A Proper Scandal (Ravensdale Family Book 2) (8 page)

“Are we heading to the pub, Marwick? Let’s get a pint to celebrate your loss.”

“Not tonight, fellas.” He straightened, watching as the body limped across the dark street, a sliver of light falling upon her strawberry hair and hazel eyes as she approached him from the lantern above, her head held high, as always. “Christ, Anne, is that you?”

“You’ve been beaten to a pulp, I see.” She winced, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, her hand clutched on the blue bag she had the day he met her. “What a cliché. A fighting Irishman.”

“Doing my part to live up to expectations.” Alex couldn’t take his eyes off her. Her face was filthy, her hair matted. The fine lady he had met had long vanished. She must have weighed a stone or two less. “They don’t feed you up in the nice part of London?”

“That’s all you’re going to say?”

He knocked his bloodied hand under her chin, drawing her eyes up to his. “No, I haven’t even started. Let’s find you a place to stay. The rest can wait.”

*

Minnie kept her eyes focused on the ground before her, trudging after Alex as he knocked on doors, only to be turned away.

“There’s no room,” they’d said. “We can’t take another.”

All the while, she limped quietly, her stomach growling from hunger. Rain fell, first softly, then harder, pelting her and Alex as they ferried from one street to the next by the Thames in search of a place to stay. It’d taken two days to track him down by the docks, one alone just to find her bearings from the theater. Minnie wasn’t looking forward to another night spent out on the streets. Truth be told, she’d barely slept the first one. She’d spent most of a few hours curled up behind a stack of crates behind a haberdashery. And when the sun rose, she was face to face with a hat that could have been featured on a Paris fashion plate.

She had stared into the shop window, her sad reflection reminding her of the little girl she had once been, curled up in the hallway of a ship being tossed around by the sea. She wept into her knees as the ground heaved and dropped below her, and the ship groaned. She missed her home—India. She missed her parents, and Grace and James. She missed the magic in the air as she roamed through her botanist father’s conservatory as birds flew in and out, and their tiger Lucy prowled her cage beyond the colocasia and orchids.

“What’s this, pet? Why are you in the hall?” her uncle had asked, sitting down beside her. His legs were still folded to fit, much too large for the narrow ship hallway. “Come here,” he had said when she didn’t answer. She sniffled as he picked her up and placed her in his lap. “There are going to be scary things in our lives, Minnie. I can’t be there always, but if you keep your head up, you’ll find the sun after the storm. The bad is only ever temporary.”

“I miss Mama and Papa,” Minnie had said between tears. “Who do I belong to now?”

Her uncle had sighed, running a large hand over her hair. He pinched her nose. “Let me tell you about your mother. Oh, what a grand ballerina she was…”

“Anne?”

Minnie tripped to a stop, bracing her hand against Alex’s shoulder. He winced, drawing back as she steadied herself.

“You’re dead on your feet. You must be wrecked.” He grabbed her bag. “C’mere.” His hand drew her close again, pulling her around him through an open door of a squat stone house. A narrow staircase ascended before her, the path dimly lit with a few tallow candles. “Mrs. Bowen owes me a favor. We’ll be staying here for the night. Besides, she takes boarders. The damn city keeps condemning the rest of the housing.”

Her eyes stung from keeping them open as she peered around, looking for another.

“I believe she’s in bed. No worries. I stay here if the work house is crowded. Go on up. All the way to the attic.”

It was always the attic with Alex. They were some secret to be stashed away, an idea yet to be had. She climbed the stairs, floating even as her limbs were heavy with exhaustion, and pushed through a heavily painted door. The wood floors were dark and roughhewn. The damp air smelled of rope and salt. There was a stack of empty grain sacks in one corner. The rest of the room was a dark shadow that the one measly candle Alex nicked couldn’t light up.

He tensed behind her, his breathing shallow as he led them further into the room. “There’s a lantern there in the corner. Can you find it?” It wasn’t until the lantern was lit and the room was washed in a dim gold light that he sighed, stretching his arms up to the low beams of the ceiling. He rolled his neck, assessing her, those eyes of his full of storms and questions.

Something between a shiver and a bolt of lightning chased down her spine as she brought her gaze to meet his. She hadn’t thought much of him while she was dancing, yet here she was, and the oddest thing of all was that it felt right. The pressure that had crowded around her chest as she navigated London on her own, the whirring thoughts of returning home, everything—it just stopped.

“Well,” she said, breaking eye contact. Her heart picked up its beat, as if her ballet slippers were still on and she danced across the stage,
allégro
. She limped forward, grabbing her valise from his feet, and set it in the corner by the grain stacks. Minnie sunk to the ground as if everything within finally imploded from the long hours and pain.

“You should go home, Anne. Whatever you need for a ticket, we’ll get. You deserve more than sleeping on grain sacks in the attic of a fishmongers wife by the docks.”

She shrugged, pulling off the worn shoes she bought when she traded in her fine leather boots. These were dull and had holes. “You should learn how to protect your face when you’re fighting. I’d say your looks are the only thing you have going for you since you like to have your brains knocked about.”

He chuckled, electrifying the damp air. Alex let go of the beams and sat beside her. “You didn’t lose your mouth with all that fine dancing, I see.”

A smile fought its way to the corner of her mouth as she peeled off her wet jacket. She shivered again, though she couldn’t tell if it was from the cold or just exhaustion. Minnie longed for her bed, the one with fine sheets and thick down blankets. She never fell in love with Burton Hall as Grace had, but right now it sounded like heaven, that dreary house in Yorkshire.

