“If he is not, eventually it will bear out.”
“Now who is being the foolish one, Mr. Merrick? You do not believe that.”
Of course he didn’t. He wanted her twelve counties away, and damn the consequences.
“Someone is trying to kill you, someone is trying to get rid of us.” She nodded. “And you have been helping us, all on your own. All in all, it would be easier to join forces in thwarting such attempts.” She nodded. “Mutual benefit.”
He felt something surprisingly like dread build within him. The tightening of melded circumstance. The smell of home-baked pastries, foul and seductive. “Go to the country. Let events unfold, create new identities, and forget about everything else. Your life will be far lengthier. You have a little over ten thousand pounds from your accounts this week hidden away. Take it and go. Your craftsmen will be hired by others. They are the best. No one will go hungry.”
She looked at him, seemingly unsurprised that he knew their financial situation so well. Her gaze moved to something over his shoulder, and she said nothing for long moments. It unnerved him far more than anything else. There was an old spirit there, peeking out behind the normal innocence of her gaze.
She smiled but didn’t successfully banish the shadows this time. “But it would be hardly fair to leave in such a way and it would negatively affect our workers. As much as I would like them to be, circumstances aren’t quite as simple as you are trying to suggest. And you well know this.”
“For you all matters seem simple.” She was infecting him. He had just muttered.
“I wish that were true. I wish we could retire to Norfolk, to Essex, to Somerset, and leave the rest behind.”
“Go then.”
“No. We would eventually be recognized. Word travels fast.”
“Go across the ocean. America. Australia.”
“No.”
“Why?” His voice was harder than he had thought it would be.
She looked at him steadily, with eyes far older than they should be. “In addition to our business concerns, my brother’s disappearance was well timed. Though I sometimes play the muggins, Mr. Merrick, I am not one.”
He grew cold. One finger twitched toward the mechanisms on his desk. “And you hope to find his killer? You think the events connected.”
She looked away. “Yes,” she whispered.
“You still hold hope that he is alive.”
She looked at her hands, folding them together on top of her books. “I hope, Mr. Merrick. Simple hope. But it has been well over two months, and at this point it would do little good for someone to have held him for that period of time. And . . . and I hired men. They confirmed that someone matching his description had been shot on Blackfriar’s Bridge.”
He tapped his finger more violently—in order to keep it above the desk top. “And? That’s it? No description of the person who shot him?”
“No. The man who claimed to have known that information disappeared before I could speak with him. The information trail has closed quite tightly.”
His finger stopped tapping as hard.
“Though I have been speaking to people again,” she said.
Itching twitch. Her actions with his men and helping around the hell suddenly gained subversive meaning. He had concentrated so much on
her
being near him that he hadn’t thought enough of
why
she was always around. What had he been
thinking
? That it was his charming personality causing her to seek out the people around him? “You are hoping to find another informant?”
“Or to flush out the guilty.”
He picked up his pen and carved a coded message to Roman, who was thankfully far, far away at the moment. “Working the East End of London for information? And you claim not to be the fool.”
“Perhaps.” He could hear her swallow, her delicate throat working. “Perhaps I am.” She leaned forward, her scent growing stronger. “But can you not say the same, that you would not try to find your brother if he went missing? To discover what had happened to him?”
Dark thoughts churned, and he pinned her with his blackest scowl, expecting her to cower. But there was something almost elemental in her that loosened under his look, that caused the hope on her face to lift. What the devil?
“Yes, you would.” She nodded and looked
relieved.
Everything in the odd signals she gave, and the antithesis to her words screamed at him. Danger. Everything about her was dangerous. “I see it. And I have to know, Mr. Merrick. I made some . . . hasty inquiries—foolish, as you’d say—in the first weeks after Christian disappeared that lost me a few opportunities I might otherwise have had.” She paused and looked down. “It was a loss of innocence I would have rather kept. Not knowing whom I can trust.”
“You are a fool if you think to trust
me,
” he said coldly. Bright brown eyes full of trust. Words that damned.
“Am I? Perhaps. But I find myself in need of an ally, and despite some of your more beastly tendencies, you have actually been quite accommodating.”
His
men
had been accommodating. He was going to have a small talk with the lot of them tomorrow.
She smiled, a small, shadowed smile. “You have, though you might not admit to it.”
Something about the shadows bothered him. He was used to seeing them—everyone around him had secrets. But this woman . . . six weeks, no, eight weeks prior, she had been full of life and open desire.
Irritation curled. Or something close enough to it that he identified it as such. “And why should your fate matter to me?”
“Mutual benefit, as I said previously.”
“You are going to save me from a knife in the dark?”
“It is my hope to be able to save you,” she said quietly.
“No.” He physically felt the echo of the word, the recoil.
“I have incentives for you.” She opened the top ledger. “It will be profitable for you to allow us to stay. Very profitable. Let me show you how that will be so.”
“I am going to burn your ledgers,” he said, almost pleasantly.
She paused, then peered up at him. “Truly?”
“Truly.”
She carefully replaced the book on the short stack on her lap. “I believe that you will, at that, Mr. Merrick. Well, then I must strictly appeal to your emotions.”
“I await with bated breath and heightened suspense.”
She smiled at him, face softening further. “You are very amusing when you choose to be, Mr. Merrick. It would benefit us both if you would continue to be more conversant, of course.”
He had already spoken more here than he had in the past seven days total.
