Rogues to Riches (Books 1-6)

by Ridley, Erica

  “I can’t do it.” Faith gripped the back of a chair. “We can’t do it.”

  “What choice did I have?” Dahlia eyes were pleading. “I’m so sorry, Faith. You don’t have to come to lessons anymore.”

  Of course she did. Dance lessons were the girls’ favorite part of the week, and up until now, one of Faith’s favorites, too. She wouldn’t let her feelings for Hawkridge ruin that. Even if it meant her choices were to bow out completely…or to find herself back in his arms.

  Dahlia bit her lip. “Simon’s new schedule precludes him from continuing on and my brother rarely has the time to substitute once the Season begins. When Hawkridge offered—”

  “He offered?” Faith couldn’t believe her ears. “How would he even know we were teaching the girls to dance?”

  “He didn’t. He offered to wield a hammer or a broom or a mop.” Dahlia shrugged. “I cannot recall his exact words, but the essence was him volunteering to help in any capacity needed.” She looked up from her embroidery with sympathetic eyes. “You know how much help we need. Should I truly have turned him away?”

  Faith rubbed a hand over her face. Of course they could not turn him away. No matter how long she’d been angry at him.

  Or how badly a small, secret part of her heart already longed to see him again.

  Chapter 7

  The following afternoon, Hawk was en route to pore over his ledgers in search of a miracle, as he had done every day for the past several years. In his distracted state, he nearly walked directly into one of their few remaining servants.

  The young girl held a heavy silver tray in her arms and bore dark circles under her eyes, but she somehow managed to smile and bob at her master as if she couldn’t be more delighted to deliver her heavy load.

  Perhaps she was. After all, she had survived the latest round of heart-wrenching sackings when Hawk realized even their pared down staff was more extravagant than they could afford to keep on.

  “Let me take that,” he said impulsively.

  There could be no doubt the laden tray was headed to his mother. The dowager refused to rise from her bed each day until she consumed a pot of fresh-brewed tea and broke her fast. It had been a ritual for as long as Hawk could remember.

  “’Tis no bother at all,” protested the maid, but she gratefully allowed him to relieve her of her burden. “Thank you. I shall return to the kitchen to work on supper.”

  Hawk’s jaw tightened as he realized this maid also pulled shifts as cook and housekeeper.

  He nodded to dismiss her and headed toward his mother’s chambers. Only when he glimpsed the golden glow of particles sparkling between the slender cracks in the curtains did he realize how late the hour had become. Mother had never been one to rise before noon at the earliest, but surely four in the afternoon bordered on excessive, given the Hawkridge family no longer attended evening soirées.

  His mother lay in repose amongst a heap of silk-covered feather pillows in the center of her bed. Her eyes were closed as if she had not heard him enter the room or set the tray on the sideboard within arm’s reach of the mattress.

  Birds chirped outside the shuttered windows, but the air inside the room seemed oddly suffocating. Dust. Stale perfume. Mother’s once brown hair was now mostly gray, her papery skin like dry powder.

  She looked old, he realized suddenly. A sinking feeling twisted in his gut.

  His mother had been the only family he had left for so many years that the thought of losing her had never crossed his mind. He pulled a chair next to the bed and lifted her frail hand in his. Hawk was glad he had not gone straight to the ledgers. A man must not forget to take advantage of the time he had been granted with his remaining parent.

  “I don’t suppose you resolved that silly issue with my credit at the modistes,” she said without opening her eyes.

  How quickly tender moments could turn bittersweet.

  Hawk patted her hand and refused to feel bitter. “Not yet, Mother. I shall let you know the moment you can once again spend indiscriminately.”

  “I should not have had to stop,” she said petulantly. She opened her eyes. “Where’s my tea?”

  “I’ll pour.” He rose to his feet.

  Her too-bright eyes scanned the room. “Where’s the maid? You should sack her if she’s too busy to serve a dowager marchioness her morning tea. You should not be performing manual labor. I’m certain I taught you better values than that.”

