The Governess (Wicked Wallflowers, #3)(96)

“Answer me this, Regina.” Regina. How she loved his full command of her name. It bespoke an intimacy that even though false conjured the myth of more. He drifted closer. “Had you been a nobleman’s daughter, would you have found yourself on London Bridge with a bounder such as me?” he asked without recrimination.

She stared at the chiseled planes of his cheek, the faintest half-moon scar at the corner of his left eye that she herself had cared for. “I wouldn’t,” she said softly. Rather, she’d found herself there because of one of those nobs whose worth he elevated. And yet she’d been safer with him than any nobleman. Never once had he expected repayment in the form of her body. He’d required nothing. He’d entrusted her and his sisters with responsibilities no man of any station bequeathed to a woman. And in that goodness, he’d snagged each corner of her heart.

He lifted a finger and wagged it. “That is precisely my point.”

Reggie set her papers back down on the pianoforte. “Marrying a nobleman does not mean a young woman will be cared for.” Lord Oliver’s hated visage flashed behind her mind’s eye. “It will see her rank elevated, but you know, Broderick, you have seen the gentlemen who come to your tables. They lose fortunes. They beat women.” Please. Please, don’t . . . I’m so sorry. Do not . . . Her cheek throbbed in remembrance of a fist that had rained down with a staggering frequency. She cleared her throat. “They”—she forced the words out past the thick shame clogging her throat—“bed women outside the bonds of matrimony. You know that. You’ve seen that.” And she’d lived it.

He said nothing for a long while. And then: “Not all gentlemen are like . . . him.”

Reggie tipped her chin up. “Have you seen honorable ones amongst their ranks?” she countered. The ones who visited the Devil’s Den were the basest lords who cared for nothing outside their own pleasures.

“I have.” At that somber admission, she drew back. “My . . . godfather was.”

“Your . . . ?”

“Godfather,” he supplied. “Yes, I had connections to the nobility.” He followed that with a wink. “Not by blood, however,” he clarified. And then he said nothing more.

“But . . . but . . .” Her questions ran together, jumbled in her mind.

“How did I come to be here?” He plucked free one of the queries there. “A thief’s blood runs in my veins.” As he spoke his gaze grew distant, and she knew the precise moment he’d forgotten her presence. “My da attended Trinity College with an English earl. They were the best of friends, and when Lord Andover was summoned home upon the death of his father, he took my father with him. Named him his man-of-affairs and set him up on his estates. I never knew my mother. She died birthing me. Instead, I grew up on those properties with my father and an earl who never managed to have children of his own. I wanted for nothing.” He absently picked up the music she’d been composing before he’d arrived. Broderick turned it over in his hands, lingering on the notes.

A short while ago she would have wrenched it from his fingers and demanded possession of those pages and her secrets. Now she wanted ownership of his. He set them down. “I had the finest tutors. The best garments and horseflesh. There was nothing I wished for. I was treated as well as any nobleman’s son, except for one slight distinction . . .”

“You didn’t have noble blood.”

He credited that with the reason he’d found himself alone on the streets of the Seven Dials.

“Aye. I merely had a godfather who entrusted my da with . . . everything. His records. The hiring and firing of the household staff.” The long, muscled column of his throat moved. “All his finances.”

A thief’s blood . . . “He stole from him.”

Her statement snapped his attention back. His lips curled in the corners in an empty half grin. “Aye,” he said with a flawless Irish brogue.

And yet . . . Reggie chewed at her lower lip. “What happened to him?”

“He offed himself.” He spoke with a casualness that was belied by the tortured glint in his blue eyes. There it was. The darkest of sins that was taboo to even whisper.

Oh, God. Her gut clenched. At her darkest time, when she’d contemplated a jump into the Thames, there had only been a shamed father and siblings left behind. There had been no child. Whereas Broderick had gone from a privileged life to one . . . alone. Resentment chased away the grief for the young boy he’d been. “No,” she corrected. “Your godfather. What happened to him?”

Broderick reached inside his jacket and withdrew that box of matches and cheroot.

Reggie plucked them from his fingers and set them down atop her belongings. “You don’t even like them,” she gently chided.

He frowned, briefly eyeing those scraps. And then . . . “He tossed us out.”

She sank back on her heels. “He tossed you out?” Broderick’s traitorous father, she could understand. But . . . “You and your father? Even after your father took the coward’s way out and your godfather knew you were alone?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know that he ever discovered that.”

“Well, then he should have.” Her voice climbed. “He should have. That is what you do when you love someone. You find them. You help them. You support them. You don’t let them suffer through life on their own.” Hatred sang through her veins on behalf of the boy who’d been failed by so many. A sound of disgust escaped her. “You make him out to be far more than he is. An honorable gentleman doesn’t punish a child for the sins of his father.” Whereas Reggie . . . her dark deeds were her own. There was no one else with whom blame could be placed. She owned her decisions. Every bad last one of them. “Oh, Broderick. What you could never see was that you didn’t need a link to the nobility. You have always been noble”—she touched her fingertips to his chest—“for who you are in here.”