“That would mean we’d have to trust the company. Perhaps we’ll take a look at their books,” Ivan said.
Val nodded. “True enough, but if you keep your eyes peeled, you’ll identify the right ones.” He shrugged. “It was just a thought. We could scrape a few margins that way.”
Darius pushed a sheet toward Val. “Here’s the current situation.”
Val whistled through his teeth when he saw the bottom line. A carefully scripted set of figures showed the potential profit of current ventures. “It’s just as well we drew up articles of association last year. This is more than we planned.”
The venture had been a sideline, a lark when they’d begun it, but now it meant much more than that for all three of them.
In fact, the two years he’d devoted to the project had not yet bored Val and showed no signs of doing so. That was because the minute he’d solved one problem, another emerged to take its place, so it was a series of linked but different problems. He traced a line of calculations down with one finger, not because it needed checking, but because his reckoning on that piece of work had given him great pleasure.
“Here.” Darius pushed another paper across. “Sign. You’ve already read this one,” he added, and presented a pen, already loaded with ink.
“I hate this part.” Val had recognized the contract the moment his brother had presented it, but signing was always a trial to him. “All those promises.”
Darius tipped a brow at Ivan, who chuckled. “Which is why you don’t make many.”
Val shook his head and scrawled his signature before he could change his mind. “That’s because I always keep my promises. I never agree to something I cannot fulfill.” Not many people knew that, and Val preferred it that way. His word was truly his bond.
Ivan signed next. “I can do this now because my brother is in the country happily making babies with his lovely wife.” Thrusting his hands in his pockets, he took a turn around the room. “I can’t tell you how much that has taken from me. I can be more than the spare heir. I can make my own life.”
Val grunted. “Marcus is much the same, but our father still insists on matchmaking.”
“Ah, but you have the lovely Charlotte,” Ivan said after a considering glance at Darius, who would most likely remain a “committed bachelor,” as society often referred to him.
“Not for much longer.” Sighing, Val tucked his hands behind his head and stretched. “I’ve just had an interview with Papa. The lovely Charlotte has asked me to release her.”
Darius snorted. “I’m not surprised, I have to say. You’ve kept her hanging far too long.”
“That does not evoke pleasant thoughts,” Val commented. “The arrangement suited both of us. It meant our father ceased to harangue me about finding a wife who would, as he charmingly put it, ‘settle me down,’ and Charlotte had someone to keep the hordes away.”
“I saw no hordes,” Ivan commented. “She is one of those women invited to make up numbers or because of her standing.”
Val’s hackles bristled. “She’s charming.”
“Indeed, you should say that, brother, and it speaks well for your loyalty. But she is hardly the kind of dashing wit you are usually drawn to. Her sensible clothes, the way she has of ducking her head when she speaks, or addressing you in a monotone can hardly be considered fetching.”
Val glared at his brother. “She would be lovely, given the chance. That is none of her doing. Her father is nothing short of a tyrant.”
Ivan snorted. “He is proud, for sure, and insists on the kind of old-fashioned manners more suitable for our grandparents, but tyrannical? I have never heard that.”
“And yet he disowned his oldest daughter,” Val pointed out. He propped his feet on the edge of the table. “Would our father do that?”
Darius frowned. “Not even if she eloped with a highwayman. True, he’d give them hell and probably try to have the marriage annulled, but he’d never cast Livia or Dru off.”
If anyone had reason to know that, Darius did. He had confessed his proclivities one unforgettable day when the twins had returned from their Grand Tour. Their father, perfectly calm, had told him that if he created any scandals, he would ban Darius to the country. So Val had created the scandals for him, and Darius had quietly gone about his business.
Val couldn’t pretend that he’d not enjoyed himself, setting society on its ear, but he sensed that game was coming to an end. Neither he nor his brother needed it anymore. They were moving on. The prospect excited him. Except that he would have to find something else to do.
Without Charlotte. That potentiality depressed him more than anything else. He would have to watch someone else nurturing her. The day at the dressmaker’s filled him with satisfaction and amusement. He would see her in that gown if he had any say in the matter. Her pure delight had charmed him, and now he was giving her the attention that she so clearly deserved he was beginning to understand what a treasure he had cast away with his thoughtlessness.
“Charlotte has found another beau,” he commented as casually as he could.
“Truly? Not a fortune hunter?” Darius watched him intently. Far too much for Val’s liking.
“Indeed not. Viscount Kellett. Hervey,” he added with a curl of his lip.
Silence fell, the kind that did not augur well.
“What is it?”
Darius glanced at Ivan. “It might be nothing, you understand, but I know that name. I’ve heard of servants using their master’s names before now when they did not want to be identified.”
Slamming his feet to the floor, Val sprang to his feet. “What? What do you know?” Energy coursed through him. He felt revitalized. This was the first time he had heard even a breath of scandal associated with the tedious Viscount Kellett. None of the discreet and expensive bawdy houses and gaming hells he frequented knew of him. He had asked.
