Page 47 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
“Oh,” she said, chewing at her lower lip. “Hm.”
“Hm?” Just that?
“Well,” she said. “It’s just that—there’s been gossip. About what was said at that dinner party.” She let out a low sigh, having successfully peeled back perhaps half of the gauze. “I’ve never had cause to think of it before, but…I think you were right.”
“About what?”
“That we assign a certain morality to killing when it suits our purposes,” she said. “That the act itself is less rendered less despicable when we tell ourselves there’s a good reason. We make some deaths more moral than others.”
Had he said all that? He’d thought he’d merely be rubbing their hypocrisy in their faces. And Phoebe—Phoebe wished to know if she might find a shred of good mixed in with the bad. Whether there had been any sort of morality, in his estimation or hers, within it.
“So I am asking,” she said. “Did you kill him?”
“Yes.” The admission had not surprised her. Probably she had expected it. “Yes, I killed ‘im. I weren’t the first child ‘e ‘ad sold—or tried to. Couldn’t let ‘im do it to someone else, someoneweaker than m’self. And do ye know, it weren’t even difficult. Alls I ‘ad to do was to lure him down to the river wiv a tale I’d spun o’ some fancy whisky I’d found washed ashore while mudlarking. The damned fool couldn’t swim. One little nudge, a splash, and he sank like a bloody stone. If ‘e’s not even now at the bottom o’ the Thames, then probably he got fished out and put in a pauper’s grave. I ne’er cared enough to ask.”
“Hm,” she said again.
“What? Nothin’ to say?”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish?” Phoebe suggested wryly. “I’m afraid I can’t manage to dredge up much sympathy for him.” At last the bottom edge of the gauze came free, and she sank back in the chair with a sigh. “Perhaps I’m not a very good person, either. Have you killed anyone who did not deserve it?”
“Depends on how ye define ‘deserve,’” he said. He let the words settle uncomfortably there between them for a moment or two, collected himself, and at last admitted in a crisp, precise voice, “I don’t kill people for insulting me, nor for defaulting upon debts.”
“You implied differently to my brother.”
“I lied. I didn’t particularly want to have to break his arm or knock out his teeth for his insolence. Better he fear what I might do than experience it firsthand.” A grin, half-feral, split his face. “I said I wouldn’tkillover it. Maiming’s a different story. I’ve killed too many men to count, but they all got what was coming to them in the end. I’m not sorry for it. But I’ve never intentionally hurt a woman or a child. Seen too damned much of that sort of violence in my youth. Never cared to make myself one of those men.”
“I suppose you’re implying that you don’t intend to beat me if I displease you?” she guessed as she folded up fresh gauze into a new pad to lay against his wound.
“Can’t imagine it’d go over any better than shouting,” he said.“Can you throw a punch?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never tried,” she said, and her fingers were so careful, so gentle when they pressed the gauze pad to his side. “Hold that in place, if you please.” She unspooled a clean bandage and rose from the chair to position it carefully—not too tight, not too loose—as she wound it around him once more. “Do you suppose I’m in any danger?” she asked.
Chris snorted. “I doubt it,” he said. “The difference is that if someone should kill me, I’m dead. But if they should so much as hurt you—they’redead. There’s not a man alive with a grudge against me that wouldn’t know it. It’d be a foolish notion on its face.”
“Somehow, I don’t imagine men desperate enough to try to kill you would be possessed of superior reasoning skills,” she said lightly, as she leaned across him to tuck the end of the bandage in.
“Most don’t. People are a stupid and panicky lot.” The faint fragrance of roses wafted to his nose. He didn’t much care for the scent of them in gardens, but he enjoyed it far more warmed by the heat of her skin. He had the strangest inclination to lean in suck that scent deep into his lungs. “After I did him in, Scratch became something of a bogeyman,” he said. “For the children in the slums—and beyond. They often claimed to have seen him wandering the streets. Or the ghost of him at least. It became a local legend, the sort the older children used to scare the younger and keep them in line.”
A tiny shudder slipped down her spine. “How dreadful,” she said as she retreated back into her chair, taking the aroma of hothouse roses with her. Absently she smoothed at the rumpled covers draped over him, and he was damned lucky she’d missed sliding her palm directly over his cock by perhaps an inch in her efforts to right them. Or damned unlucky, depending upon how one chose to look at it.
When one considered that she wasn’t likely to doanything about the state of his cock at the moment—or, indeed, ever—he’d have to put it definitively atlucky.
Her fingers knitted in her lap, and for a moment she turned her head toward the door as an odd, pensive expression slid across her face. Like a silent war raged within her head, battling forces vying for supremacy over two contrasting decisions.
Stay or go, he decided they had to be.
At long last, the tip of her pink tongue swiped out to moisten her dry lips, and she said, “May I ask you an…indelicate question?”
“Would’ve thought interrogating me about murders was indelicate enough,” he said, enjoying the little frown of annoyance that graced her lips.
“I’m in earnest,” she said. “I haven’t anyone else to ask. I’m certain it’s too improper to inquire of.”
“Really? Now I must know.”
She seemed to gather her courage, setting her shoulders and firming her lips. She drew in a large breath through her nose, and asked at last, “What is a condom?”
Chapter Fourteen
