“I never was very good at modesty.”
His hand seized on the cue. She’d purred the words directly into his ear. He could feel the heat of her breath on his nape. It lifted the small hairs there.
Slowly he turned his head. She didn’t retreat an inch. A sly half smile curled her mouth. It shot through
him like an electric current, arrowing straight to his groin.
“Am I distracting you?” she asked.
“Not in the least,” he said, but the huskiness in his voice betrayed him. She laughed and glanced toward his cue.
“You’re about to commit a foul,” she said.
With a silent oath, he withdrew his cue, which had wandered dangerously close to her ball. “And how, pray tell, how did
you
grow so skilled? I didn’t imagine Bethnal Green would be home to many tables.”
“Not like this one,” she said promptly. “This here is a fine setup, indeed. Slate and India rubber, aye? But we’ve got tables thereabouts, if none so flash.”
“And you were able to play at them?” He could not imagine women were welcomed into billiard clubs, even in the East End.
She mistook his meaning. “It ain’t all work in the Green. My friends and I, we always knew how to spend a half day properly. Down at O’Malley’s pub, there’s a table and some card games, too. Poker was always my favorite. You going to shoot anytime soon, or do you give up?”
He laughed and bent back over the table, sighting quickly.
She leaned near again. “That’s a Long Jenny you’re thinking to try. Don’t know as I’d advise that to a man with a weakness for the screw.”
He gave her a sharp look. The brightness of her smile announced that she was well aware of the double meaning. She all but danced backward, laughter glinting in her eyes. “The screw,” she said. “You know, that spin you put on the ball when you strike it below the center.”
“I do have a particular talent for the screw,” he agreed. “I’d be glad to demonstrate it. Now, or shall we wait for my five minutes?”
“Ha!” Her laughter sounded giddy.
He shook his head at her, then took his shot, sending his ball rebounding off hers and into the top pocket. “Three to me,” he said, turning so rapidly that she had no time to dance away again; suddenly they were standing chest to breast, and the sudden dilation of her pupils suggested she was no more immune to this current between them than he.
He reached out and brushed his knuckle along her satiny cheek. A pulse beat at the base of her throat. He moved his thumb to it, pressing lightly. “I am looking forward to those five minutes,” he said quietly.
Her throat moved beneath his thumb as she swallowed. Her dark blue eyes were fathoms deep, brilliant in the light shed by the electrolier overhead. She did not look so much like Kitty after all. She looked nothing at all like Kitty.
“You’re cocky as a rooster,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said. “You’ll have to tell me if my confidence is justified.”
“Seems unwise to count on victory when you haven’t seen anything from
me
yet.”
She started to step away and he closed his hand on her upright cue, effectively trapping her. “I cannot tell you how eager I am to remedy that.” He ran his palm down the stick, pausing a bare inch from her hand, brushing her knuckles with the tip of his littlest finger. “Indeed, I can think of no one I’d rather play games with.”
A visible shudder moved through her. “You play games with a lot of people?”
“Not lately,” he said quietly.
Her chest rose on a long breath. “Oh. Why is that?”
“I seem to have lost interest in them.”
A flush stained her face. The smile she gave him trembled a little before disappearing. “You’re good company,” she said. Then she shook her head and laughed. “When you’re not going on about the weather.”
He let go of her cue and stepped back, strangely exhilarated. “Thank you,” he said. “Then you’ll be glad to know that I also play poker, now and then. I confess you’re the first lady I know to do so. How did you learn?”
As she looked away toward the table, the brightness faded from her face. “Oh, Michael has a knack for it. My stepbrother,” she added with a shrug.
Now she appeared as stiff as she had in the dining room. “You’ve never mentioned a stepbrother before,” he said.
She remained silent for a passing moment. “Well. Hannah, the girls from the factory … Some people are worth missing. Some aren’t.”
“You lived with him, though?”
The look she flashed him seemed resentful. “Where else was I to live?”
The odd reply triggered an intuition. “He was the one who hit you.”
Her face became impassive as she turned to take up the chalk. “Aye, well. They say you can’t choose your family.”
He watched her closely as she scrubbed the chalk across the tip of her cue. “But now you know that he isn’t your family. Although I suppose he was chosen, by your supposed mum.”
