The Secrets of a Courtesan. Nicola Cornick

he wondered if she had even heard him. Then an expression of fury came across her face.

      “You bastard!” she said, picking up a very fine silver hairbrush from the desk in front of her and throwing it at his head. “How dare you come here and threaten to take away from me everything that I have worked so hard for?”

      Rowarth caught the hairbrush absentmindedly in one hand before it made contact. He had always been good at cricket. Eve was looking absolutely furious, her piquant face flushed and her breathing quick and light. But it was more than anger he could see in her face. It was desperation. There was so much passion and rage in her voice that for a moment the principal emotion he felt was admiration that she was as strong as a tigress in defending the things that mattered to her. Memory stirred again; when she had been his mistress he had given her money and had been puzzled when she appeared to have spent it all on nothing. When pressed it had turned out that she had given it all away to feed and clothe urchins living on the streets. Rowarth had protested at her generosity and Eve had turned on him, saying that he was spoiled and privileged and could not understand—all true, of course, for how could an Eton- and Oxford-educated duke ever understand what it was like to struggle to survive? Most dukes would not even care. They had argued passionately and then made love even more passionately and she had lain in his arms and at last confided the truth in him.

      “I did not know my parents,” she had said, her head against his shoulder, her hand resting over his heart, “and I was cold and hungry and afraid more times than I care to remember.” There had been a faraway look in her eyes, as though she were seeing far beyond the walls of her bedchamber. “If I can spare even one child from suffering as I did then that has to be for the good.”

      Rowarth had felt humbled, made to look beyond the comfort that had shielded him since his youth to another more painful existence. He knew that Eve had chosen to become a courtesan only because she had seen it as a way out of such stark poverty.

      “I was pretty,” she had once said lightly, “so I used it to escape.” But he knew those words hid a wealth of bitterness.

      “It is only the rich who can afford moral scruples,” she had once flashed at him when he had commented on the hanging of a youth for the theft of a loaf of bread and he knew that she had felt the same way about the choice she had made in selling herself.

      Or he had thought he had known her until she had betrayed him.

      But that was in the past and nothing to the purpose now.

      He put the silver hairbrush on the desk. He suspected it was part of a quantity of stolen goods that Hawkesbury had said Warren Sampson was almost certainly laundering via Eve’s pawnbroking business. Which brought him back to the matter in hand.

      “You are working with Warren Sampson to pass on stolen goods,” he said. “He runs a housebreaking gang that robs property across the county and then his accomplices bring the items here and you sell them, making him a double profit.”

      She stared at him contemptuously. “That is utter rubbish.” She turned away from him with an angry swish of skirts and took a couple of paces away across the room. She could not get any farther away from him because the office was so small and he could sense the anger in her, still simmering like a pot coming back to the boil.

      “I barely know the man,” she snapped. “And what I do know I dislike intensely. It is both insulting and plain wrong to suggest some criminal conspiracy between us.”

      Hawkesbury had suggested that Eve might be Warren Sampson’s mistress, a cozy arrangement if they were in bed and business together. And Rowarth was not simply going to accept her word that it was not so. Just the thought of her tumbling between the sheets with Sampson made him hot with rage and thwarted desire. Madness, when he had sworn he did not care and did not want to want her.

      “Shall we sit,” he suggested evenly, “and discuss this calmly?”

      She gave him another look of searing disdain. “If we must. If it will hasten your departure.”

      He bit back a reluctant smile. Never had a woman seemed so anxious to be rid of him. But then, Eve had always been different.

      “I shall want to see your accounts in due course,” he said. “I need to trace every one of your transactions.”

      “How tedious for you,” Eve murmured.

      “I suppose that they are in order?”