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He tried—and failed—to make something out of that quiet utterance.

Verity glanced past his shoulder, not meeting his eyes. “Why would you go through all of this?” Her voice faintly quivered.

“I get, simply put, the only thing I desire—my freedom. The ability to return to St. Giles and live there without intrusion.”

Verity didn’t say anything for several moments as she hugged herself in another lonely little embrace. “Can I ask you a question?”

“I suspect regardless of my answer you’d ask it anyway.”

“Why would you want to return to the rookeries? Why would you want to face the threats that go with living there and doing what you do?”

It wasn’t her business. She didn’t deserve any more from him than she’d already taken, and yet for some reason, it was important that she understood. “Why do you write?”

She cocked her head.

Malcom motioned to that worn satchel that she’d stormed his home with weeks earlier. “There are other things you might do in the name of survival. Why choose writing for some newspaper?”

Verity thought for a moment. “It is what I know.”

“Is it what you love or what you know?”

“Both,” she said automatically. “I didn’t always write forThe Londoner, but I always wanted to. There is something freeing in the work I do. It’s honest. It challenges me in ways that other, equally honest work wouldn’t.”

“And that is why I’m a tosher. That is why I’ve no interest in a fortune I didn’t build from a family I don’t even remember. I’ve built my existence with my bare hands.” He turned his palms up. “Wading through muck and waste is eternally less glamorous than holding a fancy title, and yet there, I’ve been the master of my destiny.” When there’d been none to save him, he’d saved himself.

Her eyes softened. “I see.”

And he resisted the urge to shift because he saw that truth in her eyes.

Verity brought them back to the proposal at hand. “And my being banished from London. This would be—”

“Forever.” He brought his lips up in a coldly mocking smile. “Given that you’d be trading a prison sentence in Newgate for an assignment in Grosvenor Square, I don’t see there’s much for you to consider.”

She held his gaze. “What of my work?”

“What of it?”

“If I agree to your terms, I’d want to continue writing forThe Londoneror any paper that would have my articles.”

Articles that would be about him.

“They wouldn’t all be about you. I would, however, exchange that story for employment, which I’d keep as long as we’re together.”

Regardless of the nightmare she’d made of his life, he admired the young woman’s spunk. Verity Lovelace had to be the only woman in the realm who was looking her future, fortune, and title—albeit a false one—square between the eyes, and only asked after her job. Malcom shrugged. “As long as we’re together, I don’t care what work you do.”

Wordlessly, she wandered over to the spot he’d quit at the vanity. Falling to a knee, she studied the remnants of that enamel mirror. Ever so carefully, she picked up shard after shard, dropping them into a neat little pile. Performing the work of a servant as though she’d been born to the role. And yet her language, the way she carried herself, everything about her, screamed of one who’d been born to an elevated rank.

Who was she ... Miss Verity Lovelace? Who was she really?

And why do I have the hungering to have those questions about the young woman answered?

She abruptly stopped that distracted cleaning. “How long would our partnership be in effect?”

What in hell would be sufficient to satisfy theton? “This is your world. What would you advise?”

“It is not my world,” she said automatically. “I merely write of it.”

“A year, then.”