miss Lovelace,” he said flatly.
All the moisture evaporated from her mouth, leaving her tongue heavy, and as she spoke, her words came out slightly garbled. “Am I a prisoner?”
“Trust me, had I wished to hurt you, it would have happened in the sewers, where I’d have left you, and none would have been any the wiser that we’d met.”
Verity didn’t know whether to be terrified or reassured by that blunt admission. Pushing the door shut, she leaned against the panel and eyed him warily. After all, it hadn’t escaped her notice that he’d not answered her earlier question. Therefore, there was only one conclusion: she was his prisoner.
As he wandered to the opposite end of the room, Verity silently gave thanks for that space between her and her captor. The immediate threat that had her pleading for his help had since eased.
Since they’d arrived and he had deposited her in his room, he’d also gone and washed the filth from his person. And without the murky darkness that had served as the setting for their first meeting, Verity studied the broad back of the man who went by no other name than North.
He reached the windows and drew the curtains back a fraction to peer out.
Nervously twisting the fabric of her borrowed skirts, Verity made herself stop. “I didn’t thank you for your . . . assistance earlier,” she said into the quiet.
North continued perusing the streets, only pausing to briefly look back at her. “Is that what you think? That my efforts tonight have all been to help you?”
She dampened her lips. “W-were they not?” He was a glorious specimen, and yet his features were slightly too pronounced to ever be lauded as handsome by society’s standards. He had slashing, bronzed cheekbones. A hard set to a square jaw, slightly too heavy. Prominent scars that stood out starkly. And perhaps she’d the same ill judgment her late mother had shown toward the wholly unsuitable, for her belly danced with her awareness of him as a man.
“Don’t make more of my actions than they were,” he said bluntly, and resumed his inspection of the outside scenery. He released his hold on the gold velvet curtain, letting it slide back into place before he turned around once more. “The only thing I seek is answers.”
“I don’t have any to give you.”
His lips quirked up in a detached half grin. “I didn’t even ask you a question.” Yet. It hung there clearer than had he spoken.
“Fair point,” she allowed. Verity found herself gripping her black skirts once more. That smile, however, softened him. It marked him more man than the beast she’d first taken him as and worse . . . feared him to be.
And yet, he’d also brought her here, saving her from that fiend in the street.
“Who was the man on the street? Is he why you were hiding in the sewers?”
Why she’d been hiding? Her brow furrowed, and then she realized the conclusion he’d drawn. He expected she’d been in the sewers not in search of something, but because she’d been in hiding. Over the years, such similar assumptions had been made. People of all genders made determinations about her presence and her role in life for no other reason than because she was a woman. Those erroneous conclusions had proven a valuable tool that had allowed her to collect information from the unsuspecting. As such, Verity weighed her next words carefully. “I don’t know who he was. Only that he wished me ill.”
“And what was your first clue? The fact that he had a gun pointed at your chest?”
“Actually, yes. That and . . .” She felt herself blushing. “You were being sarcastic.”
“I was,” he said drolly.
“Oh.” Verity sighed. “As I said, the man was . . . is a stranger to me.” Which was, in fact, the complete truth. She could venture and speculate any number of potential enemies, but the list would be long, and the ranks of those foes great.
He quit his place at the window, and took slow, sleek steps toward her. Verity found herself contemplating the doorway and the path to freedom.
“Would you like to leave, Verity?” he asked in that smooth, slightly-too-deep-to-be-considered-a-baritone voice.
“Would you allow it?” She answered his question with one of her own, more than half-afraid of the answer, because she suspected she already well knew the truth.
“I would,” he said surprisingly.
Verity started for the doorway.
“Although I should mention that the bloke who cornered you earlier is circling outside.”
That ominous warning jolted her midstep, and she made herself face him. She felt the color drain from her face; it left her dizzy and off-kilter. “You’re lying.”
Sweeping one arm toward the window, he wordlessly invited her to verify for herself. Verity was across the room in four long strides. Curtain in hand, she peeled it back a fraction to peer out.
Sure enough, that same stranger did a sweep of the streets. To what end would he be searching for her? Because she’d knocked him cold, no doubt.
“Do you still wish to leave?” North taunted.
Reluctantly, she let the curtain fall back into place. Nay. Not when there was a ruthless stranger bent on revenge for her bringing him down. “I don’t know him,” she repeated, carefully selecting her words, sharing that which she knew.
North snorted.
“I don’t.” She lifted her palms. “I’m not lying when I told you I don’t know.” Based on the work she’d done, earning the ire of the ton through the years, there could have been any number of people who’d sent the stranger to speak to her.
North hooded his eyes.
He stalked past her, and unlocking the door, he turned the handle and let the panel hang open. “That’s not sufficient enough for you to stay, Miss Lovelace.”
“Please, don’t send me out there. I can’t leave. Not yet. Not until . . .” He’s gone.