  “The maid is following my orders,” he said calmly as he filled an antique cup with steaming tea. “And it is not morning but late afternoon. Why are you still abed?”

  Her chin lifted. “Should I not be? Am I not in charge of my own schedule?”

  “Of course,” Hawk demurred.

  What neither he nor his mother mentioned aloud was that being in charge of her own schedule was a fairly new occurrence in her life.

  Hawk’s father had held very firm ideas on how his marchioness should look, behave, be treated. When the accident claimed him, the new guardian had been even worse. Neither of them had escaped tyranny until Hawk had finally become old enough to take control of the title.

  Yet those dark shadows persisted. Everything Hawk had thought he was inheriting was either in shockingly poor condition or nonexistent. But the thing he hadn’t seen coming, the saving grace bestowed upon him despite all the strife, was the freedom not only to be his own man at long last but also to grant that same freedom to his mother.

  With him, her tone was always sharp, but Hawk was determined to allow her to speak her mind. They both knew he held the title and thus could do as he pleased. But Hawk had no interest in becoming a tyrant.

  Instead, he handed his mother her tea and retook his seat at her side. Their financial straits weren’t her fault. They had his father and his uncle to thank for that. As soon as he’d secured enough investors to open his port, he would finally be able to spoil his mother as a dowager marchioness deserved.

  Until then, he would do what he could to keep her safe and happy.

  “Did you stay up late reading again?” he asked.

  “I tossed and turned worrying about my son’s utter lack of heirs.” She cupped both pale hands about the warm teacup. “You should have everything a man with your title deserves. A wife. Heirs. And servants,” she added pointedly. “If you tried a little harder I’m sure you could find an heiress with more fortune than we could spend in our lifetimes.”

  Hawk gritted his teeth. He had tried. For years, every night had been spent hunting an heiress. Now, every moment of every day was spent trying to build the new port on a waterfront section of desolate entailed land.

  When the port’s obvious ties to trade barred him from Almack’s assembly rooms, Hawk had lost more than easy access to the Marriage Mart’s famous balls. He’d finally realized he wasn’t going to find an heiress.

  Perhaps once his port was profitable, he could sell it for a small fortune and once again be an attractive catch to the daughter of a peer. Combine the right bloodlines, beget “an heir and a spare” for the title. Everything a lord was duty-bound to do. No matter where his true interest lay.

  But all that was someday in the future. Until then, financing the estate was up to Hawk.

  “Have you given more thought to the dowager cottage in the country?” he asked.

  Mother still hadn’t forgiven him for letting out the primary country estate, and thus far had refused to consider the idea of doing the same with the unused cottage designated for her use.

  Yet until his port was in operation, rents from entailed properties were the only income keeping them afloat.

  “It is beneath us,” Mother snapped, her eyes wild. “I refuse to be talked about worse than we already are. If my countenance appears in a caricature, I’ll lock myself in that dowager cottage and never leave.”

  Hawk leaned back in his chair.

  This was not the first time she had threatened such a thing. Mother was still furious at him for moving them
to an even smaller London townhouse. There was barely room for the two of them, and he wouldn’t even have spared the coin for that much, were he not obliged to attend the House of Lords during the Parliamentary sessions.

  And of course, he could not forbid his mother from being in town for the Season, when all her friends were out spending their fortunes and attending exciting events. Even if not being able to join them was its own special hell. While her friends were out shopping and dancing, the dowager marchioness could only afford activities that did not require ball gowns or jewels. More often, jealousy kept her from leaving the house at all.

  But it was temporary.

  It had to be.

  As soon as the Season was over, however, Hawk would cease paying this rent. He would move his mother to the country and live in a shabby, unrentable property he could neither repair nor sell until the port turned a tidy enough profit to finally give them their lives back. Which it could do in less than a year, if he could just lock in a few more investors before quitting Town.

