Page 61 of Greed: The Savage
Thornwick traded the warm compress for a cold one.
Ironically, when the cold fabric touched her skin, it wasn’t pain that sparked her reaction.
“Shite,” she hissed. “That’s bloody freezing.”
His lips formed a grin. “Only you, Addien, would express more discomfort with icy water than the injuries you su—” He quickly caught himself and corrected, suffered tosustained.
Addien would never take to having anything that happened to her described as suffering.
She didn’t say anything for a long bit. She just let him carefully tend her injury. This time, she made no further grumblings about the temperature. Granted, it was cooling. But even when he switched for a new cloth and brought the latest frigid linen to her cheek, she only slightly flinched but didn’t complain about the chill.
“Never knew water got this cold,” she marveled aloud.
Perhaps this was Addien’s way of acknowledging the pain of the compress without explicitly stating discomfort.
She added, “And I know a thing or two about the cold.”
His stomach drew tight.
“Do you?” He gave that prompting expecting she otherwise would’ve gone silent on him again.
And he wanted to know more. Maybe it was the job that he’d done for so long at the Home Office, extracting information and developing the systems to get information out of traitors and criminals. But this, too, felt different. This interest, stemmed from actual interest, in what she had to say of her past origins.
“Yea.” Her gaze fell to the broken pieces of ice. “I shook myself loose of Diggory in the winter. Winters are known for the escaping time on account there’s less effort going to go into retrieving ye.”
She’d traded one peril for the next.
A deep wrench twisted through his core.
Had he even thought about the coldest winter’s night? The question alone proved he hadn’t. He needn’t remember to know he’d have treated any frosty winter’s eve the same as all lords. He’d have servants add logs to an already blazing fire and requested more of the thick, velvet-lined coverlets and that they be warmed.
“What did you do?”Where did you go? Who was there to protect you?
But he knew the answer to that latter question he didn’t pepper her with.
No one.
She’d had—
“I’d go between the London churches.” Her lips curled into a sardonic smile. “Knew the last place the Devil would go for me was in the Lord’s house. I’d sneak in through side chapel doors. Hide in bell towers. Choir stalls.” She hesitated. “I found a friend in one of the storage vestries.”
She’d had a friend. Until last night, he’d thought she kept to herself. Today, he grasped Addien craved company.
He’d stake every farthing he owned the proud beauty didn’t even know it. Or, if she did, didn’t realize just how much.
“Where is she now?” he asked.
If Thornwick could have snatched the bloody question back, he would.
A dark shadow flickered in Addien’s eyes.
“We got greedy. She got it into her head if we found a church parish just outside the rookeries, we’d be out of reach of Diggory and in finer quarters.”
Quarters.
A heaviness settled in his every limb.
“The walk was too far,” she said softly, sadly. “Got stuck out in the cold. Curled up together in an alley.” The graceful column of her throat moved, but her voice did not waver when she spoke. “Oi tried to keep her talking as long as I could, then kept talking when she couldn’t about all the places we’d run to better than this arse end of England.”
