Chapter 18
She’d had her dance.
A waltz, to be precise, with the Marquess of Landon, and Adair on the sidelines.
He should be relieved. After all, the roguish lord had spared Adair from suffering through a lesson and then those awkward movements.
So why did he sit in his office, three hours after their return, unable to sleep . . . or even focus on his work for the Hell and Sin?
Because you wanted to be the one to take her in your arms. You wanted to curl a hand about her waist and feel her fingers upon you . . . and instead some other man had claimed that right. Just as some other man would eventually claim Cleopatra as his bride. With a curse, Adair hurled the small stub of his charcoal pencil across the room. It hit the wall with a ping and then clattered unsatisfyingly quiet to the floor.
Nor, if he were being truthful with himself in the dead of night, had it solely been about Cleopatra dancing with another man.
This frustration and annoyance came from within . . . with himself and his own damned inability to dance.
A sharp, painful laugh tore from his lungs. Oh, the bloody irony of it. He’d scorned men who’d wasted their time and energies on such inane activities as dancing, just as he’d made light of Niall and Ryker both learning the rudimentary steps. And now, here he stood, feeling wholly inadequate. For even if his role as proprietor hadn’t kept him motionless, more guard than guest at Lady Beaufort’s affair this evening, his inability to dance would have. He, Adair Thorne, who’d long prided himself on being a master of anything he wished to do, had wanted nothing more in his life than to take Cleopatra in his arms.
Instead, he’d stood as a seething observer.
A light knock sounded at the door. Adair swung his gaze over to the door. It was her. Somehow in the time she’d been here, he’d come to feel her presence. He swiped a frustrated hand over his face. I’m either bloody exhausted or out of my eternal mind . . .
He considered ignoring that rapping. Considered letting Cleopatra believe he was otherwise somewhere else.
The door opened, and Cleopatra ducked her head inside. “I don’t believe for a moment that you didn’t hear me,” she nagged.
Adair sighed. Of course, he should have known better where this spitfire was concerned. She’d take command of any situation and space . . . including his office.
She folded her arms. “Did you just sigh because I’d come here?”
“I yawned,” he mumbled, going to fetch his pencil. He stooped and, picking it up, studied it. His broken pencil. Adair scowled at the tip.
“I know the difference between a yawn and a sigh,” she carried on with her usual temerity. Shoving the door closed with the heel of her foot, Cleopatra wandered over to his desk—just as she’d done so many times since she’d arrived here.
Only these late-night and early-morn exchanges were fleeting. Tonight’s waltz shared between her and Lord Landon was testament to that. He gnashed his teeth, his frustration intensifying as she climbed into his usual seat, her small frame nearly swallowed by the large leather chair.
The sight of her there was deeply intimate, and yet a reminder that they’d only been playing make-believe where their relationship was concerned. Ultimately, she’d belong to another. Mayhap, Lord Landon: too handsome for his own damned good, unscarred, once fought over by the prostitutes inside Adair’s club, and now by Cleopatra’s easy smile that night during their set, charmer of the wary Cleopatra Killoran. A red haze of rage descended over his vision, blinding, and with it spread an insidious jealousy throughout.
Humming a tavern ditty, Cleopatra dragged her knees up to her chest and focused on the notes Phippen had sent earlier that afternoon . . . otherwise neglected by Adair.
“I haven’t seen this yet,” she correctly noted.
He clenched and unclenched his jaw. How damned casual she was. When I’m a bloody mess inside.
“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” he asked, the question coming out harshly. Stalking over, he plucked the sheets from her hands and tossed them to the corner of the desk, out of her reach.
Cleopatra dropped her chin atop her knees. “We never worked out the final terms of our agreement.”
It was official, with her ability to torture him, she was very much a Killoran. Only this form of cruelty was all the worse for the unintentional delivery of it. “You had your first waltz. No need for one from me,” he clipped out as he gathered his papers together and proceeded to set his desk to rights.
