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He placed his lips near her ear. “In search of more details for your story, love?”

“Actually”—she faced him; then, drawing in a breath, she notched her chin up an inch—“that is why I’ve come.”

Malcom opened his mouth but couldn’t get out a reply. None that was suitable. He tried again.

In the end, only a strangled, hoarse laugh burst free. “The insolence of you.”

“It’s not insolent to try and do my job.”

“It is if you go about it the way you do, Verity.” To keep from taking her by the shoulders and giving her a solid shake, he freed the saw from her grip and returned it to the wall. “I told you before I didn’t have anything to share. And yet what did you do?” An irritating muscle twitched along his eyelid. “You fed your fabricated story—”

“My story wasn’t fabricated.” She spoke with an earnestness etched in every delicate plain of the upturned diamond shape of her face. “Everything I wrote was true, Malcom ...”

He scoffed. What rot. Either she sought to butter him up for information or she was a damned romantic without the sense the Lord gave a creeper. “My actions that day were—”

“Heroic.” Verity turned her palms up. “You saved me. That was the only story I had that day, and that was the story I wrote.”

His eyes went to the rough skin of her palms, the chipped nails, the ink staining the intersecting creases of her hands. It was the ink. The black mark of her treachery, reminding him that anything spilt from this one’s lips was only about the story she was intent on snagging to sell. “I didn’t give you anything. You took it, Verity.” And he’d give her nothing else. “Now, if you know what is wise, don’t darken my door or path again.”

The young woman sank her teeth into her full lower lip. “I can’t leave. I’ve no choice. I need this s-story.”

Malcom remained unmoved by the faint crack in those last two syllables.

“My sister—”

“Ah, yes, the sister with the slippers. The same one who convinced you to come to me.”

Fire flashed in her eyes. “Are you making light of me?”

“I would have to care enough to make light of you. I don’t.”

She flinched, and something completely foreign, so foreign it was almost indistinguishable but felt a good deal like ... guilt ... slapped at a conscience that proved not as dead as he’d expected—or hoped.

Verity hugged her arms to her middle, and wandered out from behind him. Making for the front of his offices and the doorway, and more importantly, her long-overdue exit.

She stopped on the threadbare circular wool rug in the middle of the room, making herself an unwitting bull’s-eye in a target. “I’m employed byThe Londoner.”

Of course he shouldn’t have anticipated she’d leave. “You said as much at our last meeting.”

“My employment rested on my providing my editor with this story.”

“Mystory.” One that he’d few details on himself. Distant whisperings of moments that dwelled in murkiness, that he couldn’t pull from the shadows and had no intention of wading through for this woman—or anyone. His past didn’t matter. All that did was his future. “And I’m supposed to care about your circumstances more than my own?” he snapped.

She ran saddened eyes over him. “No,” she said quietly. “I suppose not. But I thought it might matter to you that my family’s well-being hinges upon my successfully attaining this ... your story, Malcom.”

“It doesn’t,” he said with his usual bluntness. Only ... why did it feel as though he lied to himself?

Verity sucked in a juddering breath. Moving her gaze just over his shoulder, as though she couldn’t bring herself to look at him, she then spoke again. “Do you not have people you care about? People whose well-being matter to you?”

“No,” he said with an ease born out of truth. There’d never been anybody. And there never would be. No good came from one’s dependence on another.

She briefly shifted her focus to him. “Your Mr. Fowler and Mr. Bram. The black-haired man who was here earlier?”

He flicked a glance over her. “No one matters to me outside of the business dealings I have with them.”

“Treating those close to you as though they are somehow less.” A pitying glimmer reflected back in her expressive eyes. “That is a sad way to go through life, Mr. North.”

“Ah, yes, but then, I’m not the pitiable one humbling myself before a stranger, abandoning honor and good sense because of a sibling, am I?”