by Erica Monroe
This was obviously a solid plan. Nothing could possibly go wrong here.
Thaddeus advanced upon her, stopping her from tugging her dress over her head. “You’re not going anywhere until we get this sorted.” He placed both hands on her shoulders, massaging out the kinks in her muscles.
“I love you,” he repeated.
That phrase echoed in her ears, once, twice, a thousand times. She believed him. Believed him when everything in her screamed that this had been a mistake and she should run from this room. She found herself relaxing against him, daring to think that he was right.
His hands were on her face, thumb stroking across her lip. Before she’d realized she was doing so, her tongue had darted out. He tasted of salt, sweat, and stale ale, accessible and common enough that he might truly love a debased woman like her.
Pulling his thumb from her mouth, he stroked across her cheek, tangled his fingers in her hair. They were so close, pressed upon each other’s bodies. He leaned his forehead against hers, his breath tickling her face. In his arms she felt whole. He’d taken these disjointed parts of her and reassembled them into something better than the original.
Maybe this hadn’t been a mistake.
She’d been an ingenuous girl before, but now she was a woman.
She was going to say it. She’d say those three words back to him. She did love him. It was undeniable now when the proof of that love lay between her thighs.
Until he spoke again and her whole world shattered before her.
“I know, Poppy,” he began. “I know you lied to me.”
“How could you possibly—how could you possibly know that?” she stammered, pulling back from him.
“I know Robert doesn’t exist,” he continued, his voice flat, without the rage she’d expected. He sounded hurt, but not angry, and that confused the hell out of her. “So, if that’s the reason you want to leave, you don’t have to worry. I don’t understand why you lied to me, but I’ll get through it. I’m not going to abandon you. You have my heart, Poppy.”
The world spun. Her grip on the dress loosened and it fell to the floor. Exposed to him, she half-expected when she looked down to see a scarlet cross burnt over her heart.
Her feet carried her forward while her mind reeled. In a fury of action, she seized his shoulders by her hands and shook him. “What have you done, Thaddeus? Who did you tell?”
He was stronger than her, stronger and taller. She was powerless against him, powerless because he knew everything. Oh God, she’d have to leave London. She’d have to change her name again.
Everything, everything would have to change.
“I posted a note to a friend in Surrey,” he said. He explained what the letter had said, the response he’d received.
As he spoke, those words beat into her mind. She stood back from him and she stared. She stared straight through him; saw a future she’d feared more than anything. Moira, slaved to a brothel because she had no other choice. Treated as property, forced to whore because of Poppy’s mistakes.
“It was when I didn’t know you well, Poppy,” Thaddeus explained. “After you’d first come to my townhouse to apologize and Whiting was pressing me to get more information. I wanted to make sure you weren’t involved.” He sighed, reaching for her arm to pull her closer. “I didn’t mean to read the response, love. I wanted to wait until you told me. But I was going through my mail and I wasn’t paying attention. Before I knew it, I’d started reading it.”
She wrenched her hands from his, retreating. The back of her knees smacked against a wooden crate. She stumbled, waving him off as he tried to help her. No, she could bloody well find her footing on her own. The box kept her from going away, but she clung to it, quite certain that her knees would give out if she didn’t have something to support her.
“You looked into me because you thought to bribe me into helping you,” she intoned, the hollowness in her tone shocking even her.
“No, no, it’s not like that.” He was quick to correct her, his head shaking so quickly she felt the rush of air the movement caused. “I’d never do that to you. I wasn’t going to give anyone the information on you, not even my superior. I wanted to understand you, Poppy, to see why you were so reluctant to get involved.”
“You could have attributed my reluctance to anything,” she countered, as she pulled on her petticoat. The cords of twine encircled her, giving her at least that much distance from him. “I’m a widowed mother in Spitalfields, wasn’t that enough? You’re reaching if you think you needed more than that, and you knew damn well what my family had been involved with previously.”
“I was concerned,” he explained, as if that fixed everything. “You were afraid, and I didn’t know why.”
“Because it wasn’t your place to know. You didn’t have a right to check into me.” She fought the urge to scream, to rip at her clothes, to do anything other than stand here and have this discussion with him. Instead, she turned her ire on him, whipping her words at him, for language was the lone weapon she had left in her arsenal.
“You think you can patch everything up with a few choice words and a touch here and there.” Her hands shook as she tried to button the back of her dress. “I told you, I told you so many times, that I’m wrecked inside. But you insisted on trying to solve me.”
She couldn’t find the right hole to slide the button in. Her hands were too unsteady. He came up behind her, trying to turn her so that he could do up the buttons. She slapped his hands away, clutching the dress.
She was trembling now, from fear, horror, and the sheer weight of it all. She’d trusted him, even though there were so many reasons to stay away from him.
“You violated my trust.” She hated the way her voice shook at the accusation, like the betrayal had sliced apart her heart.
“Your trust?” he repeated, shocked by the very idea. “What about my trust, Poppy? Anything you wanted to know about me, I told you. I never once lied to you. I told you about my mother, how I don’t fit in with my family. I believed we were starting something together.”