Chapter 8
THE LONDONER
THE SEVEN DIALS
We’ve received reliable evidence confirming just where in London the Earl of Maxwell has called home . . . the Seven Dials.
V. Lovelace
Everything about Verity Lovelace, from her presence in the sewers to the man circling for her now, screamed danger.
As such, he’d be wise to turn her out on her generously rounded buttocks.
In fact, he’d be a damned fool to let her stay.
And yet, he couldn’t very well send her outside and on her way. Not without assigning her to a death sentence.
Bloody hell. Malcom shoved the panel closed. “Fine.”
Verity’s eyes lit, transforming her from someone quite ordinary to someone . . . who enthralled. “I can stay?”
Unnerved by his appreciation of Miss Lovelace, Malcom crossed to the mahogany drink trolley and poured two glasses of brandy. “Don’t get any ideas that you’re moving in.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t. I’ve a place, a family,” she prattled, garrulous in ways that gave him a damned megrim, and yet also intrigued. “So you needn’t—” The young woman caught the look he leveled on her. “You were being facetious.”
“Aye.”
She wrinkled her pert nose. “Oh.”
Who was this woman with her absolute lack of artifice?
He held a brandy out. “Here.”
Verity hesitated, and then tiptoed over. Eyeing him with that same wariness she had in the sewers, she accepted that offering, and took a sip. She grimaced. “Good God, that’s vile!”
“Aye.” He’d always detested the stuff himself, and yet, there’d been a familiarity to the sight and smell of brandy that
had proved oddly comforting. Those peculiar details he’d never before shared with anyone, and he didn’t intend to begin with a minx who cloaked herself in more secrets than Malcom himself.
Cradling her glass, she wandered about the chambers uninvited.
He stiffened.
This feeling of being exposed was an unfamiliar one. Largely because he’d never let anyone inside his rooms, and now because of whatever damned spell this spitfire possessed, he couldn’t bring himself to bully her into stopping.
Though something told him that Verity Lovelace, who took down grown men in the street and didn’t so much as flinch at a bloodied nose, wasn’t ever one to be bullied.
Cradling her still-full snifter in her palms, she paused periodically to examine various pieces he’d fished from the tunnels. Ones he’d not brought himself to sell for reasons he didn’t understand and had never cared enough to examine.
Verity stopped, and with almost mechanical movements, she set her drink down.
And Malcom knew the very moment she’d forgotten his presence and become wholly engrossed in the crude painting in an ornate, gilded frame that juxtaposed with the unsophisticated rendering on the canvas.
Angling her head, Verity stepped closer, contemplating the small beggar girl crouched on a corner stoop. In that small child, the artist had perfectly captured the wariness, exhaustion, and absolute lack of hope that came from living here.
Verity raised her fingertips close to the basket of ribbons the tiny peddler hawked.
“You like it?” he asked gruffly, not knowing where the question came from. Only knowing he himself hadn’t ever been able to sort out why he’d kept this particular piece.
“I . . . There is a realness to it,” she said softly. “I was her.”
That admission came so faint he barely heard it. Or mayhap it was the first straightforward admission, voluntarily given, that took Malcom aback.
He moved closer, stopping just beyond her shoulder, and examined that piece with new eyes.
“I had a ribbon collection, until I didn’t. I placed each one in a basket and sold them at a corner until they were gone.”
That clue into her roots and background should be nothing more than a detail he locked away. Yet the image she’d painted of herself as she’d been—a struggling girl—was more vivid than the portrait before them. The desperation she spoke of was one he could understand. One that, despite all he’d amassed, the fortune he’d attained, stayed with him still. But then that was what set people in East London apart from the elevated members of the peerage, the strife that could never truly be forgotten. Not even when one rose up and freed oneself from the struggles of surviving.
Verity continued on to the next frame. He stood so close that her shoulder brushed his chest as she walked.
“Are you familiar with that, Verity?” he murmured. The young woman gave no indication of affront at his laying claim to her name. “Have you been that child?” Too.
Malcom had.
Bone weary with exhaustion as he’d regaled passersby with Scottish jigs for any coins they might toss his way.
Verity shook her head slowly. “No,” she murmured. “I was spared that.”
Aye, but wasn’t that the way of East London? One was spared one injustice but was the victim of ten more.
“Were . . . you?” she ventured, casting that always assessing glance over her dainty shoulder, and leveling him with it. “That child?”
Malcom set his mouth, and ended the exchange that had become entirely too intimate. Abandoning Verity to her examination of his things, he returned to the window to search out the man who’d been looking for them.
“Is he still out there?”
He peered out at the darkened streets. The lone figure out there, a small lad, darted along the cobblestones. No doubt on his way to streets that were filled with potential pockets to pick. “I don’t see him.” That should be sufficient enough to send her on her way. So why didn’t he?
Verity gave her head a slight, almost clearing, shake. “Do you believe he’s gone?”
It didn’t matter. She needed to leave. That was the only answer that made sense. So why couldn’t he bring himself to get those words out?