Frowning at him, Cleopatra spoke slowly. “You never said what prize you intended to claim.”
It did not escape his notice that she didn’t refute his words. All she’d sought was a dance, and Lord Landon had provided her precisely what she wished, and far better than a street tough like Adair ever could . . . or would. “No, I didn’t,” he acknowledged, not lifting his head from his task. “I’ve business to see to, Cleopatra. I lost most of the evening to Beaufort’s damned ball and don’t have time to speak about a damned pretend wager.”
Another woman would have been sent fleeing at his sharp tone.
“You’re angry,” she observed. Slowly lowering her legs to the floor, she stood.
From the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of creamy white skin before her modest night skirts hid that delectable flesh. Damning her for this quixotic spell she cast, and damning himself all the more for wanting her as he did, he paused in his task and released an exaggerated sigh. “Why would I be angry?”
Cleopatra lifted her shoulders in an uneven shrug. “I don’t know.” She lifted an index finger. “But I do know you grit your teeth loud enough when you are, and this vein . . .” Leaning up on tiptoe, she touched the corner of his right eye. “It pulses when you do. As it is now.”
She knew those details about him. Adair briefly closed his eyes. For all he’d survived, he’d always believed himself above cowardice. Only to find with his inability to mention Lord Landon’s name, and the searing jealousy gripping Adair even now, just how little strength he, in fact, had. He took several steps back, putting desperately needed distance between them. “I was going to require you accompany me to the Hell and Sin.”
Cleopatra opened and closed her mouth several times. “What?”
She was the only woman in the whole of the kingdom who would have been diverted at the mention of taking part in the business end of discussions about his hell. “That was to be the deal,” he clarified. “I’d give you your first waltz.” Which Lord Landon had instead seen to. “In turn, you were to accompany me and assess Phippen’s work thus far.”
A little gasp burst from Cleopatra, and she moved with such alacrity, her wire-rimmed spectacles tumbled from her nose. “When?”
Not even a month ago, he’d have taken that eagerness as a sign that Killoran’s sister wanted nothing more than a glimpse of the inner workings of the Hell and Sin. How odd to find this woman had been so much safer then, than she was now to him.
“Adair?” she prodded, tugging at his shirtsleeve.
“When, what?” he blurted, hurrying to retrieve her glasses. He held them over.
Cleopatra jammed the wire-rims back on. “When are we going to your club?” She chewed at the tip of her finger. “Of course, it cannot be during the day, because we’d be seen.” She jabbed that same long digit up, and he grunted as it hit his nose. “Unless we go early in the morning before the ton awakes and—”
“We are not going anywhere during the day,” he said, cutting her off abruptly. Collecting her hand, he lowered it back to her side.
She was already nodding. “Very well, the early-morn hours when the staff is sleeping and the lords and ladies have returned from their night’s pleasures makes far more—”
“We’re not going at night, either.”
She knitted her eyebrows into a single, befuddled line.
“We’re not going at all,” he clarified, and resumed straightening his desk.
Silence met his pronouncement, broken only by the noisy shuffle of parchment and vellum as he organized his documents into tidy piles.
“Very well.” Cleopatra moved to the opposite end of the desk.
Perplexed, he glanced up . . . and froze.
The bespectacled miss who’d wholly captivated him stood with her arms bent and stretched out before her.
What in blazes . . . ?
“You owe me a dance—”
“That you already had,” he said as much for himself as for her.
“And I join you at the Hell and Sin.”
He gritted his teeth. “I’m not dancing with you, Cleopatra.” Because every time he took her in his arms, he became more and more lost. He needed distance from her. Space that was safe so he could see a restoration of logic and order.
“You’re angry again.”
God, she was relentless. “I’m not . . .”
Clearing her throat, she pointedly tapped at her closed lips. “Angry,” she mouthed, and then she lifted her arms into position.
Adair searched about, feeling more cornered now than he had as a boy trapped against a back alley with the constables close. She was unrelenting. She’d not quit until he conceded to the set and a visit to his club.
