When he spoke again his voice was hard. “They crowd into the beds at night and huddle close, but the hearths aren’t big enough to keep the entire room warm, not with the thin walls. One of the maids must rouse herself in the middle of the night to stoke the fire again. The children who have been living with us awhile are well fed. They are fine, even if the night is cold.”
“And the others?” she whispered.
“If they have come new, often—usually, in fact—they’re thin and weak from starvation,” Winter said. “They haven’t the plumpness of a healthy child. The plumpness that keeps a child warm at night. Most do well after several months of being fed good, wholesome food. But for some it is too late. Those do not wake in the morning.”
She stared at him, her face pale. “I thought you were supposed to tell me how sweet the children are. To woo my money with gentle words and flattery.”
He shrugged. “You seem like a woman who has had more than enough flattery in her life.”
She nodded once and swept past him.
He stared after her, startled. “Where are you going?”
“I think I’ve seen all that I need to, Mr. Makepeace,” she said. “Good day.”
Winter shook his head, disgusted with himself. Every day Silence lived at that pirate’s home, the orphanage was
in imminent peril of losing what funding it got from these aristocrats. All the more need, then, to placate women like Lady Beckinhall. The home needed money and if the only way to get it was by toadying up to wealthy widows, well then, he ought to toady and be happy.
Instead, he’d just driven away a potential patroness.
Fool.
L
ATER THAT NIGHT
Silence nervously touched the ruching that decorated the neckline of her new dress. It really was lovely—the loveliest dress she’d ever worn. Before William’s death she had worn colors, but she had usually dressed in brown or gray. Sedate colors, practical colors for a woman who, when she needed to go somewhere, did so by her own feet. London was a grimy city.
Certainly she’d never worn bright indigo blue. She turned a bit before the full-length mirror that had been brought into her rooms. The silk seemed to shimmer and change, sometimes more purple, sometimes more blue.
“It’s simply grand, ma’am,” Fionnula sighed from where she sat on a footstool near the mirror.
The maid had helped her to dress and had pulled back her hair into a knot with a few locks carefully curled at her temples and nape.
“Do you think so?” Silence asked shyly. She touched again the ruched ribbon at her neckline. The bodice was round and deeply cut, highlighting her breasts pushed into mounds by the embroidered stays she wore under the dress.
“Oh, yes,” Fionnula said firmly. “Yer even more grand than the ladies that Himself used to have in his rooms.”
Silence stilled, and wet her lips before asking with feigned indifference. “Used to?”
Alas, she’d never be a good actress.
Fionnula gave her a speaking glance. “Haven’t ye noticed? He hasn’t had a strumpet in his rooms since the day after ye arrived.”
“Oh,” was the only reply Silence could think to make, but her heart leaped willy-nilly with joy.
Fionnula rolled her eyes. “He used to have at least one woman a night, sometimes more.”
“More?” Silence squeaked. “Than one? At a time?”
“Oh, yes,” Fionnula assured her. “Sometimes two or three at once.”
Silence simply gaped, her mind stopped on the thought of Michael entertaining two or
three
women in his bed at once. Had he… serviced them all? In a single night? How…?
But Fionnula had grown quite chatty. “I never understand it myself. I mean, if it was backwards, as it were, and a woman could have any number of men she wished… Well, I’d never have more than one, I think. Why, can ye imagine two men snorin’ in yer bed? Or three? And what about the covers? When Bran lets me spend the night—which don’t happen often, let me tell ye—he’s always pullin’ the covers off my shoulders in the middle of the night. I wake up, my shoulders numb with cold. No.” Fionnula shook her head. “No, ye couldn’t pay me to take more’n one man to me bed.”
Fionnula turned at the end of this speech—the longest she’d ever made in Silence’s presence—and looked at her expectantly.
Silence blinked and unfortunately an image of Michael, entirely nude, lounging in the middle of his huge bed came into her mind. In the image he was erect, his
long penis lying hard and straight against his flat belly. It was ruddy and wide at the tip where—
Oh, dear.
She cleared her throat and said rather huskily. “No, one would be
quite
enough.”
Fionnula nodded as if her argument was confirmed. “Sometimes I don’t understand men at all.”
“Gah!” Mary Darling cried as if agreeing with Fionnula. She’d slept most of the afternoon as Silence and the maid had worked on the dress, taking in the waist a bit. The baby toddled over and held out her arms to be picked up.
Silence stooped and carefully lifted the baby. “Will you be good and obey Fionnula while I’m out?” she whispered into the dark curls.
“Down!” Mary said, wriggling, so Silence kissed her hastily and put her on the floor, just as a knock came at her door. It was the corridor door, so it mayn’t be Michael, but still she checked her reflection in the looking glass.
Fionnula opened the outer door.
Michael stood there in a fine deep blue coat over a white waistcoat embroidered in silver thread. Diamonds winked on the buckles of his shoes. His gaze went straight to her and something in his black eyes seemed to heat when he saw her.
She instinctively covered her décolletage with her hands.
“Don’t.”
He took three steps and was before her. Gently, he grasped her hands in his own and spread them wide, exposing her bosom framed by the low neckline of the dress. His gaze dropped to her breasts and heat flooded her cheeks.
“Don’t ever hide yerself from me eyes,” he murmured low so that only she could hear.
Her gaze darted to Fionnula by the door. “Please!” she whispered in embarrassment.
His smile was not quite kind. “Ye may cover yerself only when we’re not alone.”
Her breath caught at the sensual promise in his eyes. Did he mean to make their friendship more intimate? And if so, would she let him?
His eyes narrowed at the confusion in her face, but he didn’t comment. He’d thrown a cloak over a chair as he entered the room and now he picked it up and drew it about her shoulders. It was velvet, rich and warm and lined with rose silk. He pulled the edges together under her throat and tenderly tied the cloak closed.
