“So what is it to be, Killoran . . . ?”
That low, faintly lilting baritone slashed across her panicky musings.
“Who does the hiring of the children inside your club?”
Worry brought her eyes closed. Oh, God. It is me the investigator seeks. Coward that she was, her feet twitched with the need to take flight. Indubitably, it was an inherent part of survival existent to all in these parts. And yet Ophelia would never be one to sacrifice the possible safety and security of her kin . . . or the people dependent upon the club because of that elemental need.
Still, she briefly considered the path of escape down the opposite end of the hall, and with her gaze found Gertrude waiting, her head ducked around the corner.
Her eldest sister jammed her fingertip toward the floor. “Get over here,” she mouthed.
Only . . . Ophelia had been the one to go out into the streets and find the children to employ. It was a responsibility she’d all but entreated her brother to turn over to her and he had given, despite the reservations he’d always shown toward her. Nay, reservations he’d always shown toward her and anyone who was not their capable sister Cleopatra.
And now I’ve gone and brought the law down upon the club.
If he hadn’t been wholly determined to see her off and married before, this would assuredly seal his aspirations for Ophelia’s future.
She reached for the door handle; Gertrude’s gasp ricocheted around the empty halls.
Ophelia glanced over, an apology in her eyes.
“No,” Gertrude silently mouthed, giving her head a firm shake. “Do not—”
Even as her sister took a flying step forward, Ophelia let herself in.
The tense discourse instantly ceased as both men were on their feet with weapons trained on the door—on her, to be specific.
The moment Broderick’s gaze registered his recognition, fury that would have withered most men roared to life in his eyes.
Deliberately turning her shoulder in a disdainful rebuff of the man who threatened her and her family just by his presence here, Ophelia trained her gaze squarely on Broderick’s face.
“You summoned me.” She offered that as a statement.
Her brother’s face turned a mottled red, and had he been any other man, the murderous rage seeping from his eyes would have sent terror through her. Broderick, however, had never lifted a hand to her or any of her siblings in violence, and she trusted him as she did her blood sisters. “No,” he said slowly, a warning in his hard stare. “No. You were mistaken.”
“Yes, you did.”
They locked in a silent battle. She tipped up her chin.
Her brother was the first to look away.
Feeling the eyes of the investigator on her, she glanced over. “I understand . . . y-you . . .” Distinct, slate-grey eyes met hers squarely.
All coherent, logical thought fled.
Four inches taller and with more muscle to his powerful frame, the man before her bore little trace of the “boy who’d gotten away.” Those thick, loose curls hung unfashionably about his shoulders, falling over his brow. She peered at him, willing to shove those locks back so she could find that mark, a hated one worn by too many, so she might confirm that she didn’t, even now, imagine him. Even as his harsh, heavy jaw and crooked nose served as all the proof she needed. That he was real before her.
The one Diggory had been obsessed with finding and who she’d both resented and cheered for the freedom he’d found . . . until Diggory had reminded her that he always triumphed in the end.
Ya let ’im go, ya fucking fool . . . ya’ll pay for it . . . Now, to make you pay.
Her fingers curled reflexively. All these years she’d believed he’d been hanged, saving her. Ultimately, that last exchange with him had brought down Diggory’s fury and seen Gertrude beaten and then blinded. And for the weight of guilt that had followed her, there was a peace in knowing that Connor had survived. “You are alive,” she whispered.
The ghost of a smile graced his lips. “And should I not be . . . Miss . . . ?” He spared a questioning look for her brother.
“Ophelia?” At her brother’s perplexity, she blinked slowly.
Then a wild rush of color blazed across her cheeks. “Forgive me. I . . . You had a familiar look,” she finished lamely. It was a lie. With his swarthy features and gypsy looks, he was unlike any she’d ever known. All the while she peered at the towering figure beside her brother, searching through that tangle of black curls over his brow for the mark that would give the most definitive confirmation.
“Allow me to present,” Broderick gritted out, “my sister Ophelia Killoran.”
“Your . . . sister?” He curled a dry edge around those two words that called her brother a liar . . . because, of course, having lived on the streets, he very well knew the Diggory-gang girls had never had a protective older brother about.
“Yes,” she snapped, taking a step forward. Just like that, the insolence of Connor O’Roarke, who’d always thought himself their better, raged to life. “I am his sister.” She might not have Broderick’s blood in her veins, but he’d been like a father when her own had no use of her other than the coins she could earn and as a convenient figure to whip about when angry or frustrated.
Once more, her perceptive brother did not miss the palpable tension between Ophelia and Connor. Frowning, he moved his stare back and forth between them. He finally spoke. “Mr. Steele is an investigator who has questions about the children we’ve employed in the club.”
“Is he?” she snorted, and the ghost of a dangerous frown hovered on the hard flesh of Connor’s lips. Ignoring that latter part, she focused on the lie her brother had unwittingly uttered. “Mr. Steele,” she greeted, placing a heavy emphasis on that name she knew to be false.
His gaze narrowed all the more. “I had questions for the man who does the hiring of the children here.”
