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The words sizzled through her. She did not look to the bed, despite the way it beckoned.
He leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest. “Shall I ask another question? Speed things along?”
She nodded. Just one more. One more, and she’d stop this game, which was getting more and more dangerous. “I am an open book.”
“No, Adelaide.” Her name. He’d said her name. “You’re nothing like an open book. Now tell me, what happened downstairs?”
She didn’t flinch. Instead she leveled him with a cool look. “What’s in the box?”
He hesitated—he couldn’t possibly be thinking of answering, and still, for a moment she thought he might. “Nothing that would send you racing from the room.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “And I didn’t race.”
He tutted his disapproval. “I don’t give hints for falsehoods. Something in that taproom unnerved you, Adelaide Frampton. And you don’t seem the kind of woman who startles easily. What was it?”
She shook her head, she couldn’t tell him. Couldn’t trust him. What Helene had seen—what she still faced—she could not trust he would not get in the way of Adelaide reaching her. Protecting her. “There was nothing.”
He was out of his chair like a shot, returning to his place at the door, his back to her for a long moment before he asked, “Are you in danger?”
Of course he asked that. “No.”
He looked over his shoulder. “Will you be?”
“Yesterday we dispatched a half-dozen Bully Boys together, Your Grace. I believe I might be in danger again someday, yes.”
He gave a frustrated sigh at the bold answer, tacit acceptance that she was not going to tell him the full scope of the situation. He turned and set his back to the door, crossing his arms over his chest. “So, you are simply chaos.”
Something warmed inside her at the description—one no one had ever used with her.
“And to think,” he went on, “you imagine yourself unnoticeable.”
“How did you find me here?”
“I thought I was asking the questions.”
She set the box to the table once more. “It’s my turn. How did you find me tonight?”
“I searched three other inns first. It was bloody cold and bloody wet.”
She tilted her head. “And if I hadn’t been here? Would you have given up?”
“No, Adelaide,” he said, “I wouldn’t have given up.”
The answer unsettled her. She shook her head as though she could clear the sensation. Erase the truth of the words. “For your box and your brother.”
“Mmm.” A half agreement. Like a word on parchment, washed out in the rain.
“And how did you know to find me in Covent Garden? At The Place?” She avoided calling it her rooms. He didn’t need to know she lived there. She didn’t want him to know she lived there, alone in the two-room flat, only the roar of the tavern for company.
“You think you are the only one with access to information?”
She narrowed her gaze on him. “I don’t like my information being shared without permission.”
He raised a brow in the direction of the dossier on the table. The information on his brother, shared with Lady Havistock. “How odd. The rest of us enjoy it quite a bit.”
She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “The information I share is to be used against people who deserve it.”
“My brother does not deserve it.”
