“A reporter who stole”—her cheeks pinkened—“my earliest story about you.” She cast a sheepish look in his direction. “Either way, newspapers are struggling. The taxes are crippling, and reporters are turning on one another, all to maintain their work. And the most recent head of The Londoner . . .”
And in the dog-eat-dog world, they’d devoured Verity. Aye, he’d happily off the pair of those fellows. “He’s proven more unbending than his father?”
“In the sense that he gave me an impossible task—” Her words immediately cut off. The color on Verity’s cheeks deepened.
He sent a single brow arching up. “Me?”
Abandoning her curled-up position on the sofa, Verity shifted so that her feet touched the floor. His ears tried to make out the grumblings she made under her breath. Something that sounded very much like “You are impossible.”
The right corner of his mouth pulled up in a half smile, one that didn’t stretch quite so uncomfortably as the grins before it.
She scooched over so their legs brushed. “It wasn’t simply that he assigned me the story of your whereabouts and past. It was that he did so anticipating that I’d fail so he would have sufficient reason to sack me without having to explain my severance to his father. He was always intending to sack me. One of those who doesn’t believe a woman has any place in reporting.” Impassioned, her eyes glittered with the depths of her outrage.
“He was a fool, thinking any man more competent than you in any task.”
Her eyes immediately softened, her lips parted, and a little sigh whispered out.
Where women were concerned, there’d been any number of reactions they’d greeted Malcom with over the years: Desire. Fury. Suspicion.
Never had a woman looked at Malcom as Verity did now. He didn’t know what to do with all that emotion. Any of it. He cleared his throat. “I’ll have you know . . . my . . . anger in the park. It wasn’t reserved for you. It was the discomfort of being there.” Her brows dipped. “Not with you,” he said on a rush. She was all that had kept him sane at that outing. Nay, she’d done more than that; she’d managed to make him smile, even. “It is my own”—insecurity—“dislike of Polite Society,” he settled for.
Her eyes softened. “Thank you.”
That was it: thank you.
He cleared his throat. “We should get on with it.”
“Get on with—”
“The interview.” The only reason they were together, and the reason they’d stay together until the end of the next Season.
The light went out of her pretty eyes. She blinked slowly, and then grimaced. “Forgive me. Of course you didn’t need to hear all that.”
Nay, he hadn’t needed to. But he’d wanted to. And it was that wanting that scared the hell out of him.
He got to the heart of it. “I don’t remember most.” He grimaced. “I don’t remember anything. The information you seek about my past?” About his parents and childhood before it had all been taken from him . . . “I’ve nothing to contribute.” All he could offer was how he’d lived in the years after. Which was largely the whole of his life.
Silence fell, thick and uncomfortable, that tension a product of the fact that he’d never be able to give her what she fully sought, and yet, he intended to hold her to the agreement they’d reached anyway.
“Malcom, you were kidnapped,” Verity said in somber tones. “You lost your parents, and when you were sick, found yourself stolen away by a faithless servant. The fiends who ripped off your title and your existence lived in comfort—opulent lifestyles of wealth and security and ease. While you struggled. While you, an earl’s son, and at his passing, an earl by your birthright, learned firsthand the strife that exists for those born outside the peerage. You might not remember what happened to you”—she covered his hand with hers—“but never, ever doubt that you don’t have something very powerful, something very meaningful to contribute.”
The air effervesced from the force of emotion that passed between them, volatile and real and terrifying for the unfamiliarity of it.
“What do you want to know?” he asked gruffly, eyeing her notepads uneasily.
Except Verity drew her knees up once more and rubbed her chin back and forth over those pale-yellow skirts. “How did you become a tosher?”
That was the easiest question she could have put to him. He suspected she knew as much. Knew that was why she had asked it.
“A gent tried to bugger me. I escaped and scurried into a sewer. Down there, I found me a purse filled with guineas . . . and Fowler. I never looked back.”
All the color left her cheeks.
Malcom tensed. He didn’t want her pity. He didn’t want any of her damned sadness and wide eyes. And he certainly didn’t want useless apologies for what his life had been. “Don’t expect that can be printed in the papers,” he said with forced amusement.
She didn’t take the bait of his teasing. “How old were you?”
He shrugged. “Twelve or thirteen.” Twelve. He’d been twelve.
Her eyes slid briefly closed.
“I was small for my age,” he went on. “Without a bit of meat to me. I was also quicker than bigger men and boys, which is what allowed me to get away and sneak into a grate that hadn’t been properly shut.”
“And Fowler . . . ?”
Malcom’s mind wandered back to that long-ago night. The frantic beat of his heart as it pounded in his ears, muffling even his own ragged breathing. “I heard someone crying and thought it was myself.”
“Fowler?” she breathed.
“Floods come sudden and unexpected in the sewers. One caught Fowler, and it carried him down more tunnels than he could remember. The force of it when it emptied into the chamber where I found him sent him slamming into a brick wall. Shattered his leg, and he couldn’t get out.” And somehow, more than a foot and a half shorter and fifteen stones lighter, he’d managed to get the tosher up and moving. “We’ve been together since.”
Her eyes were riveted on him, her pencil frozen in her fingers.
“Are you going to write that down?”
She blinked several times. “What?” she blurted.
He nodded at the notepad.
Verity looked down, and then gave her head a shake. “No. No. I . . . I simply wondered how you two had come to be together.”
That was all.
She’d not asked for her story. She’d simply asked because she wished to know . . . about him?
Never had he felt more splayed open and on display for another. Malcom shifted, the leather button sofa groaning under him. “And what of you, Verity?” he asked, the need for a reprieve from sharing of himself prompting that question. Except, even as he thought as much, he knew he lied to himself. He wanted to know about her, too. He’d wanted to since he found her in the sewers, fishing around for lost slippers. “How long have you been caring for yourself and your sister?”
She didn’t even hesitate, freely answering. “I was twelve. My mother died in childbirth. My father died soon after. Before he did, he set me up with work at The Londoner.”
She could have lived solely for herself without worrying about mouths to feed. And yet, she hadn’t. She’d lost her mother and father, and then, only a child herself, she’d taken on the role of parent to a babe. It wasn’t every day that Malcom could feel properly shamed, but in this instance, when presented with the selfless existence she’d lived compared with his own, he found himself . . . humbled. “Your father didn’t see that you were looked after?”