Her lips pursed, she set her fingers along the crook of his elbow and they walked down the three steps to the garden, weaved past the rosebushes and exited out the rear wrought-iron gate to the mews.
Talen tugged her hood farther down over her brow, glanced to the right and left, and then started forward, straight through the coach house. After walking past stalls and carriages, they slipped out a back door onto the mews behind another row of townhouses. In silence, he ushered them to the left, walking along the shadows of thecobblestoned passageand crossing three streets before he turned to the right to lead her through another passage where he opened a tall metal gate at the rear of a townhouse.
Into the wide gardens—double the size of the gardens at the first house they’d walked through—he brought her up to the rear door and quickly set key into lock.
Ness only managed to keep her mouth shut until they were both inside and the door was firmly closed behind him. “Where are we?” She didn’t care for the slight shake of fear in her voice, but couldn’t quite control it.
“This is where I actually wanted to take you. The last house was the home everyone thinks I live at when I’m not at the Alabaster. Including my driver.”
She pushed the hood off her head and peered down the dark hallway to her right. “But you don’t live there?”
“No. I live here. No one knows this place exists.”
Her look snapped to him. “No one knows of this place?”
He shook his head. “No one except for Declan. That’s it.”
Her jaw dropped, gaping for several seconds. “But why?”
In the dim light still eking into the hallway through a window beside the doorway, his icy blue eyes looked even chillier. “There are plenty of people that wish me dead, Ness. This is the only safe haven I have.”
“What? Who wants you dead? Why?”
He moved past her, walking along the main corridor. “People I have destroyed. People that want revenge. And I have power. Other people want that. The world has never been any different.” He shrugged as though that simple answer satisfied him.
It didn’t satisfy her. “So, you own one home that you don’t use, except to stroll through on the way to your real home? A home that’s hidden because you cannot sleep peacefully when you’re exposed?”
“Yes.” He stopped in the front foyer, went to a side table and lit a lantern.
The flicker of the flame lit the area about her. The last home they had been in had been grand. But this was palatial, if the imperial staircase that cascaded down from the level above was any indication.
Her look fixed on the marble stairs as she shook her head. “It just seems like such a…”
“Waste?”
“Yes.”
“It is.” He moved to the right arm of the staircase and swept his hand upward to move her along. “But this place fell into my lap and I like having a place where no one knows me. Where no one wants anything from me.”
Picking up the front of her skirts, Ness moved up the staircase in front of him. “What about neighbors?”
“The house to the left belongs to an earl that is never in town and there was a house being built on the other side, but the family ran out of money to finish it. They made it all the way to the full exterior, but have never been able to scrape the funding together to finish the interior and furnish it. Yet they refuse to give it up. Either way, this street is empty and it suits my needs perfectly.”
She glanced back at him. “And how did this place ‘fall into your lap’?”
“There was a duke with a son with a rather large debt run up at the Alabaster. The duke didn’t have the resources to pay the debt, so I accepted the house as payment.”
“And no one knows of it?”
“I used a solicitor that only serves…clients of a certain esteem.”
“Wealthy ones?”
“Yes. He deals in secrets knowing that his life is forfeit if he spills said secrets. The man knows I received it from the duke for an undisclosed sum, but he doesn’t know the business I am in. Declan knows. And now you know.”
Ness paused at the landing at the top of the staircase. “But this townhouse, I can hear the echoes of my footsteps up the walls, it’s monstrous. You must have staff here?”
“Just a maid that comes and cleans every week. She doesn’t know who lives here. And a cook dropsoff salted beef, biscuits, and brandy inthe kitchens twice a week. It’s all I need here as I usually eat at the Alabaster.”