Page 106 of Her Beast

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Malcolm moved his second peg into the last hole and sat back in his chair.

“Well, rats!” Julia muttered, glaring at the cribbage board as if it had personally offended her.

“That is twice in a row that I’ve lurched you, Julia. You are distracted tonight,” Malcolm couldn’t help teasing.

“I think you spend your days practicing cribbage rather than working,” she accused.

He chuckled.

“You said you’d not played in years and yet you count faster than anyone I’ve ever met!”

And Julia was the most painstaking, methodical point calculator that Malcolm had ever met. It was bloody adorable.

“I’ve always been good with numbers,” he admitted mildly.

“Did you learn everything you know at the, er, orphanage?”

He was amused by her hesitancy to say the word, as if it were not proper for polite company.

“If you mean schooling, thenyes.” He could have told her that his real education only beganafterhe met Smith and started working for Charles Greene.

“How did you—” she broke off and chewed her lip. “I have a proposal.”

“Yes?” he asked, intrigued.

“I propose we not be limited to one question at night.”

He laughed. “Oh, is that only a breakfast tradition?”

“It makes conversation difficult,” she pointed out.

“Ask whatever you like.”

“But you won’t necessarily answer, will you?”

“Ask and find out.”

“Very well. Tell me what it was like at the orphanage. How long were you there? Why did you leave? Where did you go? Do you have close friends you grew up with?”

Malcolm cast his mind back a good thirty years. “I left when I was twelve—all the boys did—when I went to work for a coal merchant.”

“That sounds rather dreadful. Did you hate it?”

“It was not my favorite job, but I liked my master at the time. Unfortunately, he died barely a year in and I did not like working for his son.” That was putting it mildly. “So, I ended our association and that’s when I went to work for Charles Greene.”

“He was the crime lord?” She set her chin in her hand and stared up at him as if he were the most fascinating man alive.

Malcolm’s cock highly approved of her expression.

“Tell me about him, what was he like?” she asked.

Before he could decide exactly what he was going to tell her the library door opened and Butkins appeared in the doorway.

“Hello, John,” Julia piped up.

Malcolm’s secretary blushed, as if Julia had said something wicked rather than just using his Christian name.

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