Page 16 of The Forsaken

“What are you snuffling your big nose for?”

The hard line of his lips grew harder. “My nose isn’t big.”

No, it wasn’t. “Certainly not as big as your pride.”

The big-head would hate having his unfairly godlike handsome looks questioned. And here she’d believed he couldn’t make her smile.

“What of you? I trust you aren’t beating the rogues and rakes away.”

She frowned. “I wouldn’t be so rude as to beat them away, but I also can separate sensual whispers apart from—”

Edgar laughed again.

She wouldn’t indulge him any further. Gathering her skirts wide of him, Andromena resumed her path to Rat’s Castle Tavern.

“You’re going to get yourself killed venturing on your own,” he called after her.

“No, I won’t.” Andromena didn’t break stride. “By your own admission, your friendship with my brother-in-law dictates you protect me, regardless of how much you’d like to see me raped and murdered.”

“I do not want to see you raped and murdered.” The boyish indignation in his tone made her smile.

“My heart is warmed,” she said. “In fact, as I see it,” She paused to check the sign of a particularly rowdy establishment. Smashed glass and shouts penetrated through the ramshackle timbers holding the establishment together. Andromena hastened on; grateful this was not her stop.

The reverberation of Edgar’s grumpy voice came at her heels. “As you see it?”

Andromena picked her way over a fallen figure, sleeping and snoring on the street, and continued. “I needed an escort but could not trust bringing one, lest they tell one of my big, overprotective brothers and cousins.”

“With all the times you’ve slipped out and gotten yourself into trouble, it’s highly doubtful any sane person would consider them overprotective.”

It had taken her a moment, but she had figured the gentleman out. He lived to needle her and insult her family. Knowing that now made it easy not to take his bait.

“But you happening upon me here is the perfect answer to prayers I didn’t know I have,” she said.

“Oh?”

Andromena nodded. “Regardless of how much you would love to leave me here,”

“Beyond love.”

“You cannot. You are forced to see me safely to my location and won’t breathe a word about my doings here.”

“My, how confident you sound.”

“I am. Because if my family finds out you took me to the Rookeries—”

“I did not take you to the Rook—”

“Naturally there will be those among them, likely Lord Culross, who expects you to do right by—”

He strangled on a swallow. “Good God. You bloody shrew.”

“Worry not,” she gave him another smile. “I would insist on ruin before marriage to you.”

“With the way you go running about, it’s only a matter of time before you find the former.”

Andromena’s lips formed a grim line.

She had already found it. Her free spirit had gotten her into a mess. It’s what had her traipsing around St. Giles. Between Linnie, only recently beginning to recover from a sea-battle she had been caught in several years earlier, and their cousin, Fleur, newly married to the Duke of Hartwell, who was many months with the duke’s babe—conceived that wicked night out at Lord Rutland’s—they didn’t have to deal with the problems Andromena had caused.