Page 41 of His Improper Lady

“But what?”

Finally, grudgingly, Desiree said, “It’s not as strong when you’re around.” She added hastily, “I think perhaps it’s because I’m actually doing something about it. Not just sitting around worrying.”

Tom nodded. He had no idea what to say about her statement or why her words had warmed him. “Are you going to the club tonight?”

“Yes, I suppose so. Why?” Desiree looked over at him in surprise at his change of subject.

“Because I don’t think you should go there alone. I’ll go with you.”

Desiree frowned. “I didn’t mean that you needed to be with me all the time. It isn’t as if that feeling is overwhelming.”

“No, I know you didn’t intend that. And I’m not talking about haunting your presence. Just escorting you to and from the club. That’s when that carriage was lurking there.”

“Our coachman takes me and carries me home.”

That was true, but Tom didn’t find it very satisfactory. “Your driver is watching the road. He’s standing about chatting with the other coachmen while he waits. He’s not going to look at things in the same way I will.”

Desiree looked at him shrewdly for a moment. Then, to Tom’s surprise, she shrugged her shoulders and acquiesced. “Very well. Why don’t you stay, have supper with us before we go?”

Something in him wanted to do just that. They could talk over their day, plan for tomorrow. But Tom shook his head. He needed to think, and that was harder to do around Desiree. His thoughts kept creeping toward completely inconsequential matters, like the exact color of her gray-green eyes or the wispy strand of hair that escaped her pins and curled along her neck or the way her laughter made him want to say something to make her laugh again.

“Thank you, but no,” he said a bit stiffly. “I should get back to the office. I have to change into my ‘gentleman’s togs’ for this evening.”

Desiree didn’t urge him to stay—and there was no reason he should feel disappointed by that. The last thing he needed was her meddling in his life, arranging his schedule and pulling his attention from the things he should be thinking about.

When he reached the office, however, he found that the change of location had done little to order his thoughts. He felt uncertain, which was not like him. He didn’t know how he felt about Desiree Malone. He couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth. And, frankly, he wasn’t at all sure what he was doing or why. Was he trying to protect the Morelands? Prove she was wrong? Was he helping her because she’d coerced him into it...or because he enjoyed being with her?

Tom couldn’t deny that he had enjoyed the day he’d just spent with Desiree. She drew him, not just physically, but in many ways. She was clever, she was different, she was irrepressible. There was an ease in being with her that he had never felt with anyone else. He knew her, and she him, because they were molded in the same fires. She understood without explanation things that no one else could. She’d lived, as he had, in two separate worlds.

But he didn’t really trust her. And that, at least in part, was for exactly the same reason. He understood her and her life too well.

Still...she was the child who had reached out to help him long ago. There was a bond between them that he hadn’t known existed until today. It was more than the fact that she had been kind or that he had been grateful. He could not help but feel that they were tied together, that they were somehow meant to meet again.

Tom would have said that he didn’t believe in fate or destiny. Life was more like a throw of the dice, and sometimes you were lucky, sometimes not. But still...there had been so many places along the way where his life could have gone in a drastically different direction. If Reed hadn’t been there that day or Falk hadn’t urged Tom to pick the man’s pocket. If Reed hadn’t been the sort of man he was or the duchess hadn’t set up an orphanage wherein children were treated humanely. If Olivia hadn’t started this detective agency or he’d gone to work somewhere else.

Desiree had traveled an equally varied and even more unusual road, both of them moving far away from Falk and their old life. And now here they were again, brought together by Falk, their meeting once more ruled by a series of events that seemed pure happenstance—him waking up when Desiree broke in, her dropping that gambling chip.

It would be easy to read into that a design, lives arcing around and coming back to touch again. Perhaps he had been fated to help her as she had once helped him. Fated that he and she were tied to the Morelands.

Could it be that she really was a Moreland? Tom had been certain she was not. It had shaken his certainty a bit when she explained her ability to “read” people, but after some thought, he’d dismissed that. After all, many people relied on intuition or instinct, whether it was real or not, and Desiree had not claimed to have significant dreams or other, stranger abilities. But this foreknowledge of danger? That spoke of a more serious power.

Granted, it wasn’t something as unusual as seeing ghosts or pulling information from objects or a long-dead witch jumping into one’s dreams, which were all things the Morelands had done, but not all the Moreland skills were either strong or constant. Kyria, for instance, had responded only to that particular ancient relic, and Reed’s and Theo’s otherworldly experiences consisted of no more than dreams. Desiree’s feeling of impending danger seemed to fit in with the Moreland propensity to live at the edge of reality.

On the other hand, this story was so bizarre, so full of twists and turns and coincidences that it seemed something Dickens or Eliot might write. Or a long inventive fraud set up by a family of swindlers.

He felt, as he had from the beginning, that he was being pulled into something he ought to avoid, that one misstep could land him in a quagmire, entangle him in such a way that he could not find his way out. Tom liked to have his feet on the ground. He wanted to trust in his pragmatic, realistic, even slightly cynical view of the world.

He had set up a life for himself. Tom knew where he stood and what he wanted. He had been saving money for years so that he could buy a house. Nothing large, nothing grand. Just something that was his. Though they were rather vague in his envisioning, there would also be a wife and children in that home.

For all the risks he’d taken in his life and his often cocksure attitude, for all his involvement in the frequently bizarre activities of the Morelands, when it came down to it, at the core of him, Tom desired certainty and solidity. He didn’t want this twitchy feeling that danced in his nerves when Desiree was around. He didn’t like the emotions that clashed in his chest—the thought that she was in danger and the urge to protect her, the suspicion that she was playing him like a mark, even as he wanted to believe what she told him.

None of those feelings, of course, kept him from showing up at her house that evening to escort her to the club. She was wearing green tonight, her eyes bright behind the mask, and it was, he thought, a crime how much that mask made a man want to kiss the lips below it. You’d think he’d grow accustomed to her scent, as well, that seductive, subtle fragrance that conjured up thoughts of moonlight and tangled bedsheets, but every time it laid him low all over again.

He imagined nuzzling her neck, burying himself in that scent, kissing the thin skin over the pulse in her neck. Which didn’t exactly put him in a decent condition or help him watch for an enemy. Distracting. That was the word that described Desiree.

Tom did, however, manage to keep an eye out as they walked out to the carriage and as they left it at the club, glancing up and down the street for any sign of the man who had been following them. Neither the man nor the odd carriage was there. After Desiree sat down at her table, Tom strolled through the place, checking out every face, a practice he repeated at various times throughout the evening.

In between those times, his eyes went back to Desiree. He heard her laugh, and it was like fingers up his spine. He watched her enchanting expression that gave nothing away. He saw the admiration, even hunger, in the men around her, and he felt a rather smug satisfaction that he was the one who would be leaving with her tonight.