In Bed with the Earl (Lost Lords of London #1) - Christi Caldwell Page 0,69

stay empty until they crumble with time. Now get out.”

Instead of the last hasty flight she’d made in the dead of night two weeks earlier, Verity slowly straightened. “Very well. I won’t bother you again.”

“Good—see that you don’t,” he called after her retreating frame. “Oh, and Miss Lovelace?” She paused. “If you cross me again, I’ll ruin you.”

A faint shudder shook her frame, and despite that fear, she sent her chin tipping defiantly up. “You needn’t worry. I’ll not.” A moment later, Verity Lovelace was gone.

“The miserable minx.” How dare she enter his world and tell him how he ought to live. Or question the decisions he made. He owed her nothing. He owed no one anything, which was by design.

Stalking over to the window, Malcom edged his curtains open. He scoured the pavement, and then found her.

The young woman descended the four steps with all the regal grace of a queen. She drew her shoulders up, and for a moment, he expected her to look back. To challenge him with her gaze, just as she’d defied him at every turn. But she didn’t.

“Good,” he muttered into the quiet, the sough of his breath fanning the smudged glass panel and blurring the figure below. It’d be a good day when he never saw Verity Lovelace again.

You’d be lying to yourself if you don’t admit the exhilaration you feel run through you whenever she’s near.

As if she’d followed those damning silent thoughts, the ones indicating that she knew the unwitting fascination he had with her, the young woman stole that final look back.

He curled his lips up in a mocking smile and touched a pretend hat brim.

Even with the stretch of distance between them, he caught the slight wrinkling of her pert nose. She lingered there on the pavement. Here in the rookeries, where innocents were robbed of all and left bearing the scars of that onetime naivete.

Malcom balled his hands. She was not his problem. She’d come here of her own volition, risked her own foolish life and limb. One such as her, one who took on the care and responsibility of others, only found oneself on the losing end of life. That’d be her fate and not his.

No one was his problem—as he preferred it.

You have properties. Ones that you keep empty. Not caring that you sacked servants who needed work . . .

Aye, as she’d stated, he had properties, but empty ones without servants. A piercing pain shot to Malcom’s temples. An agonized hiss escaped through tightly clenched teeth, and Malcom caught his head in his hands, applying pressure in a bid to dull that stabbing sensation.

But it was no use. Agony continued washing over him in waves.

A face flashed behind his eyes. A voice. A pair, conversing. A towering, liveried servant, glancing down at a small boy with his palms upstretched . . . An extra biscuit is yours. Now be on your way, Master P—

Gasping, Malcom jerked erect as the rest of that memory vanished. Sweat spilled from his brow and burnt his eyes, and he blinked back the sting of discomfort. He forced them open and searched again for the one responsible for the resurrection of demons that may as well have belonged to another.

Gone.

Upon the horizon, there wasn’t so much as a trace of Verity Lovelace.

Malcom scrubbed the sweat from his face. How dare she? How dare she come here and call him out? She knew nothing of it.

For that matter, he knew nothing of it. Not truly. Not his past. All the memories were murky at best, blank at worst.

Until now . . . Until that distant echo of another place and another time with figures he couldn’t place, yet innately knew. I was that boy with that servant.

“Enough,” he croaked, needing to hear his own voice, to hear anything other than the loud buzzing in his ears in order to ground himself firmly in reality and focus on a safer outlet for his rage. The insolent virago who’d dared to enter his residence and call him out.

Not caring that you sacked servants who needed work . . .

He didn’t care. He didn’t.

And yet . . .

If he didn’t care, then why not allow those people to remain as they’d been, tending an empty household and toiling away at their miserable existences, just as Malcom himself was?

“Bram,” he thundered.

The bulky former tosher limped in several moments later. “Aye?”

Malcom frowned. As long as he’d known the other man, he had been lame. “It’s gotten