She should’ve figured he would ask at some point. “We had a history,” she said tightly.
Lord Rhys’s head cocked. The question within his eyes remained, unsatisfied. “Do you get to know many lords like Sir Felix in your occupation as a lady’s maid?”
Had a man ever asked a question with as much skepticism?
Tilly had a choice.
Lie—or tell the truth.
It was that simple—and that complex.
She supposed a third option lay open to her, too.
An option that had served her well in that complex past of hers.
Run, said the little animal being that lived inside her.
But her feet remained in place, for there was another being inside her, one recently born, in fact, that wanted to answer the question for a single reason—it was Lord Rhys asking it.
“I met Sir Felix in my previous occupation.”
His brow wrinkled ever so subtly, and he looked as if he very much regretted having asked—as if she’d confirmed something he’d been wondering. “Miss Birdwell,” he began, “please don’t feel obligated to answer my questions if I’m being too forward?—”
“I was fourteen.” She’d interrupted him, because if she didn’t, she was either going to lie or run and she didn’t want to do either of those things. “Fourteen when life circumstances turned about and I became a strumpet.”
“A strumpet at…fourteen?” But he wasn’t truly asking. “Life circumstances?”
She allowed there was much to parse in that one sentence, so she reckoned she would help him out. “The lives of poor folk involve a lot of struggle and illness and death. An altogether different set of problems than your lot are accustomed to. So, by fourteen, me parents had both gone to meet their Maker and I found meself alone in the world without two pennies to rub together and two life options in front of me—Saint Mary Magdalen Workhouse or Pizzy’s Pleasure Palace.”
“Pizzy’s Pleasure Palace?”
“Heard of it, have you?” She’d asked with a little meanness in her heart, truth told. “Perhaps from those wastrel days of yours?”
“It rings a bell.” He didn’t look inclined to say more.
And she didn’t feel inclined to make him. “For various reasons, and mostly because I was young and uninformed, I chose Pizzy’s.” She spread hands helpless to the past wide. “And that was me a strumpet.”
“At fourteen?” he repeated.
“I developed certain attributes deeply appreciated by men at an early age.” Namely, her bounteous bosom.
Lord Rhys somehow managed to look both slightly red and slightly green and altogether like he might need to sit down.
But now that she’d started in on the past, she was determined to keep going. “After a couple of years”—a couple of years she had no intention of discussing—“Sir Felix came along.” She shrugged. “He was handsome and a lord and he was everything my sixteen-year-old self ever dreamed of. A knight in shining armor who would rescue me. He made me those promises, and I believed them. But those promises were fool’s gold, weren’t they? You’ve been around, Lord Rhys, you can guess what came next.”
His jaw tensed and released. “He abandoned you.”
“Discarded after he’d wrung all the fun he wanted out of me and left me to rot as a poxy, old harlot in my dotage.”
“Then how did you?—”
“Isabel.” He didn’t need to finish his question for her to answer it. “She was my knight in shining armor—and that was my lesson learned.”
She’d said that last a little offhand, and from the darkening of Lord Rhys’s brow she could see he didn’t like her flippancy. “What lesson was that?”
“That one’s dreams are precious, and they are one’s own. You can’t depend on another person to realize them.”
He’d gone quiet as he listened and took in her words—her confession.
