Undressed with the Marquess (Lost Lords of London #3) - Christi Caldwell Page 0,72

said gruffly. He wandered closer to where Rose now sat, playing with a pair of metal, painted soldiers. “I went walking.”

She bit the inside of her cheek hard, hating the pull stealing had always had over him. Hating the danger he’d willingly put himself in, again and again. “Where. Did. You. Go?”

He stared down at the child in the middle of the carpet, confirming everything she’d feared. “A baron’s.”

“A baron’s,” she repeated.

“Bolingbroke.”

Quitting her spot at the cradle, she joined him over by little Rose. “Why did you visit him, Dare?” Because she’d have the words from his own damned lips. She’d have him own where he was and what he’d been doing.

Only with his next words, he proved he couldn’t. “You know, Temperance.”

That was it.

You know.

And she did.

She swiped her hands over her face. “Oh, Dare,” she whispered.

A muscle throbbed at the corner of his mouth. “You don’t want me selling the contents of this household, and yet you don’t want me robbing from those who deserve to be robbed.”

He expected a fight. Mayhap even craved it. She’d not give that to him. “You don’t get the right to determine that someone should have their things taken, Dare,” she said calmly. Mayhap it was simply that she’d uttered those words so many times before to him that allowed them to emerge as evenly as they did.

“His family sold a child to Mac Diggory,” he said bluntly. “What do you say to that?”

Her entire body tensed. She heard what he was saying, and yet after all the evil she’d known at her father’s hands, still she could not process this depravity.

“He is responsible for some boy having been lost to his family and rightful place. I’m not the only one Diggory purchased.”

“Is that what happened to you?” she whispered, her voice breaking. “You were . . . purchased?”

“No,” he said bluntly. “I wasn’t taken. I was ten and I . . . left. I went freely with one of Diggory’s henchmen, imagining a grand adventure: me, living on the streets without my father’s disappointment and anger to follow me there.”

Her heart buckled under the weight of what he revealed: Dare’s first real offering about his past. A past he had clear memories of . . . and memories that were not the grand, happy ones she’d expected.

He took a step toward her. “And everything that happened to me was my fault for it.”

Tears threatened, and she gave thanks for the cover of darkness, lest he mistake that moisture for pity and not the regret it was. “You were a boy,” she said, wanting to know everything there was about his past. Needing to know more about him than the stranger he spoke of. And mayhap in his speaking of it, Dare could free himself of the chains that still held him.

“I was a boy with an unhealthy fascination with East London.” He spoke as one who recited words that had been spoken to him many times before. “A man there offered to show me everything I wished to see of the Rookeries.” His gaze grew glazed, distant. “And for several weeks, it was a grand adventure. Me learning to steal and filching bread that I could give to the hungry boys and girls. It was all fun.” His expression darkened. “Until it wasn’t. Coins were exchanged, and I was passed over to Diggory . . .”

She shivered, unable to let her mind think about the hell he’d known.

Dare gave his head a shake. “Until I managed to get free and go back to . . . stealing and passing things out.”

But he’d not returned home?

Rose banged the two soldiers together, clanging the metal and squealing loudly at her efforts. One of the toys skittered out of her reach, and Dare sank to his haunches and returned the item to her care.

Temperance weighed her words. “And . . . what did you hope in going to the baron’s?”

“I think that should be fairly obvious,” he said dryly, shoving to his feet.

“No, I rather think it is not.” It had never been straightforward or matter-of-fact where his efforts were concerned. There’d always been more to Dare’s motives. To each decision he’d made about which household to rob or not. Of which artifact to steal or not steal.

Just as she didn’t believe it was a coincidence that he was here, even now.

Together, they watched Rose while she played. “Do you know what I think, Dare?”

Lost in thought, his brow contemplatively furrowed, he gave his