Page 43 of Fortune Favors the Viscount
Emilia nodded.
Charlotte let the drape fall. “I—I doubt it.”
Emilia turned in surprise. “Why not?”
“Nick says he’ll never get married.”
Emilia looked down to hide her wry smile. “He will be a viscount, Charlotte. He will need a legitimate heir—”
“No,” repeated Charlotte. “He doesn’t care about that.” She saw Emilia’s confusion. “Because of our father. I don’t think Nick has a high opinion of marriage.”
Ah, so she was right: brother and sister. “How so?”
But Charlotte seemed to have decided she’d said too much. She fluttered her hands and made a face. “He didn’t tell me! But I should go back to bed, so you might do the same. Good night, Miss Greene.” She made an uneven curtsy and crossed the room to the nursery stair. “Sleep well,” she said with a small smile.
“Sleep well,” echoed Emilia as the door closed behind Charlotte, her mind awhirl with questions that had no answers.
Nick had foreseen trouble,but not this much.
“Three more,” reported Forbes. He set the membership tokens on the desk.
“How many is that?”
“Twenty-seven, with eight more rumbling about it.”
Grimly Nick surveyed the tokens, specially struck silver ovals with stars on one side and the script V of Vega’s on the other. Twenty-seven tokens returned, twenty-seven members resigned. That was almost two a day since the petition. It wasn’t the number that bothered him, it was the rate.
“I also received four inquiries,” Forbes offered. “There’s some blokes who don’t mind wagering at a lord’s club.”
Nick swept up the tokens. “I daresay there will be more, for the notoriety if nothing else.”
“Right.”
He unlocked an iron strongbox from the cabinet, put the tokens in, and relocked it. “More importantly, how are receipts?”
Forbes hesitated. “Up two percent.”
Nick looked at him. “We’re making more money, with twenty-seven fewer members. Is that correct?”
The manager nodded. “Record numbers of guests.”
“Very good.” Guests were only permitted four evenings per month. Nick counted on that taste to persuade them to apply for membership, and so far he’d not been wrong. In a few weeks, this furor would have died down, replaced by some other scandal, and the gamblers of London would remember how superior Vega’s was to every other club.
Or so he hoped.
There was a tap at the door, and Forbes opened it to reveal Jimmy, one of the boys Nick employed for errands. “Mr. Carter would like a word, Mr. Forbes, sir,” he said.
Forbes disappeared to go see the head croupier, and Nick waved Jimmy to come in. The boy slipped through the door, clutching his wool cap and waiting alertly. “What’s the latest chatter about me, Jim?”
The boy’s face scrunched up. “You, sir?”
Nick nodded.
Jimmy looked thoughtful. “A lot o’ flutter about you aimin’ to be a lord. It makes ‘em nervous, to think you might ‘spect to speak to ‘em in Parliament or some’ere. One bloke were swearin’ that he’d tell all his lady acquaintances to keep their distance.”
Nick smiled humorlessly at that. “That all?”
Jimmy shrugged. “All I’ve heard.”
