Page 1 of The Ruin of a Rake
Chapter One
London, 1817
Julian pursed his lips as he gazed at the symmetrical brick façade of his sister’s house. It was every bit as bad as he had feared. He could hear the racket from the street, for God’s sake. He pulled the brim of his hat lower on his forehead, as if concealing his face would go any distance toward mitigating the damage done by his sister having turned her house into a veritable brothel. Right in the middle of Mayfair, and at eleven in the morning, when the entiretonwas on hand to bear witness to her degradation, no less. Say what one wanted about Eleanor—and at this moment Julian could only imagine what was being said—but she did not do things by halves.
As he climbed the steps to her door, the low rumble of masculine voices drifted from an open second story window. Somebody was playing a pianoforte—badly—and a lady was singing out of key.
No, not a lady.Julian suppressed a sigh. Whoever these women were in his sister’s house, they were not ladies. No lady in her right mind would consort with the sort of men Eleanor had been entertaining lately. Every young buck with a taste for vice had made his way to her house over these last weeks, along with their mistresses or courtesans or whatever one was meant to call them. And the worst of them, the blackguard who had started Eleanor on her path to becoming a byword for scandal, was Lord Courtenay.
A shiver trickled down Julian’s spine at the thought of encountering the man, and he could not decide whether it was from simple, honest loathing or something much, much worse.
The door swung open before Julian had raised his hand to the knocker.
“Mr. Medlock, thank goodness.” The look of abject relief on the face of Eleanor’s butler might have struck Julian as vaguely inappropriate under any other circumstance. But considering the tableau that presented itself in Eleanor’s vestibule, the butler’s informality hardly registered.
Propped against the elegantly papered wall, a man in full evening dress snored peacefully, a bottle of brandy cradled in his arms and a swath of bright crimson silk draped across his leg. A lady’s gown, Julian gathered. The original wearer of the garment was, mercifully, not present.
“I came as soon as I received your message.” Julian had not been best pleased to receive a letter from his sister’s butler, of all people, begging that he return to London ahead of schedule. Having secured a coveted invitation to a very promising house party, he was loath to leave early in order to evict a set of bohemians and reprobates from his sister’s house.
“The cook is threatening to quit, sir,” said the butler. Tilbury, a man of over fifty who had been with Eleanor since she and Julian had arrived in England, had gray circles under his eyes. No doubt the revels had interrupted his sleep. “And I’ve already sent all but the—ah—hardiest of the housemaids to the country. It wouldn’t do for them to be imposed upon. I’d never forgive myself.”
Julian nodded. “You were quite right to send for me. Where is my sister?” Several unmatched slippers were scattered along the stairs that led toward the drawing room and bedchambers. He gritted his teeth.
“Lady Standish is in her study, sir.”
Julian’s eyebrows shot up. “Her study,” he repeated. Eleanor was hosting an orgy—really, there was no use in pretending it was anything else—but ducked out to conduct an experiment. Truly, the experiments were bad enough, but Julian had always managed to conceal their existence. But to combine scientific pursuits with actual orgies struck Julian as excessive in all directions.
“You,” he said, nudging the sleeping man with the toe of his boot. He was not climbing over drunken bodies, not today, not any day. “Wake up.” The man opened his eyes with what seemed a great deal of effort. “Who are you? No, never mind, I can’t be bothered to care.” The man wasn’t any older than Julian himself, certainly not yet five and twenty, but Julian felt as old as time and as irritable as a school mistress compared to this specimen of self-indulgence. “Get up, restore that gown to its owner, and be gone before I decide to let your father know what you’ve been up to.” As so often happened when Julian ordered people about, this fellow complied.
Julian made his way to Eleanor’s study, and found her furiously scribbling at her writing table, a mass of wires and tubes arranged before her. She didn’t look up at the sound of the door opening, nor when he pointedly closed it behind him. Eleanor, once she was busy working, was utterly unreachable. She had been like this since they were children. He felt a rush of affection for her despite how much trouble she was causing him.
“Eleanor?” Nothing. He stooped to gather an empty wine bottle and a few abandoned goblets, letting them clink noisily together as he deposited them onto a table. Still no response. “Nora?” It almost physically hurt to say his childhood name for herwhen things felt so awkward and strained between them.
