The Scoundrel and I - Katharine Ashe Page 0,49

her grandmother until…

“But trust is essential in business, Miss Flood,” he said. “And with this little escapade you’ve broken my trust.”

“Mr. Brittle, I understand that broken trust is difficult to mend.” She understood it intimately. “But—”

“Then you’ll understand why I have to let you go.”

The numbness settled in instantly. No need to flare into panic or distress, after all. She knew this road well.

“Very well,” she said. She cast a final glance through the press room doorway, to the desk and work that had been her life for eight years, until a captain in the Royal Navy who could barely read two words on a page came along. Lady Justice’s latest pamphlet was still in the frame and the pressmen were running the pages, one sheet after another with well-practiced fluidity, printing the pamphlets that would be sold on street corners throughout London tomorrow. Pamphlets that would net Brittle & Sons many hundreds of pounds.

Anger rose in her, swift and burning. Taking up her bonnet, she went to the door.

“Father, please,” Charlie said behind her. “You cannot—”

“No, Charlie,” she said. “Do not beg on my behalf. It is beneath you. And it is beneath me. Good-bye now.” She left the shop, and walked home. When she passed the grate in the cobbles in the alley, the place where she had lost much more than a few pieces of metal, she did not even look down.

~o0o~

“You did what?” The Earl of Bedwyr was gaping.

“Heard me the first time,” Tony growled.

“I heard you, but I still cannot fathom it.”

“Would’ve done the same yourself.”

“I would most certainly not have asked a woman to marry me for those reasons, you chivalrous numbskull. You are the only fool here with more honor than sense.” The earl wagged his head. “Idiot.”

“So glad I stopped by, Charles. Can’t tell you how much this is helping.”

“Imbecile.”

For a moment the only sound in the room was the ticking of a clock on the mantel.

“And you say she refused you at first, but then changed her mind?”

“Said she thought it over more carefully.”

“How inconveniently fickle of her. Why didn’t you simply tell her that she had lost her chance?”

“Because I ain’t as much of a scoundrel as you, I guess.”

Scoundrel.

Tony sank his face into his hands, but Elle’s soft, saucy eyes were before him every time he closed his, and he wanted a gangplank and a shark-infested sea to throw himself into.

No. He wanted her. He wanted her so much he could taste her—feel her in his hands—smell her hair and skin.

“What will you do?” Cam said. “Marry the widow and her multiple children?”

“Poor thing’s got no one. No family. No money. I can’t leave her and the little ones to the streets.”

“Mm,” his friend agreed grimly. “Or the workhouse.”

Yet if Brittle threw off Elle, she would be in the same boat.

No. That wasn’t so. Gabrielle Flood had too much spirit, too much good sense, too much intelligence and gumption and daring and willful verve to ever surrender. For God’s sake, she had masqueraded as a Hungarian princess at a society ball. Also, she didn’t have three little ones to feed, clothe, and house. And hundred to one, some man—some man better than him—would come along, give her his name, set her up in a fine cottage, provide her with children of her own, and she would make him the happiest fellow on land or sea.

Tony stared at the palms of his hands. Hers were always stained with ink: the fingertips, knuckles, even the palms sometimes. He suspected she didn’t even realize it. Or care. She had a mind and heart bent to a single devotion.

If she were his, he’d buy her a printing house.

He wanted to do it now. He would instruct his solicitor to start looking for a building, and a printing press for sale. He ached to give her what she deserved.

It couldn’t be. If Jane Park had plenty of reasons to reject a gift from a man who wasn’t her husband, Elle had even better reasons. And he would not open her to the potential shame of others misconstruing it.

Perhaps someday—an anonymous gift of a printing press—long after she’d forgotten all about him and would not guess where it came from…

The notion of that future without her was so bleak, he groaned.

“It seems to me that you are going about this all wrong, Anthony,” his friend said, echoing the words Elle had recited to him days ago from Peregrine’s letter to Lady Justice. Bedwyr was a