Free The Notorious Scoundrel by Alexandra Benedict

storm.
    “Trouble, Amy?”
    She whirled around and spotted Edward’s muscular figure stalking through the ghostly passageway, charging her. The brooding fellow grabbed her arms and pierced her soul with his glare, making her shiver.
    “How did you get back here, Edward?”
    He ignored her query and demanded, “Why did you lie to me?”
    Amy was overwhelmed by the man’s biting words and rough manner. She tamped the indignity she was feeling into the very tips of her toes, letting loose her frustration and fury instead.
    “I don’t have to tell you anything about me!” She struggled in his arms and swatted at his chest. “Let me go!”
    She was prepared to kick him in the leg, when the vagabonds slammed their shoulders into the sturdy door in an attempt to break it.
    Edward curtailed their row with a brief scowl before he yanked her arm and dragged her through the rear of the club. “We’ll finish this at your apartment.”
    “Arrgh!” She punched him in the arm. “You promised me you wouldn’t come to the club.”
    “I did no such thing,” he returned stiffly, steering her toward an alternate exit.
    He smuggled her away from the establishment undetected, and pulled her alongside him. She quarreled with him all the way back to her lodgings.
    “You lied to me, Amy.”
    He unlocked the apartment and pushed her inside the sitting room. Two candles sheltered in glass lamps still burned on the table.
    “You told me you were a barmaid.” He pointed at her eyes and flicked his finger. “But you’re…you’re…I don’t even know who you are.”
    She tossed the shawl aside, the blood burning in her veins. She scooped up a candle and strutted through the sitting room. She entered her bedroom, where she set the candle aside and poured clear water from an earthenware pitcher into a basin.
    “I don’t need a lecture from you about honesty.” She grabbed a small white towel and immersed it in thebasin before she scrubbed the black ink off her eyes. “You’re an admitted thief!”
    She peered into the mirror on the dressing table as she removed the cosmetic paint. She then observed the man’s wide, shadowy figure as he stood under the door frame, glowering at her.
    “How can you prance on stage, arousing so many men? I thought you said you weren’t a whore?”
    “I’m not, you blackguard!” She dunked the towel into the basin again, the water turning grimy. “But I need the money.”
    “Aye, so you can purchase more mirrors,” he returned dryly. “Such vanity, Amy. I’m disappointed in you.”
    “How dare you!” She scrubbed her skin with more vigor, the black makeup clinging to her flesh like baked filth. “The mirrors have nothing to do with vanity.”
    “Then why collect them?”
    Amy peered even deeper into the dark glass. The candlelight in the bedchamber danced, casting rippled waves of fire across the shiny surface.
    Amy picked up the small mirror with an ivory handle and gazed at her features. The soft swooshing sound of petticoats flirted with her ears as the older woman moved lightly about the room, fluffing her carefully pressed curls and pinning her glittering earrings.
    The warm figure soon approached her and knelt, and Amy sensed a pair of gloved hands squeeze and tickle her midriff.
    She squealed with delight.
    “Never mind about the mirrors.” She took in a deep, shuddering breath. “And keep your voice down or you’ll disturb the other tenants.”
    “Oh? Do you mean the couple fighting on one side of the wall? Or the couple shagging on the other?”
    She flushed. The level of noise from the other residents was troubling. She had one set of neighbors who bickered every night, their rows often ending in vicious blows. A prostitute regularly entertained her clients in the other apartment, leaving Amy boxed in between all the commotion.
    “I suspect the other tenants won’t mind our quarreling,” he said with wry humor.
    “We are not quarreling; you are quarreling. Unjustly, I