The Heiress's Deception

by Christi Caldwell

  “What manner of woman would give up all for the course of a month?” he asked, in an echo of her very thoughts. His was an alluring, husky baritone capable of pulling a lady’s secret from her lips.

  She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “They needed it more than I. You’ve provided me employment. A roof over my head. Food to eat. I’m not so very selfish that I’d not in turn give that to those who would otherwise go without.” No, I’m just selfish enough to lie to the man my brother nearly ended. “A person doesn’t need more than the air to breathe, food in their belly, and—” His breath caught on an audible inhalation, and Eve curled her toes hard into the soles of her boots. Those words he’d given her long ago when she’d read to him from a child’s book came forth too easily. Damningly. Wringing her hands in her skirts, she braced for the moment recognition settled in.

  “Why?”

  She frowned, meeting his gaze squarely. “I already told—”

  “Why do you come here?”

  His question brought her up short. What to say when he was the reason she’d found this place? That because of the pain she’d brought to him, and her need to see children spared from a life of begging in the streets, she’d sought out the foundling hospital? She pressed her fingers hard upon the table, draining the blood from their tips until they turned white. Someday, when she left him, when she was free of fear from her brother, and in possession of her fortune, she’d offer him up the truth. She would reveal who she was and give him the belated apology that would change nothing and could never right the wrongs committed by her family against him. Now she offered up the closest she could. “There was once a . . . boy I knew. I saw how he suffered and railed at the unfairness that he had been born to his lot and I mine.” How fate, that fickle, capricious lady, must now laugh at their reversed circumstances.

  “What became of him?” he asked quietly.

  He became powerful and successful and wealthy beyond all measure.

  “He died,” she said hollowly, handing him the lie she’d believed all these years. “And I vowed that someday, when I was able . . . if I were able,” she amended, “I would see that I helped others like him.”

  Calum said nothing for a long while. It was that contemplative silence she’d come to appreciate from him. How many lords and ladies filled voids of quiet with senseless ramblings? She far preferred Calum’s thoughtfulness. He weighed his words like the finest coins, and he handed them over as though they were just as precious. “Those are your secrets, then, Eve.”

  She’d have to be deafer than a post to fail to hear the warning there. The unspoken question asked her to lay out the secrets she’d carried into his home and hell. Her tongue felt heavy in her mouth, and she tried to get out a proper reply. “They are.” Among others that would earn nothing but hatred from you . . .

  He caught her wrist in his hand, a touch surprisingly tender and gentle for the sheer size and strength of him. And given the brief time she’d known him long ago and the handful of days he’d been back in her life, she’d wager away the entire fortune awaiting her that this was not a man who’d ever lift his hand in violence against a woman. Unlike her eldest brother and the soulless reprobates he called friends.

  “The life I’ve lived, Eve,” he said quietly, “has made me cautious. I’ve learned to trust my instinct and to be wary of all that give me reason to be wary.”

  Me. He’s speaking accurately of me.

  “That is the reason why I followed you here.”

  The breath lodged painfully in her lungs, until her chest ached from the excruciating weight of it. He was explaining himself. Trying to make her understand. “Stop,” she said in a rush as he made to speak. “Please, stop. You do not need to explain anything to me, Calum.” He owed her nothing. She owed him everything, and yet had nothing with which to pay that could ever make anything right between them. “Truly,” she beseeched when he made to speak again.

  “Very well.”

  Very well. Surely it was not that . . . easy? She followed his movements as he dragged over a chair and claimed a place at her makeshift desk. His long fingers laid possession of one of those complicated ledgers, and she shook her head. What was he doing?

  “What are you . . . ?”

  “They need help. I expect it will be vastly easier with the both of us going through their books.”

  Eve clasped a hand at her throat as he turned his attentions to the book before him. His gaze made quick work of the page, and then he grabbed a pen. The scratch of that tip punched a steady beat inside that ledger.

  After her mother’s death, Eve had been largely invisible, with her father truly failing to see her until he was sick and wasting away, confined to his bed with no choice but to see her. Kit had been studying and then traveling, and ultimately gone to her. As cruel as Gerald had always been, she was better off that he’d failed to acknowledge her existence until just recently. Even though she’d been born to a family of once great wealth and still great power, through most of her life, she’d been largely alone. She’d relied upon herself and depended upon no one. And now Calum, who knew her as nothing more than a stranger, would give of his time to help not only her but also all those dependent upon the Salvation Foundling Hospital? A wad of emotion lodged in her throat.

  “You’d give of your own time.” He, a man who owned one of the most successful gaming hells in London, would take time from his own affairs for this?

  Calum paused, glancing up from his work. “I’m not so very selfish that I’d not in turn give help to those who’d otherwise need it.” He followed that earlier echo of her words with a slow wink.

  A little laugh bubbled from her lips. As a child, she’d loved Calum for the friendship to her, a then-little girl who’d been so very lonely. And in this instance, a large piece of her heart chipped away and fell into his hands for the man he’d become. Smiling, Eve claimed the miserably stiff cane back chair opposite him, collected a book, and began to work.