“I never wanted you to believe any of that,” she snapped, finally shoving the last button into its place. “I tried to spare you. You could have gone off and been with someone else, someone who isn’t fallen.”
“I don’t want anyone but you. I don’t think you’re fallen. I don’t care what anyone else thinks.” The flash of darkness across his face belied those words.
He stepped back from her. Smoothed his hands down his breeches. He wore no shirt still. “Poppy, can’t we talk about this like rational people?”
He’d watched her frantic fight with her dress warily, as though he expected that any moment, she’d lose her mind completely.
She flung her hands up. “So now I’m not rational because I didn’t want you to dredge up the worst time of my life?”
Thaddeus was supposed to be different. He was gentle and he was courageous, and he cared. Or so she’d let herself believe.
“You made a mistake. People make mistakes, love. None of us are perfect.” He pronounced each word with the proper amount of enunciation, but no emotion.
His calm was infuriating.
“My mistake made a living person,” she spat. Tears welled up in her eyes, but she wouldn’t give in to them. “The most beautiful girl in all the world and she’s mine. I made it possible, and I’m going to be the one who defends her. She won’t pay for my sins.”
Thaddeus came back to her, his hands on her shoulders. He held her tight as she cried, salt spilling down her cheeks, mixing with the dirt and grime that coated her body like a second skin.
“Sssh,” he murmured, stroking her back. “I meant what I said earlier. You’re a good mother, Poppy. Moira is lucky to have you. You care deeply for her and that’s all that matters.”
She shrugged off his comfort. She didn’t need it. Couldn’t need it now.
“What kind of mother hates how her daughter was conceived?” Poppy shook her h
ead. “What am I supposed to tell her when she asks about her father someday? Am I supposed to tell her I haven’t seen him since that night? That’s not what you say to a little girl.”
“It’s the truth.” He dogmatically held to that point, like truth was a sword he could wield above all else.
“The truth doesn’t stop my daughter from getting hurt. I’m not going to tell her what actually happened.” Her voice held an edge, an underlying threat that he wasn’t to reveal to Moira the truth of her parentage. “I’m going to stick to the story that her father was solider, that he wanted to be a part of her life, but battle took him. Robert Corrigan may be fiction, but he’s a damn better father than Edward would have ever been.”
“If you think that’s best—” He stopped as she narrowed her eyes.
“I know it’s best.” Poppy didn’t, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.
“I don’t put the blame on you,” Thaddeus said, as if that made a difference. “Why, if I had my way, I’d make the son of a bitch pay for Moira’s upkeep. He made this child with you, he ought to be paying.”
“You will do no such thing.” Her voice, like cold steel, snapped his head up. Good, she had his attention. “Edward isn’t aware I ever had a child. If you tell him, it will destroy everything I’ve worked to provide for Moira. And I will kill you before I let you hurt my daughter.”
“I’m not going to hurt Moira.” Sincerity dripped through his tone, burned in his eyes. His shoulders sagged under the impact of her words. “God’s balls, woman, I love you. I want to be here for you. Won’t you let me do that? I can provide for you and Moira.”
He said this now. But when Thaddeus was sober, he’d regret those words. How long could he live a lie? Loving her meant keeping her secret, looking Moira in the face every day and lying to her. Thaddeus’s world was one of black and white, with little room for gray areas. He’d put his own life in danger by seeking out the Larkers because he believed in justice. He believed in truth.
And that search for truth might end up in him getting killed. Now, more than ever, she knew the peril that surrounded a case. Abigail had been tortured because Poppy had thought she could help solve this mystery.
The Larkers were coming for Poppy. She’d put Moira in a treacherous situation. All to help Thaddeus find Anna’s murderer.
She turned away from Thaddeus. Pulled her dress over her head and laced on her boots. She opened the door, looked back at him once. “This is how it has to be. We can’t be together.”
“Wait—” He called to her, but she was already out the door.
Thaddeus passed that night in a fog. He barely moved from the chair by the fire in the library, the same damn chair that Poppy had sat in when she’d visited. He imagined she was curled up in his lap, her head on his shoulder. This illusion became strongest when he drank, and so he drank more in that one night than he had in the sum of his entire life. He drank to remember her, and when that became too much, he drank to forget her.
He had not drawn the library curtains. The chiming of the grandfather clock in the hall outside of the library alerted him to the time. Six, or maybe seven in the morning. He’d lost count of the chimes.
Wearily, he pushed himself up from the chair. His gaze didn’t leave the ground as he lurched to his chambers upstairs. He needed stability, a foundation to build upon.
He had neither.
For twenty-four years, Thaddeus had prayed to the patron saint of pragmatic observation. Human nature might be inexplicable upon first glance, but he who looked closely would always find an explanation to the previously unsolvable.
He couldn’t comprehend Poppy O’Reilly.
His uniform was the first thing he saw when he entered his bedroom. Before he’d gone to the Three Boars, he’d hung a clean set of blues onto the door handle of his armoire. They waited for him, brass buttons shined, the pleats of his sleeves carefully pressed. Every detail was accounted for, because meticulousness had made him the youngest Sergeant in the entire Metropolitan Police.
