Page 24 of Greed: The Savage
Nor was it arrogance or self-conceit on his part in thinking so. At the Home Office, he’d been required to look at everything with the same precision as a diamond cutter.
Details mattered. Not just at the government level, but on every level there was. It paid to understand people, their habits, what made them the way they were, all of it.
Hadn’t that incisiveness and focus on details been what allowed him to spare his brother and mother from the duke’s violent tendencies?
In his assessment of people, he was unfailingly correct.Always.
Thornwick had to be.
On this night, with club business concluded and all the inebriated lords sleeping off too many spirits, with their lusts slaked, sated in the arms of the Devil’s Den’s most skilled courtesans, Thornwick was forced to make a correction.
He was rarely wrong.
Standing in the dark kitchen with the obstinate, tart-mouthed Addien and a gaggle of the Devil’s Den’s prostitutes collected around her, he discovered the lady didn’t live quite so solitary an existence as he’d first thought.
He narrowed his eyes.
So, at the late-night hour when staff, servants, and patrons slept—including Thornwick—Addien gathered with Dynevor’s finest courtesans.
To what end?
Addien sat flanked on either side by Delilah and Kara. Directly opposite Addien was Magdalene, one of the club’s most sought-after new hires, and Ruth. The gathering remained asoblivious to Thornwick’s presence as the moth caught in the far corner of the kitchen wall trying to get out through barriers that couldn’t be breached.
Huddled at the table, the women studied an object at its center.
Thornwick immediately had an answer to what held them so enthralled.
“A Book of Manners?” Delilah snorted. “You got to be jibing me. This is the shite Thornwick has you reading?”
The other courtesans snickered.
“Waste of my bloody time it is reading this,” Ruth muttered.
Icy rage trickled along his spine.
Her opinion was met with a flurry of agreement—from Thornwick too. It was a waste of their time. The work that was currently being, apparently, critiqued and mocked hadn’t been intended for them, but rather for the infuriating, obnoxious, insolent bit of baggage at the center of their helm.
“Go on, read,” Addien instructed as if she was a schoolmarm lecturing a student who was evading her work.
“What’s Thornwick’s story?” Magdalene, the newest addition to the club and also the most sought-after courtesan, put to the women around her.
He tensed.
“I don’t want to talk about Mauley,” Addien surprisingly said.
Briefly stunned by—
“Bad enough, I got to spend my day working with him,” she mumbled.
A fresh wave of laughter erupted from Addien’s devoted audience.
He seethed.Ah, as if it’s all roses spending the day with you.
A voice in his head taunted him with the real truth.
You did enjoy the battle of will she put up.
“Got to be more interesting than this rubbish he’s picked out for you,” Delilah jested to a fresh round of giggles.