Darius gazed up at his brother, his eyes reflections of Val’s own. “I am not sure. To be sure I’ll need to know what the man looks like. I will not speak ill of him until I have reason, but a man using that name appeared at one of Covent Garden’s greatest attractions.”
Knowing the establishments his brother frequented, Val rapped out, “Which one?”
Tilting his head to one side, Darius eyed him. “I think I would rather show you. It is not one that I frequent, as its special services are not what I prefer, but they are out of the ordinary.”
“I’ll come,” Ivan said immediately. “Should I contact Julius and Tony? I know they are in town.”
Immediately Darius shook his head. “There’s no need to create a scene. We don’t want to invade the place, merely observe it. If it is him. Perhaps we should frequent a few ballrooms and society events instead.”
“Oh, no,” Val said grimly. “That would mean nothing. I want to see this for myself.”
“What will you do?” Darius demanded.
“Whatever I feel is appropriate. But I will undertake to control my temper. For now.”
Chapter 6
The following evening, after he’d been forced to watch Charlotte dancing and laughing with her new admirer at a society ball, Val glumly reflected on the adage his father had repeated to him earlier in the day. “Sometimes you have to lose something before you appreciate its value.”
His father had checked the viscount’s credentials, and as far as his reports went, Kellett was a suitable potential husband for Charlotte. He was everything he had claimed. His wealth was solidly invested in land and a few judicious ventures, his reputation was almost staid, as if he’d set himself to create it.
Val recognized the markers, since he’d done much the same himself to an opposite effect. Although he enjoyed gaining the reputation he now held, he had reason for it, and he’d ensured the tales had spread. To the despair and reluctant admiration of his parents, it had to be said.
He’d dressed with his customary extravagance, in a symphony of greens and ivories, and fortunately his brother had
not donned the salmon pink monstrosity. Otherwise, as he’d informed Darius earlier, he’d have planted him a facer at the very least. “At least the blood would have ruined it,” he’d commented dryly.
“Thanks to our excellent work, I could order another and not miss the guineas.” Darius flicked a piece of lint from his dark blue velvet coat and glanced up at his brother, smiling. Val had burst into laughter. His brother could always do that to him. That was why they had probably not got into fights more often.
“Then give me notice when you plan to wear it. I’ll come and watch but never acknowledge you as my brother.”
“You don’t think they will notice the resemblance?” Darius waved a hand between them.
They were not identical twins, but they appeared very closely alike. Val grinned.
“I can go in disguise.” Darius laughed.
Standing in the ballroom, the smell of burning beeswax from hundreds of candles stinging his nostrils, Val surveyed the scene with the world-weariness of a bored roué.
“Now I know why I don’t come to these things very often,” Darius murmured from behind him.
“That could be because you have no interest in what goes on here.” There would be no marriage for Darius, unless forced on him, but the mamas continued to push their daughters on him. Darius’s proclivities were known by many but it was old gossip, so it was possible the newcomers were not aware of it. However, since the Shaws held an exalted position in society, Val doubted that. They were just trying their luck. One mama had confessed that she knew all Darius needed was to meet the “right” woman.
Val had answered, “Only if she has a cock”—a comment so outrageous he’d changed it to something more innocuous when the woman had begged him to repeat what he said. But people standing around had heard, and the comment was repeated.
The marquess had compelled Val’s betrothal to Charlotte the next day. And now here he was watching that same woman, regretting what they were about to do. He’d willfully ignored her, and now it was too late. For all that he kept telling himself that she deserved better, he still wanted her. The desire that had sprung to life when he’d kissed her remained to torture him, and the personality under the rigidly preserved society mask intrigued him. That made for a heady combination.
Perhaps he would have another chance to get to know her better. He would await tonight’s events.
Charlotte had accepted his invitation to dance, but apart from that spent the evening with her family. Her Aunt Adelaide, a scatty but observant specimen of the older relative, exchanged a few words with Val. “You have made my niece very happy, sir.”
“What, by severing our agreement?”
“Hush!”
Val liked the extended final syllable. He wanted to hear it again, but not, he concluded regretfully, at Charlotte’s expense. “Indeed, ma’am. But it is by no means a settled matter. Negotiations lie ahead, I fear.” And he had no intention of adding his newfound skills to that. He would not help, but he would not stand in her way if Kellett was the man to make her happy.
Why had he not seen her gentle prettiness before? Or the liveliness, so cleverly masked when she realized she was displaying it? He should have seen them, encouraged her. Their recent visit to the mantua-maker’s had provided more questions than answers. When she spoke of her father, her whole figure stiffened, and her mood turned guarded. Talking about the duke was one sure way to make Charlotte close down.
That was how Val knew the Duke of Rochfort had arrived. Charlotte was dancing with Ivan. Val was sipping wine, talking to her aunt, watching the couples cavorting on the polished wood floor when Charlotte glanced at the entrance and visibly drooped. Her manner became stiff and wooden, and her shoulders drooped. The smile on her lips faded, before she straightened up as if someone had shoved a poker down her back. Ladies in tight-fitting stays had little choice but to keep their backs straight, but the way she jerked her head up was more like a puppet on a wire than a real person.
