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Silence fell, thick and uncomfortable, that tension a product of the fact that he’d never be able to give her what she fully sought, and yet, he intended to hold her to the agreement they’d reached anyway.

“Malcom, you were kidnapped,” Verity said in somber tones. “You lost your parents, and when you were sick, found yourself stolen away by a faithless servant. The fiends who ripped off your title and your existence lived in comfort—opulent lifestyles of wealth and security and ease. While you struggled. While you, an earl’s son, and at his passing, an earl by your birthright, learned firsthand the strife that exists for those born outside the peerage. You might not remember what happened to you”—she covered his hand with hers—“but never, ever doubt that you don’t have something very powerful, something very meaningful to contribute.”

The air effervesced from the force of emotion that passed between them, volatile and real and terrifying for the unfamiliarity of it.

“What do you want to know?” he asked gruffly, eyeing her notepads uneasily.

Except Verity drew her knees up once more and rubbed her chin back and forth over those pale-yellow skirts. “How did you become a tosher?”

That was the easiest question she could have put to him. He suspected she knew as much. Knew that was why she had asked it.

“A gent tried to bugger me. I escaped and scurried into a sewer. Down there, I found me a purse filled with guineas ... and Fowler. I never looked back.”

All the color left her cheeks.

Malcom tensed. He didn’t want her pity. He didn’t want any of her damned sadness and wide eyes. And he certainly didn’t want useless apologies for what his life had been. “Don’t expect that can be printed in the papers,” he said with forced amusement.

She didn’t take the bait of his teasing. “How old were you?”

He shrugged. “Twelve or thirteen.” Twelve. He’d been twelve.

Her eyes slid briefly closed.

“I was small for my age,” he went on. “Without a bit of meat to me. I was also quicker than bigger men and boys, which is what allowed me to get away and sneak into a grate that hadn’t been properly shut.”

“And Fowler ... ?”

Malcom’s mind wandered back to that long-ago night. The frantic beat of his heart as it pounded in his ears, muffling even his own ragged breathing. “I heard someone crying and thought it was myself.”

“Fowler?” she breathed.

“Floods come sudden and unexpected in the sewers. One caught Fowler, and it carried him down more tunnels than he could remember. The force of it when it emptied into the chamber where I found him sent him slamming into a brick wall. Shattered his leg, and he couldn’t get out.” And somehow, more than a foot and a half shorter and fifteen stones lighter, he’d managed to get the tosher up and moving. “We’ve been together since.”

Her eyes were riveted on him, her pencil frozen in her fingers.

“Are you going to write that down?”

She blinked several times. “What?” she blurted.

He nodded at the notepad.

Verity looked down, and then gave her head a shake. “No. No. I ... I simply wondered how you two had come to be together.”

That was all.

She’d not asked for her story. She’d simply asked because she wished to know ... about him?

Never had he felt more splayed open and on display for another. Malcom shifted, the leather button sofa groaning under him. “And what of you, Verity?” he asked, the need for a reprieve from sharing of himself prompting that question. Except, even as he thought as much, he knew he lied to himself. He wanted to know about her, too. He’d wanted to since he found her in the sewers, fishing around for lost slippers. “How long have you been caring for yourself and your sister?”

She didn’t even hesitate, freely answering. “I was twelve. My mother died in childbirth. My father died soon after. Before he did, he set me up with work atThe Londoner.”

She could have lived solely for herself without worrying about mouths to feed. And yet, she hadn’t. She’d lost her mother and father, and then, only a child herself, she’d taken on the role of parent to a babe. It wasn’t every day that Malcom could feel properly shamed, but in this instance, when presented with the selfless existence she’d lived compared with his own, he found himself ... humbled. “Your father didn’t see that you were looked after?”

She chuckled, the sound devoid of any mirth or happiness in an unexpected display of cynicism. “My father loved my mother, but he was a wastrel. He drank. My mum said his misery was because he could never be with us as he wished. My nursemaid always insisted it was because he was endlessly weak.”

He was of a like opinion as the nursemaid. Malcom had killed many times in the name of survival. Even as every one of those devils had deserved it, he’d regretted that blood on his hands. And yet if her father weren’t already dead, Malcom would have gladly done the deed all over for the state he’d left his daughters in. “You became a sibling and parent to Livvie.”

Verity shrugged. “What else would I do?”