Undressed with the Marquess

by Caldwell, Christi

  “And no less special for it,” Dare reminded the boy.

  Temperance’s eyes filled, and the pair conversing blurred. Dare would have never been one to reject a child because of their gender. Caring for strangers as he did, he would have only passionately loved whatever child had been his.

  But then hadn’t he shown her that same kindness and regard when she’d been just a girl? When she and all her suffering and the abuse she’d endured at Abaddon Swift’s hand had gone ignored or been unseen by the other boys and men in the Rookeries?

  “That’s why I sent him looking for you,” Chance said quietly. “Mr. Buxton has been traveling, and there’s been more work for me to see to because of it. As such, I couldn’t get away from my work to speak to you myself . . . before now.”

  And in that desire to look after others, her brother proved so very much like the man he’d looked up to as a father, the one who’d been around since Chance had been the smallest child and had been raised like he were a babe of his own. Her heart hurt for the bond that had been lost . . . between Dare and Chance.

  Between her and Dare. If she were being honest with herself, she mourned that loss, too.

  She always would.

  Dare looked briefly over to the child on Temperance’s lap with a tenderness that continued to wreak havoc on Temperance’s heart. “What is her name?”

  “Rose,” Lionel answered. “’er name is Rose.”

  “Rose,” Temperance murmured to herself, and the little girl briefly quieted in her arms. With her bright-red cheeks and the mop of auburn curls on her head, it was a perfect name for the child.

  Unable to watch Dare any longer while he spoke to Lionel, Temperance forced her gaze downward to the child—Rose—seated on her lap.

  It was the wrong decision.

  Enormous eyes so dark they were nearly black met hers. The babe clapped her hands excitedly, and then studied those digits as if they were the most fascinating things in the world.

  Temperance sucked in a breath—or tried to through constricted lungs—wanting to run. Wanting to flee. Needing to put the tiny girl down but unable to. She wanted to be free of the crushing weight of pain and regret of what had almost been, and now, what could and would never be.

  “Li-Li-Li,” the girl babbled over and over, that close approximation of her uncle’s name.

  “What do you need?” Dare asked in those gentle tones.

  Lionel looked once more at Chance.

  “Tell him,” Temperance’s brother urged. “He’s one of the good ones.”

  He’s one of the good ones.

  And . . . Dare was. He’d lived a life of crime, and yet at every turn, he’d always put others, the men and women and children struggling, first.

  Still, Lionel hesitated.

  “I knew your brother well,” Dare said quietly.

  The little boy perked up. “Did ya?”

  “Dare taught me and Joseph how to survive,” Chance supplied.

  Yes, Chance and Joseph had both hero-worshipped Dare. But then so had every last soul in the Rookeries. Even as she’d struggled with Dare’s means to help, Temperance herself hadn’t been immune to him . . . in any way.

  Hesitating, Lionel twisted his hands. “Oi need ya to take ’er. Oi’m a sweep, and Oi can’t do it.” The boy directed his words at his lap. “Until me brother returns. Moi da?” His voice climbed an octave as he spoke. “’e’ll give ’er away, but to people who can’t ’ave her. Ya know the people there, Grey. They’re bad people. She’ll end up dead or worse,” he finished on a whisper.

  Yes, there was always a fate and future worse than death in the Rookeries.

  “Of course we’ll care for her,” Dare replied without hesitation, and the little boy’s shoulders sagged.

  Temperance worked her eyes over Dare. He was the only man in the whole of the world who’d simply agree to take in a street urchin’s unwanted niece. Nor did it escape her notice that he’d said, “We’ll care for her.” A pairing that would see Temperance and Dare play at that role of caregiver. It is too much. Temperance bit the inside of her cheek to repress the piteous moan building in her chest.

  Angling his chin up mutinously, Lionel glared about the room as if he resented that he’d had to ask for help. “It isn’t for forever. It’ll only be until Joseph gets out.” And that was where the boy’s thin bravado flagged. Lionel’s face fell. “If ’e gets out . . .” His voice emerged, whispery soft.