“It won’t work,” came a low drawl. “I’ve been sitting here these past two hours and I haven’t gotten a response.”
Banishing any evidence of surprise from his countenance, Julian turned to see Lord Courtenay himself sprawled in a low chair in a shadowy corner. There oughtn’t to have been any shadows in the middle of the day in a bright room, but trust Lord Courtenay to find one to lurk in.
Julian quickly schooled his face into some semblance of indifference. No, that was a reach; his face was simply not going to let him pretend indifference to Courtenay. He doubted whether anyone had ever shared space with Lord Courtenay without being very much aware of that fact. And it wasn’t only his preposterous good looks that made him so... noticeable. The man served as a sort of magnet for other people’s attention, and Julian hated himself for being one of those people. As far as he could tell, the man’s entire problem was that people paid a good deal too much attention to him. But one could hardly help it, not when he looked likethat.
Even in the improbable shadows of Eleanor’s south-facing study, Julian could properly appreciate Courtenay’s famous profile, from the aquiline perfection of his nose to the tousled waves of his overlong coal black hair. Portraitists had fallen over themselves to capture the strong lines of his features in ink and charcoal and oil paints. Rumor had it that the artist of the most famous portrait, the one that had hung in Mrs. Olmstead’s drawing room for years after their affair, had actually paid Courtenay for the privilege of painting him, as if he were a common artist’s model and not a peer of the realm.
Standing a few scant yards from him, breathing in the scent of the noxious cigarillo Courtenay held in one languid hand, Julian had to scramble to think of anything suitable to say. An insult would do the trick. He was rummaging through his brain to come up with a cutting remark, when a moan sounded from one of the bedchambers upstairs. Julian winced in embarrassment.
“Somebody knows how to start the day,” Courtenay murmured, his voice somehow even more obscene than the sound overhead.
“It is nearly midday,” Julian snapped, as if the time were what mattered. “The day is not starting here, nor anywhere else in England. Some of us have been up and about for hours.”
Courtenay held his gaze for a moment, his green eyes heavy with boredom. “My apologies,” he drawled. “I stand corrected. I ought to have said that somebody likes having his cock sucked.” He paused and glanced upwards, as if meditating on the soft sounds coming from upstairs. “At least it sounds like cocksucking. No sign of the pounding”—here he rhythmically slapped his hand against the arm of his chair—“that you’d expect to hear with any actual f—”
“Enough!” Julian felt warmth spread through his body—anger and lust all tangled together the way they so often were where Courtenay was concerned, damn it. One of his first memories of London was seeing one of Courtenay’s portraits hanging on the wall of a salon to which he had somehow managed to get invited. There it had hung, as if daring Julian to look, to stare, to throw away his tenuous claim to respectability and give himself over to pleasures the portrait seemed to hint at. He had assured himself that in person, the man’s eyes couldn’t be quite so striking, that surely the passage of time would have done something to soften the perfection of his features. But when Julian finally met Courtenay this winter, he found the man every bit as appallingly attractive as that portrait. It had taken a heroic effort to behave with some semblance of decorum. And for all that, Courtenay hadn’t even seemed to notice him, had scarcely so much as looked Julian’s way. Not that Julian wanted to be noticed, or anything so vulgar as that. It was simply that after six years spent trying not to lust after a man, it was a bit levelling to have not so much as a glance thrown in one’s general direction.
Perhaps it was the coarseness of Courtenay’s language and not Julian’s angry outburst that finally got Eleanor’s attention, but she finally looked up from her writing with an expression of consternation.
“What are you doing here, Julian?” She had the nerve to sound put out by her brother’s presence. “I wasn’t expecting you back until after Easter.”
There was a time when she would have been glad to see him. Only last year she had pleadingly renewed her offer that he make his home with her instead of keeping his own lodgings. He desperately tried not to think of that now. “That much is evident, my dear. This isn’t the sort of entertainment to which I’m accustomed.”
Oh, he sounded so peevish, so priggish, but he reassured himself that he had the moral high ground. “I came because I had word that your servants were all about to give notice. If they had aspired to work in a brothel, they likely would have arranged their lives somewhat differently.”
