The Governess (Wicked Wallflowers, #3)(35)

It was a living, breathing force that never truly left a person; it had lain dormant in Reggie, put to rest by the blanket of security Broderick had provided.

But it was always there.

She wet her lips. “H-hello?” she called out again. Danger. It hung in the shadows and blanketed the room. “Is anyone there?” she demanded.

Reggie battled with the logic that had driven her life these past ten years.

“Don’t be silly,” she whispered, in desperate need of any voice, including her own. “No doubt he’s keeping you busy, as you kept him yesterday.” After all, the pompous solicitor had been quite clear in his tangible disdain for Reggie and her insolence.

And yet . . .

Reggie had grown up in the English countryside, but she had lived long enough on the streets to sense danger. And it churned within her entire being—an instinct not to be ignored. One that said, Run.

Sprinting over to the table, she grabbed her bonnet. Her fingers curled hard around the brim. The brittle straw crunched damningly loud in the otherwise stillness. Heart racing, she bolted for the front of the club.

She’d return. When she and Clara were both able. But this, coming here alone, had been folly.

Suddenly the door opened, and she raised her bonnet reflexively to her eyes as sunlight doused the room, temporarily blinding her.

The stranger drew the door shut with a decisive click.

Reggie stumbled back several steps, and relinquishing her bonnet, she yanked out her knife. “Stop,” she ordered, proud of the steady deliverance of that directive. “I . . . ” Her thoughts and words faltered. A peculiar buzzing filled her ears as the fear that had sent her into flight exploded within her.

“Never tell me you’re leaving already, Miss Spark?” A frosty grin iced the lips of the towering gentleman before her. From the ruthless glint in his hazel eyes to the unyielding harshness of his aquiline features, he stood before her a stranger in all ways that mattered.

Reggie clutched a hand to her throat. “B-Broderick,” she whispered.

He peeled immaculate white gloves off with meticulous precision, finger by finger. Slowly. Deliberately. He drew each fragment of this moment out, a panther toying with his prey. A lethal, unforgiving creature poised to pounce.

This is bad.



Broderick let the silence stretch on. Toying with her.

All the while, rage gripped him.

Reggie was to have been the one he depended on, the one constant for his family, and with one act she’d gone and stripped that all away.

She’d deceived him. And no one deceived him.

It was an offense that went unforgiven and forever remembered.

That included the guards and staff within the Devil’s Den who’d worked for him, all the while unfaithfully funneling information to the late proprietor’s wife.

Those men and women who’d betrayed him, however, had been different.

They’d been ones he’d inherited from Diggory. People whose first loyalty had been to their original liege and his deranged, now dead, wife.

They’d not been people he’d rescued from the streets and stuck his neck out defending when Diggory and all his henchmen had ordered Regina Spark thrown from their midst for her absolute lack of usefulness.

He’d never asked for her loyalty in return. He’d simply . . . expected it.

And now, Reggie’s guilt stared back at him, reflected in her eyes.

“Hello, Miss Spark,” he finally said, shattering the quiet.

The long column of her throat moved, and she cast a desperate glance beyond her shoulder to the documents neatly laid out upon a table. When she returned her gaze to his, the usual spirited glimmer had chased back all her earlier worry. “What are you doing here?”

Brava. He’d expected her to wilt. To cry, perhaps. He should have known better. And had she done so, had she cowered and shook as she’d done at finding him before her, it would have made it vastly more difficult to go through with his plans for her.

He leaned a shoulder against the doorway. “I trust I should ask the same of you.”

She flinched . . . but did not back down. “You followed me.” Mayhap a day ago, before he’d read the information brought to him by Stephen, he’d have felt a suitable amount of remorse at having done so.

“And do you intend to stick a blade in my belly because of it?” he drawled, nodding pointedly to the dagger clutched in her white-knuckled grip.

Reggie followed his stare and then swiftly dropped her arm to her side. “I have never given you reason to follow me about,” she said tightly, returning her knife—a knife he’d provided her—to the pocket sewn along the front of her cloak.

It was amazing the conviction she put behind her pronouncement.

“Now,” he went on, venturing past her and removing his cloak as he went. Broderick stopped beside the makeshift workstation. “Shall we begin?” He tossed his garment in a purposeful display of mastery along the back of her chair.

The faint tread of her boots striking the floorboards indicated she’d moved. “Begin?” she echoed, confusion steeped in her tone. With all the enthusiasm of Eve confronting the serpent in her gardens, Reggie hovered across from him. Yet again, however, she didn’t bow to fear.

Then the truth hit him. “You still have not pieced it together?” He made a tsking sound. He saw the question in her eyes as clearly as if it had been spoken. “I’m disappointed. You’ve always been far cleverer than this, Miss Spark.”