The Governess (Wicked Wallflowers, #3)(94)

“Broderick.” She didn’t return that stiff formality but rather nudged her chin up and laid bold command to his name as though she had a right to it. And she had. For so long. How much more he’d preferred those syllables rolling off her lips as an entreaty for his touch.

A proper gent would have offered a polite bow and left her to her privacy.

Broderick had abandoned proper long ago. Restless and haunted by demons, he didn’t want to be alone with them. Nay, he wanted to be with her. Reggie, who’d always been there, a confidante and friend. And given the bastard he’d been, he wasn’t deserving of her company. He took it anyway. Pushing the door wider, he stepped inside.

Of its own will, his gaze worked a path over her. She’d abandoned her muslin skirts for a modest ivory nightshift and wrapper. At some point the ties she’d belted at her waist had loosened. The cotton article gaped ever so slightly, revealing a tantalizing hint of skin, more enticing than the green silk creation that had expertly draped her frame.

He swallowed hard. I am a bastard in every way.

Removing the box of matches and cheroot from within his jacket, he lit the scrap. “I heard you . . . playing,” he said, shaking his hand once and putting the flame out.

There were dark circles under her eyes. She was a woman haunted. And that truth ripped at him. “I was unable to sleep and thought I might . . . work.”

As Reggie tidied her space, her wrapper fell slightly open, revealing another flash of creamy-white skin and a hint of freckles that teased. Drawing his mind with questions of how far those alluring little specks traveled and the pattern they made upon her skin.

Reggie piled all the pages together and drew them protectively close, shielding the words written there.

Ah, innocent Reggie. She believed the source of his focus had been the ideas penned upon those pages and not the flash of creamy-white skin now hidden from sight. Glastonbury may have stolen her virtue, but she remained an innocent in every way that mattered. Broderick picked up a lone page and held it before her face, waving it lightly back and forth. “You forgot one, love.”

She made a grab for it, and the awkward pile shifted; the pages slid from her hold and rained down, fluttering between their feet.

An impressive sailor’s curse exploded from Reggie’s lips. Very naughty. Very dark. And not at all Regina Spark.

Finding himself smiling, the first real expression of amusement since his world had been ripped apart this latest time, Broderick fell to a knee.

“I don’t require help,” she said, her fingers moving frantically to gather up the papers strewn about. Reggie tugged the pages from his hands, adding them to her stack. Aye, she had a right to her suspicion. He wasn’t a man to be trusted, and certainly not one to turn over the secrets of one’s business ventures to. Only . . . this curiosity wasn’t born out of competition but out of a genuine desire to know . . . about her. “You needn’t . . .”

Broderick opened his mouth to offer a flippant reply and stopped. His gaze snagged on the neat marks upon the page in Reggie’s hand.

He puzzled his brow. Picking up the nearest sheet, he studied it for a long while. Reggie sank back on her haunches. Silent. Unmoving.

Broderick grabbed another page, and this time she was unresisting as he examined her work.

Why . . . why . . .

“The Last Rose of Summer?” At her answering silence, Broderick lifted his head. “It’s music.”

Surprise lit her pretty eyes. “You can read it.”

“And you can write it.” He stared wistfully at the instrument. How many years had he spent playing? After he and his father fled the earl’s properties, he’d not allowed himself to think back to all those pursuits he’d once enjoyed. They’d been frivolous and offered a man nothing in terms of survival. Broderick smiled sadly. “Most fathers would have been horrified that their son would rather be playing a pianoforte and composing original songs than riding or partaking in other boyish pursuits.” A memory flashed behind his mind’s eye. His father tapping his foot livelily while he skillfully struck the chords of his fiddle. All the while Broderick had danced a quick Irish step to those songs. And I’d forgotten all of that about him . . . until this moment. “My father was a master with the fiddle.” That reminder slipped out, for himself as much as the woman beside him. “He made his own.”

“I insisted mine play the Sligo style with his fiddle.”

“Your father had one as well?” he asked.

“Had one?” She snorted. “He made his own and every night would play.” All these years, that had been an unknown bond they’d shared. Before he could formulate a response through his shock, Reggie tipped her head back and forth and hummed a quickened tune. “I favored the o—”

“Ornamentation,” he supplied, sitting forward, craning closer to her.

Her eyes sparkled. “Precisely.”

They shared a smile.

He sank back. How much he’d forgotten . . . all of this. Any of it. What had become of that beloved instrument? In their hasty flight, the article had been left behind, and Broderick hadn’t thought of it since.

Mayhap because you haven’t wanted to think of it . . .

Reggie had made him think about . . . so much. Not just life inside his clubs and his quest for power and stability but the joys he’d once known and then let himself forget. And his father. He’d spent all these years hating him so that he’d forgotten the happiness they had shared as father and son.