Read Online In Bed with the Duke by Annie Burrows - Free Book Online Page B

.’ He flexed his bruised, grazed hands.
    â€˜Did you make them rue the day as well?’
    She’d blurted out the question before she’d even known she was wondering about it. She looked up at him in trepidation. Only to discover he was smiling. True, it wasn’t what she’d call a very nice sort of smile. In fact it looked more like the kind of expression she imagined a fox would have after devastating a henhouse.
    â€˜Yes, I made a whole lot of people sorry yesterday,’ he said.
    She swallowed. Reached for the teapot.
    Something about the way she poured her second cup of tea must have betrayed her misgivings, because his satisfied smile froze.
    â€˜I don’t generally go about getting into brawls, if that’s what you’re afraid of,’ he said.
    â€˜I’m not afraid.’
    He sighed. ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you were. Look...’ He folded his arms across his chest. ‘I’ll tell you what happened, and why it happened, and then you can judge for yourself.’
    She shrugged one shoulder, as if she didn’t care, and took a sip of her tea. This time, thankfully, it had much more flavour.
    â€˜It started with a letter from a man who worked in a...a manufactory. In it he described a lot of double-dealing, as well as some very unsavoury behaviour towards the female mill workers by the foreman, and he asked the owner of the mill whether he could bear having such things going on in his name. He couldn’t,’ he said, with a decisive lift to his chin. ‘And so I went to see if I could get evidence of the wrongdoing, and find a way to put a stop to it.’
    So he was employed as a sort of investigator? Which explained why he had a secretary. Someone who would help him keep track of the paperwork while he went off doing the actual thief-taking. It also explained why he was reluctant to speak of his trade. He would have to keep a lot of what he did to himself. Or criminals would see him coming.
    She took a sip of tea and suddenly saw that that couldn’t be the right conclusion. Because it sounded like rather an exciting sort of way to make a living. And he’d said he had lived a dull, ordered existence. She sighed. Why did nothing make any sense today?
    â€˜I soon found out that it wouldn’t be possible to bring the foreman to trial for what he was doing to the women under his power, because not a one of them would stand up in court and testify. Well, you couldn’t expect it of them.’
    â€˜No,’ she murmured, horrified. ‘So what did you do?’
    â€˜Well, Bodkin—that’s the man who wrote the letter—said that maybe we’d be able to get the overseer dismissed for fraud if we could only find the false ledgers he kept. He sent one set of accounts to...to the mill owner, you see, and kept another to tally up what he was actually making for himself. We couldn’t simply walk in and demand to see the books, because he’d have just shown us the counterfeit ones. So we had to break in at night, and search for them.’
    â€˜Aunt Charity said you looked like a housebreaker,’ she couldn’t help saying. Though she clapped her hand over her mouth as soon as she’d said it.
    He frowned. ‘It’s funny, but I would never have thought I’d be keen to tell anyone about Wragley’s. But you blurting out things the way you just did... Perhaps it’s something to do with the drug we were given. We can’t help saying whatever is on our minds.’
    â€˜I...suppose that might be it,’ she said, relieved that he wasn’t disposed to take her to task for being so rude. ‘Although...’ She paused.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Never mind,’ she said with a shake of her head. She didn’t want to admit that for some reason she felt as though she could say anything to him. ‘You were telling me about how you tried to find the second set of