She asked the question that tantalized her.
“How did you know I’d gone to the Earl of Sydenham’s residence, Mr. Marchand?”
“Your eyes lit up with the zeal of an owl spotting a juicy rat when Bolt mentioned Sydenham’s waistcoat buttons at the dinner table.”
“The waistcoat buttons are the only thing Hogarth would tell me about that night. And that’s the second time you’vementioned my eyes, Mr. Marchand. Careful, or you’ll be writing love poetry about them next.”
This caused a beat of silence.
“It’s the funniest thing,” he mused. “I started writing a poem about them just this morning, but I encountered a hurdle when I couldn’t find a rhyme for ‘pain in my arse.’?”
She honored this with the impressed wordless moment it deserved.
“Farce,” she suggested quietly. “Parse.”
His expression was a picture then. Complicated. Perhaps amused. But the predominant emotion seemed to be amazement.
“In truth, it is difficult tomissyour eyes, Miss Woodville, because you never take them off me.” His voice had gone dangerously low again.
If she blushed in the near-dark, hopefully he wouldn’t notice. It was true that if a room contained him, there seemed no compelling reason for anyone to look elsewhere, because for God’s sake.
“Well, that’s only good sense,” she admitted frankly. “You’ve demonstrated an inclination to do the unexpected, Mr. Marchand. I feel I should at all times be braced.”
He took this in with equanimity. “You should never play five-card loo, Miss Woodville. You’d give yourself away every time. You’d lose a fortune over and over again.”
“What aterriblepity to hear it. I guess that means I won’t be able to ever again set foot inside your pretty, pretty gaming hell.” She sounded like a child, and she didn’t care.
“It’s not a hell. It’s a bloody paradise—or it was, until you walked into it.”
“Mr. Marchand. ‘Hell’ is a relative word. Lucifer’s Fall was the location of the third worst thing to happen to my family. And if you’re about to say ‘your birth was clearly the first worst,’ ha, now you can’t, I said it first.”
“Miss Woodville, anything can happen to anyone anywhere. One street over, one can buy a lovely ice or be run over by a carriage. Though I’m flattered you think I’m capable of such a scathing rejoinder. I wish I’d thought of it,” he added.
“?‘Rejoinder’ is quite a fancy word for a rogue.”
“After you make your first fifty thousand pounds, they let you use any words you wish.”
That figure dropped on her like an anvil.
He remained quiet and let her marinate in the realization that he was very wealthy. Mr. Marchand was not a gloater, but he was a dirty, dirty fighter and he knew that had shut her up.
“Do you have any idea what your little visit to the earl could do to my business?”
“I imagine I can’t stop you from enlightening me.”
“Are you familiar with what the black plague did to Europe?”
“Oh,honestly.”
“When word that an earl’s sister has gone rogue, tracked down a member of Lucifer’s Fall at hishome, and actually had the temerity to ask him togive backthe money he fairly won, news of your little visit will spread from earl to duke to MP to every single member of Lucifer’s Fall. They will rightly assume the confidentiality that is the cornerstone of their membership at Lucifer’s Fall, which theyabsolutely count upon, has been breached. And just like that, I will have lost their trust, and then their business, and then I will be ruined. And regardlessof your contempt for my livelihood, Lucifer’s Fall is the second best thing to ever happen to me. Correction: It did nothappento me. I built it. From nothing.”
Damn him, now she was wondering what the first best thing to happen to him was.
“From nothing? Not from the bones of your enemies?”
“Essentially the same thing.” Then with a mildness that made the hair on the back of her neck prickle, he added, “Do you doubt me?”
Beware the strivers, Mrs. Haddock had said. Perhaps shewasa sage.