Her eyes narrowed as she looked over her shoulder at him. She was still quite tetchy on the subject of Jane Whitby. But after a moment’s study of his face—she was deciding, he gathered, whether or not he’d meant the remark as a jibe—she decided to relax. Turning to lean against the table, she said conversationally, “She’d no idea what she was bargaining for with that marriage.”
This remarkable moment—this decision to trust him, even if only in a matter so small that she probably had not consciously debated it—gave Simon a thrill of satisfaction. He found himself smiling, and realized how thoroughly inappropriate it was only when she frowned at him. Forcing his expression to straighten, he said, “Tell me. What bargain did she end up with?”
She shrugged as she set aside the chalk. “Jack Whitby was a good man. But he died within a year of the match. All we got for it was his wretched, no-good son. And a flat,” she added thoughtfully. “That is—” She rotated the cue in her hands. “We got the right to rent his flat after he passed. Mum might have had a hard time finding one for us, otherwise.” She pulled a face. “Nobody likes to rent to a woman. Can’t depend on her for the money, they say.”
“Because women are paid less,” he ventured.
Her look suggested he’d said something very obvious. She reached for his glass, not asking before she took a long drink. “They’re always the first to be sacked if times are hard. Or if they fall pregnant. And they’re worth less on the lines than a man, anyway. People think they’re not dependable tenants.”
He accepted the correction with equanimity. To her, these things
were
obvious. To him, the rules of poverty—and of honest moneymaking, for that
matter—seemed fairly obscure. “And when did he take up hitting you, then?”
For a long moment it seemed she wouldn’t answer. Then she sighed and finished the last of his drink. “Well, he always had a bad temper. But”—her glance was sharp, daring him to object—”my
mum
stood in the way, more often than not. And when he was younger, he obeyed her. Scared of her, no doubt.” A breath of a laugh slipped from her. “Mum could be properly fierce.”
He made some noise of agreement, although his thoughts were blacker. Indeed, a woman capable of snatching a six-year-old in the night might be willing to do any number of things to put fear into someone. “What changed, then?”
“He got put in jail.” She pushed off the table and surveyed the spread on the baize. Then she leaned over and took the shot in one smooth move, knocking out a canon that potted the red ball and netted her five strokes.
Simon felt a flicker of dismay. A lucky shot, no doubt.
She did not remark on the victory as she turned back to him. “That riot last year in Hyde Park—Michael got taken up by the bobbies. Wasn’t the same afterward.”
The hint of sympathy in her voice shocked him. She could feel for a man who had blackened her eye—more than once, Simon suspected. “I would hope that you don’t feel sisterly toward him.”
“No,” she said after a moment. “But he’s a pitiful creature, you’ll agree.”
Pitiful creature
. As Simon lined up his shot, the description put him in mind of a fatally lamed horse. He knew how to deal with those. It required a bullet.
He knocked out a winning hazard, then turned to catch her attention. “You needn’t worry about him now,” he said. “He’ll never come near you again.”
Hearing Simon talk of Michael made her feel queasy. God forbid they ever met. Michael would loathe everything about this man: his handsome clothing, his untroubled laughter, even the hew of his broad shoulders and the easy, muscled grace of his well-tended body. He had arrogance bred into him, and Michael had been nursed on rage. If ever they met, somebody’s blood would spill.
A shiver broke over her and left behind an ache that felt like foreboding. She shoved the thought away as she leaned over the table. It didn’t take but a moment to spot her target. She made another canon and pocketed her ball, causing the lord of the manor to groan.
Good Lord, maybe he really imagined he’d win. The thought made her grin. He couldn’t complain later that she hadn’t warned him.
As she straightened, all this talk of family stirred a thought that had been preying on her for days now. “I want to meet my sister.”
“Ah.” A brief silence. Simon glanced toward the tip of his cue, where his thumb was testing the grain of the leather. “I called on her this afternoon, but she wasn’t at home. I left a note.”
“She knows I’m here, now.”
“So I assume.”
She took a quick breath against the sinking feeling in her stomach. “You think she doesn’t want to see me?”
His light eyes met hers squarely. “She
hasn’t
seen
you, yet. Once she does, her opinion of my tidings will change.”
