AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Shuffling in as much of an arc around her as he could manage in the stairwell, the brute moved past her and up the stairs.
Pen smoothed the front of her black dress, pulling the wrinkles out of it, trying to conjure all the haughtiness that she imagined would come with being Mr. Hoppler’s sister.
She pulled her shoulders back, straightening her spine.
Whatever it took. Forward.
Everything depended on talking to Mr. Hoppler.
Everything.
She needed to do this. Do this for her future or she would be forced under Mr. Flagton’s control forever.
Bile burned up her throat at the thought. She swallowed quickly, not letting her mind go there. She was good at that. Swallowing the bile. Pretending that what was coming wasn’t coming.
Her last chance—her only chance—was at hand, and she couldn’t waste it.
Her chin high, she followed the man up the stairs and into the depths of the devil’s den.
{ Chapter 2 }
“She said she was yer sister, boss.”
Strider’s left eyebrow lifted as he looked up at Jasper from the sheet of numbers in his hand. That was a new one. “I don’t have a sister.”
Jasper shrugged, taking another step into Strider’s office. The man was smart, the reason why Strider kept him close as one of his main men and paid him so well, but Jasper had a gullible streak about him Strider could never quite place. Gullible meant weakness and that was the one thing Strider despised. Weakness.
Good thing Jasper’s Scottish brogue tended to make their patrons quiver. As long as they were sober enough, most English dandies didn’t want to mess with the Scot.
“The words were enough to stop Egbert from dragging her up into the whores’ dressing room,” Jasper said. “He didn’t want to run afoul of ye and I don’t blame him.”
Strider shifted in his seat and looked back down at the column of numbers on the sheet. Dammit. Now he’d have to re-add them. “I don’t have a sister.”
No movement.
He looked up again. Jasper still stood across the desk from him. “Why are you still here?”
“Well, it’s just that we dinnae ken what to do with the lass.”
Strider’s forehead wrinkled. “You don’t know what to do with her? Send her up to Madame Juliet. Kick her onto the street. I don’t care.”
Jasper didn’t move. “She’s not our kind, Hoppler.”
“Who cares what kind she is?”
“It’s just…”
He slammed the paper onto his desk. “Just what, Jasper?”
“Just…could ye please come look at her and ye’ll ken what I mean.”
Strider leaned back in his chair, a sigh deep in his chest. All he wanted that night was one hour of peace to look at the accounting and he’d only been sitting down for five minutes. “Where is she?”
“The drawing room.”
His eyebrow cocked again. “You set her in the drawing room? Any of the entertaining rooms would have done. Madame Juliet is going to slice you through for setting a strange woman in there.”
“We thought she was yer sister.” His hand flipped over, waving about in a circle. “And the mirrors and the…uh…implements in the entertaining rooms…well, we didn’t think the lass should see that.”
