Page 7 of The Good Girl's Guide to Rakes
“How is she?” The question tore from Dom as if he’d had to lure it out like an animal from its hiding place.
“She’s . . .” The last time Kieran had seen Willa had been a fortnight ago. He and Finn had gone to her as she’d waited in the vestibule, their family standing with her as they prepared to begin the ceremony. Finding the right words had never been problematic for Kieran, but at that moment, facing his little sister to tell her that he’d assisted in the flight of her groom, he’d been unable to speak. It hadn’t made sense. He and Finn had acted in her best interest, and yet as he’d stared at Willa in her wedding finery, the veil obscuring her face but the gauzy fabric risingand falling with her quick breaths, for the first time, he’d doubted whether or not they had done the right thing.
Willa had lifted her own veil and stared at him. Her face had been pale as paper, and written across that paper was terrible, icy resolve.
He’d wished she had railed at him. Thrown something as she shouted opprobrium. But she’d been still and quiet in a way he had never seen in all of Willa’s twenty-three years.
“I’m sorry, Will,” Kieran had managed to croak.
“Sorry? Sorry for what?” his mother had demanded, her Irish accent thickening with her distress.
“Dom is gone,” Willa had said. “And Kieran and Finn helped him go.”
“He says to tell everyone you called things off,” Finn had answered.
“As if that makes everything better,” the earl had snapped.
Willa hadn’t spoken to him again after that. They’d left the church and she’d gone up to her room, not coming out all day and all night. In the morning, when Kieran and Finn had stopped by for breakfast, she’d left, with only a note from their parents saying they were seeing Willa off.
“I don’t know how she is,” Kieran answered, realizing that Dom waited for a reply. “If she’s sent any letters home, none have been to me.”
He shifted on the cab’s seat, but the squabs were worn from countless passengers, and the uneasiness twisting in his belly remained.
“I’m to be met with a firing squad, I suppose,” Dom said lowly.
“All I know is that we’re to deliver you to the Green Parlor,” Kieran said. “Though it’s doubtful you’ll be greeted by a row of rifles. My mother’s fond of the wall coverings in the Green Parlor.”
“Comforting,” Dom muttered.
Yet surprisingly, when the cab stopped briefly to permit a wagon to pass, Dom didn’t attempt to leap from the vehicle and run away. It was almost as if he was reconciled to whatever punitive measures were likely waiting for him. Or perhaps, in some way, he welcomed them.
A taut silence fell, and Finn attempted to fill the quiet with chatter about a new gaming hell that had just opened on Moreton Place in Pimlico. Kieran hadn’t been to it yet, but he joined in the conversation. It was a way to pass the time, and kept his thoughts from shifting toward that morning in the church, and the awful stoicism on Willa’s face when she’d learned that her groom was gone, and that he was responsible. But he’d done the right thing, saving her from a lifetime of misery. Hadn’t he?
The cab finally stopped outside Wingrave House, and Finn tossed a coin to the driver as they emerged. From the street, the earldom’s city residence radiated importance, evidenced in the lights that blazed from many windows. Kieran had never given the amount of illumination much thought, until the first time he’d brought Dom to his family’s home, and his friend had cursed in wonderment that they could afford so many candles, and so much glass in the casements.
Of course, Dom’s family’s fortune nearly matched that of the earl, but he hadn’t been born into wealth.
Kieran, Finn, and Dom marched up the steps that led to Wingrave House’s front door, which opened to reveal Vickers, the butler.
Tension collected in helixes in Kieran’s stomach, though he’d no reason to be uneasy. All he had been tasked to do was bring Dom, so his friend ought to be the anxious one. Yet that apprehension trailed after him as he walked the well-known hallways of his family home. He glanced at Finn striding beside him, but if his brother shared his discomfiture, he did his usual expert job of hiding it.
Kieran didn’t envy his brother’s ability to conceal how he felt. Unlike Finn, he didn’t spend the majority of his time at the gambling tables, so he’d no need of such disguising. And life was simply too delicious to spend suppressing your responses to it.
Voices came from up ahead in the Green Parlor. It was a strange symphony of the smooth, cultured timbre of his father, his mother’s more musical tones that still bore the lyricism of her native Galway, and the heavier, rougher angles of Ned Kilburn’s East London cadence. At the sound of his father’s voice, Dom’s steps faltered, but he kept moving toward the parlor like a man unflinchingly determined to meet his fate.
Kieran stopped in the doorway of the chamber. His father stood in front of the fire, hands clasped behind his back in his typical posture, whilst his mother sat on the divan, with the usual amount of distance between herself and her husband. Neither of his parents greeted Kieran, and he realized that this was the first time he’d seen them since the wedding. They hadn’t met for their weekly stilted Thursdaynight dinners after that day, and he’d received no summons.
“Father,” Kieran said, coming into the parlor. “Mother.”
Heavy lines bracketed the earl’s mouth as he pressed his lips together, and his mother barely inclined her head to receive Kieran’s kiss on her cheek. Ice crystallized along his spine. Relations between him and his parents had never been especially warm, yet this was a new tier of distance.
“Mr. Kilburn,” Kieran added with a nod toward the other man.
The grunt that Ned Kilburn gave him was almost identical to Dom’s. Though the elder Kilburn was approaching middle age, his shoulders remained wide as a marathon, and despite his costly clothing, it was an easy feat to imagine him hauling cargo in London’s docks. The man had made his fortune leasing warehouses to shipping companies, his beginnings humble but his ambition extraordinary.
His glance at Kieran was icy, just as it was when Finn greeted him. Yet his eyes blazed when his son entered the parlor.
“Da,” Dom growled.
