The Heiress's Deception

by Christi Caldwell

  He’d let her remain.

  There should be the thrill of relief and a lightness within.

  My lady.

  That is how she would forever and only be to Calum Dabney. She would work these next two and a half months for him, and then he wanted her gone.

  Tears clogging her throat, Eve picked up her valise and began unpacking, hating that there would never—could never—be more with him.

  Chapter 19

  Over the course of that week, everything within the club continued on as it had been.

  Standing at the mahogany table in the Observatory, Calum alternated his attention between reviewing the reports Eve had drafted and watching the patrons on the gaming floors. For all intents and purposes, it was any other day inside the hell.

  For all of Eve’s staggering revelations, there had not been any dramatic scandal to rock the club. There’d been no raging duke to storm the hell and lay the final deathblow to their success.

  Nor had there been any of the other shared tender moments between them. Damn him for being weak, Calum missed them. He missed the teasing discourse, and their working together at the foundling hospital.

  Instead, Eve had become the perfect employee. A barrier of formality had been erected between them where she was his bookkeeper and he her employer, and but for business meetings and topics pertaining to the club, nothing further was discussed.

  Her footsteps sounded in the hall. “Enter,” he called before she’d even lifted her hand to knock.

  Eve entered, somber and silent. Adjusting the ledgers in her arms, she drew the door shut behind her and came over. Wordlessly, she laid several of those folios and ledgers atop his table.

  It’s my boots. There’s nothing else for it.

  Frustration broiled in his gut, and Calum grabbed the leather folio. Yanking it open, he proceeded to read her expense report. As he scanned her meticulous columns, she hovered at his shoulder, silent as the damned grave. Damn you, Eve. Damn you for being . . . what? What right did he have for resentment? When he’d set out terms under which she might remain, he’d been clear that nothing was to exist between them except the role of employer and bookkeeper. She’d fulfilled her every responsibility and complied with his demands.

  And he was bloody miserable.

  He glanced over. “And the wheat—”

  She handed over another folio, placing it on his desk. “By my calculations,” she said in flat tones, “with the adjusted prices agreed upon in my meeting, you’ll save an average two hundred pounds each month, and a cumulative savings of two thousand four hundred annually.”

  It was damned good news considering the money they’d bled since Niall’s marriage. Now he felt . . . oddly hollow. “Thank you. That will be all.”

  Eve dropped a curtsy—a bloody, blasted curtsy—and took her leave.

  “Eve?” he called out.

  With the smooth, regal grace only a duke’s daughter could manage, she wheeled slowly back.

  Say something to me. Anything beyond this eternal politeness and formality. “You are well here?” His own sister had eventually chafed at the constraints of remaining solely inside the Hell and Sin. What of a lady accustomed to running her family’s estates and going where she would, when she wanted?

  “I am well,” she murmured. She stared questioningly back.

  He cleared his throat. “That will be all,” he said gruffly.

  Eve dropped another infernal curtsy—and left.

  Calum dropped his focus back to the records she’d brought him. Or attempted to. With a curse, he slammed his fist down. Abandoning his place at the desk, he stalked over to the windows and absently viewed the patrons around the club.

  It shouldn’t matter that he and Eve existed in a solely businesslike state. In fact, it was the only relationship that should have ever existed. Men, of any station, who longed for and lusted after women who served on their staff were scoundrels. Worse, they were fiendish reprobates, and Calum had descended into their ignoble ranks.

  Only, Calum hadn’t lusted after Eve. Oh, he’d longed to know the feel of her in his arms—and ultimately had acted on that hungering. But there had been more with Eve. For all the guardedness that had existed between Calum and his siblings, with Eve there had been an openness. He’d not felt lesser for laughing with her or worried that it made him seem human when men in St. Giles weren’t permitted any weakness. Scarred and broad as he was, women, from the girls who worked in his club to the ladies of the ton, eyed him with equal parts fear and disgust. Eve never had.

  But then, she hadn’t when he’d been a boy of fourteen, either.

  He squeezed his eyes shut.

