Beauty Tempts the Beast (Sins for All Seasons #6) - Lorraine Heath Page 0,61
seduced him. Was it the same with all men or with only him? She’d thought being a temptress involved peering through lowered lashes, revealing bits of forbidden flesh. What if she’d had the wrong of it all along, and it merely involved being only herself?
Last night he’d sought her secrets. Tonight she wanted his.
“After dinner I had time to curl up with your book. I suspect after we are done here, I shall be up the remainder of the night turning the pages.”
He’d abandoned the fire to look at her, and she was grateful to have a clear view of his eyes, his features, as she continued on. “Your depiction of the city at night is so vivid I felt as though I were actually walking through it. How do you manage it?”
“It’s the world I know.”
“Why do you write about murder? Why not write about fairies or ship captains or young ladies searching for a prince?”
“I know nothing of ladies searching for a prince.”
“But you know of murder?” She knew it was a silly question. People could write about things of which they had very little knowledge. Yet a tiny part of her, no bigger than a grain of salt surely, wondered why he’d not told her how his name, Beast, had come to be.
After taking his drink in hand, he crossed the ankle of one foot over his other knee. He looked to be a man settling in to tell a saga that would take most of the night. And she didn’t care if he spoke until dawn, didn’t care that it was dangerous to her heart to know so much about him. To see him as anything other than an impartial tutor. Unfortunately, when it came to him, none of her feelings sought impartiality.
“When I was a lad of about eight, I spied a man, in clothing finer than anything I’d ever seen, strolling about Whitechapel. He so fascinated me that I followed him for a time. Periodically, he would stop, remove a golden timepiece from his waistcoat pocket, look at it, tuck it back into place, and carry on. I wanted that timepiece with a fervor that to this day I don’t think I’ve ever known since. So I stole it.”
Her eyes widened at that because every timepiece she’d ever seen a gentleman carry had been accompanied by a fob that secured the watch to a buttonhole in his waistcoat. It would take remarkable skill to free it without being snatched up by the scruff of his collar, and only one sort of person would have that skill. One with a great deal of experience at lifting things. “You were a pickpocket?”
He merely shrugged. “It’s not an aspect of my life about which I’m particularly proud or tend to boast. However, a lot of lads and lasses in the rookeries are. Some blighter is always willing to teach you how to nick things without getting caught as long as you give him a large portion of what you pilfered. But I saw the timepiece as my way out. I knew if my mum ever realized what I did, she’d be ashamed. At the end of the day, I gave everything I’d stolen, except for the watch, which I’d hidden in my shoe, to Three-Fingered Bill and told him I was done, wouldn’t be working for him any longer. He was not pleased with my announcement, and that evening I returned home with two broken arms.”
“My God, no.” When she reached for her sherry, she realized her hand was shaking.
Again, he simply shrugged. “He gave me the choice. One broken arm for the arrogance of believing I could just walk away. Two if I wanted his permission to walk away. I chose the latter. Never regretted it.”
“He let you go?”
“He might have been a criminal, but Bill was a man of his word. Sometimes I think about how he might have used me once I grew into myself because at the time, I was naught but gangly legs and arms, large for my age but not particularly graceful. I paid a small price to be free of him. And I had the timepiece, so I went to work as a knocker-upper.”
Until three months ago, she’d not known what one was because they’d had servants to wake them. “Griff hired a man for threepence a week to rap on his window at half five every morning so he could get to the docks on time. Is that what