In the Dark with the Duke by Christi Caldwell Page 0,54

throat, and she took a step toward the doorway out.

Hugh caught her to him, keeping her in place beside him.

“Wh-what was that?” Ava croaked.

There was a beat of silence, and then the girls took off running in the opposite direction.

The footsteps retreated until they faded altogether and the only sound was that of Lila and Hugh’s mingled breathing.

“Well known, indeed,” he said in barely discernible tones against her ear.

Yes, her family’s failed construction project was information that had fascinated the ton for some time before other gossip had taken its place.

“This isn’t going to work,” he whispered.

Her heart dipped. This was where it came, then—the rejection he’d been so insistent on giving her at their first meeting.

“We’ll have to meet someplace else,” he went on in that same hushed voice. “Someplace where we aren’t going to find ourselves hanged for being there.”

“And do you have a place in mind?” she returned, matching his quiet tones.

“My apartments.”

It took a moment for those two words to sink in.

He’d invited her to . . .

He arched a brow. “That is, unless you have a problem meeting in my apartments?”

It had nothing to do with the location, and everything to do with the fact that they’d be alone. In his household, where there’d be none of her family or their servants on the fringes, one wrong move away from discovering Lila and all she was up to. “No. I’ve no problem,” she lied.

Meeting in the privacy of his home could only be dangerous.

And yet she proved as reckless as she’d been at Manchester, for she found herself eager for tomorrow, when she’d join Hugh Savage in his apartments—alone.

Chapter 13

He’d not thought she’d show.

The following morning as he unlocked the oak door of his East London apartments and found Lila standing on his stoop, he accepted the young woman’s resolve to continue her lessons and their arrangement.

Of course, he should have already gathered enough about her spirit and determination to know she’d never turn tail and run.

And now? Now, she was here.

She smiled. “Good morning, Hugh.”

And with the same command of every moment and exchange, Lila stepped past him and made her way inside.

He gave the collar of his jacket a hard pull.

No one had ever stepped inside his apartments, and for the simple fact: there was no one in his life. The extent of his friendship with Maynard and Bragger was really just their partnership. Aside from the club and the ties that bound them to their past, Hugh had no dealings with them. Which was, in short, the way of their world. There weren’t really friendships or families; there was just taking what one could from another and offering up whatever skills one had in return. Men and women of the rookeries operated under a system of barter, where it always came down to the services they could exchange.

Lila glanced back, a question in her eyes, and he forced his feet to move, entering more slowly behind her.

Now, as the silent Lila March swept inside the cramped, largely empty quarters he called home, he was needlessly reminded of how little he possessed in this world.

And yet, for as sparse as the four rooms in this place were, it may as well have been a palace when compared with the places he’d called home since he was just a young orphan in the rookeries.

Lila looked around the quarters, and it was a reminder to him that he didn’t know where she came from or what her world looked like. But there was only one certainty on which he’d stake his life in that moment: her residence didn’t and wouldn’t ever look like this.

“Is there a problem?” he asked coolly as he pushed the door closed behind them.

“No,” she murmured, that clever gaze that missed nothing moving through the room to the pair of mismatched upholstered armchairs in desperate need of reupholstering. The Irish Fools Chair tucked under the table.

Her eyes stayed on the folded, dark-oak drop leaf table. That small piece, where he took his meals and reviewed his work for Savage’s Fight Society, merely highlighted that Hugh’s was a place for one.

Which was simply as it had been and would always be, but her seeing that solitary state to his existence? It left him feeling exposed in ways he’d never been.

“This is where you live,” she said wistfully.

“Did you expect more?” The question came more sharply than he intended.

Lila, however, merely lifted her shoulders in a casual little shrug. “I just thought you