  Dare and Chance spoke at the same time.

  “He will.”

  “I promise, he will.”

  That was Dare . . . issuing promises to free the oppressed. And invariably he’d done so.

  “Thank ya, guv’nor. Oi ’eard of ya, Oi ’ave. When Mr. Chance told me to come yar way, Oi’d ’eard about all the people ya’ve helped.” There was so much adoration in the little boy’s eyes, a sentiment Temperance had worn in her own eyes more times than could have ever been counted. The same went for most in the Rookeries.

  Dare waved off those words. “Helping is what all people should do. The world needs more helpers, wouldn’t you say?”

  Lionel nodded, and in Temperance’s arms, Rose bobbed her head up and down, as if in an agreement of her own.

  And as if he’d just realized Temperance was there, holding the babe, Lionel looked past a silent Gwynn and nudged a chin Temperance’s way. “Who is this one?” He eyed her with a worldly wariness of a man twenty years his senior.

  “My wife.”

  “Also my sister,” Chance volunteered.

  Some of the tension left the waif’s slender frame. “I can trust her, then.”

  “I used to look after your brother whenever he’d come to visit Chance.” Temperance spoke in solemn tones. “You can trust me, Lionel,” she said, understanding those words should and needed to be spoken from her.

  “Do you know anything about babes?” he piped in, his voice hopeful.

  “I . . .” Her entire body turned to stone. Her facial muscles froze. Oh, God. She was going to break. One more wrong word . . . from him or Dare or her . . . and she’d shatter into a thousand tiny shards.

  “She has countless experience,” Dare said when Temperance couldn’t make herself answer the child.

  Temperance tried to get a breath out from her lungs . . . but couldn’t. And for a moment, she thought he knew. But he couldn’t. Because he’d not known of their babe, and when he’d returned, two months later, from robbing a Kent country estate, it had been too late. And there’d been no babe anymore to mention.

  And there’d been no way for her to ever face him again. Not without mourning all she’d lost.

  “She raised me like her own,” Chance said quietly to Lionel. Her younger brother to the rescue, saving her from the past.

  Temperance managed to squeeze that still strained breath out, after all.

  “What else do you need?” Dare urged the child.

  Throughout the years, many had come to Dare with their hands out, in search of help and support. Temperance, however, had never borne witness to it. Now she took in the exchange, seeing it for the first time, truly. Seeing what had so compelled him to risk his life again and again and again without thought of his own neck. “If either of ya can ’elp me see about . . . freeing Joseph?”

  Dare and Chance exchanged a look. “We will . . . ,” Dare promised. “Absolutely, we will.”

  And Temperance was so very grateful that talk of the babe and Temperance and Dare acting as foster parents was forgotten.

  “They said ya weren’t coming back to the Rookeries. That ya were a fancy lord now.”

  It was a likely conclusion for anyone to have drawn. Dare’s time of living dangerously was at an end, and yet . . . he’d not stop helping. It was why he’d agreed to his grandfather’s terms. It was always about others. Never about himself.

  He frowned. “Who said that?”

  “Me da, and the people in the Rookeries when Oi said Oi was goin’ to ya. But everyone? Small tol
d his men, who’re tellin’ all the boys and girls there ain’t any savior there to ’elp us. That free ’andouts from the loikes of Dare Grey are gone, and there was only one choice for all of us.”

  “Small,” Temperance repeated, hate unfurling inside. Once part of Diggory’s gang, Small’s control of the Rookeries had only grown with the years and that other bastard’s passing. He’d always been attempting to exploit the desperate men and women and children there. When her brother had been a boy, she’d fought him on numerous scores to keep him away. And it appeared, with his influence over Lionel, nothing had changed.

  Dare straightened and leaned against his desk. “I’m not a man who’d simply quit helping those in need.”

  Nay, Dare always gave unconditionally, asking for none, when he very well should have accepted support from others. His pride had alternately awed and infuriated Temperance. And that had been the crux of why she and Dare hadn’t been able to come together. Because he’d been so desperate, so determined to help everyone that he’d committed himself to a life of danger and thievery, a life that would have only seen Temperance with her heart broken for different reasons.

