Page 32 of The Truth Serum
He’d already lost Becca. That disastrous tea a week ago had shown him that. He couldn’t lose Ras as well. It would destroy him.
“You can trust me,” his friend said.
“I do.” Two words that meant the world to him. He trusted Ras as much as he could trust anyone. But the only reason he could function as a spy, the only way he could slip in and out of the shadows as he did, was if no one saw anything but the feckless, irreverent ne’er-do-well that he presented to the world.
And that included Ras.
Because one exception here and another exception there was how people got exposed. Or played. Or killed. And that didn’t even factor in all the English boys who would get killed if men like him failed.
So he looked at his very last friend and flashed an irreverent smile. “Come on. Lend me a cravat and let me go play with some pretty girls. You’ve got Kynthea. Let me—”
“Will Lady Rebecca be at this ball?”
He winced. He couldn’t hear her name without flinching in memory. He’d really botched that reunion.
“I don’t know.”
“And if she is?”
“I’ll call for a glass of brandy and devote myself to charming the nearest blonde.” His lips curled. “I’ve always had a fondness for blondes.”
“No, you haven’t.”
Truth. Becca had curly brown hair. And the prettiest blue eyes.
“Ras…” he began but then didn’t know what to say. He’d run out of convenient lies, and he hadn’t the wits to craft another.
The duke waited, his expression somber, and then he sighed. “I’ll get you a cravat that will match your droopy green eyes.”
“And fifty pounds, if you please.”
Ras jolted. “What?”
“I suppose I could make do with forty.” Then he glared at his friend. “And my eyes don’t droop!”
He thought for a moment that Ras would cut up stiff. Indeed, he waited with his gut clenched tight and his breath suspended. He couldn’t bear it if…
“God, you are an intolerable burden.”
The words were spoken as such phrases often were. It was a throw-away line. A grumble. It meant nothing, unless it meant everything.
So when Nate didn’t chuckle, Ras’s expression abruptly softened.
“You’re not a burden,” he said gently. “Well, you can be, but not in the way you think. Damn it, man, I want to help!”
“Damn it, man, you are!” Then he pointed. “Stockings! Honey ointment! Safe lodging!” Then he grinned. “Fifty pounds.”
“Forty. And a cravat.”
“And a partridge in a pear tree,” he sang.
In the end, Ras brought him fifty pounds, a cravat, and use of the ducal carriage. Normally he would refuse, but since he was going to the ball as himself, there was no reason to refuse the conveyance. And if his eyes were moist when he accepted the pound notes, then that must have been because he’d shoved his broken feet into his shoes.
He hoped Ras knew how much of a lifeline he was to Nate. Just as he fervently hoped that tonight’s excursion would be worth the effort.
Then he gingerly walked down the stairs before directing the ducal carriage to Madame and Monsieur Joguet’s ball. The two were French emigres, loud and proud royalists, and connectedenough to London society to host an annual ball. But they wouldn’t be the first French emigres to harbor split loyalties.
The Joguets’ ball was an obvious place to go, in order to ascertain the couple’s potential as rifle smugglers. They had money, connections, and an interesting one-upmanship relationship. Husband and wife made sport of finding interesting ways to make coin. While all of society disdained those who worked for a living, the Joguets were open about their ventures. At least some of them.
