Luck Is No Lady(19)

This here was what she understood.





Six


Roderick stared at the woman seated behind the small desk. Her workspace was cramped and ill suited to her task, yet she kept her spine straight and her head tipped at a genteel angle while she moved the pen smoothly over the paper. Her manner was unhurried and efficient. She barely made a sound as she sifted through the various documents one by one.

It had taken all the skill he’d developed over the years not to give away the flash of exhilaration that ran through him when he had looked up to see the young woman from Hawksworth’s ball standing in his office. His glimpse of her face that night had been brief, but the details had been burned into his mind. There was no doubt the woman who had spirited herself away from Marwood was here now.

Keeping his reaction from being revealed in any outward expression, he had waited for some indication she recognized him as well. But she remained entirely unperturbed, fully composed.

What the hell was she doing here?

A daughter of the beau monde did not seek employment at a gambling hell.

He studied her in her common garb. He may never have guessed she had been gowned in fine silk and lace of a high society debutante only a week prior. Her dress today was simple and clean, but worn at the hem. Her pelisse was quite dull and her bonnet was of a style he hadn’t seen around in years. Nothing about her appearance now would suggest she belonged in the ballrooms of London’s highest society.

She was intentionally practicing a deception. That much was clear. What Roderick needed to know was whether or not her deception involved any threat to his club.

His experience with women of her social standing was limited and unfavorable. Yet she did not behave as those ladies had. Not so far today, and not when they had met in Hawksworth’s darkened study. That night her witty retorts and thinly veiled sarcasm had helped him forget he stood in the enemy’s lair. Her manner had been far more self-assured than he would have expected from a young debutante.

That same self-assurance had lifted her chin defiantly when he suggested the position as club’s bookkeeper might not be suited to a modest lady. He sensed her indignation even before she challenged his implication. She had a sharp tongue tucked behind her even teeth, though he suspected she did not allow herself much occasion to use it.

None of it explained why she was here.

Relaxing his gaze, he made conscious effort to clear his mind. Whenever he was in doubt about anything, from which card to throw down to which road he should take, Roderick relied on his gut feelings.

As he sought to identify what his intuition might be telling him about the young lady before him, he experienced a strange tightness in his chest. It was not a sensation he had felt before and it took him a moment to get past the odd feeling. When he did, he did not notice any rise of trepidation or tremor of caution through his psyche. There was no tug of reluctance or flash of warning.

There was just an intense tightening sensation spreading out in thin rivers of awareness through his person. It was a sort of inner urging.

She may have applied for the position as the club’s bookkeeper under less than honest circumstances, but there was something about her…something that made Roderick wonder if she might be exactly what he needed.

He didn’t believe for a moment Mrs. Adams was her real name, but that did not bother him so much. Many of Bentley’s staff members did not go by their given names.

He had made it a policy long ago to judge no one by their past. He measured people by their ability to be loyal to him and to Bentley’s. Whatever they may have done or whoever they were before coming to him was irrelevant as long as he was able to trust them to carry out the tasks he assigned and maintain the best interests of the club. He had never gone wrong in this approach.

Until Goodwin.

Roderick lowered his gaze to the incomprehensible markings in the ledger before him. He fought off the frown threatening to weigh his brow.

The rows and columns spread across the page before him wavered under his steady gaze. He had spent hours over the last two weeks intent on discovering the mysteries contained in the orderly itemizations of notes and figures. But he had gotten no closer to solving the problem of his skewed profits.

He knew something in the ledger was wrong, but he was horrible with calculations and abhorred the tedious process of figuring sums and products. He had never been able to force numbers into making proper sense, and he had long ago given up on trying. He employed a bookkeeper for the express purpose of not having to.

Roderick accepted the uncomfortable twist in his gut when he thought of his former accountant. He may never figure out how Goodwin had managed to fool him, but he would not allow that failure to affect his confidence in his own judgment.