Her insides twisted into vicious, painful knots, and just like that, she was recalled to the purpose of his being here. “The man who does the hiring?” she asked coolly.
Broderick regained his footing as they connected with a shared mockery for the interloper endangering all they’d built. He tossed his arms wide. “Allow me to present her.”
Connor narrowed his eyes. “You would be the first proprietor I’ve dealt with who’s ever given such responsibility to a woman.”
Her brother smiled, and unlike the practiced gestures of before, this contained a whisper of mirth. “I am the only proprietor to have sisters like I do.”
In a bid to hide the tremble to her fingers, Ophelia dropped her hands on her hips. “What do you want?”
Connor honed his piercing gaze on her face, and for an uncharacteristic moment of cowardice, she wished she’d remained silent. Wished she hadn’t taunted this older, harder, more unforgiving version of the boy she’d kept safe. Then he spoke. “I would like a meeting.”
That was all? Brother and sister exchanged a look. It could never be that simple. Not with any man on his side of the law.
Broderick’s mouth went taut, and he reached reluctantly for his chair.
“With your sister,” Connor said coolly. “Alone.”
“Absolutely not,” Broderick barked. The muscles bunched under his sleeves; he was a man prepared to fight.
Were it any other man before them, she would have not doubted Broderick’s ultimate triumph. But two inches taller, and with a solid wall of muscle, in this man Broderick had met his match. As if in silent testament to that supposition, Connor flicked a restrained, bored glance at the other man.
She gnashed her teeth. He’d always been a blight upon her existence. “You have twenty minutes,” she announced. “Leave us, Broderick.”
Chapter 4
It was her hair.
It may as well have been a calling card, as defining as it was of the young woman before him.
With hair so pale it was nearly white hanging loose about her back, there was an ethere
al, otherworldly quality to her.
Aye, such hair would forever make it an impossibility for the spitfire to have anonymity . . . anywhere, regardless of the passage of time.
If there had been any doubt, however, that the woman before Connor was anyone other than the girl loyal to Diggory, who nonetheless had spared Connor’s life, the effortless way she ordered Broderick Killoran from the room, and his compliance, served as all the confirmation Connor needed.
Killoran paused as he reached Connor’s side. “You have twenty minutes.” With a sharp, warning look at Connor that promised death, he stalked from the room.
As soon as he’d gone, Ophelia Killoran drifted closer, all the while keeping a slight distance between them.
She walked a slow path around him, the same girl who’d caught him unawares more times than he’d deserved to survive, assessing him with her clear blue eyes, watching.
Her incisive stare periodically returned to his brow.
Through her scrutiny, Connor remained motionless. In the past he’d lived in the shadows, carefully skirting all members of the Diggory gang. Frankly, his life would have been forfeit had he been discovered.
As such, he’d studied them all—including this woman before him.
Ophelia Killoran had been angrier, fiercer, and more terrifying as a slip of a child than most grown men in St. Giles. She proved all that and tenfold as a woman. And while she examined him, he used the opportunity to study her in return.
He passed his gaze over her satin-draped figure; the fine lace trim of an expensive gown was better suited for a lady than any common street pickpocket. Though a hideous shade of brown, there could be no mistaking the quality of that modest dress. Nay, she’d done more than survived. She’d flourished and thrived as one of the Diggory gang. He trailed his gaze up and down her tall frame. Just a handful of inches shy of six feet, she was a medieval warrioress. Her gown clung to a generous bosom, trim waist, and lush curves that would make a saint into a sinner.
Nor had Connor ever been confused with the former.
His breath stuck oddly as once more the truth pierced him—Ophelia Killoran was no longer the snapping child of the streets but had grown into a carnal siren. Hers was the haunting beauty that those foolish sailors would thrash themselves happily against rocks for should she wish it.
She finally stopped, a mere handbreadth between them.
Her large crimson lips curved up in a smirk, and that cynical expression suited to one twenty years her senior knocked out the lustful musings. “Steele, is it now?”
He touched an imagined brim, specifically that spot where he’d been marked as a mere boy of eight, revealing his scar. “If it is not Lagertha,” he murmured. A lifetime ago it had been a utilitarian name he’d given this woman. Back when she refused to share her real one with him, he’d assigned her one. One that had been drawn from old books read to him by his mother.
Lagertha—Ophelia—had survived. A ball of emotion stuck in his throat.
These streets aren’t yars . . . they’ll never be yars . . . now go before he foinds the both of us.
Coming around him, she hitched herself up onto the edge of her brother’s desk, an incongruity of lady and street rat. “Last I saw of you, you were carted off. Never to be seen again,” she said. Her hushed, smoky tones barely reached his ears, and he drifted closer.
How different this sultry woman’s tones were from the guttural Cockney of her childhood years.
He stopped with the leather winged chair between them and placed his scarred palms along the back. “Did you look for me?” He met her question with one of his own.
Her eyes darkened. “Why would I have looked for you?” she asked with nothing more than a faint curiosity so that he may have imagined that fleeting grimness.
And more . . . why should he have asked? The question, irrelevant to the case he’d taken on, hung on his lips and remained unspoken.