  And for a brief time, when only the illusion existed between them, he’d cared for her.

  Belatedly he registered Adair’s visage behind him.

  “You didn’t hear me enter,” his brother observed, a question there.

  “I was distracted,” he said, not taking his gaze off the floor.

  “As you’ve been since you indicated Mrs. Swindell was in trouble.”

  It had been a mistake to storm off that day and blurt out the truth to his brother. Calum gritted his teeth. Nay, the only mistake was in not revealing Eve’s identity to the other man. “It doesn’t merit a discussion,” he said for the third time since his brother had pressed him for details.

  “But it is enough that it has you distracted and Mrs. Swindell downcast.”

  Calum’s ears pricked up. “You’d say downcast, would you?” All Calum had seen in their dealings was one wholly unaffected, and perfectly formal. Downcast would suggest she felt . . . something.

  A snorting laugh left Adair’s lips, and withdrawing a cheroot from his jacket, he lit the scrap and took a pull from it. “Highly unusual for you to sound so bloody hopeful about another person’s misery.” A glimmer lit his eyes. “I’d expect as much from Ryker and Niall, but not you.”

  He mustered a chuckle at the other man’s jest.

  Adair held over his cheroot, and Calum gratefully accepted it, filling his lungs with the smoke. “What kind of trouble?” his brother put to him, relentless.

  He deserves the truth, and yet the moment Calum revealed all, Adair would order her gone. “The gentleman she worked for prior had nefarious plans for her,” he hedged, offering partial pieces of Eve’s existence.

  Adair cursed. “Bloody noble?”

  Bloody duke. He nodded once.

  “And so, she’s in hiding?”

  “She is,” Calum confirmed. Taking one more inhale of the cheroot, he handed it back.

  Scrap in fingers, Adair folded his arms and continued his smoke, all the while eyeing Calum through the plumes of white. “Did she steal from the gentleman?”

  He shook his head.

  “Harm him?”

  Calum scoffed. “No.” Just the opposite. Fury went blazing through him as Eve’s telling resurfaced. “She was wronged,” he reiterated. And having been victim to the evil the Duke of Bedford was capable of, he’d no doubts of Eve’s peril.

  Adair shifted back and forth on his feet. Of course. Calum’s explosive defense went counter to the calm evenness their siblings had prided themselves on. Again . . . it had only ever been Eve who’d let him speak without fear of recrimination or judgment.

  “You missed your shift,” Adair said quietly.

  Calum blinked slowly, then jerked his gaze over to the longcase clock. The damning angle of those black handles glared back his error. “Oh, Christ,” he whispered on a quiet exhalation.

  He, who’d prided himself on putting this club before all, had faltered now twice, and in the most egregious ways.

  “It’s fine.” It wasn’t. Adair squeezed his shoulder. “But you cannot be on the floors right now. I have it.”

  Here Calum had served as second-in-command, always believing himself effortlessly able to slide into the role of head proprietor if the circumstances merited, only to be proved an utter failure in this. And so much.

&nb
sp; “Here.” Adair handed over the partially smoked cheroot, and his meaning rang loud. Calum needed a break.

  “Thank—”

  “Don’t thank me,” his brother said impatiently. “We all serve different roles at different times. It’s why we’ve been successful. There’s five of us.” Adair started for the door. “Oh, and Calum?”

  Shaken, he glanced over.

  “A letter arrived earlier from Helena. She wants to meet Mrs. Swindell.” With that casual pronouncement, Calum’s world lurched again. Following his abrupt departure, he’d not gotten ’round to paying her a visit. Having her here wasn’t an option for entirely different reasons. Helena, now living among the ton, kept circles with the peerage, and that made any meeting with Bedford’s sister an impossibility.

  Just one more bloody lie.

  “Calum?”

  “I’ll make arrangements,” he said tightly. Helena would have to come here. They couldn’t risk Eve going outside. Not with all of London searching for her.

