The Suffragette Scandal (The Brothers Sinister) by Courtney Milan Read Free Book Online Page A

expanse of wood. She licked her lips, and he felt his mouth go dry. Oh, no. There was nothing boring about her. He was riveted, in fact.
    She smiled at him, and then spoke in a low voice. “You said you’d done your research, Mr. Clark. You said you knew who I was. You obviously didn’t look very hard. A woman doesn’t run a newspaper and perform her own investigations without learning how to deal with scoundrels. You think you can push me around, that you can traipse in here and take charge. You can’t. If you really want your revenge, you’re going to have to work for it.”
    He tried to muster up a sense of annoyance. She was complicating everything. She watched with an expression that struck him as halfway between severe and impish. But—alas—he couldn’t come up with even a trace of exasperation.
    It was going to be downright fun working with her.
    So instead of agreeing, he picked up her pen again and pulled the letter he’d forged back from her.
    “Postscript,” he narrated aloud as he wrote. “Don’t let Edward Clark’s patent humility fool you. He is maddeningly brilliant. Beware. It will creep up on you over time.” He passed the letter back to her. “There. That makes it rather better, don’t you think?”
    She perused the line he’d added with a dubious raising of her eyebrows. “Not particularly, no.”
    “Should I have underlined maddeningly?” he asked. “Or brilliant? I ask because if you’re going to have me up for forgery, I want to make sure you have a perfect specimen to present to the court. A man has his pride.”
    “Underline neither,” she said calmly. “I’ll let you know when you’ve earned my italics. For now, you may only lay claim to regular type and full stops.”
    He couldn’t outblackmail her, outthink her, or outcharm her. He couldn’t even outbrazen her.
    “Tell me, Miss Marshall,” he said. “Do you ever bend to anyone?”
    She shook her head. “Only if it will get me what I want. I’m a very determined woman.”
    He could believe it now. He’d been misled by her idealism, her smile. A man might see her trim form seated at her desk, her fingers slightly stained with ink, poised above the letter he’d written, and see only a small, lovely woman. He might see that and completely miss the steel in her character.
    Edward wouldn’t make that mistake again. A hint of a smile touched her lips as she looked down. She was maddeningly…everything. This entire endeavor had tilted, and now, like a cart on a hill without a driver, it was careening away. He didn’t know when the crash would come, but he wasn’t about to jump off.
    This was so terribly bad that it had actually come full circle round to something…enticingly good.
    “Well, then.” He stood. “Lead on, Miss Marshall. If you’re to keep me under lock and key, I suppose you must let me know where I will be staying.”

Chapter Four

    M ISS M ARSHALL PUT E DWARD in something she called the archive room. In actuality, it was little better than a dusty closet. A single high slit of a window allowed barely enough daylight through to illuminate a chair, a spindly desk, and a mass of cabinets.
    “Mr. Clark is considering advertising with us,” she told the other women in the main room. “He wants to look through the archives of the paper.”
    Which, actually, was not a bad idea. He thought he’d done the necessary research, but he’d had only the vaguest notion of what Miss Marshall was like when he arrived here—and that had been gleaned from five minutes in her company and the combination of notes in his brother’s file. The reality of her had smashed all his dimly held expectations to bits.
    He started reading her paper from the first issue.
    It took only four issues for Miss Marshall’s thrice-weekly paper to leave him properly terrified. She’d had herself committed to a government-operated lock hospital—one of those dreadful institutions established for the protection of the Royal Navy,