Taming of the Beast (Scandalous Affairs #2) - Christi Caldwell Page 0,39
comfortable fire.”
She winced. “It’s not always been… as comfortable as you think.”
Finding strength in the reminder of who she was and who he was, he felt ice form around his heart. “Is this where you go about pretending we are somehow alike?”
Her blush deepened. “I didn’t say—”
“Where you think to commiserate with me over your woes and think it binds us?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer. “Well, it doesn’t. We’re not alike in any way, Faye,” he gritted out, shoving his face near hers.
She, who proved fearless at every turn, didn’t so much as edge back. She just met his gaze with her usual strength and boldness. “You can insist all you want that you are terrible and dangerous and cruel, but I’ve seen none of that,” she said evenly.
Tynan scoffed. “Why? Because it makes you feel better about the fact that you’re dealing with the most ruthless man in London?”
“I don’t believe you’re ruthless.” Her features darkened, as if she was offended on his behalf. As if she found it completely beyond the realm of possibility that he was a beast of a man. “In fact, I believe you are good. You just don’t see it.”
She was the first person outside his late mother and sister who’d ever treated him that way. A sweat broke out on his body, and he snapped.
“Stop,” he thundered, catching her lightly by the arms and pulling a gasp from her. “Just stop doing that.” He abruptly released her, for whatever the world said about Tynan Wylie, he would never put his hands upon a woman. Forcing his voice into a calm he didn’t feel, he spoke again in more measured tones. “You would undermine me at every turn. And try to sow seeds of suspicion about my reputation to the people I have dealings with here. And your fine-heeled friends.”
Faye caught her lower lip between her teeth, her stare falling briefly away from his and going to her feet. She swiftly found her footing.
Shame splotched the lady’s cheeks, bright red circles suffusing her pale skin. “I do not presume to know what you’ve known, Tynan,” she said in those haunting tones. “I do not believe my struggles somehow greater or in any way even tangentially close to what you’ve likely experienced.”
As she spoke, his gaze slid over the top of her head. Memories flooded his mind’s eye, and he saw himself as a child in the workhouse, using a hammer to crush human bones. Boom. Boom. Boom. Around him, his fellow workers also churned those bits of the human body into the fertilizer it ultimately became for the gardens of the peerage.
“But there is different pain that a person could know,” Faye was saying, drawing him back from those memories that had driven him for the whole of his life to ensure he never suffered that life of hell again.
“Pfft,” he said, curling his lip derisively at that naïveté. “You sit there in your fine garments, coming from your fine house. What have you ever really known about being uncomfortable, Faye Poplar?”
They stared at each other, their eyes locked.
Faye was the first to look away. But not before he caught the flash of hurt there. And he, who prided himself on being immune to those weak displays of emotion, felt his gut tighten with guilt. “Our time is almost up for the day,” he said tersely, wholly unnerved by this weakness on his part.
She jerked her gaze back to his. “But… but…”
“I gave you an hour. But what happens in that hour doesn’t mean you get a moment more because of it.”
Fire glimmered in the browns of her irises.
Tynan smiled. “Is there a problem, Miss Poplar? If there is, you can always leave and put this foolish venture behind you.” He swept his arm toward the door.
“There is no problem,” she said tightly. “None at all.” With that, she marched over to the table, grabbed the chair, and seated herself. “The remaining twenty-seven minutes are mine, Mr. Wylie.”
Mr. Wylie.
Not Tynan.
Which was… vastly better. Hearing his Christian name fall from her lips had created an intimacy—a false intimacy—between them. In even giving her his name, he’d already let her too close. Far closer than he’d ever let a single damned stranger in his life.
Faye picked up her pencil and tapped it in three rapid beats. “If you would, Mr. Wylie? This time I am claiming as my own.” She jutted her delicate chin at an obstinate angle.