Taming of the Beast (Scandalous Affairs #2) - Christi Caldwell Page 0,12

left upon the floor, the household had the same look it had when Tynan had begun renting it out two years earlier.

Tynan unfastened the buttons of his jacket and hung it over his opposite arm.

Aye, they’d stripped the place clean.

Not that he would have expected anything else of the old couple he’d paid to keep up this place. Not that he would have expected anything else of anyone.

The floorboards behind him, groaned.

Tynan went still.

“Stop.” That low growl came from behind him, those steps ones Tynan should have heard, but that had also been so stealthy as to be impossible for him to have heard. “Now, turn yerself around. Slow.” The follow-up command came quickly.

Perhaps it was simply that being locked up for nearly half a year in that prison had cost him his edge. Raising his arms, Tynan complied, moving in a careful circle so as to not get himself blown clear through.

The ten-year-old boy’s eyes widened. “Mr. Wylie,” he whispered in some of the thickest, coarsest cockney Tynan had ever heard.

“Care to lower that, Finn?” he drawled. “I didn’t make it out of Newgate only to take a blade to the chest here.”

The child promptly let his arm fall, his eyes alight as he sprinted forward. “Ye’re alive,” he whispered.

“Can one stab a ghost?” Tynan motioned to the dagger the child still held.

The boy paused, his freckled nose wrinkling under a wave of contemplation. He scratched at hair about eight months overdue for a shearing. “Not so sure, sir. Me mum said ye’re best just asking a ghost to leave. They don’t take too well to angry people ordering them about.” The boy’s face fell. “Or that’s wot she used to say.”

He’d been orphaned some five years now. That was one similarity they shared—weak mums in the Dials. Mums too soft for these parts, who’d done neither Tynan nor Finn any favors when it came to matters of survival.

The child’s blond eyebrows snapped together, and he took several hasty steps back. “Are ye a ghost? If ye are, would ye please mind leavin’?”

Tynan chuckled. “Alas, it would take a good deal more to smite me than a stint in Newgate.”

Finn immediately brightened. “That’s wot I said. But nooooo.” His little features pulled in a scowl. “They insisted ye were dead, or soon to die in that prison, and that everything was fair game to take.”

Once more, Tynan assessed his household, now stripped to the bones. Rats in London were made up of the four-legged as much as the two-legged sorts. That they’d left Finn to fend for himself was a surprise to none. “And yet, you stayed,” he remarked, rubbing the back of his neck, the muscles sore from too many months spent on an unforgiving, hard prison floor that had still been more forgiving than the thin mat he’d been provided.

“Oi knew ye’d be back. And it wasn’t my place to take anything, sir,” Finn added with a lift of his shoulders. “Managed to hide away some of your clothes, and some towels and dishes, too. Tucked them away under the loose kitchen floorboard, and then moved them back when everyone was gone. Ye’ll find yer things in the kitchen cupboard.”

Tynan started for the kitchens. “It was your place to take what you needed,” he pointed out, pushing the door open. “You should have sold it before they did.”

The child followed quickly at his heels. “But the stuff didn’t belong to just anyone. It was yers.”

Thinking like that was the reason the boy had found himself living in a ransacked household with a belly that was smaller than when Tynan had first hired him and set him up here.

Doing a glance about the kitchen, he found the firepit cold and the table as bare as the rest of the residence. Tossing his jacket across the back of a dilapidated wood chair that hadn’t been taken, Tynan headed over to the stack of wood at the back door and proceeded to set a fire in the stove.

Finn appeared at his shoulder with the small metal tinderbox.

Tynan worked in silence, kindling the flame and getting the logs to catch until a sturdy fire burned in the hearth. He remained there, squatting alongside the stove, and then rubbed his hands together, bringing warmth to the frozen digits… and welcoming the heat he’d achieved with his efforts.

Fire.

Of anything and everything he’d missed while being locked up, it hadn’t been the food—he’d been accustomed for too long to going without to have ever