“The lights attract the customers, don’t they, Mr. Sinclair?” Tommywas doing his best to sell the place to her. “So does all the cheerful paintwork. Mr. Sinclair says you need to put up a good façade to get the good feet through the door.”
“Mr. Sinclair is an expert when it comes to façades.” She gazed at the building rather than at him while she shot her poison dart. “But it is always what’s behind the façade that counts.”
For Tommy’s sake, he didn’t take that bait. Instead, he bit his tongue until the hackney came to a stop and made sure he jumped out first, ensuring that she had no choice but to let him help her down so that she had to be gracious about something. “Do you want me to give you the tour or would you prefer to explore Hades by yourself?” He held her hand for too long on purpose to gauge her reaction to his touch, not caring that hers had such a profound effect on him. She knew already that he desired her.
That damn horse had already bolted.
She tugged her hand from his grasp the second her feet hit the road, plainly as disgusted to be here as it was physically and mentally possible to be. “Tommy can show me around while he explains to me exactly why he likes working here.”
“Suit yourself.” Gal stood back as he gestured inside. “I’ll be in the bar awaiting your verdict.” Not that he expected it to be anything other than guilty. There had never been any of her legendary benefit of the doubt for him, and she hated him more than ever since their kiss. There wasn’t a hope in hell that she’d allow those boys to be apprenticed to him.
Even so, he held open the door politely while he waited for her to pass, then strapped on a mask of indifference as he left her in the hands of Tommy and made his way through the small crowd of early-evening patrons to the bar.
“Evenin’, Muldoon.”
“Tráthnóna maith.” He might not have seen the emerald isle of his birth for over a decade, but Muldoon was still more Irish than not. As usual, his manager towered above the bar top as he pulled a pint, hiswily gaze watching everything and missing nothing. “Who’s the bit o’ raspberry?” He stared across the room at Venus in obvious masculine appreciation. “Yours?”
“No.Of course not.” Gal tried to pull a face of distaste as he said that, which didn’t feel convincing. “She’s fartoomuch trouble for my tastes.” In case he was asked to elaborate, he did. “She’s the woman from the orphanage. The one the boys rave about. The royal pain in the ass I told you about.” Although he had censored most of what he had confided in Muldoon, sticking to her downright disgust at having him as a neighbor rather than all their other dealings. “Come to snoop around to see if we can be trusted to look after her precious orphans.”
“That’s the pious Miss Merriwell?” Muldoon stared at her some more, his eyes raking her pretty face and tempting figure with interest. “Well, she certainly isn’t what I pictured. I had a plain, pinched, and pasty figure in me head—a scary, unapproachable, unappealing sort—not an absolute corker. You never mentioned your nemesis was a looker, Gal.”
“Is she?” Gal checked the takings in the till with a casual air he was quite proud of. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Of course ya haven’t.” Muldoon’s bark of laughter called him a liar. “That’ll be why you’ve got no clue how much money you just counted.” One meaty paw slammed the till closed before Gal could recount it. “Prove me wrong, Yank.”
“Ten pounds and some loose change.” His guess was all bravado, but it was worth a shot.
“Fifteen pounds, seven shillings, and sixpence on the nose,” said Muldoon with a grin so wide it displayed his three solid gold back teeth, “and you’ve noticed her. Ye’d have had to be blind not to.”
As a pair of sailors had also noticed her, and were already prowling toward Venus with their tongues hanging out, Gal pulled rank before they pounced. “Go keep her subtly out of trouble until we can be rid of the witch.”
Still laughing, Muldoon did the exact opposite, and sauntered pastthe sailors issuing an unsubtle warning before he went and introduced himself to Venus. Within minutes, and much to Gal’s consternation, the reprobate had her laughing.
Put out, he busied himself behind the bar while he pretended not to watch her progress around his business, wishing he didn’t crave her approval quite as much as he did. First Sydney Claypole, then Billy Tubbs climbed the steps from the cellar. As they were a welcome distraction, he decided to focus on them. “Good evening, fellas.”
“Evenin’, Mr. Sinclair.” Sydney offered Gal a cheery grin whereas the other boy silently nodded a wary greeting.
In the few days Billy had been working for him, he’d managed to prise out some scant details about the boy’s life. Most of the information he had so far came from Tommy, who had a knack for weaseling tidbits from people, and by any definition what poor Billy had been through was horrendous. He had been on his own since the age of eight, and the three and a half years he’d been surviving alone on the streets hadn’t been kind. How Billy had come to be on the streets in the first place was still a mystery, but through the wiliest Claypole, Gal now knew that he had been scooped up by bad people almost immediately, who had used him to steal and had taken all of the profits until the then-ten-year-old pickpocket had broken free.
Billy still wasn’t ready to trust anyone, and Gal appreciated that. As someone who had also been scooped up by what the English calledwrong ’uns,he had had to learn the hard way how to avoid being exploited. His tenure as a pickpocket had been blessedly short, and with all the bartending and innkeeping skills his grandpa had equipped him with, it hadn’t taken him a year to get himself off the sidewalk and working full-time at a tavern. But those terrifying, hopeless months had scarred him nevertheless, so he reckoned poor little Billy’s wounds ran deeper. And consequently, they would take much longer to heal over.
“Sydney—there’s a heap of glasses in the kitchen that need stacking behind the bar. Billy”—the lad typically jumped the moment hisname was mentioned, because his brain had been trained to always think the worst—“there’s around fifteen pounds in the till. Leave all the smallest change, count ten out, and put it in the safe in my office.” He unhooked the key from his waistcoat and held it out, because his grandpa always said trust had to be given before it was earned, and Billy had nobody to teach him that.
The boy blinked at the thing, startled. “You want me to put your money in the safe?Me?”
“You can count to ten, can’t you?”
“I can.”
“Good.” He thrust the key in the boy’s still-limp hand. “Because it bothers me to have that much money in the till where nimble fingers can steal it. The cash boxes are in the bottom of the safe. The blue one is for coins and the red is for the folding stuff.”
Billy swallowed, panicked by either the temptation or the test. “Are they both empty?”
“I hope not, else I won’t be eating this week.” Gal turned back to check all the bottles and his eyes instantly met Venus’s in the mirror behind them. Only briefly, until she spun on her heel and disappeared into the growing crowd again with Tommy.
“I won! Iwon!” The burly docker leaped from the hazard table and danced a little jig of joy before his workmates as Gal maneuvered Venus out toward the waiting hackney.
As it was after nine and the place was filling up, it was sensible to send her home before things got too raucous. Especially when he had assumed she would leave an hour ago when his regular driver came to pick up the boys and take them back to the orphanage. But she hadn’t, instead hanging around with Tommy as her chaperone and, to his complete surprise, whiling away a good hour chatting to his assorted patrons as they wandered past, tapping her foot to the music and sipping a drink.
