She nibbled at her lip, and he had to stifle a groan. “Yes. How did you do it?”
Well, hell. How to explain?
He raked
his fingers through his hair, struggling for a proper answer. “It happened at an…er…a School of Venus.”
One of the most sought-after, he might have added, for it would have been true. Where the depravities were a little more depraved than the rest of London. But such a revelation would scarcely earn the lady’s admiration, would it?
Hell. Did he want her admiration?
Yes.
“A School of Venus?” Her brow furrowed.
“A nunnery,” he clarified.
“You went to a nunnery for me?”
“It ain’t that generous, lovely.” He shifted his weight from one boot to the other, feeling deuced uncomfortable. “I’m familiar with the abbess.”
Why in the devil’s arsehole did you say that?
“But what was Lord Gregson doing with an abbess at a nunnery?”
Now he had done it. Miss Wren—Persephone—was such an innocent, she had no notion of what a nunnery was. Or why a man such as the despicable Gregson—or himself, for that matter—would seek out such a place.
“A bawdy house,” he explained, feeling like an utter cad. The lowest of the low. Lower than the lowest of the low. “A nunnery is a bawdy house. The abbess is the bawd who oversees the whores.”
There. He had told her all. Well, not the bit about Lord Gregson liking to be whipped by whores. No need to tell her everything he knew.
Her lips parted. Her expression was unreadable, a mix of shock and something else.
Curiosity?
Surely not.
This was the prim Miss Wren before him.
“You are familiar with the abbess,” she said, repeating what he had just told her, only with a new tone of comprehension in her voice. “Does that mean you…oh. Is she your paramour?”
Ah, hell. “No. She is a friend.”
He had never bedded Sophie. But this was hardly the sort of conversation he wished to have with Persephone.
“I see.” She nodded, and that tongue of hers once more slid over her lower lip.
He swallowed. “Yes. Enough patter. I’ve a full day’s work ahead of me.”
The need to flee this conversation was strong. Being alone with her was a temptation he could not afford to indulge in for another moment. She had been through far too much with Gregson. She deserved to be wooed and courted and treated with the utmost of care, as if she were fashioned of finest silk. She was too good for a man of his sort, that was for damn sure. And explaining any more of his past to her would be bloody unpleasant.
He turned to go for the second time.
But her hand caught his coat sleeve, staying him yet again.
“Mr. Sutton,” she said. “Rafe.”
He turned back to her. “Yes, Miss Wren?”