  Eve devoted her time to a foundling hospital.

  She neither knew a child inside these halls nor had a familial connection to anyone else who worked or lived here, and yet she visited and sought to make better the lives of the children who called the sterile place home.

  Calum stared blankly down at the columns.

  I was one of those children . . . Only there had been no kind-eyed, protective nurses who watched over that institution, but rather merciless men and women who’d beaten children until they’d screamed themselves raw. As Calum had. The day he’d crept out of the miserable dwelling and into the streets of St. Giles, he’d vowed to never again set foot inside another foundling hospital. And he hadn’t.

  Until Eve. Until Eve had reminded him there were boys and girls who, by a cruel twist of fate, found themselves alone.

  His stomach lurched, and he forced his hand to move as he went through the rote calculations. Except, guilt had crept in along with the past, and there was no escaping it.

  When his parents had both fallen ill and died within two months of one another, Calum had found himself alone, without a single relative or familial friend to care for him. He’d fallen into the mercy of the streets, which even in his then-innocent and tender years, he’d quickly learned were ruthless ones that destroyed the weak.

  So, he’d stolen to put food in his belly, and he’d killed for the right to draw another breath, and he’d all but bartered his soul to the Devil in order to live. Through it, there had never been a person who’d cared. Lords and ladies had kicked him out of the way and spit on him for coming too close. He’d learned in short order that no one cared about him. Certainly not the people of those exalted stations with their fancy speech. Instead, he’d found a new family . . . people who did care, but people who cared because they lived a shared experience. And in those streets, he, Ryker, Adair, Niall, and Helena had formed a bond greater than any connection he’d shared—even with his own parents. Lords and ladies of the peerage, wealthy merchants, members of t
he gentry—none of them had acknowledged Calum’s existence.

  You cannot die . . . You have the mark of life . . .

  That child’s voice of long ago whispered fresh around his memory. The pen slipped from his fingers.

  “Calum?”

  Blinking, he looked up at the woman hard at work across from him. Concern wreathed her features.

  He’d not allowed himself to think of Bedford’s sister, who’d betrayed him and nearly cost him his life. Mayhap it was the frequency with which that missing woman’s name was mentioned now in the scandal sheets. But for the first time, he wondered after her. Whom had she become?

  “Fine,” he said succinctly. Unnerved by the intensity in Eve’s brown eyes, he fixed his attention on the ledger. It was surely being in this place that had forced to the surface memories he preferred dead and properly buried. Only a man bent on madness and a life in Bedlam chose to focus on the darkest time in one’s life. And with every sin Calum had committed and every struggle he’d endured, the time he’d spent in Newgate was greater than the flames of hell undoubtedly awaiting him. But for a brief time, there had been a member of those lofty ranks of nobles who had helped him. Who’d brought him food and read books to him, reminding him of his—until her, forgotten—love of literature. He’d not allowed himself to think of Little Lena Duchess.

  “Who was he?”

  It was harder to say who was more surprised by the question that left him.

  Startled from her task, Eve picked her head up. “Who?”

  Setting aside his pen, he rolled his shoulders. “You mentioned you began coming here because there’d once been a boy you knew?” he clarified. Muscles fatigued from the cramped position they’d been in for the better part of two hours, he stretched his right arm out before him, and then the left.

  Eve’s expression grew shuttered. “He was . . .” She glanced quickly about the room, putting him in mind of the wild cats who crept around the back of the Hell and Sin, wary of all who came near. “He was a friend,” she said at last, laying her own black pen on the table before her. With fingers that shook, Eve fiddled with that slender instrument, adjusting it into a flawless horizontal line. “I’d been a lonely girl, invisible in my own household.”

  “No siblings?” he asked, filled with an urge to know more about the woman seated across from him. A woman who so fearlessly made her way in the world.

  She held two fingers up. “Two brothers.”

  He scowled. “Miserable bastards?” he ventured, hoping she’d contradict his drawn opinion. Already knowing by her earlier admission that he was unerringly on the mark.

  “One is,” she said tightly. Her gaze took on a far-off quality, distant with so much pain he hated himself for having asked even a single question with his selfishness to learn more. She cleared her throat. “The other is gone.”

  Gone.

  So much agony underscored those four words, his gut clenched. And yet, as she’d vowed at their first meeting, not a tear was shed. She jutted her chin out at a mutinous angle, daring him to offer empty words of condolence. Calum, however, had learned firsthand the value of knowing when to allow a person one’s secrets.

  Eve coughed into her hand. “Yes, as I was saying, through that loneliness there was a friend. One day he was just . . .” She turned one hand up. “There. It didn’t matter to him that I was a bothersome girl, underfoot. It didn’t matter that we were of different stations.” There it was. The first statement confirming what Helena had predicted and Calum had suspected, that Eve Swindell had been born to a respectable family. “He spoke to me as though we were equal in every way.”

