Taming of the Beast (Scandalous Affairs #2) - Christi Caldwell Page 0,43

now. “Time’s up, Faye.”

“But—”

“You know my terms, love.” Tynan stood. “You’ll come here, and I’ll accompany you.”

The lady looked about ready to protest, but then sighed. He studied her as she fetched her cloak and donned that elegant article. Everything about it, from the luxuriant shimmer of the muslin, to the glide of her steps as she headed for the door, marked her a unicorn amidst the seedy side of his world.

Then Faye froze at the doorway.

He tensed. That slight stiffening of her stubborn spine was one he knew all too well.

Even as she turned, dread filled him about whatever insane thought had entered her foolish head now. “You weren’t an orphan.”

It wasn’t a question, but rather a statement.

One that brought him up short, not for the first time that day… with her. Because of her.

“I don’t…” He shook his head.

The lady didn’t so much as move for several moments, and then she blinked, her lashes sweeping down, and it was as if she were coming awake after a long slumber. “You said about Diggory, ‘He’d enough homeless boys without a ma or da to look after them that he wouldn’t bother with me.’ You have a family.” There was a soft-spoken gentleness to those last four words, ones that oozed with both tenderness and questions.

God, she saw and heard too much.

All the cool he’d mastered these years failed Tynan in this instant.

His entire body recoiled, and his mind stalled. Keener than Newgate was cruel, Faye Poplar missed not a thing. Not a damned thing. She was perhaps the most unlikely of adversaries, and also the most worthwhile, he’d ever come up against.

“Had,” he bit out. “I had a family.” Having assumed the role he had as warden and as one who’d wheeled and dealed with some of the most powerful to amass wealth and power, he never would have one again.

“What?”

“I said, ‘Time’s up, Faye.’” He growled that single syllable that was her name.

She nodded. “Very well. Tynan.” Pressing the handle, she let herself outside and was gone.

Chapter 11

“You kept your word,” Faye said sunnily.

After all.

The lady might as well have tacked on those two words as they made their way through the Rookeries the following morning.

Nay, not just the Rookeries. The seediest, darkest, most dangerous end of those streets.

And yet, walking side by side along the broken cobblestones, with the stench high, they might as well have been taking a stroll in Hyde Park or down Mayfair. “I must admit, given the false address and the twenty guineas you pilfered…”

As she went prattling on, his mind recoiled. Good God, what had he gotten himself into? In retrospect or hindsight, he probably would have been better off declining the offer of freedom she’d brought to Newgate and taken his chances.

Any other option out would have been free and clear. Even in death.

There wouldn’t have been someone thinking to hold him to any deal, because people knew he wasn’t a man of honor. They knew…

“… but here you are, and now here we are. And I do appreciate you not playing any games this time, Mr. Wylie. I would have never been able to conduct the research in the limited time I have were it not for you, and…”

The lady talked. And talked. And—

“Do you ever shut up?” he snapped with a terseness and rudeness that would have horrified any woman into silence.

“Actually,” she continued cheerfully as they headed across the street, “my sister Claire is known for her loquaciousness in the family, and my brother, Tristan, is ever the charmer with his words.” She didn’t even pause to fetch a breath as she spoke about her family. “And Christina is also easy with her words.” And by God, he was winded just listening to Faye Poplar. “But I’m generally not much of a talker. If you can believe that.”

He fought the urge to dig his fingers into his temples and rub as a slow-growing megrim formed. Alas, the young woman would have had to have a street’s wit to realize his had been a damned rhetorical question. “I cannot,” he muttered under his breath.

Faye heard it anyway. “Oh, mine was a rhetorical question. No answer needed there, but we don’t really know one another altogether well for you to have gathered that. Though I did see you naked,” she slipped that detail in so very matter-of-factly, Tynan missed a step, righting himself. She smiled. “But I trust by the time our arrangement is complete, we will be very familiar