The Rogue's Wager (Sinful Brides #1)(26)

Standing beside the sideboard, Calum poured himself a brandy. “Adair called him to the floors,” he said, following her searching gaze.

With a nod, she carried her ledgers over to the foot of the broad, mahogany desk littered with papers and leather folios. She made to sit.

“Where were you?”

Helena froze, and then settled into the unupholstered wood chair. By rule, furniture in Ryker’s office was hard and darkly austere. But for a single, eerie reproduction of Bosch’s Death and the Miser that hung above his desk, not a single artifact served anything beyond a functional purpose here. She’d long suspected it was a way to keep his employees and visitors from being too comfortable around him. In a deliberately dismissive move, she dropped her ledgers on the edge of Ryker’s desk, grabbed the book on top, and opened it. “I slept later than usual,” she said, dryly. “Given it was the first time in the ten years I’ve been keeping books, I expect it’s forgivable.”

What was decidedly not forgivable was moaning for the kiss of a powerful nobleman patronizing the club. Heat scorched her cheeks. What manner of man could manage to set her blood aboil with fury and her body ablaze with desire? She tamped down a groan. And a pompous nobleman, no less.

“Why are you doing that?” Calum pressed.

She kept her attention on the rows of numbers detailing last autumn’s liquor expenses. “It is my job to look at the books.” And she’d always done an admirable job of focusing all her efforts and attentions on nothing other than the finances of the Hell and Sin. Only recently had the constraints thrust upon her, in the name of safety, stirred restlessness inside. A hungering for more.

Calum took a sip and studied her over the rim of his glass. “I meant blushing.” His suspicious tone only sent further warmth coursing up her neck. She gripped the edges of the book in her hand. Did she wear Robert’s kiss upon her lips, still? “Why are you blushing?” Tall, dark, threatening to most, terrifying to all, men quaked in his presence as she’d witnessed from the secret observatory at the top of the gaming hell floors and on the streets of London.

Not her. To her, he’d always be the serious young boy who’d let her curl in his lap when the nightmares came. It was hard to fear him, even when he’d become one of the most notorious gaming hell owners in all of London. “Oh, I don’t know. Because I’m fair? Because I’m annoyed? It’s no doubt a combination of the two.” As such, it was easy to return her attention to her books. She picked up her head, and quirked a brow. “Though if you are requesting a scientific explanation for it, then I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

He lowered his brows.

Digging deep for the proper nonchalance, she drummed her fingertips on the open ledger.

“You never sleep late,” he stated bluntly.

She ceased midtap. His persistence spoke of his suspicion. Pale skin be damned, she’d learned to prevaricate as well as every other member of the Hell and Sin Club. “I was more tired than usual.” Which wasn’t altogether untrue. Confronting a stranger in the middle of your home in the dead of night and waking up to that same man’s kiss had that effect.

Calum carried his partially drunk brandy over to the desk and perched on the edge. “Niall said he heard noise on the main apartments last evening.” He continued to scrutinize her through hooded lashes.

Helena stilled. The club had eyes and ears in every room and hall. She carefully picked through her thoughts. If she mentioned the golden-haired gentleman who’d found himself not only on the main floors, but in her bed, Calum, Ryker, and the other men who’d fashioned themselves as her defenders would find him, hunt him down, and remove his entrails. “Is that a question?”

Calum’s brows dipped. “Helena?”

. . . Nor did I imagine your moans and the warmth betwixt your beautiful thighs . . . Her skin pricked under Calum’s focus and she schooled her features. “I didn’t hear anything.” The lie slipped out easily. Too easily.

He leaned forward, relentless. “Diggory’s been spotted outside the club. Ryker suspects he’s infiltrated the inside.”

Oh, God. And just like that, all memory of her arrogant nighttime visitor faded. Diggory. The hated name of an even more hated man. A monster who roused terror and fury with equal measure. Unwittingly, her gaze strayed to the nub of the candle on the edge of her brother’s desk. Her heart thumped loudly in her ears. Please, please, stop. Please . . . She closed her eyes as her screams from long ago pealed around her mind.

“Did you hear me?” Calum’s concerned voice drew her back from the brink, and she clawed her way from the never-absent horror. “I said, your brother believes Diggory has penetrated the Hell.”

She managed an uneven nod. “I heard you,” she said, despising the faint quality of her reply. Nearly twenty years later and the man’s name alone could reduce her to the blubbering, begging girl she’d been. “It wasn’t Dig—him,” she said blankly.

He studied her the same way he eyed the patrons on the gaming hell floor, and she went still under that scrutiny. “You don’t see the threat he poses.” His was a statement of fact, and the tight frown on his lips hinted at his displeasure.

They couldn’t see her as anything more than a girl who still battled nightmares of her past. Yet, they were the ones who saw demons in the dark. This talk of Diggory, the threat he posed now, so vastly different from when she’d been a child, this she could handle with a woman’s strength. “I see the threat, Calum. To the club,” she elucidated. “Not to me.”