For some inexplicable reason, he settled for vagueness. “I’m not certain.”
She sighed, and with a restless energy resumed her circle about his private rooms.
Making a show of watching the streets, he alternated his study of the outside view and the woman reflected back in the slightly smudged lead panels. Her steps were gliding ones. More in line with the men and women he’d spied at a frost fair years ago, skating on silver blades over the frozen Thames, than with a woman walking on her own two feet. Her hair hung loose down her back; the dark curls glistened in the candle’s glow. There was something compelling about her.
“It’s a stunning set.”
He started. His neck went hot at being caught woolgathering. “Beg pardon?” he asked gruffly.
Verity motioned before her, and he followed her vague gesturing to the burled-wood chess table and the embroidered chess set that rested atop it.
Malcom grunted. “Never played it.”
“Oh, you should learn,” she said almost cheerfully. One might forget what had brought them together this night and that she even now hid from those wishing her harm. “It’s been years since I’ve played.” There was a wistful quality to that admission. “We could always . . .”
“What?” he asked tightly.
She lifted one shoulder. “It’s just, while we wait to be sure he’s gone, we might . . .” She nodded at him as if he were supposed to understand what she was suggesting. Which would be bloody nigh impossible with this one. Every last word out of her mouth left him spun around, and upside down.
“What are you saying?” His question emerged sharper than he intended.
Either way, she gave no indication that she’d detected the crisp edge.
“That we might play chess, of course. I could teach you.”
“You, teach me?”
“Chess,” she reiterated. Pulling out a chair, she sat, and urged him over.
Good God, the minx was mad. Of course, he’d had confirmation of as much when he’d stumbled upon her. This was just a needless reminder. “I didn’t invite you for tea and biscuits,” he said flatly. Dismissing her outright, he tugged the curtains back for another sweep of the streets.
“No,” she murmured. “I know that. It just seemed a way for us to keep busy.”
Keep busy. He scoffed. What a rubbish phrase. The whole of his existence was devoted to his work and scouring the sewers. There was no need to “keep busy.” He was busy.
Or perhaps he was the mad one, for Malcom found himself abandoning his place at the window, and joining her at the other end of that table. He yanked out the chair and seated himself.
Verity beamed, her full cheeks dimpling and her soft violet eyes aglow.
He’d never known a person could smile like that. All honest and real and luminous.
And then, as if she feared revealing her joy might make him quit the table, her smile slipped, and he lamented the loss of that earlier lightness. “Now,” she began, all matter-of-fact business that strangely proved as endearing as her earlier joy. “The chessboard is always arranged the same way. The second row”—she pointed to the area in question—“is filled with pawns. The rooks”—she gestured to those pieces—“they go in the corners, and the knights are next to them.” She held one of her two knights aloft. “Then there’re the bishops, and lastly the queen, who always goes on her own matching color, and the king on the remaining square.” Verity briefly paused in her telling to look up. “Have you gathered all that?”
“I think I’m following along sufficiently,” he drawled.
“Now, each of the six pieces are capable of different moves. You cannot go through another.” As if to illustrate that point, she knocked the rook in her hand against the pawn on her end of the board. “
The knight, however, can jump”—she demonstrated, leaping one of her two knights over one of her pawns—“but you can’t ever move onto an area with one of his own pieces. You can use him to take the place of your opponent’s piece, which is then captured. This is the king,” she went on, lifting hers up. “He’s the most important but the weakest.”
As she prattled on with her instructions on that piece and all the remaining ones, he found his gaze drawn to her mouth as she spoke. That full lower lip and slightly narrower upper one that set her mouth into a perpetual pout. Hers was a mouth that conjured all manner of wicked imaginings of even more wicked delights to be known. “The other special rule is called ‘castling,’” she was saying, completely oblivious to his lust-filled musings over her mouth.
He tamped down a wave of disgust.
Get control of yourself.
Malcom forced himself to focus on his unlikely tutor’s words.
“Do you have all that?” she asked, glancing up from the board.
“Aye.”
“Pink is paler than green, and the rules are white first. Therefore, it is your move . . . Mr. North.”
Barely sparing a glance at the table, he moved one of his pawns to the center of the board, and then waited for her to make her first move.
She frowned. “You didn’t even look.”
“I looked.” He nudged his chin at her, urging her to get on with her turn.
“Chess is about strategy and taking one’s time,” she intoned, her gaze firmly trained on the board. Verity chewed at a fingernail, the distracted worrying endearing. Fifteen loud ticks of the wall clock marked the passing time before she moved a pawn.
He moved his queen.
Verity eyed him quizzically. “Do you remember what I’d mentioned about the queen?”
Nay. It had been somewhere between that lesson and the one of the rooks that he’d become lost in improper thoughts about her mouth. “I know what she does.”
The young woman dropped her elbows on the edge of the table. “You’re just moving the pieces.”
Malcom matched her pose. “Would it matter if the only purpose is to pass the time until it is safe for you to leave?”
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