“Are you going to let him talk to me like that?” the woman, Norah, demanded, her arch tones getting shriller.
The man beside her looked alarmed. “What do you expect me to do, fight him? He’s probably carrying a knife.”
“Happen I am,” Rafferty said agreeably. “Now why don’t the two of you go back to wherever you came from and stop disturbing me in my slumbers? I don’t come haring into your bedroom at night—you should do me the same courtesy.”
“Alcott!” the woman cried, her voice getting shriller. “Do something about him!”
Rafferty rose, slowly, careful to balance on his so-called good leg, and towered over her. “I’m thinking someone should do something about you,” he said, moving toward her with a small dose of the menace he could easily summon. She moved back, away from him as he advanced on her, tripping over her own delicate feet and landing on her backside on the filthy street.
He barely heard the smothered laughter from the second female. He glanced at her, but couldn’t see much, just a tumble of messy curls and a plain dress. No bared, perfect shoulders for this one.
“I’ll have you horsewhipped,” Norah hissed at him, her fine eyes narrowed in fury. “I’ll have you hanged.”
“Miss Manning, you can’t...” her companion began uncertainly.
“I can do anything I want,” she snarled.
Manning? Rafferty froze. He wasn’t a man who believed in coincidences. He knew that Sir Elston Manning had two daughters—what in the world were they doing here?
The young woman was making her way in their direction, her amusement unabated. “Not this time, you won’t,” she said cheerfully. “If I were you, I’d go somewhere else to find the dregs of society.”
The beauty allowed her companion to pull her to her feet, and she looked up at Rafferty with pure hatred. “I will,” she said, replying to the girl without looking at her. “But I still intend to see this man punished.”
“Come along, Miss Manning. I should never had agreed to bring you down here—it’s all my fault.”
“She wouldn’t have given you any choice, Mr. Alcott,” the young woman said, sliding to a stop a full ten feet away from Rafferty.
But no one was paying any attention to her. The beauty scrambled into her carriage with less grace than she’d descended, and the young man followed, slamming the door behind them. In a moment, they were off.
But he wasn’t alone. He turned to focus on the girl they’d abandoned in the worst streets of London. No, she wasn’t quite a girl, though clearly not long out of the schoolroom. He’d heard that the fashion that year was for dark hair—the unpleasant young woman was most likely an absolute diamond. This one had hair that was neither blond nor brown but a tawny shade in between, coming down from a messy knot, and her evening dress was plain and unadorned. There was a faint streak of black on the side of her face.
“What are you still doing here?” he growled, hoping to scare her away.
She was made of sterner stuff, though. “I...I thought I should apologize,” she said, stammering only slightly.
“For what?”
“For leading my sister here. For agreeing to hunt for the dregs of society and coming down here to you. It wasn’t very nice.”
She looked absurdly chastened, and he was tempted to laugh. He kept his expression a powerful glower, hoping to scare her away before she got a good look at him. Not that he was recognizable with the full beard and shabby hat, but he couldn’t afford to stand chatting to an ingenue in the midnight air.
“No, it wasn’t,” he agreed. “And exactly why did you want me?”
“Oh, it wasn’t you. Anyone would do. We were having a treasure hunt, you see, at Millie Rutherford’s, and we each had a long list of things we must retrieve in order to win the prize. Except there is no prize, just the glory of winning, but Norah always wins, and just this once I really wanted to beat her.” She stopped, a little breathless.
“Your sister deserves to be beaten in every sense of the word,” he said. Why the hell was he extending this conversation?
The girl sighed. “It’s true. She’s so pretty she’s always gotten her own way, and now she’s too big and too important to punish.”
“Too important?” he echoed, confused.
“Well, she’s a beauty, you see,” the girl said explained.
“I noticed.”
“And our family is very, very poor. My father made some bad investments, and my brother Neddy gambles, and now we can barely afford servants. It’s up to Norah to marry well and bring in a nice marriage settlement, but so far her nasty tongue has scared them all away.”
“What about the young man with her?”