  The prospect of living so far from London was less enticing than ever. He yearned to find room for himself in the lives of the two people he had thought lost forever: Faith Digby and Simon Spaulding.

  “I took dinner with my brother the other day,” Hawk said without thinking.

  “He’s no son of mine and no brother of yours,” Mother snapped, slamming her teacup back into its saucer with enough force to crack the porcelain. His mother struggled to sit up straight amidst her sea of silk-covered pillows. “You owe no allegiance to a bastard. We are Hawkridges. Never forget what that means.”

  Hawk winced. For a moment, he had forgotten that his relationship with his brother was a part of himself that he could not share with his mother. The thought of having to keep separate versions of himself, to never be able to truly and completely share his life, was as sad now as it had always been.

  But he would not upset his mother with his contrarian ideals. Not when he was just starting to realize how old she was becoming. How little time they might have left. Very soon, Simon could well be Hawk’s only remaining family. He would not waste what time remained with his mother.

  “It’s a beautiful day, Mother.” He leapt up from his chair to throw back a curtain to let her see. “We could take a stroll along the—”

  A wracking cough from the center of the bed interrupted his train of thought. Hawk turned in shock to see his mother convulsing with each violent round of choking coughs.

  He ran to her side and leaned her into his arm in order to lightly pound her back to open her airways.

  She felt like nothing in his arms. The bones of a bird, and not much more weight than one. The light from the open curtain illuminated the gauntness of her cheekbones. Her skin was no longer porcelain, but ghostly. Her body was no stronger than that of a child.

  “What is happening?” he demanded as soon as her coughing fit ceased. “Are you ill? Shall I fetch a doctor?”

  “I’m fine,” she snapped, jerking her frail shoulders from his loose grip. “If we don’t have enough money to pay for my modiste then we certainly don’t need to waste a coin on some quack surgeon.”

  “It was just a cough. Haven’t you ever coughed? And I don’t feel like taking a walk. I feel like being alone.” She waved a thin hand in the direction of her chamber door. “Go about your business, Hawkridge. I order you to leave. I am perfectly fine.”

  Hawk rose to his feet out of respect for his mother, but with the disheartening suspicion her sudden attack was not as meaningless as she would like for him to believe.

  Chapter 8

  Hawk charged into the Cloven Hoof, his blood racing as rapidly as it had when the long-awaited summons first arrived. His investment payout was finally here.

  When Maxwell Gideon had first come to Hawk with the idea of investing in a fledgling gambling salon meant to somehow rival exclusive gentlemen’s clubs like White’s and Boodles’s someday, despite allowing less savory clientele through its doors, Hawk had been unconvinced of the Cloven Hoof’s potential appeal to the high-in-the-instep upper crust.

  Hawk, however, had been desperate. He’d come up with the idea of creating a thriving port but, as yet, had been unable to secure enough financing to begin. Only he could see future fortune amidst the jungle of weeds covering the rocky coast.

  That was to say, only Hawk and Maxwell Gideon.

  So they’d struck a devil’s bargain. Hawk would invest in the gaming hell for a guaranteed two hundred percent profit, and when the money came due, Gideon would match the payout as an investment into developing Hawk’s port.

  Today, the money was due.

  He elbowed through the crowd of drunkards and gamblers, excusing his brusqueness by promising to stop and chat as soon as his meeting with Gideon was through. To Hawk’s delight, the Cloven Hoof appeared busier than ever.

  His step lightened. If business was good for Gideon, that should mean the return on investment should be good for Hawk. Perhaps his return would be even greater than double the initial sum. If so, he would be able to move the development schedule up by months. Open the port well ahead of schedule. Finally put an end to years of wading against the riptide of crushing debt.

  But no matter how much or little his investment in the Cloven Hoof had earned, his primary goal was to send a doctor to check on his mother’s health whether she admitted her symptoms or not.

