To Tempt a Saint by Kate Moore Page B

bid him goodnight, her own sleepy boys clinging to her skirts, her hands idly ruffling their hair, and he had fallen irrevocably in love. With her unerring perceptiveness she understood his need before he did, and for all her quiet voice and calm manner, she contained a storm of passion. When she became his lover, he learned how strong a streak of sensuality his nature possessed. He offered marriage.
    She refused him with gentle firmness, but when he took his suit to her family, they removed her to the south and married her to a man of standing in the world. His collarbone healed perfectly.
    So Xander knew a man might dream of fairy princesses locked in their high towers, but princesses always came with nasty dragons. Even an unwanted princess, like Cleo Spencer, had March. It made no sense then that from their first meeting, he had been aware of an electric attraction, more than he had felt in years for any woman. His nerves trapped the charge of her presence, bottling up a most inconvenient desire when his plan was to end their marriage as soon as he found Kit.
    Her demand that they make a babe was no part of that plan. To imagine her with his babe at her breast was like offering the dragon a piece of toast on a stick. A babe was permanent. A babe tied two people into a bargain or a contest that could last a lifetime and that did the babe very little good. A babe became an inconvenient boy, stuffed in a closet, blind and choked, ears filled with voices that deceived, accused, blamed, and parted.
    He would not bed his bride, and he would banish her from his dreams.
    In front of him Bread Street was real enough. It twisted up a slight hill to the west. Buildings of crumbling lath and plaster, soot-blackened brick, and rotting wood tilted against one another, their steep roofs at crazy angles. A foul trickle ran along both curbs and disappeared in black gully holes at the edge of the cobbles. Men and women slouched in and out of the public house on the lower east side and in and out of the fish shop where the curve of Upper Bread Street began. Strings of crisp-fried, shiny brown bloaters hung in the window, six for a penny. Below the fish shop the street opened to the east on a wide, rubbish-filled court.
    A group of idlers, as filthy and oddly sorted as the buildings around them, slumped on a low set of steps opposite the court. A stranger who tried pass to them, even in rags, faced a reckoning. They knew their own. A man from a rival street or a lost soul would be set upon, stripped of his possessions, and left to come to consciousness on the foul stones with only the lint in his pockets. According to Will even the police rarely ventured to enter the neighborhood and always came in sufficient numbers for self-defense.
    The idlers roused themselves to jeer as a woman at an upper window tossed out the contents of a night soil pot, narrowly missing a donkey cart driver. A grimy urchin with an empty beer can seized the moment to dart from one of the basement dwellings past the loafers, headed for the pub.
    Not a chance. A large, leather-faced fellow snagged the boy with one long arm and dangled him by his scrawny legs, shaking loose a few coppers from his pocket. The child slunk back toward his hole with a tear-streaked face.
    “Welcome to Bread Street,” Will mumbled at Xander’s side. “Ready?”
    Xander nodded. The loose, outlandish clothes felt freeing. He’d have no trouble swinging a fist in the purple velvet jacket Will had insisted he wear over a checkered waistcoat and baggy breeches. They were supposed to be pugs, prizefighters who had made it out of the rookery by the smashing skill of their fists, coming back to lord it over those whose grand escapes remained mere daydreams. Their movement drew all eyes.
    “We’d do better to come with a detachment of the Ninety-fifth,” Will said. “That lot won’t talk to us. We got lucky with Cullen because he wanted to complain about being sacked.”
    Xander kept moving,