The Governess (Wicked Wallflowers, #3)(42)

Broderick caught his chin between his thumb and forefinger, contemplating Reggie.

She simmered, her body poised for a fight on this point.

“Very well,” he acquiesced. “But a guard is with you at all times.”

Fury lanced through her. “Am I to travel in shackles, too?” Reggie sneered. “That would certainly earn you the respect of the peerage you so desperately crave.”

He flushed; splotches of indignant rage suffused his cheeks. “We’ll begin with just the guard,” he said, refusing to take the bait she’d hurled at him.

“I’m no man’s prisoner. I want independence to conduct my affairs without your spies about.”

His eyes formed slits. “That is nonnegotiable. Is there anything else?”

She wanted to leave. To end this meeting and find a place to privately rail at her folly in trusting him. “Nothing,” she spat. “I want nothing from you.”

“Come. You did this to us. You, Reggie.”

A shuddery smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “There was never an ‘us.’” Not truly. Not in any way.

He considered her for a long moment with that piercing, penetrating stare capable of stripping a person of their secrets. And for one horrifying, agonizing moment, fear struck. Fear that he knew the secret she’d kept from him all these years. That he’d at last gathered her reasons for leaving were largely grounded in what she could never have—with him. He spoke. “You act the wounded party, Reggie.” That use of her nickname sucked the palpable anger from the room and restored a familiar ease to their discourse. “Do you think I wanted this?” He shoved the legal documents across the table at her. He didn’t allow her to speak. Nor did Reggie in this instance have any words for him. “I trusted you more than nearly anyone. I shared things with you about the club that I didn’t even reveal to Cleo.” Cleopatra, who’d been like a second partner at the clubs before she’d gone and married.

And yet . . . Reggie hadn’t wanted that to be all he’d shared with her. She’d wanted him to share himself—the past he kept secret from all, the family he’d had before he found himself in the same hellish existence Reggie had. She looked away.

“And you?” he spat with such vitriol she forced herself to meet his stare.

Betrayal blazed bright within his always guarded eyes. Reggie’s throat worked.

His rage had been easier than the sting of his disappointment. “You were intending to not only take my best staff from me, Reggie, but also planning to leave with barely a goodbye?”

“I was going to tell you,” she said, her reassurance lame even to her own ears.

“And what? Hmm? Knock on my door and give a short notice at the hell as though you were simply any member of the staff and not . . .” He gave his head a shake, leaving that statement unfinished.

Her ears pricked up. “What?” she asked, unable to call the question back. Neither did she want to. For she needed to know just what she had been. She held her breath, weak as she’d always been for this man because of that yearning.

He gave her a sad smile and completed his thought. “My friend.” Her heart dipped. “You were my friend.”

Were, which implied a friendship that had come and gone.

Sadness flooded her: for the loss of that bond, but also for the loss of something that had never been. “Me leaving,” she said tentatively, “does not have to mean we become enemies.” That is never what she’d wanted to come out of her departure. “My having an establishment of my own doesn’t undo the years of friendship we shared.”

The indifferent mask was back in place. “Whatever bond we shared is dead.”

His pronouncement carved a place in her already-broken heart.

Broderick proceeded to gather the documents and papers strewn about the table. How many times had he carried out those same mundane movements before her? She stared on, unable to look away; sadness filled her. Every casual exchange they’d shared may as well have existed within another lifetime for all that had come to pass in these last moments. “I’ll have new documents drawn up with the terms carefully spelled out.”

“Thank you.” She pulled a face, detesting that response born of automaticity that had been chiseled into her as a respectable young girl in Kent.

He didn’t spare her another glance. “You are dismissed.”

Reggie jerked.

Like a servant. Drawing on every last lesson of deportment she’d doled out, she climbed slowly to her feet. Shoulders back, chin up, she gathered her cloak and shrugged into it. Broderick now saw her as nothing more than hired help. In a sense, that was all she’d truly ever been. Oh, he might dress their relationship up as friendship, but he’d paid her well, and she’d dedicated her time and energies to the Devil’s Den.

Reggie placed her bonnet on and, hating the quake of her fingertips, tied the strings under her chin. “Mr. Killoran.”

With that she swept out and left him there in the club that would one day be hers, feeling very much like she’d struck a deal with the Devil himself.





Chapter 11

Any hope you have is false. Nothing and no one will save you . . .

“Where are they?”

It was the fifth time since Stephen had joined Broderick outside the Devil’s Den, beside the loaded carriages, that he’d grumbled that question.