The Governess (Wicked Wallflowers, #3)(17)

No, most weren’t. Life had proven as much to Reggie. But Broderick . . .

“Do you think Broderick Killoran would make the decision to purchase or not to purchase an establishment because of a misplaced sense of righteousness?” Clara demanded, as if she’d followed the unspoken direction of Reggie’s thoughts.

No, the man who’d turned a seedy tavern frequented by society’s vilest thugs into a gaming empire to rival any in England would never let emotion drive his actions. This, however, was different. He’d saved Reggie, and that was a debt that could not be repaid and at the very least commanded a modicum of loyalty.

She made to return the document to the folder, but Clara put a hand on hers and stopped her. “Keep it.”

“I cannot do this. . .” Nay . . . “I will not purchase anything just three streets away. Nor is mine strictly a matter of honor. Broderick would crush any place in the Dials that even remotely threatened his bottom line.”

With slow, precise movements, Clara stacked the remainder of the papers and reorganized them so they were perfectly ordered. Shutting the folio, she shoved it across the desk toward Reggie. “Is it purely loyalty that drives you?” She held Reggie’s stare. “Or is it that you need as much distance as you can place between yourself and . . . him?”

Reggie’s gut clenched. If she’d been so transparent that this woman, whom she’d known less than three years, had gathered the depth of her weakness for Broderick, who else knew?

“No one knows,” Clara said with a gentleness that she’d only shown to the young women who answered to her at the Devil’s Den. She scooted her chair closer until she sat beside Reggie and then covered Reggie’s tense hands with her own. “This was not my dream, Reggie,” Clara continued with that same tenderness. “You presented me with an idea of something that has never been done.”

Yes, she had.

“Do you recall that night?”

“I do,” she said softly. Unable to sleep, Reggie had gathered her wrapper and slipped out into the gardens Broderick had built for Gertrude. She had come upon a quietly weeping Clara. “You said the idea was rot,” she pointed out. “That men wanted only one thing from women and it wasn’t their voice. Not unless they could have a woman on her back, too.”

A wry grin twisted Clara’s lips. “I was wrong.” It was a foreign admission men and women she’d lived amongst didn’t freely make. She gave Reggie’s hands a light squeeze. “Just as you are wrong now in not going forward with this.”

“I have not said no,” she said, a defensive edge sliding into her reply. “Only to this place.”

“And every place before it,” Clara interjected. “I’m merely asking you to come with me today. The appointment has been made. There is no harm in simply visiting the place.” She let that dangle there, enticing Reggie with a promise of a future.

Reggie dropped her gaze to the folder. Honor, logic, and self-preservation all warred for supremacy. And it surely marked her a faithless snake that she wanted to visit the property anyway. Broderick be damned. She wanted to put herself, her future, Clara’s future, and other nameless-for-now women’s futures, those women in desperate need of security, first.

And yet mayhap she was proving herself still the naive miss she’d been from the country, new to London, for she could not bring herself to betray the man who’d helped her when she by all rights should have perished in the Dials.

In the end, her allegiance to Broderick won out. “Find additional properties.” Reggie shook her head. “But it won’t be this one.”

“You deserve to be more than the lackey for some man who doesn’t need you and who’ll eventually cast you out.” Quiet even as it was, Clara’s voice still rang with the conviction of one who knew.

Reggie jumped to her feet. “He wouldn’t do that.” He wasn’t like Lord Oliver.

She’s a lovely fuck . . . worth the price . . .

Her breathing increased, and she dug her fingers into her skirts, her jagged nails penetrating the thin wool fabric. She’d not think of him. Or of that night. Or of every mistake that had brought her to this point . . .

Sadness twisted the other woman’s exotic features, wrenching Reggie back from the misery of her past. “Reggie, that is precisely what I said. And look at me now. Dependent upon you partnering with me so I might try my hand at a new beginning. And you? You’ll abandon your plans all because Broderick Killoran rushed to your rooms to see why there was blood all over his carpets,” she said with so much pity that shame coursed through Reggie.

God, how she hated Clara for being right. But she hated herself for wanting so very badly for her to be wrong. For Broderick had entered other rooms belonging to women who’d been hurt or injured, but Reggie had more often than not been at his side. He’d spoken gently, also wheedling details from them.

Not in a single instance, however, had he personally tended those bruises, scrapes, or cuts.

Fool. She was a fool, just as Clara suggested . . . wanting to see more where there never would be.

Clara touched her arm. “We need to both be thinking of our futures, Reggie. What will happen when Killoran decides he wants to become the next White’s or Brooks’s and rids himself of the female staff?”

“He hasn’t given any indication that those are his intentions.”