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Authors: Kate Moore

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“You presume to know him well after mere days.” He held the shop door for her. “No, just to know boys. If you want him to do well in school, you’d do better to call him Charlie than to buy him fine leather-bound books.”
“I decide what is right for my brother and me.”
Her husband nodded and handed her into their carriage without a backward glance. She had a long journey home through London traffic to rail to herself that she knew Charlie best and to smart under the mortifying sting that her husband was probably right.
 
 
 
 
 
M
OTHER Greenslade’s absence from Bread Street was not a topic a stranger could broach with the regulars at the public house, no matter how convincing a disguise he wore. Bread Streeters were a suspicious lot, but today the doors of the public house, propped open by broken paving stones, allowed customers to wander freely in and out. A stranger with no worries about the contents of his pockets could mingle at will among them to pick up any rumor going about, and Xander had nothing in the old brown corduroy jacket he wore.
Reverend Bredsell was preaching from a donkey cart with
Truman’s Brewery
painted in red and gold lettering on the side, leveled and anchored in place by a bale of hay under the wagon’s tongue. This makeshift stump stood directly in front of the signs Xander’s men had put up earlier in the week. Indeed, Bredsell was preaching against them.
“Bread Street belongs to itself. Around her an indifferent London gets rich, a London that pays no heed and offers no help to Bread Street. Look around you. No, Bread Street must take care of its own. Outsiders who know not Bread Street come here only for profit. But what they offer is bondage, bondage to commercial interests, bondage to the police. Bread Street, do you want bondage?”
“We want free beer,” came a jeering answer.
Xander listened with intermittent attention to Bredsell and scanned the crowd, his eyes drawn to boys as well as to women of Mother Greenslade’s age. There were dozens of women in the street, dirty aprons over mud-splattered skirts, grimy shawls around thin shoulders, pint pots in work-worn hands. A young mother holding a dull-eyed infant in her arms passed a brimming pot back and forth with a neighbor. The true Bread Street genius, Xander supposed, was for dying. Babes who knew nothing else knew how to catch every disease in London.
Bredsell warmed to his subject. “A Bread Street man must be strong against the outsider. He must not betray Bread Street. Sadly, we’ve been betrayed, my brothers and sisters, and the man who has betrayed us must atone. He must act alone to turn away the outsider.”
Several people muttered the word
nark
, and a tall man in a rusty top hat with a beggar’s message tacked to the crown called out, “We’ll break his ’ead for ’im if there’s a nark.”
Bredsell shook his head.
“Bread Street has friends in high places. Bread Street can call on the Almighty himself to send fire and flood on those wicked commercial interests who would profit from the poor.”
Will, in a ragged seaman’s coat, a pot of dark beer in hand, slipped through the crowd to stand beside Xander. “I suppose he means March.”
“I don’t like the reference to fire and flood. I think Bredsell wants someone far less exalted than the Almighty to take a hand here.”
Will’s gaze made a lazy sweep of the street over the rim of his drink. “Fire would be a nightmare here.”
“You don’t see Cullen anywhere, do you?”
Will shook his head. A faint scoring, as of fingernails, marked the stubble on his jaw. “I do see our friend whose nose you rearranged. Let’s move. Keep your head down.” He passed his drink to Xander, and they shifted position in the restless crowd.
Will spoke again from the other side of the street. “You know Mother Greenslade doesn’t own Number Forty. I think we should find out who does.”
Chapter Twelve
A
letter from Uncle March arrived by private messenger as Cleo was dressing for the evening in the third of the Spaniard’s gowns, an emerald green so deep it was nearly black. She sent Alice off and tore open the letter.
My dear niece,
 