He tugged the uniform down from the hanger and threw it upon the bed. The fabric would wrinkle from such disregard, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Nothing was important. Neither his stellar arrest rate, nor how many books he’d read. Not even his dedication to an organization that the majority of people in the rookeries loathed.
What was the point? Whiting wouldn’t pay for his sins. He’d go on corrupting the system because he had the power, and no one would stop him. So, Thaddeus would continue on, policing the same damn route, catching the same damn types of criminals because nothing changed.
Two weeks prior, he would have said unequivocally that he comprehended people. He would have cited his clever avoidance of his mother’s matchmaking attempts as proof he could identify a person’s motives. This intuition had prepared him, made him believe he’d know the instant he met the woman suited to his needs and interests.
He realized now he’d never considered whether or not the woman he’d selected as his future wife would want him back.
I never wanted you to believe any of that, she’d said. As if this union between them had been nothing more than the combination of two bodies in heat. He knew better, knew that their tupping had been achingly real.
He loved her. His feelings didn’t make sense. On paper, she was wrong for him, but in his heart, he knew she was right.
His hands shook as he did up the buttons to his coat. Drinking had been another bad judgment—the miles of his patrol would be hard in today’s heat.
He’d made so many wrong judgments lately. Thaddeus slid on his breeches, closing the ties that the night before Poppy had pulled apart with alacrity.
Faster, she’d said, for she wanted him as badly as he wanted her, and reason would dictate they should have been able to act on those desires. They were both adults. They’d worked in this furious, wonderful tandem together.
It’d been better than anything he’d ever felt in his whole bloody life.
A proper man, a man of responsibility and conviction like he’d always thought he was, would never have spent himself within her. No matter how snugly her cavern gripped him or how wickedly her muscles clenched around him, doing things to him he’d not thought possible for a woman to do.
He tugged his boots onto his feet, but he didn’t feel that comforting sense of purpose and righteousness. First, he’d check in at the little watch-house on Wood Street and then he’d go about his route. Whiting had taken to working night shifts, so for the next few weeks, he might avoid a confrontation.
Poppy and her daughter would disappear into the cracks of these overcrowded tenements. She did not want him. He couldn’t protect her, not with Whiting around. She’d be better off with Atlas and his bloody army of thieves, for at least Whiting couldn’t predict their moves. In the midst of St. Giles, distant from the Larkers, Poppy and her daughter would be safe.
And he’d live like this, without her. He’d catch the Larkers. Patrol his route. Read his books and pretend he wasn’t missing this vital part of his life.
He knew no other way to survive.
20
Two days passed since she’d slipped from the Three Boars, flagging down Kate to take her Atlas’s. She couldn’t bear to face Daniel. He’d want to go after Thaddeus, force him into marrying her.
And if there was one thing Poppy didn’t want, it was to become an obligation.
Atlas’s loft was a safe place, but it held nothing for her. She was lost without Thaddeus. She hated him for that, for ripping apart her carefully arranged life and leaving this emptiness in its place.
“Perhaps the beauty of life is that it breaks us,” Atlas pondered, as he sipped from a flask of gin.
“I find no beauty in being broken,” Poppy said.
Atlas shrugged. He sprawled out in a leather armchair, the lone piece of furniture in the room that didn’t appear as if it’d been lifted from the pages of the fantastical novels piled up around his loft.
There was simplicity in that chair that attracted Poppy’s attention. In Atlas’s loft, thousands of objects crashed in together without reason. Thousands of stories that didn’t give her any answers.
She was as disordered as she had been in Dorking, when the townspeople she’d grown up with had rejected her with paint-splashed signs nailed onto plank boards, driven into the freshly tilled west field of Uncle Liam’s farm. Sinner, the signs had said, and sinner she’d remained.
Now, Poppy perched on an iron sphere, apparently made in the shape of a Roman Dodecahedra, if Atlas’s description was to be believed. The sphere pushed up against the diving bell that Atlas had somehow obtained years ago.
Careful not to let the spokes sticking out of the iron ball protrude into her backside, Poppy narrowed her eyes, focusing in on Atlas, shutting out the whirling kaleidoscope of objects around him. Atlas’s loft provided constant stimulation. She longed for the peace of the cottage on Finch Street. Edna had taken Moira downstairs to play with the clothespin doll, citing the cramped nature of the upstairs rooms.
The sight of that damned doll slashed at Poppy’s heart, but Moira refused to part with it.
Atlas yawned, stretching out as a cat would in a sunbeam. It was three in the afternoon. He had been out late the night before, off on some job or such. Poppy didn’t want to know where he’d gone. With Atlas—with everyone in her life, it seemed—the less she truly knew the better.
“You see the world through a single mind-set, Pop,” Atlas commented.
“Is that not all one can do?”
“There are those who claim writers put quill to paper because they want to live many lives.” Atlas sat up straighter, dropping his chin into his outstretched hands and balancing his weight on his elbows.
Her nose wrinkled. “You are not a writer.”
“Aye, yet I have led many lives.” Atlas smiled enigmatically. “From the orphanage to the streets to ruling the Rat’s Castle. Each role made me a different person, a shade of what I once was. I have raised and crushed empires underneath my feet from this high perch.”