“No? Pity.” She looked at her lap for a moment, then met his eyes again. “What do I need to do in order for you to allow us to stay?”
“There is nothing you can do. And you play a deadly game trying to find out what happened to your brother. You may find everyone around you dead or gone while you are still holding your game pieces.”
He saw her breath hitch, a motion that vibrated up from her chest to her chin.
“Your brother Roman—”
The inactive ice in his veins changed to another variety entirely—spiked and deadly. “He has nothing to do with any of this,” he said harshly. Considering the consequences and possible pitfalls, he needed to make that very clear.
She stared at him for a long moment, and his feelings overwhelmed him too much to read the expression in her eyes.
Andreas willed the emotion down. Flat. Unemotional. Empty. Flat. Unemotional. Empty.
“I didn’t mean to appeal to your emotions in the negative,” her soft voice said.
The chant wasn’t working. He took to examining her instead, every minute detail of her. “You don’t appeal to me at all,” he said harshly.
“N
o?” Phoebe looked at the dangerous man in front of her. The one who had interested her since she’d started corresponding with him. A faceless man on the other end of pressed ink, combined with cautious warnings given by Christian, entreating her to mysterious daydreams and fantastical thoughts.
And then he’d become her link to the world he lived in, and she’d needed to cultivate that daydream into hardened reality. She’d do whatever she had to for her family.
The candlelight flickered across his features. Her fascination with him had not ceased. Had only grown.
He was stripping her bare. Again. He did it so frequently that she wondered if he was even aware of it. Probing her insecurities and flaws. Her weaknesses.
It always made her feel uncomfortable in a way that had nothing to do with fear. Made her wonder about her rationale when it came to anything to do with him.
“Do you plan to seduce me into agreeing?” he asked tightly. “To sell me that innocence, which would still clasp so tightly to you even if you were dressed in the weeds of a whore?”
Beneath the steely, harsh words, he almost sounded disgruntled. But he was on the thin edge of reason, and she needed to choose her words carefully.
“No. I have no illusions about my powers of seduction,” she said. He, on the other hand, in his dark way, was the most seductive man she had ever met. “I had thought to appeal to your rational sense instead.”
He was the contradiction of rationality and sensuality. This man who sat so still and moved so fluidly when provoked. Power clinging to him, whispering in the air around him. Completely captivating, teasing her senses with visions of grandeur and bargains with the devil. Not a man to flirt with but one to whom you’d have to sell your soul.
Ruthless and fierce. There was something in that ferocity that made her lean closer. Something coiled with it, irreparably bound with that other part of him that he tried to hide, that she was still piecing together. A vulnerability that she
had
to understand. That made every part of her want to reach for him. To fill it, to soothe it, to complete it—that
something
that pulled and pulled and pulled at her, unceasing.
He tensed a fraction at her advance. So small that she wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t been so keenly aware of him.
“Though it seems I do make you nervous,” she said softly.
It was as if he was physically unnerved by her at times. Something visceral to his reaction. And she relied far too often on her intuition to discount it.
Christian and Edward always said she gave rationally minded men megrims.
Andreas Merrick’s eyes narrowed.
She spoke before he could reply with something cutting that she would need to fend away with humor or innocence. She’d become adept at it in the past few weeks, but doing so was never without peril. “Truly, Mr. Merrick, I desire—need—your help.”
When he watched her like he was doing—stripping her—she had to hold herself still. For fear that she would utter something completely past any fair claim of manners.
“I care nothing for your safety or that of your family.”
Reason told her to believe those words. The man in front of her was reported to have but one attachment, his brother, while all others were treated with hostility at best. And yet, Andreas Merrick had pushed her to the floor that night, using precious seconds to do so, then saved her again within a span of half a minute, regardless of his words to the man who held her.
She looked at the floor near her chair, now clean again but for a few darkly stained sections of wood. At the current rate of attacks on him, they would blend with the other spots soon, staining the room’s floor a new hue entirely.
Ever since that stain had been made, she’d been hard put to believe his words for truth. Especially with the nights she had peered from her window to see a man parting from the shadows and eliminating any threat that neared their door.
No, there was no question that Andreas Merrick was at least
interested
in their safety.
The question was whether he was complicit in her brother’s . . . disappearance. Or knew who was. There was knowledge there. Obvious knowledge hidden behind threatening scowls and dark words. He
knew
something.
“Why should I let any of you stay? Especially with the way you essentially broke in.” His eyes narrowed. “Though I’m sure you had plenty of assistance, now that I think on it.”
She hurried to respond. “Do not be upset with your men. I convinced them I had your permission. Punish me, if anyone.”
“How does one punish you? Take away your ability to speak?”
“No. I would simply use my ledgers more. Writing out anything that came to mind.”
She forgave herself for thinking that perhaps a ghost of a smile lifted the left edge of his mouth.
“Perhaps burning your ledgers
is
key then.”
She unconsciously hugged them to her chest.
He held out a hand. “Give me your ledgers for the night, and you can stay.”
“What?”
He smiled darkly. “You cannot do it, can you?”
There were all manners of things scribbled in her books that he should not be allowed to read. She tended to write her thoughts down as they occurred. Part diary, part business record. Christian had always been appalled by her tendency to add narrative. But she recorded her thoughts as they occurred and somehow, when she looked at them, she could separate the bits and form them into a whole.