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“Completely alone,” Giles clarified. “She must be a different sort of desperate than the others.”

Plump and short? Severe hairstyle? A different sort of desperate ... Nay. It was impossible. After all, there were any number of women to fit that physical description.

“And she’s a determined look to her.”

Malcom went absolutely still.

And that was when he knew ...

Surging to his feet, he stormed over, pushing Giles out of the way so he could have unobstructed access to the window. He peered out the grimy pane, and damned the dirt.

And sure enough, there, attired in an all-too-familiar black muslin dress, she stood.

Nay, his mind merely played tricks on him. Malcom jammed the backs of his hands into his eyes and rubbed, and when he looked out once more, the sight remained. She remained.

“Impossible,” he whispered.

“I take it you know this one?”

He ignored Giles’s question, his gaze riveted on the minx thumping a fist away at his front door.

A door that Bram had been instructed not to open in greeting of anyone else that day ... or any day until Malcom gave word—which he had no intention of giving.

KnockKnockKnock.

She paused midhammering, and let her arm fall. Verity backed away from the door.

Malcom narrowed his eyes. She’d gathered, then, that he’d no intention of allowing her entry. Good, the miserable harp—

Just then, she lifted a hand to her eyes, shielding them from the early-summer sun. And then slowly, ever so slowly, she crept her gaze higher and higher—until their eyes met.

And with two hundred feet between them, tension sizzled like the earth just before a lightning strike.

Verity’s full mouth formed a perfect pout as she motioned—

At his shoulder, Giles broke out into a laugh. “Good God, is she ordering you to open your door?”

“Indeed,” he muttered.

With a regal toss of her head, Verity returned to her post at the door and set to pounding it again. This time harder, the heavy boom carrying the stretch of distance between there and Malcom’s window. It was an impressive, continual beating sure to drive a man mad—

And apparently had already driven Bram to the point of lunacy. The rapping stopped as the older man appeared below.

Giles peered down. “What in God’s name is she saying to him?”

“I’ve not a damned idea.” After Bram’s last misstep with the shrew, he’d learned his lesson well. “I only know Bram is aware that if he values his post, he’ll not allow—”

The old tosher smiled and beckoned her forward.

Verity Lovelace entered, and then the door closed.

Several beats of silence passed. “He appears to have allowed it,” Giles said with more of that infernal amusement.

There was something a good deal safer feeling in walking through Malcom’sfront doors.

At least, safer than being secreted away through the alleys with none the wiser, and whisked inside back entrances.

Or at least, as she was permitted entry to the cramped foyer, that was what she told herself. That was what she attempted to convince herself of.