As Val watched, Charlotte became an automaton, one of those clockwork dolls brought to the dinner table during dessert for the amusement of the guests.
Charlotte’s antics did not amuse Val. What was charming and quaint in a piece of brass and wood didn’t sit so well on a flesh-and-blood person.
Now Val knew who was at the root of Charlotte’s disquiet. In all the time they were together, in the few private meetings he’d had with her and the public ones, she’d never intimated that her father was anything except a strict but loving parent.
Did she not trust Val, or were spies set around her all the time?
Val had no answer, but when Ivan restored her to her aunt and Darius came back to their small group, his mien was serious, devoid of the amusement he customarily wore. “We should go now,” he said. “Do you mind walking as far as the Garden?” His clipped tones expressed how Val felt.
As soon as they were out in the open air, Val demanded, “Did you see that?”
“I’m not blind,” Darius answered. “I was beginning to see why you were so reluctant to let her go, but after her father came into the room, I understood how you could have missed it for so long.”
Ivan, striding by their side, gave his morsel. “As a totally disinterested party, I’d say she is terrified of her father.”
“I can remember times when I was terrified of our father,” Darius observed, “but I would never allow him to control me to that extent.”
Val pushed aside the heavy skirts of his evening coat, feeling the reassuring hilt of his sword. They had given them up for the ball, but collected them on leaving the house. If he’d been in possession of it in that ballroom, Val might well have run the Duke of Rochfort through. “Charlotte has spirit. She has demonstrated it quite clearly, but never in the presence of her father. She has always retreated.”
They rounded a corner at speed and nearly collided with a footman in livery hurrying the other way. He muttered at them as Ivan stood aside, but the men took no notice. Another time they might have boxed him, trapped him into the upright box belonging to a night watchman and pushed it against the wall so he couldn’t escape, but Val felt ninety tonight, way beyond youthful folly.
“When we were first betrothed,” Val said, thinking aloud to two of the men he trusted as he trusted himself, “I resented Charlotte, I admit it. Papa imposed it as some kind of punishment. And I had the lovely La Venezia in keeping, but not for long. She was ruinously expensive and temperamental as…well, as an operatic soprano, so I rarely got what I was paying for.” He could hardly remember what the renowned beauty he’d hooked from the opera house looked like now. “She was all I could handle at the time. I used my betrothal as an excuse to rid myself of her a month or two later. She was cruel, of course.”
“You should have sent her to Rochfort,” Darius commented. “That would have served him right. Of all the birds of paradise you have shown generosity to, she was the worst.”
“Thank you for that.” Val shrugged. “Charlotte agreed with me when I said we could use each other. She was making me respectable, and I was giving her an excuse not to accept the hand of anyone else, which at the time she said she did not want.”
“Her father was talking to my father at the time,” Ivan said. “Pa is a decent enough man, but I wouldn’t have called him a suitable husband for Charlotte.”
Val shuddered. “No indeed!” They strode down the Strand toward the sins of Covent Garden, passing grand houses and tiny, thrown-up houses, existing side by side. Before the fashionable world had moved to Mayfair, this and Piccadilly were the residential areas of choice, and a few people still lived there, in the grand houses that spoke of a different time, before the neat terraces of their generation.
The light was variable. Torchères set outside the mansions vied with the inky blackness of shop doorways and tiny alleys leading who knew where. Actually Val did know where some of them led. Interesting places, those.
“The arrangement worked for both of us until recent
ly.” He would not explain the rest, even to his brother and his friend.
Until recently, he hadn’t kissed her or felt the warmth of her body, the heat of her mouth. She had not allowed him past the battlements she kept around her. He had not known about the other Charlotte—the warmer, softer, more desirable Charlotte who lay waiting for him behind the fortifications.
Were they for him? Why did she keep herself protected from the world so carefully? Everyone had some kind of facade, but not as much as Lady Charlotte Engles, and not so perfect that even her betrothed failed to notice it.
Questions thronged his mind, and it angered Val that he had no answers. He wanted more of the woman he’d begun to uncover, too late it appeared. But he was ready to go on this wild-goose chase tonight and discover if there was any truth in what his brother suspected.
As they neared the Garden area, a gust from the river let the dank smell wash over them, but they were too used to it to let it bother them. Lights became more frequent, and so did people. Groups of men wandered the narrow threading streets leading to the great open area that, as well as a magnificent church and the Opera House, contained some of the seediest, most depraved houses in London. Val should know. He’d sampled most of them in his time.
A man grew tired of such pleasures, though if anyone had said that to him five years ago, Val would have laughed them to scorn. The sound of drunken revelry drifted out from open doors, and women stood outside, touting for business, bragging about the quality of the wares within.
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