“Needs must, Alex. Turns out I’m no ballerina after all.” She fell back onto the grain sacks, craving something warm to drape over her tired body. “No matter how hard you wish something to be true, sometimes it just isn’t possible.”

Alex followed, rolling over to face her. His body was longer, his arms more corded than she remembered. And that sickly pallor had begun to fade to sun-kissed skin. His hair, though. His hair was still that unnatural yellow.

“You won’t be heading back then?”

It appeared as if she would fit perfectly against his chest and though he was equally soaked by the rain, she bet he’d be warmer than she was. “If I go back, I lose whatever chance I have left. If any. And if I stay…”

“Mhm.” Alex rolled over onto his back, tossing his arm underneath his head.

She instantly missed his closeness, missed his eyes taking in the details of her face as if he had been starving for the sight of them these past few weeks. “Even still, I’ll be just as lost if I go home. I’m like those birds caged up. Something to be cooed over as the rest of the world walks by. I don’t know where or who I belong to.”

“Do you need to belong?” Alex stretched his neck from side to side, a small sigh slipping into the dark the only sign of pain. “You’ve a flair for the dramatics.”

“And you’ve a flair for being a cad. I was trying to…”

Alex rolled back over, a smile stretched upon his lips, those eyes of his shining, even as one began to swell and close up. Minnie playfully slapped him across his stomach, the two of them laughing as soon as she withdrew her hand.

“You were saying?” His thick eyebrow was stuck from the swelling above his eye, unable to arch up to give his face that full charming quality it possessed.

And did it ever. Even bruised and swollen, there was something about Alex Marwick.

“I don’t know anymore.” She tried to pout, but couldn’t as he drew her to him. Minnie rested against his chest on a heavy sigh, the rest of her suddenly wide awake. Alex was Turkish coffee on an empty stomach.

He tugged her close again, his focus still on the ceiling. “You’re shivering.”

The truth was, they both were. They both trembled in the dark and Minnie wondered if she had a similar effect on him. She’d only ever kissed her Ahya’s grandson once under a table back in India. A first kiss at five is not a kiss at all really, but that’s all she had to draw on from experience.

“And you’re on my side of the bed,” he continued, his voice growing lower, rougher.

She’d missed that too. Why had she grown to miss a near stranger? Minnie hardly knew him. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

“You have yourself a deal, Mrs. Marwick. Now close your eyes and rest.”

*

The sun was still rising from its bed, the outside sky more stars than the birth of dawn through the tiny attic windows. But there was a fireball in Alex’s arms anyway.

She hadn’t let go during the night. In fact, Anne had tangled herself around him, more stubborn than the few patches of grass that popped up between well-trodden cobbles of Whitechapel. This strange, willful girl who smelled of roses. This hand that curled entwined with his fingers, her skin soft and warm, as though it was meant to be palm to palm with the likes of him. The mouth of hers that even when relaxed curled into an easy smile at the ends. That fine nose of hers, the one of a high-born lady, aristocratic in its delicate slope.

He tried to pull away gently, his body aching from the fight last night, and aching more from wanting to kiss Anne awake. She was the devil with those eyes of hers, that plump mouth full of sass and fire. She belonged at home with her family; she deserved better than what he could ever give her, and though it was selfish to admit as much, he’d felt a sliver of satisfaction in his chest as she approached him in the dark last evening. His angel, returned.

Who was he to send her packing, telling her where she belonged? He’d been chained up in the dark, all but left for dead from being unwanted. Desire was a powerful thing, for it fueled his next breath in the dark as a little boy. It was tinder to the soft beat of hope in his chest as he was wrapped in a blanket and carried out by Danny, out into the world, to live a life previously denied to him.

And maybe she’d be of use to him. Maybe with her fine connections, she might know of the woman who helped Danny escape from the asylum. Maybe then he’d have a name for himself instead of the one he made for himself. His given name. How could a man take on the world without knowing who he truly was? That was the difference between a man and a boy, and Alex was done with being tossed around Whitechapel as a boy with a temper, another troublesome mick.

“I dreamt we were in Paris, in a grand hotel, with muffins waiting, and champagne,” Minnie whispered. Her lips brushed against the linen of his shirt. They might as well have moved over his skin because he was burning.

“Of course you would.”

She softly laughed as she opened her eyes and met his. Anne stretched her body, paying no mind that it rubbed against his side. It seemed she welcomed his touch, and as for Alex, it was the most unnatural thing he knew.

He coyly pulled away, sitting on the edge of the grain sacks. He felt the cool pressure of her eyes on his back, washing over him like the waning moonlight outside as it sunk in the horizon.

“It’s too early to be awake.”

Alex peeked over his shoulder, closing his eyes at the sight of her copper hair cascading down her shoulders, her cheeks pink from sleep. “It’s time for me to report to the docks, darling. As for you, you should get up and meet Mrs. Bowen so she doesn’t think there’s a thief stowing away in her attic.”

“Isn’t there?”

He laughed to himself, standing to stretch. He was thankful for the lack of mirror. Alex wasn’t of the mind to come face to face with an eejit this early. He heard her get up and adjust her dress, then issue a soft hiss as she stepped forward. “We’ll figure out the rest tonight, but for now, I want you off that ankle.”