Read To Tempt a Saint for Free Online

Xander’s gaze, and his lips peeled back in a snarl, baring strong white teeth. “He might know something.”
    “If he’s one of Bredsell’s boys, he knows all the rigs in St. Giles and more.”
    “What’s his history?”
    “Born in the Seven Dials, raised on drink, brawls, and thievery. Bredsell’s only had him a year though, so he’s not gallows bait yet.”
    Bredsell ran a school for boys in a warehouse off Bread Street in one of London’s worst rookeries. “Receptacles,” they were called, for boys in trouble with the law. If Bredsell wanted to get a young man out of the hands of the law, he generally managed. Xander scanned the crowd for Bredsell’s aristocratic patron, Archibald March.
    In the year that Xander and Will had been attending the night court sessions, Xander had come to expect the appearance of Bredsell and March.
    The charges against the boy were read. The list was long, and the penalty for his most grievous crime was transportation.
    The Reverend Bertram Bredsell rose, a pink-cheeked man with a head of close-cropped, yellow gold curls and a downcast gaze as if the wicked ways of the world grieved him, but Xander was not fooled by the angelic face. Bredsell, dubbed “the Moralist” by the papers, could get a crowd to believe almost anything.
    “Your Worship, if I may speak a word on this young man’s behalf.”
    “Mr. Bredsell, this court is not a pulpit. Speak briefly and to the point.”
    “Thank you, Your Worship.” Bredsell then fell silent until the hum in the court died down and all eyes were focused on him. The man had presence. He looked up and spoke in a silken tenor. “The world judges Nate Wilde harshly, but he is not to blame for the darkness in which he lives. And that darkness will not be cured in the blackness of the hold of a transport ship or a cell. No, his spirit can only be cured if we bring him into the light. I appeal to this court to turn this young man over to me and my school so that we may bring light to his soul.”
    Xander swore and turned to Will. He doubted Bredsell had much spiritual light to offer the boy. “Better to bring light to his street than his soul.”
    “That is your plan, isn’t it, Brother?”
    It had been. With Miss Finsbury he believed he had found the perfect match for the sort of marriage he had in mind. Her father was a grazier whose fortune had allowed him to establish his family in fashionable circumstances among London’s wealthy tradesmen. Miss Finsbury had been broad-minded in her taste in suitors. Xander’s knighthood and the town house off Berkeley Square had been sufficient inducements to get her to that meeting in the bank.
    His plan had suffered a severe blow with her rejection of his suit. Without her thirty thousand pounds he could not join the Metropolitan Works Group. His part in the partnership was an experiment in lighting the streets of St. Giles, the darkest rookery in London, where the likes of Bredsell preyed upon the hungry and desperate. He had lost a month courting Miss Finsbury. Now he had to begin again. He had only been half joking when he asked Miss Ragmanners to recommend an heiress.
    Will nudged Xander as a gentleman ambled into the court and leaned down to whisper something in the learned judge’s ear. Archibald March, the chief “patron” of Bredsell’s school, was a man of lean, cool good looks. In his forties, he had a long nose made for sneering at the world and a thin slice of a mouth. His dark hair fell with careless abandon over his broad brow. For all the foundling schools and widows’ societies that March supported, Xander could not detect a charitable line in the man’s smooth face.
    “Self-satisfied worm,” Will grumbled.
    March settled himself in a reserved seat with a proprietary air. According to Will, March had endless funds to pass around to charities. Will suspected that he profited in unholy ways from Bredsell’s school, by training boys as petty thieves and using them to