Reggie’s gut clenched. If she’d been so transparent that this woman, whom she’d known less than three years, had gathered the depth of her weakness for Broderick, who else knew?
“No one knows,” Clara said with a gentleness that she’d only shown to the young women who answered to her at the Devil’s Den. She scooted her chair closer until she sat beside Reggie and then covered Reggie’s tense hands with her own. “This was not my dream, Reggie,” Clara continued with that same tenderness. “You presented me with an idea of something that has never been done.”
Yes, she had.
“Do you recall that night?”
“I do,” she said softly. Unable to sleep, Reggie had gathered her wrapper and slipped out into the gardens Broderick had built for Gertrude. She had come upon a quietly weeping Clara. “You said the idea was rot,” she pointed out. “That men wanted only one thing from women and it wasn’t their voice. Not unless they could have a woman on her back, too.”
A wry grin twisted Clara’s lips. “I was wrong.” It was a foreign admission men and women she’d lived amongst didn’t freely make. She gave Reggie’s hands a light squeeze. “Just as you are wrong now in not going forward with this.”
“I have not said no,” she said, a defensive edge sliding into her reply. “Only to this place.”
“And every place before it,” Clara interjected. “I’m merely asking you to come with me today. The appointment has been made. There is no harm in simply visiting the place.” She let that dangle there, enticing Reggie with a promise of a future.
Reggie dropped her gaze to the folder. Honor, logic, and self-preservation all warred for supremacy. And it surely marked her a faithless snake that she wanted to visit the property anyway. Broderick be damned. She wanted to put herself, her future, Clara’s future, and other nameless-for-now women’s futures, those women in desperate need of security, first.
And yet mayhap she was proving herself still the naive miss she’d been from the country, new to London, for she could not bring herself to betray the man who’d helped her when she by all rights should have perished in the Dials.
In the end, her allegiance to Broderick won out. “Find additional properties.” Reggie shook her head. “But it won’t be this one.”
“You deserve to be more than the lackey for some man who doesn’t need you and who’ll eventually cast you out.” Quiet even as it was, Clara’s voice still rang with the conviction of one who knew.
Reggie jumped to her feet. “He wouldn’t do that.” He wasn’t like Lord Oliver.
She’s a lovely fuck . . . worth the price . . .
Her breathing increased, and she dug her fingers into her skirts, her jagged nails penetrating the thin wool fabric. She’d not think of him. Or of that night. Or of every mistake that had brought her to this point . . .
Sadness twisted the other woman’s exotic features, wrenching Reggie back from the misery of her past. “Reggie, that is precisely what I said. And look at me now. Dependent upon you partnering with me so I might try my hand at a new beginning. And you? You’ll abandon your plans all because Broderick Killoran rushed to your rooms to see why there was blood all over his carpets,” she said with so much pity that shame coursed through Reggie.
God, how she hated Clara for being right. But she hated herself for wanting so very badly for her to be wrong. For Broderick had entered other rooms belonging to women who’d been hurt or injured, but Reggie had more often than not been at his side. He’d spoken gently, also wheedling details from them.
Not in a single instance, however, had he personally tended those bruises, scrapes, or cuts.
Fool. She was a fool, just as Clara suggested . . . wanting to see more where there never would be.
Clara touched her arm. “We need to both be thinking of our futures, Reggie. What will happen when Killoran decides he wants to become the next White’s or Brooks’s and rids himself of the female staff?”
“He hasn’t given any indication that those are his intentions.”
“Competing with Ryker Black’s family?” Clara eyed her like she’d sprung a second head. “You’re too clever to be naive.”
And the rub of it was, the other woman was correct. Broderick was always wanting more. Taking more: The clubs. Power. Noble connections.
The door flew open.
Reggie and Clara exploded to their feet.
Reggie’s heart kicked up a beat. “Stephen,” she greeted. Hurriedly gathering her papers and folio, she filed them away in her bottom drawer. Blast and damn. One of the stealthiest pickpockets in London, he’d plucked fortunes with the same ease he had secrets used by Diggory and his henchmen. “Is something wrong?” From the corner of her eye, she searched for some hint that he’d caught the talk between herself and Clara.
“I got to talk to ya.” Stephen spared Clara a quick, derisive glance and then jerked his head at the door. “Time for ya to go.”
“You miserable little bastard. You need someone to teach you manners,” Clara said crisply.
Reggie winced. No truer words had ever been spoken, and yet Stephen was still just a boy. A boy who’d endured greater hells than most grown men. He’d forever locked horns with the woman who’d come to them from Black’s establishment, with Reggie playing at peacekeeper between them.
“Ain’t gonna be ya.” He sauntered into the room like a prized peacock. “Ain’t gonna be anybody. But certainly not ya.” As proud as if he owned the Devil’s Den himself, he plopped himself into the seat Clara had vacated and dropped his ankles on the edge of the desk.
That relaxed pose he’d imitated from his eldest sibling, however, merely painted Stephen in a boylike image. He was very much a child playing at adulthood.
“Stephen,” Reggie reprimanded in her governess tones. Giving his dirt-stained boots a little shove, she knocked his feet back to the floor. “If you’ll excuse me?” Reggie asked as she handed Clara back her folder.
They exchanged a look, Clara silently pleading.
Reggie shook her head once.
As soon as she’d gone, Stephen again dropped his small feet on the corner of her desk. “Wot was that about?”
Meeting that insolent question with a blanket of silence, Reggie leveled the boy with a stern glance.
His button nose scrunched up.
“Now.” She folded her arms and reclaimed control of the situation. “I don’t believe you’re here to speak about Miss Winters.” Hers was a statement.
“No.” Stephen narrowed his eyes. “Oi ain’t.”
Although the staff and former gang members left over by Diggory regularly derided her for her lack of ruthlessness, she’d gleaned enough from her time in the streets to know the importance of unsettling one’s opponent. “Why were you at that residence?”
Stephen’s color went slightly ashen. “Ain’t yar business.” Except this time he sounded scores less confident. He swallowed loudly. “Did ya tell him?”
That question came out on a whispery croak that tugged at her heart. For all the ways in which Stephen was crass, cold, and oftentimes unkind, he still was just a boy. In these streets that stripped a person of their humanity, it was too easy to forget that.
“I had to tell him something,” she quietly said. “He’s your brother. He’s concerned about you and deserves to know—”
“Did ya tell him where I was?”
In Grosvenor Square. “I didn’t.” She paused. “Should I have?”
He stared at the tips of his feet and answered with a question of his own. “Ya going to?”
Reggie placed her palms on the back of her chair. “Well . . . it depends.”
“You want to know why I was there,” he grumbled, slipping into his perfect King’s English.
“I want to know.”
Stephen scoffed, instantly shattering all pretense of vulnerability. “Do you think Broderick wants to know that Clara missed her shift?” He narrowed his eyes. “He of course will want to know why she missed that shift.”