Page 59 of A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
Lucy. He wondered if she had been given a middle name.
A pile of notebooks he had taken from Vitium et Virtussat on the table beside him, tomes that described some of the day-to-day happenings at the club that had been kept as a reference by Jacob, Frederick and Oliver ever since he had left. He flipped over the first page of the top book and smiled as he slanted it to firelight. Jacob presumably had drawn a couple in full mask at a ball. The notes below described the night in detail—those who had attended and those who had won or lost at the card tables.
The rest of the book was in the same vein, he saw, as he kept on turning the pages, though towards the end a passage from two weeks ago caught his whole attention.
‘Nash Bowles has been harassing a number of the patrons with his particular kind of unsuitable lust and when confronted by Oliver he asked if we believed Nick to be dead. Oliver’s hand was injured by Bowles’s blade and he told him to forget Nicholas for it was no business of his anyway.’
Nicholas could almost hear Oliver giving the warning in his direct manner. But why would Bowles even ask such a question?
He could well have been killed a number of times in the Americas, but it was too far-fetched to imagine Nash Bowles paying for someone to stalk him thousands of miles from home.
Yet Nicholas felt as though he was missing things. It was late and he was tired and the stamina he might have had in his early twenties was wilted at almost thirty. His searing headache probably did not help, nor the throbbing pain in his left hand and fingers. Stretching out, he grimaced as a shot of white heat buried into the bone at his wrist without warning and did not relent.
He’d been hurt so very often. The gunshot at his thigh. The more recent knife wound to his face and hand and the strips of scarring on his back from the jail in Boston. But this time everything was different for he did not want to be shunted on to another location to find safety. This was where he must stand up and meet the one that wished him harm, head on and with determination. He had the help of his friends and the resources of the Bromley fortune. He had the motivation and he also had the fury.
His eyes went across the darkened stains of blood on the breast of his jacket and the dried brownness of it on his fingers. He should wash, he knew, but somehow such stains gave him strength and courage. A badge of resolve and tenacity, his vehemence harnessed by something more than just himself now. He had a daughter to protect and he had Eleanor. It was time to bring the fight out into the open and end it once and for all.
Leaning back in fatigue, he gave consideration to the fact that it was now the second day of the new year.
A sign. A direction. He closed his eyes and dozed.
* * *
The doorbell rang before the hour of ten in the morning, waking Nick with a start for he wondered just who on earth would come to see him this early.
‘Lady Eleanor, my lord.’
She was there in his library even as his man stopped speaking, pushing in behind him and coming into the room.
‘Thank you, Browne. That will be all.’ He tried to keep the surprise at seeing her from his eyes, but he was disorientated and cold and his arm hurt like hell. Last night’s soiled clothes were still upon him although he hoped he had washed all the blood off his face.
‘You have not slept?’
Her words were laced in question.
‘Did you?’ He made a point of looking across at the time.
‘No. I lay awake all night and wondered what I should do.’
‘Honesty,’ he drawled, ‘may have come a little late for me, Eleanor.’ Her eyes were ringed in the same darkness he knew his own would be.
‘There is no good time to tell a man you have not seen in six years, and who cannot remember you at all, that he is now the father of your child.’
He laughed at that because the words were so quintessentially Eleanor.
‘Were you going to enlighten me if I had failed to guess the truth or made no progress in regaining my memory?’
When she lifted her left hand to her temple in a gesture of complete worry he saw she wore her small braided bracelet with the colourful beads around her thin wrist and the fight went out of him just like that.
‘I want to know you, Eleanor. I want to remember you.’
The blue in her eyes blazed.
‘Well, I am running out of days to try and help your recall. After tonight—the sixth day we spent together—I do not know what happened next, for it was the last time I saw you.’
‘What happened the last time I saw you, Eleanor?’
‘You asked me for dinner at your town house.’
