A Wayward Man: A Prequel to A Dangerous Invitation (The Rookery Rogues) (8 page)

He stood in front of
the window, his damnably handsome features on display for her.
Doffing his hat, he carded a hand through his short ginger hair, a
gesture as familiar to her as the soothing weight of her pistol. His
wide forehead was creased with worry, strong jaw set with
determination. His straight nose led down to lips reddened from the
cold.

“Kate.”
His voice sent a shiver up her spine. A hint of a brogue, mottled
with thicker country English, like he'd been raised by Irish
immigrants.

It could not be
Daniel.

He had fled London
three years ago. Surely, he'd not be foolish enough to return. One
hint of his whereabouts and the Peelers would be out for his blood.

“I won't hold
you accountable if you shot me.” His gaze never left her gun,
green eyes wide.

Her heart pounded in
her ears, every part of her body awakened by his presence. She didn't
meet his eyes, instead letting her gaze travel down from his face to
his broad shoulders and narrow waist. He was lanky and well-built
like a bar brawler, with powerful hands that had once brought forth
the most salacious of moans from her lips.

Powerful hands that
an eyewitness claimed had been used to slit a man's throat with such
force that it ripped out his esophagus and severed his windpipe.
Those hands were currently raised, unarmed, in supplication. But Kate
knew better: a man could secret away many weapons on his body.

With Daniel, his
greatest weapon had always been the destruction he wreaked upon her
carefully ordered existence.

“Put down your
barking iron, love. I'm not going to hurt you. I only want to talk.”
He placed his hat back on his head.

She narrowed her
eyes. “There is nothing you could do to me that you haven't
already done.” Her hold on the gun shook and she quickly
steadied it.

“While
shooting me might be justifiable, it'd make a hellish mess...”
A small smile creased his lips, an attempt at a joke she didn't
appreciate.

Kate lowered the gun
but left it cocked. Stubbornly, she held on to that last defense. She
tried to make herself believe she would fire on him—if the need
arose.

She should be
furious. Enough to
want
to shoot him, for if anyone in England
deserved shooting it was Daniel O'Reilly. She should want to do
anything but fling herself in his arms, crush up against his chest,
and press her lips to his to see if they still fit so wondrously
against hers.

This, like
everything else, was a situation that could be met with order and
rationality.

Kate tapped the butt
of the pistol against her leg. “What are you doing here?”

“I'm proving
to you that I didn't kill Tommy Dalton.”

So simple, so
direct, she almost believed him. As if the years were nothing and
losing him hadn't torn her carefully arranged world apart. But things
had changed, and she couldn't stand across him from as the besotted
girl she'd been, desperate for his love and willing to do anything
for him.

“Three years
I've waited for you to bloody come back,” she hissed. “I
thought you'd
died
, Daniel. For so many nights, I imagined you
lying in a ditch off Brighton Road, with nobody to identify your
body. I can't come back from that.”

“I'm sorry. I
thought if I left—” He stopped. Bit his lip, like he'd
done whenever he wasn't certain of something.

He damn well better
not be sure of what they were to each other. She'd gone through too
much to get him out of her head, too much to let him back in only to
hurt her again.

Her eyes narrowed.
“You should have stayed if you were innocent.”

“I know.”

Was that guilt in
his tone? He tugged on his hat brim, pulling it lower over his eyes
until it was a mourning shroud. Did he grieve the time lost, the life
he could have had with her if he hadn't been so foxed? Maybe he would
have remembered more about the murder and proven to the police he
wasn't guilty.

No, he couldn't
regret the past. Because a repentant man—a caring man—would
have reached out to her again.

She sunk back into
anger, her voice rising with each question. “If you knew you
were wrong to leave, why didn't you come back? How am I supposed to
believe in your innocence when you escape transport to Newgate? When
you don't write?”

He held a hand up to
stop her. “Please, quiet your voice.”

“Why should I?
Because this isn't good and proper for you?” She spat the words
out, refusing to lessen her volume. “Because someone might find
you? God forbid, you finally face the Met's officers.”

“Do you truly
believe I could have slit that man's throat?” His voice broke.

No.
The local
constable had an eyewitness to the murder. But here she stood across
from Daniel, and part of her wanted to fall back against him and
never be alone again. Even if being with him meant she'd lose
everything she'd worked for—a life where she answered to no
one.

His eyes never left
her face, as if memorizing the contours. She fought the urge to cover
her face with her hand. In the lamplight, every imperfection was on
display. Time had not been kind to her. When he fled, she'd been on
the cusp of the lowest levels of the
ton,
almost accepted but
not quite. She had worn tailored silk, not a secondhand dress from
the rag shops in Field Lane, originally made for a woman on a better
diet than scraps.

Kate didn't know who
she hated most: the spoiled woman she had been then, the harridan she
currently was, or Daniel.

She stepped back
from him. “It doesn't matter what I believe.”

“It matters to
me,” he pleaded.

“You know, the
Peelers interviewed me after you fled.” She ran her finger
along the handle of her gun, tracing the inlaid roses. The pattern
was familiar, but a comfortable familiar, one that did not fling her
headfirst into a strange abyss like his presence. “They dredged
up every bit of our past, told me all about finding you with that
warehouse laborer's corpse, and all I could think about was how we
were supposed to be married. We were supposed to be
happy
.”

Happiness was
illusive. It didn't come to ruined women like her.

“I never lied
to you. I've done many wretched things, but I never once lied to
you.” His voice dipped lower, gentle and intimate, a caress to
the tired parts of her soul that had ached to hear such confessions.

