So he was employed as a sort of investigator? Which explained why he had a secretary. Someone who would help him keep track of the paperwork while he went off doing the actual thief-taking. It also explained why he was reluctant to speak of his trade. He would have to keep a lot of what he did to himself. Or criminals would see him coming.
She took a sip of tea and suddenly saw that that couldn’t be the right conclusion. Because it sounded like rather an exciting sort of way to make a living. And he’d said he had lived a dull, ordered existence. She sighed. Why did nothing make any sense today?
‘I soon found out that it wouldn’t be possible to bring the foreman to trial for what he was doing to the women under his power, because not a one of them would stand up in court and testify. Well, you couldn’t expect it of them.’
‘No,’ she murmured, horrified. ‘So what did you do?’
‘Well, Bodkin—that’s the man who wrote the letter—said that maybe we’d be able to get the overseer dismissed for fraud if we could only find the false ledgers he kept. He sent one set of accounts to...to the mill owner, you see, and kept another to tally up what he was actually making for himself. We couldn’t simply walk in and demand to see the books, because he’d have just shown us the counterfeit ones. So we had to break in at night, and search for them.’
‘Aunt Charity said you looked like a housebreaker,’ she couldn’t help saying. Though she clapped her hand over her mouth as soon as she’d said it.
He frowned. ‘It’s funny, but I would never have thought I’d be keen to tell anyone about Wragley’s. But you blurting out things the way you just did... Perhaps it’s something to do with the drug we were given. We can’t help saying whatever is on our minds.’
‘I...suppose that might be it,’ she said, relieved that he wasn’t disposed to take her to task for being so rude. ‘Although...’ She paused.
‘What?’
‘Never mind,’ she said with a shake of her head. She didn’t want to admit that for some reason she felt as though she could say anything to him. ‘You were telling me about how you tried to find the second set of books?’
‘Oh, yes. Well, long story short, we found them. Only the night watchman saw the light from our lantern, called for help and came after us. It was touch and go for a while, but eventually we got clean away,’ he ended with a grin.
So even if he wasn’t a professional thief-taker, he certainly enjoyed investigating crime and seeing villains brought to book. A man who could speak of such an adventure with that look of relish on his face would be perfect for helping her untangle whatever it was that Aunt Charity and Uncle Murgatroyd thought they’d achieved last night.
Someone who could fight for her. Defend her. And he was certainly capable of that. She only had to think of all those bulging muscles. The ones she’d seen that morning as he’d gone stalking about the bedroom, stark naked and furious.
Oh, dear, there was that word again. The one that made her blush, since this time it wasn’t just her own nudity she was picturing but his.
She pushed it out of her mind. Instantly it was replaced by the memory of him handing her his jacket. And that after she’d almost brained him with a rock.
Which helped her come to a decision.
‘I should like you to make Aunt Charity and Uncle Murgatroyd sorry, too. Because I think you are right. I think they are trying to take my money. Trying to make me disappear altogether, actually. If it was them who put me in your room—’
‘Who else could it have been?’
‘I know, I know. You’re clearly very good at working out how criminals think. It still isn’t very pleasant to accept it. But...’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Very well, when they put me in your room,’ she said, although her stomach gave a little lurch, ‘they probably did take advantage of the way the rooms were isolated up there—particularly after they saw the way you looked and behaved at dinner. I do think they believed that of all the men in that place you looked the most likely to treat me the worst.’
‘For that alone I should break them. How dare they assume any such thing?’
And that was another thing. He had a vested interest in clearing his own name, too. Now that she’d heard the lengths to which he’d gone to right the wrongs being done to the women at that mill, she felt much better about going to the house of which he’d spoken. They would need somewhere to go and hatch their plans for...not revenge. Justice. Yes, it was only justice she wanted.