Bound by Your Touch

Author:Meredith Duran
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Regency, Man-Woman Relationships, London (England), Fiction, Romance, Historical, General, Love Stories
ISBN: 9781416592631
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2009-06-29T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Lydia did not know what she was doing. She felt breathless and unsure of how to look at him. This urge to mend things seemed to have taken her into new territory. It had led her to a gin palace, hadn't it? She had never laid eyes on such a place before, but as she gawked up at its exterior, this fact seemed less a consequence of righteous living than a stupendous fluke. There was no way she could have missed such a building, had she passed one. Three stories of ornately molded and gilded plaster hovered over her, like a fairy tale castle placed direcdy into the weary surroundings of the slum. But surely no castle had ever emitted such a tremendous reek: the sourness of alcohol mixed with the rich aroma of fried food. She inhaled deeply. Oysters, or perhaps whilks.

Inside, the heat and noise hit her first. The long saloon was crowded; a variety of customers yelled, laughed, slapped each other, banged mugs, thumped the bar, stamped their feet. Laborers in rough-spun woollens rubbed shoulders with clerkish lads in sober suits. The lady in the drooping boa, her face painted with lacquer and blush, did not surprise Lydia, but the middle-aged matron in the modest dress, sharing a glass with her husband, seemed less likely. A few paces away, two girls in patched gowns flirted with a young man; none of them looked a day above seventeen, and their pallor suggested that their money would be better put to food. But they were laughing so merrily that Lydia's lips moved in automatic response.

She cupped her mouth, surprised by herself. "The addiction knows no class."

Sanburne's laughter was brief. "So all of them are addicts?"

"Why else would one be consuming deleterious spirits at this hour?"

"Boredom? A happy way to pass an hour?"

"Happy! To rot one's brain on poison?"

"Spoken like a woman who's never been drunk."

"You speak as though that's a failing."

He cocked a brow. "And if I say it is?"

She arched a brow back at him. "Then I will remind you that I've never needed a stranger to fix my bustle."

He looked at her in surprise, and then, after a moment, smiled. A simple and commonplace thing, but she saw the appreciation in it. Her heart gave a sudden, sharp thud.

Stop it, she told herself. You don't know the rules to this game. It is beyond foolish to try to court his favor. She started to move past him, in the direction of the bar, but her path was blocked by a man carrying a basket of boiled shellfish. Mussels—she'd been wrong all around. The two girls bounded forward, handing over a coin in return for a bounty packaged in greasy cones made of newsprint. She was glad to see them eating.

A hand took her elbow. She let Sanburne steer her through the crowd, craning her head this way and that to absorb the place. She knew gin palaces as pits of doom, where poor people met their ruin, but this room was as gaudily resplendent as the lobby of an opera house.

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