“Or maybe she didn’t get your letter.” She couldn’t believe that Katherine wouldn’t even be curious. “Who’d you leave it with? Could somebody have taken it? To protect her, you know. If her guardian thought me a fraud—”
His long mouth twisted in a grimace that said it was possible. “If he did intercept your letter, I suspect it wouldn’t be the first time he’d done so. You did try to write to your father, didn’t you?”
Nell’s cue slipped from her grasp, the butt thumping hard against the floor before she caught it up again. “He was the one who got old Rushden’s letters? The guardian—Grimston, aye?”
He gave a single nod.
“Well.” She wet her lips. “Grimston.” The name felt unhealthy on her tongue, slippery and sour, like the skin on spoiling milk. “Now I know who I should have saved my bullets for. He’s a bad ‘un, is he?”
“He likes money,” he said. “Your sister has it. I believe he has designs to wed her—preferably as the sole heiress, you understand. Whether or not she knows his intentions, I can’t say.”
“Maybe somebody should tell her.”
“Kitty has never been known to take advice.”
“
I
could tell her.”
He slanted her a cynical smile. “By all means. But do keep in mind that family is … often not as one would hope. And you were raised very differently, of course. Katherine Aubyn is very much her father’s daughter.”
A nervous flutter stirred in her stomach. “Was old Rushden so bad, then?”
“To her?” He shrugged. “I suppose she wouldn’t think so.”
“But to you, he was.”
“Ah. Old business, long finished. Too tedious for a night such as this.”
“It’s all right if you don’t want to talk about it,” Nell said. “But I admit I’m curious.” She cleared her throat, feeling a touch awkward. Reaching out to run her finger along the edge of the baize, she added, “I grew up thinking my father a farmer from Leicestershire, you see. But I supposed you aren’t the best man to ask about the late earl.”
Simon laid down his cue across the corner of the table. “It is a bit of a tall order, to ask me to speak of him in any measured way.” He turned away to the liquor cabinet, glass clinking as he refilled his whisky and poured another for her. She accepted it with a murmur of thanks.
They leaned against the table and drank, their eyes on the fire burning low in the hearth. Woodsmoke and the scent of oiled leather blended with the rich fumes of the drink in her hand; the silence felt companionable. She’d almost forgotten her curiosity when Simon finally continued.
“I will say this: he was learned. He liked the trappings that came with his station. Ritual, tradition, meant a great deal to him. Manliness,” he said after a brief pause. “Honor, courage. He would have flourished as a soldier—a general, mind you, someone who gave orders rather than took them. But he would have put himself at the front lines, no doubt, and cursed any bullets that dared to strike him.” He hesitated. “I suppose you have that quality from him: very little cows you.”
The compliment startled her, since it was delivered at some price to him: it had required him, in a backhanded sort of way, to compliment her father as well. “Thanks,” she mumbled—fighting a losing battle with a foolish smile, which she directed first toward the malachite mantel, then to the tall brass dogs that guarded the fire screen.
“Your courage is not exactly like his, of course.” Simon spoke in a slow, low voice. “His was—inflexible, you see.” She stole a quick glance at him and saw that he wore a slight frown, a look of concentration. “He had no patience for any way but his own.”
She gathered that he was feeling his way out of the previous moment—trying to retreat from any appearance of kindness toward old Rushden. But he was proceeding carefully in the attempt, lest he wound her by accident in the process.
He was kinder, she saw suddenly, than she’d ever imagined a man like him could be.
She put the glass to her lips but didn’t drink.
She
liked
this man.
The idea required a long, bracing swallow.
Like
wasn’t a feeling most people held in high value, but when paired with all else Simon St. Maur kindled in her—attraction, interest, admiration, gratitude—kindness tipped the balance of feeling into something hotter. It kindled a greedy longing that flamed through her body and left her unable to remove her attention from his sharp-boned profile.
All she said was: “Go on.”
Simon nodded absently, his eyes on the glass in his hand. “Cowardice rather fixated him. He was terrified, I think, of being seen as … weak? I’ve no idea why, but, yes, that was his devil. And so he saw weakness
everywhere, in the most peculiar places.” He gave her a brief look of significance. “In harmless inclinations. An eye for beauty. An interest in art, in music.”