The Governess (Wicked Wallflowers, #3)(71)

“Yes.” Adjusting his rumpled cravat, he faced her. “You would have found yourself—”

Reggie lifted her foot and strapped her dagger just above the inside of her ankle, killing the rest of that flippant reply. “Where is your sister?” She paused midmovement, her skirts rucked about her leg, and whipped her head up. “You should be with her. I should be with her,” she swiftly amended.

She’d asked a question. What was it? All logical thought had fled. My sister. Gertrude. “She is currently dancing with Lord Landon.”

Some of the tension left Reggie, and she retrained her efforts on her dagger.

His throat moved rhythmically as a wave of lust bolted through him, and he proved himself as caddish as Lord Cavendish himself, for he could not look away.

While she bent her head over her task, Broderick used the opportunity to study that generous expanse of flesh exposed, a firm, muscular calf belonging to a woman unafraid to work. Of their own volition, his eyes drifted higher, following that swath of skin, and those shameful, wicked questions that had recently stirred at last had an answer—she was freckled everywhere.

An enthralling pattern of those dark flecks kissed long, graceful limbs.

Reggie lowered her dress back into place, and his sanity was restored. He tore his gaze away. “Where have you . . . ?” The question trailed off as he took in those details he’d been previously too preoccupied to note: Reggie’s perpetually red cheeks stood out stark white; her eyes, rounded with fear, had the look of the hunted so familiar to one in the Dials.

She’d pulled a knife on him, in the middle of a crowded ballroom, no less. Reggie wasn’t one to act impulsively or draw a weapon without provocation. He did a quick search of her, lingering on the handful of loose curls that had escaped her intricate chignon.

He narrowed his eyes. “Has someone offended you?” Fury shot through him, a seething, simmering rage that briefly darkened his vision.

“What?” She blinked slowly. “No,” she squeaked. “Why would you . . . ? Who would . . . ?” Her ramblings came to an abrupt cessation. “What are you doing here?” she asked this time with a greater calm. “You should be mingling with the duke’s guests.”

He frowned. Is that what accounted for her peculiar reaction around him? “Are you trying to be rid of me, Reggie?” The idea that she wished him gone . . . rankled.

“Yes,” she said with a blunt honesty that earned one of his first real smiles of the night.

He claimed a spot on the narrow bench built into the wall.

Reggie stamped her foot. “This is not a game, Broderick. We cannot be discovered together.”

He spread his arms behind him. “Pfft. I’ll speak with whomever I wish and wherever I wish.” Nor would he treat her as a servant, lesser than the other people present.

“The rules of your world don’t apply here. You’re in their world now.”

Broderick searched her face.

He’d convinced himself that her feelings on entering Polite Society hadn’t mattered. Nor had her long-held derision for the ton. And for the first time, he felt a modicum of shame at his selfishness.

“What?” Reggie watched him with suspicion in her expressive eyes.

“You think this is all about my appreciation for the nobility.”

She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I know it is.” He’d have to be deaf to fail to hear the thinly disguised chastisement buried in her tone.

Gertrude’s face flashed to his mind, and a familiar panic knocked around his chest. The omnipresent threat hanging, posed by the marquess.

Ticktock. Ticktock—

“I have no choice.”

“We always have a choice.”

It took a moment to register that quiet murmur uttered by the woman seated across from him.

And suddenly his patience with her thinly disguised disapproval snapped. “Tell me, were you born to a noble family, Reggie?”

“Me?” She snorted. “Hardly.” And yet she conducted herself with the regality of a queen.

Questions swirled anew about the enigmatic woman before him.

“It’s why you found yourself at London Bridge.”

She jerked as if he’d put a bullet in her belly, and for an instant he wished he could call back the words that had ushered in a haunted glitter in her eyes. And yet, at the same time, he wanted them spoken.

Reggie rushed to her feet. He caught her loosely about the waist, keeping her from fleeing. Keeping her at his side. Her chest rose hard and fast, and she yanked free of his hold. “You know nothing about why I was at London Bridge that night,” she whispered.

Before she left and he hanged, he wanted those secrets she kept. He wanted the memory of her—even the darkest ones—to be whole in every way.

It was the first they’d ever spoken of it. “You offered yourself to me,” he reminded softly.

“Why are you doing this?” She stared at him with stricken eyes. “Do you hate me this much?”

Stung by that question, he frowned. “Do you think I would deliberately shame you?”

“I don’t know what you would do anymore.”

He flinched. It was warranted, and she was right to have that suspicion, and yet . . . he’d never deliberately hurt her in that way.

But you’d hurt her in others . . .