Taming of the Beast (Scandalous Affairs #2) - Christi Caldwell Page 0,86
man than she felt with anyone, even her own family.
Faye drew her knees up to her chest so she was perched on the chair with her chin atop them and watched him as he went through his ablutions. “You didn’t say who hurt you,” she murmured.
With all the secrets he insisted upon between them, she expected he would not answer that question.
“My father was a miserable bastard,” he said, wiping the sweat from his chest as though it were the most casual cleaning in the world.
Mayhap it was. For all the fuss Polite Society made about carnal affairs, was there anything more natural than this between a man and a woman?
“He lost his work and found solace in a bottle and comfort in beating up his wife and”—his jaw formed a hard, resolute angle—“daughter.”
“And what of you?” she asked quietly.
His broad shoulders came up in a quick, offhand shrug that both confirmed the abuse he’d suffered and the discomfort it brought him to speak of it.
Her heart convulsed, and she hugged her arms tight around her knees as she imagined a small boy with his dark curls suffering so at his father’s hands. Even now, he didn’t speak of the pain he’d known, but rather the mother he’d lost and the sister he still sought to protect. A man such as Tynan would never have tolerated those acts against his family. She bit the inside of her cheek and then made herself ask the question. “Did you…” Except, she couldn’t get it out.
“Kill him?” he finished so very coolly for her. “It certainly was what he deserved. But no.”
“What happened to him?” she asked quietly, after he’d put his shirt on.
“My father?” he asked, as if they’d ever been speaking of anyone else in this exchange.
She nodded.
“He was caught stealing from the supplies of coal at the workhouse we called home.” A cold grin frosted his lips, an indication that, for all his indifference, a bitter rage and loathing for the man who’d sired him lived on.
It was something Faye understood all too well. Not necessarily in the way he did. Her parents had never laid anything more than a cruel word upon her. And then she froze, staring at him. “You had him turned over to the law,” she said softly.
“Horrified?” And this smile on his lips was the ugly, sneering one he’d worn at their first meeting, back when they’d been strangers.
Strangers? Weren’t they still, after just a handful of days of knowing each other? And yet, they’d also shared so very much in that short time.
Faye swung her legs over the side of the chair and stood. Her skirts fell with a soft swish about her ankles. “No,” she said with an instantaneousness that only truth could bring.
At her approach, his body tensed.
Faye stopped before him, and resting her palms upon his chest, she smoothed them over the fabric that hid those scars. “I admire you for placing the safety of you and your mother and Sara over perceived loyalty to someone simply because they are a parent. Just because he shared your blood did not make him your family. It didn’t make him deserving of your love or devotion.” Her mother hadn’t been her family for so long. Mayhap forever. “Whatever fate he met, Tynan? He deserved.”
His eyes locked with hers, and a kindred connection flared to life born of an understanding they each carried about what family was—and what it was not.
Tynan glanced at the door. “Your family is likely missing you. You have to go,” he said gruffly, shattering the all-too-brief moment.
Another wave of regret swept through her at how swiftly he’d ended that moment. “My family is otherwise busy.” Springing into motion, Faye fetched her cloak and drew it about her shoulders.
“Too busy to notice their daughter and sister is missing?”
Actually, it was that exactly. “My siblings are living their own lives. And my mother is occupied with my eldest sister,” she explained. She made to bring her hood up, but Tynan came over. Edging her hands out of the way, he set to work righting her hair with a tenderness that did funny things to her heart’s beat. “Th-the servants all believe I’m with Daria.”
“The peculiar girl you call friend?”
The icy inflection he’d once used was no longer there.
“She’s not peculiar. She is interesting, and I adore her for it.” Just as she’d come to admire and appreciate him.