She saw Ellis, not Handsome.
“Do you know I have a brother?” he asked.
She swallowed because she hadn’t actually thought he would open up to her. Now that he was, she feared moving too quickly and scaring him away from this moment.
“Yes,” she said softly. “In fact…I’ve seen him.”
“What?” he gasped his eyes going wide. “When would you have seen him?”
“At the Donville Masquerade,” she admitted. “The night you first kissed me. I was storming across the room, ready to tell you to leave me alone, and a man stepped up to you.”
His brow wrinkled. “And how could you know he was my brother?”
“He looks a little like you and Rook, for one,” she said. “But also there was something in your demeanor. Although I’d seen glimmers of the real you before, that night when you spoke to him, you weren’t Handsome Ellis Maitland. You were just…you. That connection was real. Later, Rook mentioned your brother. And I put it together.”
“You are almost too observant,” Ellis muttered. Then his frown turned down. “Rook told your family about Gabriel. Of course he did. It seems all my secrets belong to the Shelley Sisters and Harcourt now.”
“Not all,” she said. “I want you to tell me about him.”
Ellis let out a long breath and crossed to the settee. He sank into the cushions and shook his head. “My father died when I was very young. He was in trade, just a man who delivered ale to the inns and taverns. My mother was a barmaid in one. They married when she got with child. Me.”
“Were they…happy?”
“They survived,” he said with a shrug. “That was something. Until he didn’t. There was an accident. He was crushed when a rope holding some barrels broke.”
She jerked a hand to her lips. His tone was even and breezy. His eyes, though. That empty, haunted look was something she would never forget.
“How old were you?” she whispered.
“I was eight,” he said. “And I mourned him. Perhaps she did too, but she had to eat, didn’t she? Had to live. She found herself a new husband within a few months. The man who owned that same tavern she worked in. A bastard named Young. They became the Young family, and I…well, I was a Maitland. A reminder to that bastard that my mother had once been with someone else. He hated me and he let me know it.”
Her brow wrinkled. “Ellis,” she whispered as pain flowed through her. Pain on behalf of this man as a child. On behalf of him now as he sat on the settee and stared straight ahead like he was in another world. Another time.
Perhaps he was.
“I could see the writing on the wall as he got more hostile to me. I started running the street to avoid him. And by nine, I was out entirely. On my own.”
“You want to sound proud of that,” she whispered as she slowly moved to him and took a spot perched on the other side of the settee. He glanced at her as she took it, his gaze haunted. “But you never should have been put in that position. Did your mother not fight for you?”
The corner of his lips tilted slightly. “My mother was built to fight for herself, not me. She was happy to have peace in her home, I suppose. I visited from time to time whenhewas out. And I don’t regret it. I met Marcus Rivers on the street. He was working for a true bastard, one who almost killed him. But he helped me learn the ways. I was good at pickpocketing and running the game.”
She frowned. “You’re clever. I’m sure you were very good at it.”
“Then Rook had to run, too,” he said, his lips pursing. “So I took him in. I was ten by then. We started organizing. Doling out work to the other boys, making a real place for ourselves, so we didn’t have to depend on men who had just as bad intentions as my mother’s husband or Rook’s mother’s ‘protector.’”
“You educated yourself,” she said as things became clearer.
“Got that street accent out by force,” he agreed with a slight smile. “It made it easier to slip intotheirworld when we needed to. Rook taught me to read. I devoured everything I could steal. And I brought myself up in the world, out of the shit. And Iamproud of it.”
She saw that was true. Hewasproud of what he’d overcome, and rightly so. But there was also regret there, deep in those glittering eyes. Regret and loss and a tiny wish that he hadn’t had to escape so much.
“So how did the brother enter the picture?” she asked.
He blinked as if he’d forgotten how this story began. He worried his hands in his lap. “I was sixteen when I came home one day to slip my Ma some funds and found her swollen up with a baby. I was so angry. So angry she would make a new family with a man who—”
He pushed to his feet and stalked off to the fire. He stood there, his shoulders ramrod straight, his hands clenched at his sides.
“A man who hurt you,” she whispered. “Who didn’t give a damn.”
