The Hunger(61)

“McGee, isn’t it?” Reed said as he closed the door behind himself. “You’re the one who replaced Silas Pennypacker.”

McGee ran a hand through his hair.

Reed cleared his throat uncomfortably. “It seems you have mistaken my desk for your own,” he went on.

A youthful grin crept across McGee’s face, lighting him up. Then he quickly corrected it, once again giving Reed a knowing look, as though the two of them were sharing a secret. “I beg your pardon, sir. It isn’t what it looks like—Mr. Fitzwilliams sent me to find this. He told me exactly where it was kept. I disturbed nothing else on your desk, sir.”

“And did Fitzwilliams direct you to open it as well?” he asked with a curt nod toward the ledger.

McGee looked Reed steadily in the eye. “I wanted to make sure I had the correct volume. The accounts can be confusing sometimes.” The young man was incorrigible—and lying, certainly.

Reed felt a pang of alarm as McGee rose from the chair—taken aback by his tall build, the way his shirt pressed firmly against the muscles in his chest. There was an energy about him, something Reed couldn’t quite pinpoint, that made it seem like he was going to reach out and touch Reed.

Reed held still, waiting for it.

But instead, McGee retrieved his jacket and moved toward the door.

For some indefinable reason, Reed couldn’t let the clerk leave just yet. He remained where he stood, blocking McGee’s way. “Why don’t you take a seat, Mr. McGee, and have a glass of whiskey with me? Perhaps I can help explain the ledger to you.”

McGee did not retract his bluff, if that was what it had been. He stayed and made himself comfortable as Reed poured two generous shots of whiskey from the bottle he kept in a desk drawer. They sat in chairs by the window, the fading afternoon sun falling across McGee’s lap, tracing fingers of light over his jaw. He seemed to be perpetually grinning even when he spoke, and Reed found he often lost the thread of McGee’s words as he stared at the younger man’s mouth.

McGee told him how grateful he was for this job—the business of real men, he’d said—after a failed apprenticeship with an actor. At first, the story seemed far-fetched to Reed—perhaps even fabricated—but as he learned more about McGee’s childhood in New York, the father who had been distant and cruel, and then the loss of both parents to illness, he began to soften toward the young man. There was a darkness in McGee’s past, that was certain—something he wasn’t telling Reed. But Reed didn’t pry. He wasn’t interested in the details, only in the way McGee looked at him—like he was a light in all that darkness. It seemed impossible.

“But enough about me,” McGee said then, though he didn’t seem at all ready to stop talking. “My background is hardly worse than what anyone might read in the news.” He laughed, and the sound caused Reed’s stomach to flip with anticipation. He crossed and recrossed his legs. “I read every newspaper I can get my hands on,” McGee went on. “Do you enjoy the news, Mr. Reed?”

“Me?” Reed frowned into his whiskey; he had no desire to answer questions. He felt once again caught, exposed. “I suppose I follow the news as much as any other businessman.”

This prompted McGee to reel off a series of delightfully horrific stories he’d read recently. How bodies were still being found two weeks after a terrible tornado had struck Natchez Trace and that Christian ministers were protesting the opening of some scandalous play in Philadelphia. Then a strange tale about a German ship that became stranded at sea and how, as the weeks without rescue dragged on, passengers and crewmen had to resort to cannibalism to survive. Edward’s eyes glowed as he heaped on detail—describing how they gutted a corpse in a lifeboat on the open sea, cracked rib bones apart to suck out the marrow—and Reed wondered once again whether Edward might be making it up. But why would he—merely to prolong the moment? Was he also reluctant for their time together to end?

“I was wondering, Mr. McGee, if you might care to join me for dinner? I was just on my way to the chophouse up the street.” Where had this idea come from? He had been on his way home to dine with his family. Margaret and the children were expecting him. Yet it seemed very important that this conversation with his new junior clerk not end. “They do a very fine lamb with mint jelly. You have my permission to crack the bones for the marrow, if that is your wish.” Reed had made a kind of joke—something he didn’t usually do. He was surprised by that.

He was surprised later, too, when he realized he’d never remembered to bring home his new hat.

The inevitable started that night, because Edward McGee really had seen something in Reed with those searching eyes—had discovered, or sensed, the secret that lay deep within James Frazer Reed. He knew what Reed wanted, probably well before Reed had admitted it to himself.

The change occurred over dinner brandy, the liquor relaxing Reed, lowering his reserve. He let his gaze linger on the clerk, who did not look away. At one point they both reached for the bottle of brandy and the young man’s hand rested on Reed’s. It was only for a moment, but that was enough. Reed would remember that touch for the rest of his life.

The next six months were bliss. Reed turned into a besotted schoolgirl. To think he had gone so long in life without love.

They passed as business associates, Edward acting as Reed’s private clerk. It was only natural, wasn’t it, for a man’s assistant to accompany him on business trips out of town, to long lunches at the club, to work late in the office? They carried on right under everyone’s noses. Reed was amazed that they got away with it.