Page 37 of Cocky August Rake

“Nearly ten years.”

Rose did not look at him as she answered, but she felt his gaze settle on her. Felt the silence that followed.

He had gone very still.

“Ten years.”

“Yes.”

His voice, when it came again, was almost a growl. “My brother hired children?” he demanded. The anger in him startled her more than the accusation.

Rose straightened. “I was not a child.”

“How old were you?”

“Six and ten. I don’t know for sure.”

His jaw hardened.

“Sixteen,” he said. “You were sixteen.”

“I know how old I was.”

“You were a child.”

“No.” Rose lifted her chin. “Girls of sixteen are presented at court. They enter Society. Some are married before the Season is over.”

“That is not the same.”

“Why? Because they wear white gowns and have fathers to arrange the bargain for them?”

For that, he had no reply, his expression twisted with both confusion and outraged fury.

He knew nothing about her.

Rose had ceased to be a child the day her grandmother died. The day the landlord looked at a twelve-year-old girl and knew she could not pay the rent. The day Rose understood that no one was coming to protect her.

After that, there had only been survival.

“Whatever you imagine, my lor” she said, struggling to keep her voice even, “The Domus did not steal my childhood. Rather the opposite, actually, it gave me a life again.”

Rose suppressed a wince then, suddenly aware of how far this whole venture had wandered from her original intention. Angering him—arguing over a past that could no longer be changed—was not what she had meant to accomplish.

The tour.

She needed to get on with the tour.

And yet, before moving on, she needed to make herself perfectly clear.

“Your brother is not a villain,” she said, forcing her voice back into steadier ground. “And this place isn’t the workhouse.”

Lord Reginald exhaled through his nose, hard enough that the sound might nearly have been a laugh. “You are not free here.”

And then, before she could answer, he turned and strode from the receiving room.

For one moment, Rose considered following him. Demanding that he finish the tour he had agreed to take. But by the time she reached the doorway, his footsteps had faded down the corridor.

Fine. Let him retreat.