Page 68

“Ah, right.” He knew this was about favors. But her clipped, businesslike tone put a catch in his throat. He began straightening the lace gloves she’d discarded, aligning the thumbs. “I hadn’t forgotten. I’m meeting with Crofton tonight.”

Her gaze leapt to meet him. “Really? What time shall I—”

He shot her a warning look. “I’m going alone,” he said quietly.

Her nostrils flared. Before the rebuttal could come, one of the ladies by the silk counter cried, “Might we have some service? Anyone?”

Much more of this and he’d have hell to pay with Thomas. He turned to bow to the group. “I will go check on the Queen’s silk for you straightaway, milady.” On his way past Sophie he whispered, “Service stairs to the second floor. Last door on the right.”

Slipping away was becoming too commonplace for safety, Sophie thought, as she dropped her skirts into place after mounting the last narrow step. She barreled down the dusty corridor until she reached the last door. It was half open, and she saw the familiar knife-edged shoulders inside, their angles sharpened by the afternoon light spilling through the small windows. This was not a time for admiration.

She closed the door behind her and stalked up to him. “You think I shouldn’t accompany you for this interview?”

She glared at him. Curse the light—she seldom saw him in anything but shadows. The sun laid emphasis to the pale planes of his skin, punctuated the caramel freckling atop his brow bone. And green. Of course it drew out that millimeter of color in his irises, the forested depths of which seemed to be laughing at her just now.

“I may be a lady, Mr. Balfour, but if I’m grown enough to offer guardianship of this child, I suppose I have wits enough to discuss the details of such an arrangement.”

“You are a silly woman indeed to suppose I doubt you.”

To her great irritation, the cool surety of his words rendered her speechless. He reached into his breast pocket and offered her the white lace gloves she had just tried on. “They look lovely on you. And, unlike the ones you’ve got on, they actually fit.”

“What?” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “Back to task, Mr. Balfour, and besides, I cannot buy your fanciful gloves. Well, I suppose I could, if I had a mind to waste my pin money, but—”

“I’m giving them to you.” He shook them at her.

Frowning, Sophie took them and brushed them between her fingers. Thousands of white filaments, expertly plaited and twisted and arranged. Someone had spent dozens of hours to achieve just this shape.

“You’re spending your own earnings on them?” She avoided his face as she exchanged her old pair for the new. She had never said as much aloud, but Rafe didn’t seem the sort of man with limitless capital, no matter how much Balfour’s was worth. It was part of what drew her to him, his refreshing normalcy, his detachment from finery even for all his expertly tailored suits.

“Not that, either.” He lifted her left hand and peeled back the cuff of her sleeve, just enough to reveal a thin red line running perpendicular to the bluish-green network of her veins. He laid a kiss to the wound.

His mouth was hot and damp, an abyss she desperately wanted to fixate on until the rest of the world ceased to exist. She drew in a deep breath. She hadn’t realized she had closed her eyes until the kiss ended, and she opened them to the bright light of day.

“I want you to have them. But you should know, Sophie, that I take things. From this store. And from my father.”

She swallowed. There was so little she knew of him. Ever since the night she had made a drunken fool of herself, she had felt bared to him. She supposed that she had a sense of his heart. An unuttered communication of goodness. But to trust feeling in its entirety … She was not foolish.

“You steal from him?” she asked evenly.

He had hooked his thumb inside his coat and turned toward the window. “Yes. I do.”

Her pulse did a wild maneuver, a caged bird flitting its wings in vain. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because,” he said, half-turning toward her, “I want you to know me fully. I’m hoping to be someone you understand, not condemn.”

Her throat tightened painfully. Condemn?

“What, Rafe? You think because you see yourself as some kind of thief, I’ll judge you for a bad man?”

“I don’t see myself as anything.” His tone was flat. “I am a thief. You should judge me.”

“I have judged you.” She stepped toward him, reaching for the hand that rested laxly at his side and interlocking her fingers with his larger, cool ones. “And you’ve come out a gentleman.”

When he raised a brow, she whispered, “Bad men can be thieves, but not all thieves are bad men. Tell me why you do it.”

He stared at the floor. “I’m scarcely paid for the work I do here. And by my morals, that’s theft, too. You may count upon it—the great Thomas Balfour provides me with less than your father does his housemaids. That is why I take up contracts with Alfie. For the extra coin.” He cleared his throat gruffly, as if he had reached an impasse and would not say more.

“Does he treat you ill? In other ways, I mean.”