As if she’d followed his thoughts, Cleopatra waggled her arms.
“Foine,” he snapped. All he’d end up with by the time this lesson was through was a lesson in humiliation. Particularly as she’d so elegantly glided about Lord and Lady Beaufort’s ballroom with the rakish Lord Landon. Fury whipped through Adair, and he took a lurching step toward her . . . and then stopped.
He eyed the graceful arc of her arms, lost, when as a rule a man in St. Giles didn’t ever ask the way.
“Here,” Cleopatra murmured. Stretching a hand out, she gathered his left one in her delicate but firm grip and guided it to her waist. His fingers tightened reflexively upon her. The warmth of her skin penetrated the thin scrap of fabric between them, searing his hand. His mouth went dry as lust bolted through him. “Put your other hand in mine,” she said softly, and of its own volition, his arm came up and he found her fingers with his in a grip that felt so very right.
“Now what?” Was that question for himself . . . or for her?
“All the steps are: one, two, three. One, two three. Even,” she added, as a seeming afterthought. “You’ll step forward with the heel and backward with the toe to the foot.” She squeezed his hand slightly, urging him through the box movements. “And count: one, two, three. One, two, three.”
His pacing off, Adair stepped on her right foot. He cursed. Lord Landon hadn’t missed a single bloody step. His movements had been as smooth as his rakish smile.
“Shh. Close your eyes, Adair.”
“A man who closes his eyes is asking to be stabbed in the belly,” he muttered.
“Hush,” she scolded. “If you overthink the movements, they’ll never come natural. Your eyes,” she again instructed.
Adair hesitated and then complied. It was surely a mark of her hold over him that she managed to make him abandon so many of the rules of the streets that had guided his existence.
Cleopatra led him through the movements, neatly sidestepping the handful of furniture pieces in the otherwise empty space he’d converted into an office. Adair held himself stiffly erect, training all his efforts on the soft instructions she offered up. Her husky voice washed over him, chasing off some of the tension in his frame. Mayhap he’d been wrong about this dancing business, after all, and the fancy toffs had been correct. For there was something so damned appealing in having a woman in one’s arms like this. Nay, you wouldn’t feel that way about any woman. It’s this one.
He immediately stomped her left foot.
His eyes shot open in time for him to detect Cleopatra’s wince.
“Oi’m rubbish at this,” he rasped, slipping into his Cockney.
Cleopatra squeezed his hands. “Eyes closed.”
Then she began to sing. Hers was never a voice that would be considered flawless by society’s standards. It was slightly too low, and even more discordant. But there was a sultry realness to her contralto, and it only pulled him deeper and deeper into her hold.
As I was a walking down Paradise Street
A pretty young damsel I chanced for to meet.
She was round in the counter and bluff in the bow,
So I took in all sail and cried, “Way enough now.”
I hailed her in English, she answered me clear,
“I’m from the Black Arrow bound to the Shakespeare.”
So I tailed her my flipper and took her in tow
And yardarm to yardarm away we did go.
But as we were going she said unto me
There’s a spanking full-rigger just ready for sea.
“You sing that one often,” he observed.
This time, Cleopatra faltered, missing a step. Adair quickly caught her against him. Righting her, he brought them gliding back into steps of the waltz.
“That has nothing to do with your waltz lesson,” she said gruffly, fixing all her attentions on his shirtfront.
He caught her foot again under his, but instead of drawing back in humiliation and ending the set as he’d attempted to earlier, he continued waltzing her sloppily about his makeshift office. “No,” he acknowledged. “It has to do with you.” And he wanted to know because of it.
“Not much to say.” The pain in her tone said enough for her. “Diggory had one of his wives”—it was what he’d called the women he bedded and gotten his brats on—“care for me and my sisters. She used to sing it.” There was an air of finality that discouraged further probing.
And a little more than three weeks ago, he would have contentedly left her to her secrets and her past. A person didn’t ask those personal questions, but she’d cracked the door open, and he wanted to walk through.
