What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

warmth. Kat kept her gaze trained on the fire. “She’s had flirtations with a number of men, from Lord Grimes to Admiral Worth. But I don’t think any man has had her in his keeping.”
    She was aware of his assessing gaze upon her. “Do you know what part of the country she was originally from?”
    “Some village in Worcestershire. I don’t remember the name. Her father was the vicar there, but he died when she was about thirteen, and she was thrown onto the parish. They apprenticed her as a housemaid to a local merchant.”
    Kat paused. It was one of the things the two women had in common, the similarity of their pasts. The shared memory of wheals left by a whip on bare, tender young flesh. Of rough hands bruising struggling, frantic wrists. The sharp thrust of pain, and the dull, endless ache of a humiliation and degradation that went on and on.
    Kat set aside the fireplace tools with a clatter and stood up. “When she was fifteen, she ran away.”
    He was watching Kat closely. He knew some of what had happened to her, after her mother and father had been killed. More than she’d ever told anyone else. “That’s when she came to London?”
    “Of course,” said Kat, keeping her voice steady. “Like all young girls hoping to start a new life.”
    It was an old story, of young women—sometimes girls as young as eight or nine—tricked into the flesh trade by the legion of procuresses who preyed on the innocent and vulnerable. Rachel had fallen into one’s clutches before she’d even left the stagecoach.
    “You met her when she started at the theater?”
    Kat shook her head, a soft, sad smile tugging at her lips. “We met on London Bridge. It was December, if I remember correctly. A few days before Christmas. I talked her out of jumping.”
    “And found her work as an actress?”
    Kat shrugged. “She was bright, with a good accent and exactly the kind of face and body men like. She was a natural.”
    “So what was she doing at St. Matthew of the Fields on Tuesday night? Do you know?”
    Kat shook her head. “I wouldn’t have said she was religious.”
    He came toward her, those strange amber eyes fixed, uncomfortably, on her face. “What aren’t you telling me?”
    Kat gave a soft, practiced laugh. “I can’t think what you mean.”
    He reached out, his fingertips hovering just above her cheek, as if he’d meant to touch her, then thought better of it. “You’re afraid of something. What?”
    She forced herself to stand very, very still. “Of course I’m afraid. Rachel and I share many of the same friends and associates.”
    She watched his lips move as he spoke. “The Kat Boleyn I knew didn’t scare so easily.”
    “Maybe you didn’t know her as well as you thought you did.”
    “Obviously not,” he said dryly, and turned away. “How well did you know Rachel?”
    “I was probably closer to her than anyone, but even I didn’t know her all that well.” Kat paused, struggling to put some of what he needed to know into words. “Rachel might have been only eighteen, but life had scarred her. Toughened her. There was a calculating side to her. She could be cold—ruthless even, if she had to be.”
    “You two had much in common, did you not?”
    The stab of hurt his words brought was so swift and unexpected, it nearly stole Kat’s breath. She hadn’t thought he still possessed the power to touch her heart—hadn’t thought that anyone did. She glanced toward the hall. The house was silent, the hush broken only by the clatter of a horse’s hooves on the street outside and the mingling cries of the street vendors: Chairs to mend , and, Buy my trap. Buy a rattrap . “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.
    He smiled then, a faint narrowing gleam of the eyes that she remembered only too well. “What’s the matter? Afraid Lord Stoneleigh will awaken and find you gone? I shouldn’t think he’ll stir for another hour or more.”
    “How did you know—”
    “That he’s here? I saw his walking stick and top hat in the entry.”
    The walking stick and top hat might have told Devlin she had company, but it wouldn’t have given him the name of the man in her bed. That information, she knew, he must have acquired beforehand. It shouldn’t have mattered. She told herself she didn’t care. And yet, disconcertingly, she did.
    “So you came via the entry, did you?” she said, keeping her voice light.
    He had a habit, she was noticing, of answering her questions with one of his