  Adair nodded and took his leave. Calum remained at the windows, surveying the crowded floors. He finished his cheroot and tamped it out on the glass window. Dropping the scrap, he stared out as his brother reentered the hell, moving freely and casually as Calum himself once had. Envy sluiced through him. With just one hire of an heiress bookkeeper, his life had become like one of those card towers their former guard Oswyn used to construct—one misstep or faulty movement away from toppling. Adair stopped alongside the edge of the floor, and with his arms akimbo, he was very much king of this empire.

  And I’m threatening it all . . .

  Swiping his hand over his face, Calum abandoned the Observatory and found his way through the halls, making his way to the mews. For all the darkness he’d faced as an orphan, where his brothers and sister had known zero kindness from the world, for a brief time, Calum had known warmth. The Duke of Bedford’s stables had initially posed as a brief shelter from an unexpected rainstorm. In that place, he’d remembered everything he’d lost along with his parents those then nine years earlier. A horse. As a boy of five, he’d had a horse of his own.

  After his parents’ deaths, in those secret moments he’d sooner have died than admit to his siblings, Calum had allowed himself dreams of more. Of a stable of his own, with a mount like Night. That time he’d spent with Eve had allowed him dreams when his siblings had ceased to think of anything else but survival.

  Eve had done that for him. Over the years, with the passing of time, however, he’d not allowed himself to remember anything but his bitter resentment at being turned over to the constable. That dark night had shaped him, so that he learned to trust no one other than his siblings.

  But there had been books with her. And laughter. And discussions that hadn’t involved death and dying and survival, as it had only and always been with his family.

  Entering the scullery, Calum strode past the handful of servants still working at that late hour. MacTavish, stationed at the back entrance, jerked his chin. “She’s outside, Mr. Dabney,” he said on a hushed murmur for Calum’s ears alone. “Been out there for some time.”

  Calum followed his gaze out the glass panel. With a quiet word of thanks, he exited the scullery, drawn to Tau’s stables.

  Giving his eyes a moment to adjust to the dark, he entered.

  Eve sat against the stable wall, an apple and a knife in her hand. She held out that piece of fruit to Tau, and the enormous creature swallowed it in two loud bites.

  She spoke suddenly, unexpectedly. “Do you know, the day we met was one of the happiest ones of my life?” Her words struck like a gut punch, throwing him off-kilter. What did it say about Eve’s existence that their time together had been the happiest of her five and twenty years? “You were my first and only friend,” she whispered. “In retrospect”—she waved a hand, fluttering that apple about, and Tau made a grab for it—“as a woman grown, I see that to a boy on the cusp of manhood, a nine-year-old girl would have never been considered a friend.” Not even one who’d brought him food and kept him company and taught him to smile again.

  He had, though.

  “For every ill thing you believe about me and the unfavorable opinions you have and are entitled to”—but was he?—“I would have you know before I leave here, that time together meant something to me. You saved me from abject loneliness, and I repaid that gift with betrayal.”

  He shook his head. “It’s done,” he said gruffly, not wanting to hash out the past and speak about the darkest moment of his one and thirty years. No good could come of it, and more, coward that he was, he didn’t want to relive that terror.

  She continued anyway. “That night, my father had been out, as he so often was. My brother, Kit, was away at school, and Gerald had recently returned from wherever he’d been.”

  At a wicked club. A boy of the streets who’d wound his way about picking those fancy lords’ purses, it had been Calum’s position to know where to find the most plump-in-the-pockets nobles and who were the easiest marks. It’s why he’d made a grab for his watch fob that night.

  Eve went silent, and Calum was drawn forward by the need for her to continue. She nibbled the corner of an apple piece and then turned the larger portion over to Tau. She patted him on the nose. “Sometimes, I would go through my book”—that heavy red leather volume they’d both looked over together—“and I would pretend I was one of those mythical figures. The night you were injured, you’d said you would be there. But you didn’t come.” She lifted her eyes to his. “Of course, I know now where you were.” Eve caught her lower lip between her teeth. “As a girl, I was so self-absorbed.” She grimaced. “So lonely. I was angry that you weren’t there.”