Do not be alarmed. Deepest concern moves me to use all means to reach you. Know that you and your brother are most welcome to return to your father’s house and my protection. Say the word, and I will arrange it.
In the meantime I fear for your reputation and indeed for your health of body and mind. You have evidently been taken in by a most unscrupulous fortune hunter and led by him into an unsanctifi ed union, a dangerous position for a woman of your uncertain frame of mind. No less a witness to your fall than Reverend George Tucker assures me of the falseness of your position.
We must do all we can to free you from this entanglement and restore you to your rightful place in society. As to the harm such an arrangement does your brother’s character—to reside in the home of an infamous whore—no other word can describe her—it is incalculable.
A message at any hour of the day or night brings me to your side.
March
Cleo felt the color drain from her cheeks.
Any hour of the day or night.
Her knees buckled, and she sank heavy-limbed into the nearest chair. This was where her husband’s strategy led them. The court would declare them not truly married. They could be arrested for fraud. Her smooth, unscrupulous uncle would win. She wrenched herself into motion, took up her knife and her uncle’s letter, and headed for her husband’s room.
Unlike the other rooms in his house, it had been stripped of luxuries. It was spare and plain, with blue-papered walls above the white wainscot and a serious dark expanse of bed covered with a woven rug of Oriental design. Beyond the open clothespress and a desk piled with papers, Cleo saw what she supposed must be his dressing room door. Her knife and letter in hand, she pushed her way into his private space.
He lay back in a large footed cast-iron tub, his eyes closed, dark head resting against the porcelain lip. Her gaze went to the strong column of his neck exposed to her view, and his shoulders and arms, more powerful in repose than she had imagined. Beads of water sparkled in the dark hair on his chest, and fragrant steam rose around him.
His eyes opened and his arrested gaze locked with hers. “Nice ribbons.”
Cleo looked down at her shift, corset, and drawers. A dizzying scent enfolded her. “Thank you again.”
“You have a complaint, I take it.”
“Only the usual. Your strategy isn’t working. My uncle has sent a politely poisonous letter.”
“You want me to read it?”
“Oh, I insist.” Cleo waved her knife at him. “Particularly if it might motivate you to take desperate measures.”
“Towel?” He pushed himself upright with a shift of muscle under the smooth skin of his shoulders. Rivulets of water trickled down his chest, and Cleo realized the heady scent was warm, wet male flesh.
“Towel?” She found one hanging at the edge of a heavy dark chest on which stood her jar of leeches. He dried his hands, tossed the towel aside, and reached for her letter.
As he read, Cleo studied his head, his shoulders, the damp curls at his nape, his hands, anything but the pale limbs under the water. His chest she had seen briefly two nights before, but strangely what she remembered was not the taut symmetry of it, the line of dark, curling hair, the red scratch left by her knife, as if she had scored his flesh. What she remembered, with her body’s memory, a memory that was in her limbs, was the sensation of being crushed against that chest in a long embrace. She wanted to use the strength she sensed in him against Uncle March, but she had not imagined that it would be seductive, that she would want it for its own sake, for the pleasure of feeling that strength surround her.
He looked up, handing the letter back to her. “I don’t think you mad.”
“Yes, well, I am grateful that you did not house me in the attic or attach restraints to my bed. So we must assume you’ve simply no taste for the most expedient procedure to defeat my uncle. I imagine you put off visiting the tooth-drawer as well, but sometimes there’s no avoiding it.” She brandished her knife again.
“Is the knife meant to encourage my amorous attentions?”
Cleo began to pace. She couldn’t just stand there looking at him so at ease in his . . . nothing. “In truth, Charlie gave it to me to keep you
from
my bed. He was worried, you see, but of course, the problem appears to be not to discourage your attentions but to provoke them.”
“Desire on your part might be more provoking than cutlery.” He said it quietly, matter-of-factly, an unexpected revelation.
“You want provoking? I am here in my shift in your dressing room. Provoking?” Cleo stepped into the tub. Water sloshed up around her legs, plastering her stockings to her calves, and her thin drawers to her knees. Xander shifted his feet. “Stand.” Cleo jabbed her knife at him.
He flashed that rare grin of his. “Oh, I’m standing.”
“Up.” She gestured with the knife.
“Done.” His hands gripped the edge of the tub, and he pushed himself smoothly to his full height. The water shifted again, lapping against her legs.
Cleo swallowed, eye level with his lean throat, and the pulse that beat there. She felt the insistent beating of her own pulse in the most intimate of places. A rush of sensation like a swollen stream overspilling its banks flooded her limbs. Unsteadily, she brought her knife up to his ribs.
“Are you sure you mean to encourage me?” His voice stirred all her nerve endings.
She nodded. “I don’t want my uncle to win.”
“You make things very difficult.” His voice was low and hoarse and sent a shiver all over her.
“What things?” Her own voice had dropped into a timbre she did not recognize.
He took her chin in his hand and tilted her face to his. “Honor.” His lips touched hers.
“Patience.” A slow brush of his mouth against hers made their lips catch and cling.
“Sense.” He kissed her fully.
Cleo tried to keep the knife steady, to hold him to this joining of mouths, but as the kiss deepened, her free hand came up and pressed against solid, warm flesh, while the knife hand dropped to her side.
In a flash he caught and twisted her wrist, and the knife fell into the tub at their feet. His other arm came around her, and he lifted her up and out of the tub and carried her to the door. Cleo twisted and squirmed against his iron hold until he set her on her feet at the door, turning her face to it and pinning her there.
“Let’s put that wounded vanity of yours to rest.” Cleo was pressed to the door, her breasts flattened against its smooth wood panels, behind her, her husband, lean, hard, urgent, pressed his male fullness against her backside, his breath a rasp against her ear. The pressure against her breasts sent aching messages to the place between her legs that beat with an answering pulse. She squeezed her eyes shut against the sensation.
Behind her he was unmoving. She had pushed him farther than before and sensed that he was a man on the edge. Only his chest rose and fell against her back. His arms and weight trapped her in a warm cage of male strength. Held helpless, soaking up the imprint of his male body on her female flesh, her skin hungry for the heat of him, she waited for him to yield. He kissed her shoulder, just that, and the kiss floated down into the deep aching well between her thighs.
“If we do come together,” he said in a low voice at her ear, “it won’t be like any tooth drawing you’ve ever experienced.”
With a quick flex of his arms, he pushed back, turning her, yanking open the door, and propelling her through it. She heard the lock click into place behind her.
Cleo dripped back to her room and stood by the fire, making puddles on the hearth stones. A realization, shocking in its frank carnal interest, held her standing absently. She wanted to see her husband naked.
Sometime later Alice appeared with a pot of tea and scolded Cleo out of her wet clothes.

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