  He’d known her but a handful of days, but with her clever wit, spirit, and determination, she was unlike any other he’d known before. Prior to meeting Eve, Calum would have said there was no braver, stronger woman than his sister, Helena. Even Helena had not survived without help of her kin. They’d all depended equally on one another in different ways. Eve, however, had carved out an existence of her own. It may not have been in the streets, and instead in the comfort of some fancy lord or lady’s home, but Eve had no one else to rely upon. “I’d wager you’re equal to none and superior to most.”

  Her lips formed a little moue, and such adoration spilled from her eyes, he shifted in his seat, uncomfortable with that show of emotion. Mayhap she’d ignore that statement that had spilled forth. Mayhap—

  “You hardly know me. You . . . you followed me here because you don’t even trust me.”

  Then, Eve was not one of those women who danced around her word choice and suppressed a question. He rested his elbows on the desk. “I’m an excellent read of character . . . but cautious, anyway,” he said, lightening the sudden intensity of their exchange with a wink.

  They shared a smile, and just like that, the casualness of her earlier telling was restored.

  Calum and Eve fell once more back into a companionable silence, working away at their respective ledgers, when something she’d said crept in. He paused. “You have a brother.”

  Blinking, she glanced up. “Beg pardon?”

  “You indicated that one brother is miserable.”

  Eve shook her head slowly. “No. I . . . I—you misheard me,” she said quickly. Too quickly. Then, darting her gaze about, she retrained her attention on her work.

  Her head bent over her desk, she gave every indication of being engrossed in her task. Only, he took in the tense set to her shoulders, the quiver of her hand as she splashed ink upon the otherwise immaculate page.

  The same warning bells that had gone off countless times in his life, saving him from certain disaster, rang clear at the back of his mind.

  He leaned back in his chair. “Eve?”

  Her tightfisted grip on the pen drained the blood from her knuckles. “If someone intends you harm—a brother . . . a father . . . a husband . . .” He put that last, loathsome possibility out, hating the taste of the word on his mouth and hating more the idea there might be someone to whom she was bound.

  She cleared her throat. “I assure you, there is no husband.”

  Some of the tension slid from his frame. “I would not send you away,” he said quietly. “My family is a powerful one, and I could help you. If you need it.” He held her gaze squarely. “If you trust me.”

  Eve stretched a hand out, covering his with her smaller one. He glanced down at her fingers, stained with ink, callused. They were the hands of a woman who’d been forced to work with her hands. Another mark of her strength and skill. “There is no one, Calum.” She spoke in such even tones, with such a matter-of-factness, he may as well have imagined her earlier reaction. For a moment, it looked as though she might say more. To let him in on the secrets she kept. But then she picked up her pen and resumed her calculations. And for everything Eve had revealed to him this day, more questions lingered about the new bookkeeper.

  Chapter 11

  It had been a week.

  Seven days had passed since Calum had followed her to the foundling hospital and sat down beside her to work on Nurse Mattison’s worrisome books and records. In that time, he’d not only accompanied her back each day but also continued to assist her. And somehow, even with the impending threat of doom that hovered and the breathless fear of discovery, when she was with Calum, there was no terror or worrying about being found or harmed.

  As such, given how Eve now worked tirelessly on the accounts for two establishments, she should be exhausted.

  And yet, late that evening, with the early-morn hours looming and her work for the Hell and Sin waiting, Eve lay abed, restless, unable to sleep.

  Her forearm draped atop her forehead, she stared overhead at the naughty mural painted in vibrant jewel tones. In the past, where she’d been riveted by the wickedness of that tableau playing out, now her mind ran amok.

  “I’m going to hell,” she said. Even spoken in quiet tones, those four words echoed around the room. Having given them life, however, did not make her feel any better. �
�Nor do you deserve to feel better,” she muttered, flipping onto her belly. Dragging the thick feather pillow from its spot against the rococo rosewood headboard, Eve punched her fist against the satin pillowcase.

  That soft, fine fabric was smooth against her palm, only highlighting just how generous Calum had been with her in every way. Groaning, Eve buried her head into her pillow.

  Must he be so . . . so perfect?

  A proprietor who not only hired women but also held them to the same high standards he kept his male employees to. Who would devote his time to overseeing the books of a foundling hospital, sacrificing his own time at the Hell and Sin? What manner of man did that? Any of it? Her father had been loving and kind while he’d been living, but neither had he given anything more than the occasional donation to local charities. And he certainly wouldn’t have sacrificed time spent on his own business matters to benefit anyone else.

  It is why Calum deserves the truth . . .

  Restless, Eve turned onto her side and propped her head on her elbow. Staring out the lone window of her chambers, she considered the offer he’d made her that Sunday inside the foundling hospital. To his thinking, he’d known her but four days and vowed to help her should she require it.

  He’ll not be so generous when he discovers you’re Bedford’s sister. “If,” she mumbled. For the kindness Calum had demonstrated to her and those at the foundling hospital, she could not be naive enough, trusting enough, to believe that he’d forgive both her connection to Gerald and her complicity that day long ago in the mews.

  Eve rolled onto her back once more and stared overhead. No, the truth remained: with all the lies between them, the last thing Calum should or would offer Eve for that duplicity was help. This time she accepted the guilt washing over her.