“There,” he said when he was done. “A shield to hide yer modesty behind. And to hide yer identity…”
He held out a velvet half mask.
“Oh!” She’d been worrying all afternoon about appearing in public with him, though she wasn’t sure how to bring up the subject. It was not for her reputation that she worried—that was already ruined—but for the orphanage. Now she looked at him gratefully. “Thank you.”
He gave her an ironic glance and moved behind her. Gently he lowered the mask over her face and tied it behind her head. She could feel his male heat at her back and the whisper of his breath on her nape. Something warm and soft brushed her ear.
Her breathing went shallow.
Then he was beside her again, holding out his arm. His voice was husky when he said, “Come now or we’ll be late.”
She made her good-byes to Fionnula and Mary Darling and then he was taking her hand and pulling her into the hall.
“Late to what?” Silence asked breathlessly.
But he only glanced over his shoulder at her and grinned, white teeth flashing, and so handsome her heart seemed to leap into her throat.
He led her to the front door this time, nodding at the two guards standing there. Outside a carriage waited.
“Is this yours?” Silence asked, eyeing the polished lanterns hanging by the coachman.
“Aye,” Michael said as he handed her in. He leaped in beside her and knocked on the ceiling. “I don’t have much use for it, so I keep me carriage and horses at a stable.”
“And the coachman?”
She saw the flash of his teeth again as he grinned at her in the dim carriage. “One o’ me crew. He had a job as a stable lad in another life.”
“I see.”
Silence fingered the soft velvet lying over her lap, the realization suddenly hitting her that they rode in a small enclosed space together. She tried to keep her breathing even, but the feel of his broad shoulders leaning against her, the sight of his long legs stretched clear across the carriage floor, seemed to make breathing rather difficult.
“This is only my fourth carriage ride,” she said nervously into the heavy quiet that had fallen.
“Oh?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Papa could not afford to keep one, but I once rode in a carriage belonging to a friend of his, Sir Stanley Gilpin, who helped to found the Home for Unfortunate Infants and Foundling Children. That was
when he took us to a fair in Greenwich once. And when Temperance was married, her husband, Lord Caire very kindly provided a carriage for the family to ride in to the church and later the wedding breakfast.” Silence stopped suddenly having run out of breath.
She darted a look at Michael.
His face was shadowed in the dark, but he seemed to be paying close attention to her babbling. “And the fourth time?”
She remembered and had to look down at her hands in her lap. “The fourth time was on the morning after I spent the night in your bedroom. Temperance rented a hack to come search for me. She found me at the end of the street after I’d walked it with my hair undone and…” She trailed away, unable to say the words.
But he was quite able to supply them. “And yer dress unlaced to show yer chemise and the tops o’ yer pretty titties.”
“Yes.” She looked at him. The old anger and pain was in her chest, but it was dimmer now, allowing her to think. “Why did you make me do that? Walk up the street like a whore coming home from a night of sin? Did you want to destroy my marriage?”
“No.” He shook his head sharply. “Had I thought enough to want to destroy yer marriage then me actions might be forgivable.”
She wished she could see his face. It had never occurred to her that he might think what he’d done that day unforgivable—that he might care enough to
want
forgiveness. The idea was a revelation.
“Then why?” she asked.
“Why not?” he replied and the simple cruelty of his
statement sent a jagged shard of pain through her breast. “It was me whim, that and only that. I was bred and birthed in St. Giles. I clawed me way up to become king o’ hell and now me every wish is granted, love.” He shrugged, his expression filled with self-mockery. “If I should have a mind to crush a virtuous woman merely for me own entertainment, then I do it.”
His honest depravity took her breath away, but her eyes narrowed in suspicion. Once she might’ve taken his words as simple fact. Now she knew him better. He might think himself a devil, but he was far more complicated than that.
Far more good.
“So you have no control over your desires?” she prodded skeptically.
“Sure and I have control.” He closed his eyes as if disgusted. “Don’t harbor false illusions about me, Silence, m’love. I
chose
not to control me desires when I met ye—even if that meant making an innocent walk, disheveled, up a street in St. Giles to fall into her sister’s arms.”
“How do you know I fell into Temperance’s arms?” she asked. “You didn’t escort me to your door—that was Harry’s job.”
He went still. “I watched ye with a spyin’ glass from me windows. I saw yer courage—and I saw ye collapse into her waitin’ arms.”
“Why?” she whispered. “Why should you watch me?”
“Why shouldn’t I share in yer pain?”
She shook her head, looking away from him, staring blindly out the darkened windows. “You say you chose not to control your basest urges that night, yet you did not harm me physically. You could’ve taken me to your bed and destroyed me, yet you did not.” She turned and stared
at him seriously. “You cannot tell me that you don’t feel true remorse for the pain you caused me.”
He looked startled for a moment and then he laughed, short and hard. “Ah, Silence, m’love, don’t mistake me for a gentleman. I am a pirate, a thief, and a killer, and nothin’ but.”
“Then you would do it again, if you had the chance?” Silence demanded. “Make that terrible bargain with me? Send me into the street, disheveled and ashamed?”
His hesitation was so slight that had she not been paying careful attention, she might’ve missed it. But she didn’t miss it. It was real.
He looked haunted—confused as if the very earth had shifted under his feet. “D’ye hope to change the stripes on a snake, darlin’? Rub as hard as ye might, they’ll not come off and yer like to be bitten for yer pains.”
“You didn’t answer me,” she whispered.
He turned to face her though she could not make out his expression in the dark. “And yer sure o’ that now?”
She drew in a wavering breath. “You can
choose
not to do such horrible things in the future, can you not?”