“What happened to her?”
Cleopatra abruptly stopped. “Doesn’t matter,” she said impatiently, taking a step out of his arms.
Settling his hands about her shoulders, Adair brought her back around. “I don’t believe that.” He passed somber eyes over her face.
Her skin white and her eyes ravaged, she wore her pain like a physical mark. “Oi don’t talk about it.”
“And I don’t waltz.”
Cleopatra chewed at her plump lower lip. “Fair enough.” And yet, still, she said nothing.
Adair didn’t press her; he allowed her the time she needed, more than half-afraid that should she not speak on her own terms, she wouldn’t speak at all. “She cared for us, but not the way Diggory’s other women did. Joan cleaned our scrapes when we fell, or sang us songs when we had night terrors.”
What hellish dreams must have come to her as a child. Himself having survived Diggory’s cruelty and having also witnessed firsthand the suffering his siblings endured, he had an idea of what her childhood must have been like. His heart ached.
Absently, Cleopatra skimmed her fingertips over the top of his recent notes from Phippen. The tension in her slender frame, however, countered all show of calm. “Then Joan made an unforgivable mistake.”
Do not ask . . . Having found himself on the edge of death too many times because of cruelty exacted by Mac Diggory, he didn’t want to know that unforgivable mistake. “What was it?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
“She wanted to name us. Fought Diggory on it. Said we deserved names. Said she was giving them to us whether he liked it or not.” Cleopatra glanced up from his desk and offered him a chillingly empty smile. One that had no place on her lips. One that he wanted to erase from her face and instead fill her life with laughter that dulled all the darkest memories she carried.
Then her words registered. He shook his head. What . . . ?
“For many years of my life, I was simply Girl.” Cleopatra traced the D upon her palm. “My sister Ophelia was Stupid, and Gertrude was Twit.” A mirthless laugh bubbled in her throat but never made it past her lips. “I went through those years of my life believing my name was Girl.”
Oh, God. Her profession briefly weighted his eyes closed. Dead. He wanted to kill Mac Diggory all over again, only this time with his bare hands, and not the mercifully quick bullet his sister, Helena, had put in the bastard’s belly. “What did Diggory do to Joan?” he asked quietly. “After she’d wanted to give you a name?” The most basic gift passed down to a babe to begin their place in the world, and she’d been robbed of it until a stranger to whom Diggory had turned her care over stood up to fight for her.
Cleopatra drew in a slow, noisy breath through her teeth, then let it out. “’e set fire to our apartments. Diggory told me to choose.”
Horror turned his blood to ice in his veins.
“Someone always pays the price for lines being crossed,” she said in an eerie echo of orders that had been hurled at Adair himself by that same monster. “Oi ’ad to choose my sisters’ burning room . . . or Joan’s.” She took her skirts in a deathlike grip, draining all the blood from her knuckles. “Oi chose my sisters.”
“Oh, Cleopatra,” he said on an agonized whisper. He wanted to take her pain, make it his own, and fill her life with the happiness she deserved. He’d spent years hating her, but she, in having no choice but to remain under Diggory’s control, had endured far more than Adair or his siblings.
She waved her scarred palm about in a stiff gesture. “Oi did what I had to do.”
“I know that.” He paused. “Do you?”
Growling, she jerked her chin up. “Didn’t I just say I did,” she barked, sounding like a wounded pup he’d come upon outside the Hell and Sin once.
“No. You said you chose your sisters.” He continued with the same calm he’d affected for that fractious dog. Had she ever made peace with the sacrifice she’d been forced to make? But then, did any of them?
A sheen of tears filled her brown eyes, those crystalline drops made all the brighter by her lenses. It was the first time he’d ever seen her cry. With an agonized groan, he pulled her into his arms.
She held herself with such tautness, a sharp wind could have snapped her slender frame. Tightening his hold upon her, Adair lowered his cheek atop the crown of her head.
When she spoke, her words emerged muffled against his chest. “She told me Oi needed to save them. She made the choice.”