“Why would you?” he murmured to himself. God, she’d always been more stubborn than a mule. She’d not give him a single answer, and he knew Ophelia enough over the years to know they’d stand here until the earth ceased spinning before she ceded a proverbial inch. “I’m an investigator now.”
“An investigator,” she repeated, those two words rolling from her tongue as if foreign ones she puzzled through and, by the souring of her expression, had found wanting. “You became an investigator.”
“That is so hard to believe?”
She lifted her shoulder in a defiant shrug. “Given the last I saw of you, you were stuck between a nob and a constable, yes, it is.”
He searched for a hint of undeserved regret or guilt from that long-ago day, but her expression was as empty as a slab of uncarved stone.
She leaned forward, her long, graceful neck arched as she strained toward him. “How did you get away?” Silver flecks within her irises glittered.
In other words, how had he escaped the filth of St. Giles and eluded a ruthless Mac Diggory? “Luck.” He finally settled for that vague but accurate reply. “Which I trust you know something of.” He glanced pointedly about the mahogany Chippendale furniture better suited to a nobleman’s Mayfair offices than to a gaming hell . . . and then Connor touched his eyes on her fine gown.
The young woman followed his stare, briefly grazing her fingertips along the lace overlay at her flat stomach. Those long digits fluttered back to her lap and curled into defensive fists.
“After all, your brother is now the owner of Mac Diggory’s impressive gaming establishment,” he persisted.
“Yes, it would seem we’ve both been . . . lucky.”
Adopted by the same man he’d rescued Ophelia from, and supplied with tutors and a Cambridge education, Connor had certainly made out better than most any other child in East London. He knew that. And was grateful every day for the gift he’d been given that day outside the Covent Garden Theatre.
“Is this why you’re here?” she asked, sotto voce. “To fondly chat over the past and reminisce over lost years?” Ophelia looked briefly across the room to the clock ticking away louder than their actual words. “Because you’re already down five minutes, Mr. Steele.”
Connor drifted around the chair until they stood so close their knees touched. “I’m searching for a child.”
Her shoulders went back. “A child?”
Whatever she’d been expecting, it had not been that.
“Did you think I’d come to bring you and your kin to justice for past crimes?” Committed so they might survive. Ruthless acts he himself was as guilty of as any member of the late Diggory’s gang.
She leaned forward. “How adorably naive of you,” she said. The scent of her apple blossoms conjured the fields of his father’s property in Lythe Valley. “To assume the Killorans are now free of sin.”
“Still attempting to intimidate me, Ophelia Killoran,” he murmured, trailing his gaze over the heart-shaped face that had always been set in a perpetual scowl.
She quickly drew back, retreating. “Four and ten minutes,” she warned, her husky contralto gruff.
Connor reached into his pocket and withdrew the notepad and pencil tucked away there. “I’m looking for a child,” he repeated, opening the book.
“Yes, you said as much.” She followed his movements guardedly. “And you believe me and my family guilty of an underhanded operation of harming children?”
“That was your brother’s assumption,” he clarified. Though every instinct that had served him well since his parents’ murder told him she would not harm a small boy or girl, from his own dark existence he well knew what any person was capable of. “I merely explained I had questions about the person responsible for bringing the boys and girls inside this establishment.”
“Man.”
Connor creased his brow.
Ophelia angled her head back to better meet his stare. “You wanted to put questions to the man responsible. Not person.”
She missed nothing.
It w
as why she’d endured. Always tripping up one’s opponent was the key to survival in St. Giles, and her presence here, despite the peril she—they—had faced, was a mark of her strength. It was also likely why her brother had ceded responsibilities over to her when nearly all men—regardless of station or birthright—rarely entrusted women with any.
“How long have you been accountable for hiring the children employed here?” With Diggory dead only these past four years, she could not have found herself with power during his reign of terror.
A muscle in her jaw twitched. “Just a handful of months.”
Questions swirled. If she’d only recently taken on that task for the club, what had been her role before that?
“I suggest if you have another question, you ask it, O’Roarke. Ten minutes,” she warned, ticking down his remaining time allotted.
“Steele,” he quietly corrected. Connor O’Roarke had been reborn again under the care of the Earl of Mar; the name of his birth represented a connection to the darkest time in his life and the evil he’d carried out to survive.
“Ah, yes, of course,” she said, as if she could see. As if she knew. When she didn’t. When no one, not even his adoptive father, could begin to speculate about the horrors that linked back to that birth name. “A fancy investigator now. Are you trying to erase the streets from yourself, Steele?” she persisted, dangerously accurate in her supposition. “Still haven’t figured it out, have you?”
She was baiting him. It was there in the spitfire’s eyes and tone and insolent smile.
Do not take it . . . do not take it.
“I trust you intend to tell me, Miss Killoran?” he asked with that same rash impulsiveness he’d managed to quell over the years that had seen him rush headfirst into Mac Diggory as a boy of eight, riddled with rage.
“It will always be part of you. No matter”—Ophelia flicked at the lapel of his jacket—“the fine garments you wear,” she taunted.
He’d always thought himself better than Ophelia and her family.
He’d believed himself better than any of the people in St. Giles.
The Vixen Page 5