  “We were going to blow out candles upon a cake.”

  A sad little chuckle slipped from her lips. “You didn’t want the candles. You said to save them for mine.”

  What a miserable bastard he’d been. Of course, life in St. Giles had jaded him, had knocked most of the niceness out of him. It had been what allowed him to live when men like Diggory would have beaten Calum down for any weakness. Still, he wished he’d been better—for her. He slid into the place next to her so they were shoulder to shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  She waved off that apology. “I continued to go ’round to the mews to see if you’d suddenly come, and then I told myself I didn’t care if you came. Instead, I played by myself. That night I pretended I was the deity Philotes.”

  His gaze fixed on the top of her head as a memory whispered forward.

  “Let me read this one, of Philotes, Calum.”

  “I’d rather you read of Zeus, Duchess.”

  “But you don’t know this one . . . Oh, fine.”

  He stilled. Now he wished all those years ago he’d let a little girl win out and read of that Greek story.

  “Philotes was the daughter of the goddess Nyx but had no father,” she explained. Just as she’d been without a mother. “She was the deity of friendship, and I loved to imagine myself as her.” Eve dropped her chin atop her skirts and rubbed back and forth. “I’d been so lonely until I found you.” His heart spasmed. “Then you were there, and I had someone to talk to.”

  He looked down, giving her a wry glance. He’d been silent and surly and afraid the wrong sound would find him dead. “I wasn’t much for conversation then.”

  They shared a smile.

  “Not at first,” she concurred with the same honesty she’d shown as a girl, “but in time you were. Until you, there were only stern nursemaids and myself for company.” Her gaze grew distant. “I didn’t know of your siblings then,” she said wistfully.

  “No.” He hadn’t confided in her because the danger would have been too great.

  “I’d imagined you were, not unlike me, alone.” Eve stopped that back-and-forth movement of her cheek. “I wish I’d known that. I wish I’d known that you had family in your life. Not like mine, people who didn’t know I was there, but people who cared about you, because I used
to lie abed hating that for you. Hating that you were as lonely as me and on the streets. It was doubly unfair.”

  “Yes, but then, isn’t that life?”

  “Unfair? Hmm. Who am I to say that? I always had food and shelter and security.”

  As a child, perhaps. As a woman, she was just as much without now as he had been then. She drew in a shuddery breath. “I was so angry with you that night, because you weren’t there. I swore I wouldn’t keep checking, but I did anyway, with that little cake I’d cajoled Cook into making.” Eve held the remaining part of the apple in her hand over to Tau, and he swiftly consumed it. “And then I found you.” Her rapidly indrawn breaths filled the space, blending with Tau’s steady munching on the apple. “It was the blood.”

  I’m not afraid of blood, Calum. They bled my mama.

  “There was so much of i-it.” Her voice broke. “It was different than when the doctors bled my mother. I came to you that night pretending I was Philotes.”

  Calum closed his eyes, not knowing what to do with her suffering. Only knowing he wanted to take it away and make it his own.

  “One of Philotes’s siblings, Apate, was the personification of deceit, the cause of bad.” Her eyes darkened, and his arms ached with the need to drag her close. “With Gerald as a brother, I knew what he was.” She shot her eyes up to his. “Even as a girl of nine. I knew he was e-evil.” Her voice broke again, and that evidence of her misery threatened to break him. She shook her head back and forth, and it knocked against the wall. “And I went to him, anyway.” Eve covered her mouth with her hand, muffling her hoarse words. “It was my fault you were taken to Newgate.”

  A piteous sound tore from his throat, and going up onto his knees before her, he forced her up, demanding she look at him. “It wasn’t your fault.” He’d only ascribed blame to her over the years because it had been easier to live an existence of black and white, and not the nether shades in between.

  Eve’s shoulders shook with a hideous laugh devoid of her effervescent spirit and cheer. “Oh, come. You remembered me only in hatred and rightfully blamed me. Don’t you lie to me now.” Then she dissolved into shuddery, noisy tears that shook her slender frame.