  Although days had gone by since the last of his mother’s coughing attacks—at least as far as he knew—Hawk still wanted to ensure a medical professional looked her over and assure him nothing was wrong.

  The tall oak door to the Cloven Hoof’s back office was ajar by a few inches. Hawk rapped his knuckles on the thick doorjamb.

  “What is it?” snarled a deep voice from within the depths of the office.

  Hawk pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  To call a man like Maxwell Gideon intractable or formidable was akin to claiming the sea to be somewhat damp. The Cloven Hoof and its infamous owner were both of deservedly questionable repute. Gideon was as impossible to predict as the turn of his cards, and just as likely to change the outlook of one’s fortunes overnight.

  Or, in Hawk’s case, over an investment of five long years.

  Gideon glanced up from a few small stacks of obsessively neat piles of paper and motioned for him to enter. “Lord Hawkridge. Do come in.”

  Hawk closed the door behind him and blinked as a total and eerie stillness descended upon the shuttered office.

  Gideon preferred to work in complete silence. To conduct business from within the eye of the storm.

  Hawk would never get used to the drastic change. Or the irony of a vice merchant cloistering himself inside walls designed to combat the din of his own gamblers.

  There was neither a decanting port nor a glass of chilled ale on Gideon’s desk, but rather a simple mug of black coffee. The walls of the office were bare of adornments. Every surface sparkled. Hawk imagined Gideon hired a team of employees to ensure every file was perfectly square, every seal perfectly centered. Everything within sight was relentlessly managed and in its place, just like Gideon ran his entire business, and likely, his life.

  He seated himself on the other side of the wide desk.

  “There is a new opportunity I believe could interest you,” Gideon began without preamble.

  “I am not interested in a new opportunity.” Hawk leaned forward and said slowly and firmly, “I’m here to reap the rewards of the last opportunity…and to collect your portion as well.”

  “Don’t be hasty,” Gideon said, his legendary calm in place. “Everything in its time. I would like to ask your opinion about—”

  “You are not listening. I am truly out of time.” Hawk’s voice was hard. “Is the money here or not?”

  Gideon leaned back in his chair and touched the tips of his fingers together, unperturbed by the frank coldness of Hawk’s question. One could be forgiven for almost believing him a completely diff
erent man than the laughing, dark-eyed rogue who had discussed the new Dulwich Picture Gallery over drinks with Zachary not a fortnight earlier.

  But that was friendship. This was business. And Maxwell Gideon did not blur lines.

  Neither did Hawk.

  “I repeat,” he said quietly. “Do you have the money?”

  Gideon’s cool gaze and hard features did not so much as twitch. Vauxhall Gardens boasted carved statues with greater range of emotion than the blackguard currently displayed.

  Hawk stared back at him without backing down.

  These walls had seen more secret deals brokered than he could even imagine. Gideon had his thumb in all of the pies. His office might be closed off to the noise of his clients, but Maxwell Gideon was well-informed about everything that happened under his roof. He spread the word about opportunities to the right ears, gathered speculative funds from the right investors, took an impressive percentage from every deal.

  And now it was Hawk’s turn to benefit from the arrangement.

  Gideon gazed back at him without blinking. “Yes, I have the money.”

  “Good.” Even if all Hawk had earned was a measly shilling, he wasn’t walking out of this office without it. “Double, as promised?”

  “Double,” Gideon agreed. “For now.”

  Hawk frowned. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means,” Gideon said as he leaned back in his chair. “That I have another opportunity. You have an opportunity, that is. What I have is a counter offer.”

  “I am not interested. Prepare the bank draft at once.”

  Gideon shook his head. “Hear me out.”

  “I don’t have time,” Hawk said simply. “My mother is ill. The port is nearly a year away from opening. And my father’s overdue accounts are still—”

  “You’ll earn back six times your investment,” Gideon interrupted. “Six times the amount as it currently stands.”