  “I’m one of you, no matter where I live or what title they give me,” Dare said. “Is that clear?”

  Wide-eyed, Lionel nodded.

  A knock sounded at the door, and Spencer opened the panel a moment later.

  A maid stepped forward. Studiously avoiding Dare’s and Lionel’s eyes, the girl hovered by the doorway, steadying the tray in her hands.

  “You may enter,” Dare called, and the maid stumbled slightly as she rushed over. “If you would set them right on the edge of my desk? That will be all,” he said to the girl.

  Laying down the silver tray of pastries, bread, cheese, and two pitchers—one with water and one with milk—the servant curtsied and rushed back to the front of the room.

  Rose immediately scrambled down from Temperance’s lap and ambled over to the food that had been set out. Babbling, the little girl plucked a piece of bread from the tray, and waving it wildly about, she set off to explore.

  “Spencer,” Dare called to the butler. “Would you see that the nurseries are prepared? We shall also be requiring the services of a nursemaid.”

  The butler nodded. “As you—”

  Gwynn shot a hand up. “If I might . . . suggest that I take on the role of nursemaid? I’ve . . . some experience with children.”

  Temperance started. It was the first she’d ever known that her friend had previous connections to children. But then, neither had Temperance shared the many details of her past.

  Gwynn looked to Temperance. “Unless you object? I can still help you as you have need.”

  Dare looked to Temperance, his meaning clear . . . The decision would fall to her.

  But that was who Dare had always been, allowing her control . . . a say in her life when in the Rookeries, that was a luxury most weren’t permitted. It had been a gift. It still was.

  Temperance nodded. “Of course I don’t mind. If you are willing, I think that is a wonderful solution for who should care for Rose.”

  The moment Spencer was dismissed, Lionel sat and stared longingly at the feast before him.

  “Why don’t you eat,” Temperance urged, following Rose out of the corner of her eye as she teetered and tottered on a walk about the room.

  Lionel dived into the plate of food. Ripping enormous bites from the loaf, he spoke around his filled mouth. “They don’t loike us.” The boy swallowed down his mouthful and jabbed the remaining piece of his bread at the doorway. “Yar servants.”

  “They don’t trust us,” Dare allowed. “That’s a bit different.”

  And mayhap don’t like us, Temperance silently amended. Over the top of Lionel’s head, she and Dare exchanged looks. Knowing him as she did, she knew he’d not speak that truth to the child. They ceased with their questioning or comments, instead allowing the child to his meal, likely the first one he’d had in longer than Dare cared to think about, before he got to the rest of the reasons for the child’s visit.

  Rose drifted closer to the fire, and Temperance flew out of her seat and rushed to gather the girl up. “Pr-pre,” Rose wailed in protest.

  “Yes,” she murmured, balancing the babe on her hip and bouncing her up and down as she’d done with Chance as a child. “It is pretty but also unsafe.”

  The chubby girl’s tears faded to little giggles as the fire was forgotten, and Rose slapped her remaining piece of bread in her tiny fist against her open palm, raining crumbs upon the floor.

  Besieged with emotion, Temperance waltzed the child in a small circle.

  Feeling eyes on her, she glanced across the room.

  Dare’s eyes were locked on her. And there was such emotion in that gaze. One she didn’t want to explore. Because she couldn’t. She didn’t want to know anything more about that look of longing there. That Dare Grey, an island of a man with a professed need and want for none, should now stare at her and a little babe—

  Tearing her eyes from his, she directed her attentions once more down to the top of Rose’s riotous red curls.

  When Lionel had a chance to eat enough, Dare straightened and perched himself on the edge of his desk beside the half-empty tray of food. “What else has you desperate?”

  Temperance frowned. “He’s already indicated his sister—”

  Lionel cut her off. “Oi grew an inch.” Just like that, proving Dare saw and knew more where people were concerned. As such, he’d known more had weighed on the child. That acuity was a testament to how aware he was of other people’s toil.

