Free The Perils of Pleasure by Julie Anne Long Page B

that he could do.
    “We’ll go in through the kitchens,” Madeleine or dered coolly.
    Interesting that she was intimate with the lay of this place. But of course she would be familiar with it. It was where her broker resided.
    Colin kept his head ducked into his chest and his hat pulled down and he slouched, and the irritatingly serious and confident Madeleine Greenway, without looking at him, strode to the kitchen entrance in the alley, eased through the door and stepped in.
    One deep breath gave the visitor an olfactory his tory of the place: every cigar or pipe ever smoked, every fire ever fed to warm the patrons, every drop of spirit imbibed or blood spilled in a fight or fat dripped from meat turned on a spit lent their ghostly scent.
    A narrow hall emptied onto the kitchen, where a filthy boy was languidly cranking a haunch on a spit over the kitchen fire. It was difficult to know what animal it once might have been, but it was glistening fat and smelled magical. The boy brushed a hand across a runny nose, glanced sideways toward the main dining room to see if anyone was watching him, then touched the same finger to the tempting grease on the meat.
    “Young man,” Madeleine said quietly.
    The boy nearly went airborne with fright and guilt. He whirled around to seek the person who’d spoken.
    “I wasna touchink nuffink!” He pulled the fi nger back and stuck it in his mouth reflexively. Ah, sadly, this one was a poor liar. He would need to work on that if he was going to survive long here on the docks. He couldn’t have been more than seven years old or so, Colin assessed.
    Madeleine’s mouth twitched. “Good sir, will you tell us where we can find Mr. Croker?”
    And what a surprisingly gentle tone that was.
    Colin looked at her, nearly as seduced by it as the boy clearly was, judging from the expression the little creature turned up to Madeleine: yearning mingled with shrewd assessment. Kind voices were no doubt rare in his world, but he had that English bred-in-the-bone instinct to determine Madeleine’s class before anything else—first to determine what her presence might mean for him, and second, what he might then get from her.
    The boy had arrived at some sort of conclusion, be cause he decided to smile. And good lord, it was an angelic one. A charmer, this one.
    “The Mr. or Mrs. Croker, mum?” He wanted to know.
    “Your master , young man. Fetch Mr. Croker imme diately .” Colin snapped the words. Each one a master piece of glacial elegance.
    The boy jumped straight up, his legs scrabbled in place for a moment, and he bolted into the main pub dining room.
    Ah. And there you had a demonstration of the uses of an aristocratic accent.
    Madeleine angled her head toward Colin; a vee of dis approval between her brows. Colin touched the brim of his big hat ironically. He knew all too well what would make a boy jump and run, having been a boy who lied poorly and charmed easily, and he wasn’t interested in wasting time in wooing the little creature.
    Madeleine Greenway turned away and absently reached out and gave the spit a crank so the fi re wouldn’t lick overlong at one side of the haunch. Some thing about the homely gesture pierced Colin. Despite their fraught mission, despite her way with a pistol, it was such a very female thing to do, such an ordinary thing to do.
    Colin wondered if there would ever be anything or dinary about his life again.
    They both looked up sharply when small pattering footsteps and heavy thumping strides came toward them, along with a piping whispering voice, saying, “ . . . big angry cove,” and then Croker and the boy appeared, and Colin stepped back into the narrow hall, deeper in shadow.
    Croker, broad, bald as a mushroom, with a brow that went on for miles, looked irritated and weary, and was wiping his great hands on a stained apron. He saw Madeleine and froze mid-wipe.
    And a dizzying sequence of expressions—pleasure and relief and terror and surprise and