Page 83 of My Own True Duchess
Theo was not intent on drama. She was intent on answers. The relief of that insight was enormous.
“I’ve hurt you,” Jonathan said, taking her in his arms. “I am so sorry, Theo. I am deeply, endlessly sorry. I’ve never been a suitor before, though I ought to know better. How can I make amends?”
She was quiet in his embrace, not cuddling. He could feel her thinking, feel her gathering her courage.
“Tell me the truth. Where do you go of an evening, and what has you so worried?”
Theo was to be his wife, his partner in all significant matters, the mother of his children. With her, he could and should be absolutely honest.
“I truly am tending to financial affairs,” he said, stealing a quick kiss. “My primary source of income now is a club, and during my years in Paris, I’ve allowed it to fall into some disarray—serious disarray, of which I’m only now becoming aware. Somebody has set out to sabotage the venture. I’m almost sure I know who and why, but not how. I must find that answer before I can put the club back on solid footing, which will give the dukedom a healthy source of funds as well.”
Theo’s gaze was troubled. “You own a gentlemen’s club?”
His idiot mouth was too eager to boast of his pride and joy, and his suitor’s heart wanted only to be honest with her.
“It’s a well-kept secret, but I am proprietor of the premier supper club and gambling establishment in all of London. The Coventry is mine, and I am pleased to include you in the small circle who know that. An employee of long standing has taken a notion to—Theo?”
She whirled away, as far away as the little chamber allowed. Her expression suggested Jonathan had confessed not to owning one of the best investments a ducal heir could aspire to, but rather, to ruling in hell.
* * *
“You have taken leave of what little sense you claim,” Casriel said, fitting the tuning key to the little screw that adjusted the tension on the harp strings. “The Coventry is an honest house. You’ve made a pest of yourself there for the past several weeks and only discovered that, once again, an older sibling is right and you are barking mad.”
Sycamore sidled past the harp, a great behemoth of an instrument with grapes and flowers fancifully carved all over the maple wood pillar.
“I have discovered that your friend Mr. Jonathan Tresham has more trouble afoot than he can handle on his own. What are you doing?”
Casriel gently plucked the string. “Having a polite difference of opinion with a venerable matron, a far more productive exchange than the one I’m having with you.”
Sycamore folded into the chair behind Casriel’s desk. “There’s a pattern. I just can’t see what it is.”
Another pluck, infinitesimally higher on the scale. “Jonathan Tresham can spot patterns in the stars, in wind undulating across a field of ripe oats, in attendance at church on Sunday mornings. He can’t help himself. If there were a pattern, he’d see it.”
Another tiny increase in pitch.
“I can spot patterns too, and I know I’m seeing one. Lipscomb always sits in the same place, for example, across from the dealer at every table. Viscount Henries prefers any chair with its back to the wall. The most expensive food is always at the end of the buffet, so that patrons will have a full plate when they come to it.”
Casriel bent closer to the harp and eased the tuning key a quarter turn. “And my youngest brother must stir up trouble.” He plucked the string again, sending a gentle tone wafting through the office.
Of all the rooms at the Dorning town house, this one alone bore a stamp personal to the earl. Grey loved his acres, and thus the landscape on the wall was the view from the Dorning family seat in Dorset. A sheep-dotted checkerboard of green fields stretched away to the abbey ruins where Sycamore had played as a boy—or watched his brothers play while his sisters had scolded them.
On the opposite wall was a painting of Durdle Door, an arched rock formation on the beach near Lulworth that looked like a dragon drinking from the sea.
“If you miss home so much, why have all these reminders of it around you?” Sycamore asked.
Grey moved the tuning key up one string. “To remind me why I serve out my penance in the Lords. To encourage me when my daily bout of faintheartedness threatens. To show some hapless female just how rustic”—pluck—“her circumstances will be if she throws in her lot with me.”
Sycamore stored away for later consideration the startling admission that the earl grew fainthearted nigh daily.
“The lady will be your countess, Grey. If you’re marrying some cit’s daughter, she won’t care that rustication comes with it. She will care that you love your sheep more than you love her.”
Casriel plucked the next string and turned the key gently, the tone rising as the tension increased. “You’re an expert on courting heiresses now?”
“Lady Canmore is no heiress. Why did you bring her ’round The Coventry?”
Grey sounded the first string and the second in the do-re sequence that began the major scale.
“She brought me around.”
