“How do you think I eat?” he asked with a chuckle. “Or what?”
“Fire and brimstone,” she said.
“Oh, because I’m the Dragon?” He ladled stew into a bowl and set it before her, along with a spoon and a napkin. He set the plate with bread and cheese, along with salted butter, between them and then joined her at the table.
“I always thought the Dragon fit you,” she said as she buttered her bread. “Powerful. Sleek. Dangerous.” She hesitated and then lifted her gaze to him. “Beautiful.”
He swallowed his sip of wine, feeling it stick in his suddenly thick throat. “Beautiful?”
She shrugged. “You know that you are.”
He didn’t know that. To him beautiful meant soft and gentle. He wasn’t those things. He’d forgotten how to be over the years where he made his money through violence. He still did, actually, just training others to take and throw the blows. How was that beautiful?
“Eat,” he said, and motioned to the stew cooling in her bowl.
She did so and for a short time there was only quiet between them. He could feel her unwinding from the terror of finding out her sister was missing. Her shoulders relaxed, her expression softened. That was what he wanted, but he hated that he had to break that now. That he had to drag her back to her fear.
“If your sister ran away…” he said at last, and just as he thought she would, Jane tensed. “Where do you think she might have gone?”
Her lips tightened and she set her napkin on the table beside her empty bowl, shoving both away. “The last time she wrote to me,” she said slowly, the pain obvious in every word, “she told me that I couldn’t keep her from our mother forever. That one day she’d go to her and there was nothing I could do about it.”
“You think she might have made good on that threat after all these years?” Ripley asked softly.
She let out a shuddering sigh. “It would be the best of a horrible group of options. Which is saying something.”
“Then we should start there,” Ripley said, and stood to clear the table. When he faced her, he leaned against the edge of the basin table and folded his arms. This was for her good, not his own. If he continued to sit too close to her he was going to touch her again. To offer comfort and he didn’t want to violate her space. “Where does she live?”
“Little Oak,” she said, and her voice wavered.
His brow wrinkled. “I’m not familiar.”
“It’s a pleasure village just outside of London. A little like Bath, though not quite as fine. It’s half a day’s travel.”
He nodded. “Then we’ll go tomorrow.”
“We?” she repeated with a shake of her head as if she didn’t understand.
“I told you, I’m here to help.”
She leapt to her feet and took a few steps toward him, nearly closing the distance that separated them. “But your business, Ripley!”
“You have a business, too,” he pointed out.
Her brow wrinkled as if she couldn’t recall what he meant. “Oh, the shop. Oh God, the shop. Well, I’ll simply close it. It’s hardly successful at any rate.”
He stared at her a moment. Esme and Delacourt had gifted her the shop recently, so perhaps Jane was still adjusting to the way it worked. But he sensed it was more than that. Often she seemed…disconnected when he visited her there.
“I can’t ask you to do the same,” Jane continued.
He shrugged. “I’m not closing the club. Brentwood will take care of the management. It will make no difference at all. Even if it did, I’d still do it.”
“It would be…good to have you there,” she said softly.
That admission, even said so softly and in such a shaky tone, meant the world to him. He did take her hands then, reveling in the weight of them in his own. “Janie,” he said, reverting to the pet name he sometimes used for her. “We’ll find Nora. I promise.”
There was a deep sadness in her eyes in response. Both of them were too savvy, too aware of the unfairness and cruelty of the world, to believe that statement. It was a promise he might not be able to keep, something said to soothe her in this moment of high terror.
“I know you’ll try,” she said at last. She stared up at him a long moment and her fingers flexed against his. Her thumb stroked across the top of his hand and he shivered. Then she bent her head. “I-I should go home. I should prepare for the trip and whatever we might find there.”
