Page 52 of This Haunted Heart

Her jealousy was like a balm to my aches and pains. “I pretend that none of your clients mattered to you at all,” I confessed.

“They didn’t!” she said earnestly. “Truly, not a single onemade it into my heart. They couldn’t. I’d given it away already to you, so there was no path for them inside.”

“I tell myself that bedding them was a terrible chore because they were all boorish with tiny cocks—”

“Some of them didn’t even have cocks at all.”

I harumphed at that but not because of her flexible preferences. I’d seen the company of the lovely ladies she kept at the Lark. It made it hard to pretend that all of her prior partners were commonplace. She’d always had elastic tastes. She could find something attractive about most anyone, always looking for the best in people. I was the exact opposite. My preferences were Rynn. Just Rynn.

At thirteen, when I got my hands on my first photo of a scantily clad lady, I’d been curious what all the fuss was about. Rynn had been more interested than I was in the woman seated behind a sheer curtain, showing off her naked legs for the camera.

“I can’t decide if I want to be her or just want to keep looking at her,”she’d told me. But I couldn’t find anything appealing about a person I’d never met before. The woman was just a stranger in a photo to me.

“I like to pretend,” I continued, “that your clients were all tedious and you just needed the money desperately.”

“No client could hold a candle to you, Loch. Not even standing up all together. They don’t compare.”

It was exactly what I wanted to hear. In her own words, wasn’t that just the thing she was best at? Telling men and women what they wanted to hear. The thought soured my mood, stealing the bit of warmth her playfulness had inspired. I climbed up from the floor, rattling the door in the frame with my movements.

“I’m going to bed,” I muttered.

“All right . . . I guess I should, too.”

“You should,” I added firmly.

“Sweet dreams, Loch.”

My dreams were only ever sweet when my nightingale was in them. “Goodnight.”

* * *

The next morning, I started my day with a fresh shave. Rynn’s things arrived from Salt Rock. I went in search of her to let her know, but she wasn’t in her room. I started to panic when I couldn’t find her in the small library or the dining room either.

“Rynn?Rynn!” I shouted, fear fisting around my heart. My hand went to my waistcoat pocket, checking to make sure the house keys were still secured there by the chain I usually used to hold my timepiece. Surely, she wouldn’t have attempted another escape barefoot and without her savings.

Her voice reached me then, calling from the drawing room on the first level, and I let the breath trapped in my lungs out. My heart took longer to calm down its erratic racing. Seeing her helped a little.

Rynn wore an apron over her freshly laundered dressing gown. Dark smudges shadowed her eyes. The hutch was open, and she hunched before a table covered in the presentation silver. Linen cloth in hand, she cleaned the silver with water that gentle steamed.

I came to a stop just inside the doorway. Her gaze immediately went to my cleanshaven chin. She shot me a small smile but didn’t say anything. I feltdifferentnowafter my confrontation with Rynn, changed in a way I couldn’t articulate, and so I’d wanted to look different, too.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

She finished drying the spoon in her hand with her apron, then she laid it out beside the others. A deep crease formed between her brows. “Penance, I think?”

“You hate cleaning.”

“Wouldn’t be penance if I enjoyed it.” Rynn rubbed at the back of her neck. “What did you want? I heard you yelling. It sounded serious.”

My feet shuffled beneath me, uncertain about this new development. Was all this a trick to put me off-guard? “I just didn’t know where you’d gone, and I worried. Your belongings arrived. I had them brought up to your bedroom.”

“Oh. Thank you.” Her bottom lip went between her teeth. “It’ll be nice to have my own clothing again.”

I disliked the tension between us, the mountain of words left unsaid. An unspoken question hung there, one I couldn’t answer.

Where do we go from here?

Nothing had turned out the way I’d planned, not from the moment I’d met her in her rooms. Not from the second she’d smiled at me in that way only Rynn could. She was supposed to behave like a villain, a cruel, wretched thing that belonged in a prison, a woman deserving only of punishment for her crimes. She wasn’t supposed to be sad and sorry. And what was I to do with her acts of penance?

---