The Governess (Wicked Wallflowers, #3)(43)

It was the same question Broderick himself had been asking for the better part of thirty minutes.

“They’ll be along,” he said tightly, staring at the double doors hanging open.

“Ya told them to be here twenty minutes ago.”

Broderick frowned. He knew very well the directive he’d sent around that morn to Gertrude and Reggie. The carriages had long been loaded with trunks and valises, and his sister remained inconveniently absent.

Though it isn’t your sister whom you’re worried about . . .

Reggie Spark, who’d given him countless reasons to be wary of her, was the true source of his unease.

“Maybe she snuck ’round back?” Stephen piped in, hope contained within that supposition.

Broderick caught his speedy brother by the back of his collar. “Reggie doesn’t sneak,” he said impatiently. She was a spitfire who’d gone toe to toe with him at every turn yesterday in ways that he’d never expected. He’d always gathered there was a strength in her, but never before had she turned that fire upon him.

“She don’t sneak. Now we know that ain’t true,” Stephen pointed out. “She does.” He flashed a gap-toothed smile. “Just badly,” he added, nudging Broderick in the side. “Freakishly tall to be of any use in the Dials.”

Broderick scowled. “Watch your words,” he warned, immediately quelling whatever else Stephen had been about to say.

Color splotched Stephen’s cheeks. “Ya’d defend her?”

“Men don’t talk unkindly about women.”

His brother wrinkled his nose. “Yeah they do. All the time. Lord Tamley said Sally’s tits were even smaller than her brain.” A muscle leapt in Broderick’s jaw. His brother referred to the disparaging words hurled by drunken patrons. That was what Broderick had unwittingly exposed a marquess’s son to: crude talk about whores and serving girls. Stephen kicked a lone pebble toward the steps of the club. The stone caught a crack in the pavement and bounced to a stop. “And Cowan said it anyway.”

“Said what?” he demanded.

“About Reggie being too freakishly tall and that she ain’t yar usual preference for a fuck—”

“Enough,” he barked, his cheeks going hot with rage at those vile charges against her. He wrestled with his cravat.

“Cowan’s words,” Stephen said with a shrug.

Broderick gnashed his teeth. “I’ll sack the bastard.” Another one of Diggory’s leftovers. The bloody servant wouldn’t work in the Dials again.

“So you haven’t kept her around because you’re tupping her?” Stephen pressed.

Broderick swept a hand over his eyes, and then he let his arm drop to his side. “I have never been anything but respectful toward Miss Spark. Reggie is”—was—“a friend.” And regardless of what had come to pass these past two days, he’d never so disrespect her that he’d tolerate Cowan or any other man, woman, or child in his employ disparaging her.

Stephen swiped the back of his hand over his nose. “Hmph,” his brother said noncommittally. “Cowan said that was the only reason you trust her.”

Not only had he disparaged Reggie but he’d also cast aspersions on the reason for her influence at the club? He’d bloody the man senseless before he sacked him.

“Bloody hell,” he gritted.

“You asked,” Stephen protested.

“I know. It’s . . . let it go. I assure you, Cowan is wrong . . . on both scores.” Proper as any lady in London, Reggie Spark wasn’t the manner of woman who’d take any man as her lover . . . including a blighter like Broderick.

“So why ya keeping her around, then?” his brother persisted.

Had he always been this tenacious?

“I am not . . . keeping her around.” He was keeping her close, as he would anyone who came upon the information about Stephen’s parentage and Broderick’s role in the boy’s kidnapping. He’d not share Reggie’s fate with the Killorans with his brother. His world had been upended enough. “This isn’t appropriate discourse.” In the Dials there was no limit to the type of talk a person, of any age, could take part in. Not, however, for the world Stephen would soon enter.

And he’d do so with a knowledge of the streets and life that no young child should carry with them. Glancing to the doorway and finding it still empty, Broderick dropped to a knee. “It isn’t appropriate to use that language or to speak as you’ve done about Miss Spark, Stephen.” Again, guilt assailed him. For he was the one responsible for stripping this child of his innocence.

Stephen pulled his brows together. “Why?”

“Because you just do not,” he awkwardly explained.

“That ain’t much of a reason.”

Broderick grimaced. “No,” he muttered to himself. It wasn’t. He’d failed Stephen in so many ways. At the very least he could eventually return him to his father with this most basic form of decency explained. I should have done so long before . . . I should have worked harder to see that he didn’t become this angry, scarred creature. He tried again, calling forth lessons given him by another man long ago. One who’d been good and decent and like a father. “How you speak, the words you use, matters. To descend into cursing suggests a lack of intelligence and an inability to find the appropriate words to convey how you’re feeling.” That guidance had come not as a castigation by the earl his father had worked for, but rather as a gentle explanation.