  But then, hadn’t he always been the same with her as a young woman? Even when she hadn’t borne bruises indicating her latest troubles, he’d known.

  “Ahh,” Dare said with a dawning understanding.

  Returning to the desk, she set Rose down so the child might grab a piece of cheese from the tray. “And that . . . is a problem?” Temperance asked in confusion while the girl nibbled away at the morsel. Most boys, including her own brother when he’d been Lionel’s age, had stretched themselves on tiptoes to secure an additional height.

  “Yea, it’s a big problem.” Lionel eyed her like she was daft.

  Nearly eleven but with the look of a seven-year-old, any other boy would have sounded more pleased than this forlorn child did. But height was the difference between working and being sacked for the chimney sweeps.

  “Oi’ve been slouchin’,” the boy went on, staring intently down at the remaining piece of the loaf in his hand. “They don’t know yet . . . but they will. Can’t keep it a secret forever.” From clogged lungs to fires lit under them and eyes bloodshot and vision damaged, it was a mark of the desperation faced by all in the Rookeries that a child would fear greater being without that work than with it.

  And the child couldn’t stop himself from growing, either.

  “Here,” Dare murmured, pouring Lionel a glass of water.

  Taking it with his spare, small, dirt-encrusted fingers, Lionel chugged down the clear contents of his glass. “My mum is dead now. Birthin’ a babe. An’ my sister? She be ’avin’ a babe of her own.” The boy returned to eating.

  So many babes.

  In the Rookeries, one of those additional mouths to feed was a burden. It was why Temperance should have been only relieved after the loss she’d suffered. And yet . . . it hadn’t been there. There’d been only an aching void, an irrational hungering that had defied the logic of what she should or should not want.

  She studied Dare as he sized up his office, and a moment later, he fished a gold timepiece from his pocket and looked down at the object a brief moment.

  “Dare,” she said quietly, knowing what he intended before he even spoke his next words aloud.

  Ignoring her, Dare pressed the valuable into the child’s hand. “Here.”

  Lionel stared down at it, his eyes stunned. “Sir?”

  “It is gold. Solid through. This will cover your family’s
rent forever. You tell your landlord I said as much. And you also tell him if he has any questions about the value or the terms of your rent? He is to come to me.”

  “Thank ya, sir,” Lionel whispered, clutching the piece close to his chest.

  He patted Lionel’s hand. “None of that.”

  “Why do ya do it?” the child asked, curiosity in his query. “Ya don’t get anything from the loikes o’ me, an’ ya don’t use it for power.”

  “Sometimes it is just about doing the right thing and helping those who need helping.”

  Helping. It was what he’d always done. People were acts of charity, and he was the savior of the people.

  Just as his offer of marriage all those years ago had been made not because of the love he had for her, but rather because of his desire to protect her. Keep her safe.

  Temperance hugged her arms around her middle, warding off the pain of the past.

  The little boy’s lips formed a flat line. “Oi ain’t ever goin’ to be able to ’elp anyone. Oi sometimes feel loike Oi’m gonna doi a sweep.”

  Her heart ached all over again at the forlorn acceptance of a hard fate.

  “I was you once,” Dare said quietly. “We are all in those circumstances, Lionel.” Dare motioned to his office. “Until we’re not. And then it is even more our duty to help.”

  Another knock interrupted the pair, and they looked up as Spencer returned with a young maid, Efa, in tow. “As you’ve requested, my lord, several of the maids have tidied the nursery and are able to show the child abovestairs.”

  The girl dipped a curtsy. “My lord,” Efa said in heavy Welsh tones.

  Temperance’s body coiled, and she found herself equally relieved and wanting to cry when Gwynn came forward and retrieved Rose.

  Her friend lingered a moment and touched her fingers to her lips, blowing that kiss to Chance.

  There was such a longing in Chance’s eyes as he watched his sweetheart take her leave, and it was a reminder all over again of why Temperance was doing this. Why she’d let Dare back in her life, despite her vow to never do so.