And yet, Cleopatra had claimed ownership of a decision that hadn’t really been a decision, taking on the guilt of it. “Oi wish we’d been kept together,” he said roughly. “Oi wish that Oi’d been part of the same end of London as you and your sisters.” For how her life would have turned out differently. She and her sisters would have become part of his family, and she’d not have relied upon a merciless monster.
Cleopatra stepped out of his arms, and he fought the need to draw her back, close. “That could ’ave never been, and it could ’ave never worked,” she said in deadened tones. She blinked in rapid succession and then looked up, her thick brown lashes shielding her thoughts from him . . . but not before he caught the flash of regret. As soon as that emotion flickered to life, however, it was gone. She jutted her jaw out. “After she . . . was gone, I took over caring for me and my family—until Broderick.”
“And you’ve been taking care of them ever since.” Did she realize she’d taken on the mantle of responsibility to assuage a guilt that would always be with her?
“I haven’t done it alone,” she said defensively.
Reality intruded. “Killoran.” How easy it was whenever she was near to forget who her brother, in fact, was. To set aside all the enmity between their families and just . . . be two people who enjoyed being together.
“My brother,” she corrected. God, how he abhorred her connection to that vile bastard, and how he resented her injecting him here. “He’s a good man.”
He met that with a mutinous silence. Adair knew precisely who Broderick Killoran was.
Cleopatra carried on in more wistful tones than he ever remembered her using. “He joined Diggory’s gang when he was orphaned. He was educated, a scholar who knew books. Knew math and poetry and Greek mythology and how to dance and . . .” She scrunched her mouth up. “He knew a lot.” She grinned wryly. “Growing up on the streets, he knows even more now.”
Surprise filled him. Her revelation was the most he or his siblings had ever gleaned about the enigmatic proprietor. And the puzzle that had eluded him all these years now slid into place. Why, it all made sense. Broderick Killoran had offered Diggory the one thing none of his lesser-born street thugs could—a bookish mind.
“So that is how Diggory managed to keep books and handle a business,” he said to himself.
Cleopatra nodded once. “Broderick had power over Diggory. My brother demanded he have the right to keep us safe. After Diggory realized how powerful my brother in fact was, he never laid hands on me or my sisters ever again.”
How was it possible to find himself so very indebted to Broderick Killoran? His gaze slid to the scarred flesh—that letter D left upon her palm by a monster. A cinch squeezed off airflow to his lungs. She’d known so much suffering. Feeling her stare on him, he forced himself to say something. Cleopatra would interpret any admiration or warmth as pitying. “It’s why neither me nor Ryker nor Calum had ever been of true value to him.” And Diggory had been too small a man to see Helena’s skill with numbers.
“Diggory’s bounties all went to the Devil’s Den, but it was Broderick who built it into what it is and allowed me to become who I did inside our world.”
A woman of courage, strength, and influence, who with her business acumen where gaming hell business was concerned, could rival Adair and his brothers. He brushed his knuckles over her cheek. “No one made you into the woman you are. You did that all yourself.” Her and the experiences that she’d suffered through and emerged triumphant, despite.
She shook her head. “You’re wrong there. You see me as Oi am now. Oi wasn’t always fearless. Oi didn’t speak my mind to Diggory. Oi found my voice when Broderick came ’round.”
Adair palmed her cheek. “Oh, Cleopatra. You’ve never been anything less than a warrior.”
Her lips parted, and a whispery sigh wafted out.
Wanting to ease the heartache he saw there and drive back talks of Diggory and Killoran and right or wrong and good or bad, he drew her fingertips to his lips. “My turn, then.”
She looked at him quizzically.
“Visit the Hell and Sin with me,” he clarified.
It was an act his brother would have his head for if the truth were discovered, but for the first time since his siblings had each wed their respective spouses, Adair understood what it was to want to bring a woman nothing but laughter and happiness.
Her eyes went soft. “When?”
He grinned. “Now.”