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“You’re still afraid.” He pressed her. “Will he implicate you?”
At that, she lifted her chin. “Never.”
There was a fervent, prideful note in her voice. It raised his hackles.
“No, he wouldn’t, would he?” He proceeded with a touch of cruelty. “He bullies you all day long, but God forbid anyone else does. That’s family to men like him. A means of holding a monopoly on mistreatment. Honorable. Or maybe that’s his version of loyalty?”
Her lower lip trembled. “I’m the one who forged the pictures you saw. I imperiled art itself. Isn’t that what you said forgers do?” She smoothed her hands over her skirt. “But now you say you won’t turn me in to the police.” The look she gave him was sharp. “Why would you show such loyalty to me?”
He pressed his back into his corner of the settle. Because forgers in the abstract weren’t her, the woman who invaded his dreams. Because he wasn’t falling in love with forgers.
He cleared his throat. “Your crimes and your brother’s are qualitatively different.”
“I painted more of the pictures.”
“The Berneys.” He nodded. “Everything but the Jan Steen at South Kensington. Not the Rembrandt.”
Obvious, in retrospect, that the forgeries hadn’t all been painted by the same hand. He’d been too focused on the techniques used to age them, on evidence they came from the same workshop.
He rested an elbow on the settle’s hook armrest. “I’m not concerned with the quantities. Who taught you how to paint? Or rather, how to hate to paint?”
She firmed her lips.
“Jack Reeve did,” he answered for her. “And while you painted, he colluded with Chips Sleaford to find patrons for your pictures and fabricate provenances. Or was that your idea?”
“I agreed to it.” Her eyes began to shine.
“When did it begin, your artistic training?”
“Right after he got out of Pentonville.” She hugged herself miserably.
“Which made you what? All of thirteen? Is that when you agreed? As a child?”
She smiled a thin smile, its irony cutting inward. “Everyone has a story of woe. You think the jails aren’t filled with men and women who were once children? Who grew up hungry and exploited, or worse? By your logic, no one should be imprisoned.”
He stared. “You want me to turn you in.”
“Or neither of us.” She slumped. “It’s your choice.”
His breath sawed. She was looking down, and her lashes were moist. He had the strange notion that if he stroked them, his thumbs would smear their darkness across her cheeks.
“I knew what we were doing,” she whispered. “I knew we could make more money on forgeries than anything else. I knew I’d never get a bakery selling combs, or dipping matches, or marrying a bloke who’d take what was mine, then take himself off.”
“All right,” he said, staring at her face, her downcast eyes. “You win. I’m not being logical. I don’t bloody care. I’m not letting you go to Pentonville, not when I know where you belong.”
With me.
God, the unconsidered phrase had almost slipped out.
“Nina’s Sweets,” he said.
She looked up at him then, with a bright, wondering expression, already darkening as she shook her head. “Impossible, regardless. My money’s all gone, every farthing.”
He held himself still. “Where did it go?”
“Jack put it into a different venture.” She uncrossed her arms and pressed her knuckles to her satiny cheek.
He flexed, then curled his fingers. “This new venture of his. Is it as wholesome as baking?”