“What do you
call telling me that you'd protect me? That we'd always be together?
All you did was
lie
.” She flung each accusation at him
with the same accuracy she shot her gun, knowing what weaknesses
would hurt him most.

She hated every damn
thing about him because he made her believe things that weren't true.
There was no haven in loving him. Devil take it, when laws defined
women as property, there was no safe man.

She stepped back. On
the edge of Upper Shadwell, a carriage clopped by, for at this late
hour London didn't sleep. Prostitutes lingered at the street corners,
powder and rogue over skin stretched tight.

Daniel followed her
out onto the street. He lingered too close. She wondered vaguely if
he'd smell like bergamot and cloves, the scent that haunted her
dreams. He'd obliterate the odor of rotting refuse of the rookeries,
and make her believe she could go back into the past.

That woman didn't
exist any longer.

Kate retreated
quickly, so fast that she didn't notice the drunken sailor leaning
against the doorway until she'd already backed into him. A hand
brushed against her bottom, thankfully protected by her thick skirts.
She tore away and turned to face the offender. His eyes were
red-rimmed and a knife hung limply between his fingers, forgotten
over the pursuit of her rump.

“'Ello, Merry
bird, ye got somethin' for me? Look at 'er, Jay, 'ave ye ever seen a
better dimber mort?” The sailor gestured to a man hidden in the
shadows of the doorway, his face clouded and barely visible in the
darkness. “I tell ye, Jay, when we get 'em Things down by the
Fortune—” The sailor's knife twitched between his
fingers.

Kate took another
step back. The Fortune of War public house was a known haunt for
grave robbers. Her fingers clenched around the handle of her fully
cocked pistol. She could defend herself if it came to that.

The man in the
shadows snapped something under his breath, and the sailor's
expression changed. Paleness swept over his yellow skin, his lower
lip quivering. She felt the tension rise between them, thick and
choking. A fight brewed.

She wanted to leave,
but she wouldn't turn her back on Daniel. Before she could form a
plan of attack, Daniel grabbed hold of her arm and tugged. He kept
moving until they had rounded one corner and then another,
reluctantly releasing her when they entered a more populated area. In
the distance, a low-pitched scream echoed from where they had been.
It died off in the distance.

Another one
killed, and no one to mourn him.

She doubted the
sailor's death would make the papers. He'd slip through the cracks
like so many others. The warehouse laborer Tommy Dalton had only
warranted a few broadsheets because of the gruesomeness of his murder
and the connection to her father's old company, Emporia Shipping.

Daniel had pulled
her onto another part of Upper Shadwell. The road buzzed with
activity, from the influx of patrons who wandered in and out of the
dram houses to the dockworkers on the prowl for a cheap whore. Their
noise filled her ears, snippets of various conversations clouding her
thoughts.

“It kills me
to see you here,” Daniel murmured.

A lover's tone,
softer and warmer than she wanted. “If it hurts you so bad,
leave again. This is where I live now.”

He shifted his
weight from one foot to the other. “I couldn't have known
Emporia would go bankrupt. I thought your father's company was
insoluble, as did the rest of the shipping industry. You've got to
believe me, Katiebelle.”

“Don't call me
that. You've got no right to call me that.” Her throat clenched
at her father's nickname for her, a sting of grief that had lessened
but not dissipated in two and a half years.

“Once you
liked it when I did.”

“Once I liked
a lot of things you did.” She stepped out into the street,
under the beam of the street lamp.

But now I don't.
If she told herself that enough times, she might start to believe
it.

Daniel remained in
the shadows, unwilling to risk the exposure offered by the lamp. He
would always be in the dark: an accused murderer too scared to atone
for past mistakes. He'd drag her down with him. She couldn't risk
tying herself to him, and the Peelers investigating her criminal
activities.

She took one last
look at him. He smiled at her, accepting her perusal as a sign of
good will and not the goodbye it truly was.

When patrons came
out of the nearby Three Boars public house, Kate took advantage of
their exit, slipping in unnoticed by Daniel. From her vantage point
at the door, she saw him turn slowly, first to the left and then the
right. Eventually, he might follow her, but by the time he did she
would be tucked away at a table far in the back.

This was her world.
The rookeries were her life.

He could not change
that with a simple reappearance.

Daniel's stomach
lurched. He should have known he'd have to enter a public house
again. The single-floor dram joint was jammed between several other
shops on Chapman Street. Set up above were tenements, reached by an
entrance unseen from the road. Flaked green paint on the walls
revealed bare, rotted wood in areas. A circular sign hung above the
street, bearing the image of a three-headed boar on a rampage.

The Three Boars was
in short, a public house like any other in the borough of Stepney.
His breath came in short, irregular pants.

Devil take him, he
wanted—he needed—to see Kate again. She had gone inside,
leaving him no choice but to go in as well. He lingered too long at
the door, blocking the entrance. People gathered behind him, shouting
their inquiries on the wait. That was attention he didn't need:
should the police find out about his reappearance, he would surely be
taken back to Newgate to face trial, not only for his escape, but for
the murder.

But he had to be
something better. He hated the man he was when he drank. His sister,
Poppy, claimed he was ready. She supported him, and damn it all, he
would not fail her again.

He stepped inside
the door.

Almost all of the
battered circular tables were occupied by a squalid collection of
rogues, men with bleary red eyes and hard grips around mugs of gin.
The whole place reeked of blue ruin, assaulting his senses and
triggering memories of times after he'd left London, waking up on the
floor of another brothel. He remembered fights he'd started because
the gin made him wild and reckless.