Romancing The Rake (Brotherhood 0f The Black Tartan Book 2)

by Nichole Van

  “Allow me to guess?” he asked, turning to Sophie and fixing her with another of those friendly looks that set Rafe’s teeth on edge. “Rafe here has insisted ye call him Lennon at every turn?”

  Sophie laughed. Again. “Why yes, he has. How very astute of you.”

  “Thank you. I am very astute.” Alex gave a decidedly flirtatious grin. “In fact, ye should probably throw off this lummox here.” He jutted his chin toward Rafe. “Find yerself a cleverer man—”

  “Alex.” Rafe pitched his voice low in warning.

  “Yes, Lennon?” Alex returned, face entirely too innocent, blithely ignoring the thunderous Beware! in Rafe’s eyes. The wretch.

  Ewan nodded, as if thinking. “And why are ye in the company of the bonnie Lady Sophronia?” He shot her a far-too-appraising look before darting his gaze back to Rafe.

  Ah.

  It finally sank in. The pair of bawbags he called friends were teasing him, deliberately cozying up to Lady Sophie in order to wind him up.

  He glared at them; he was onto their games.

  “I seek Dr. Ross, as well,” Sophie answered Ewan’s question herself.

  Sophie openly explained to his friends the purpose of her quest, Lord Mainfeld and his brood, her own wishes.

  Alex was tapping his fingers as she finished. “You present lofty goals, Lady Sophronia. Though I dislike being the harbinger of bad news, ye must know it is extremely unlikely that Dr. Ross would remember who else had been in the house while delivering a baby over twenty-five years ago.”

  “I know.” She smiled. “Or perhaps you would say it’s a wee bitty daft.”

  Rafe chuckled.

  Silence for a moment.

  “I do have one question, however,” Alex said. “Why would a physician who specializes in diseases of the mind have been the one tae deliver a countess’s child?”

  19

  Sophie studied the row house as Rafe extended a hand to assist her from the chaise.

  So this was the current residence of Dr. Ross?

  It was an older building outside Old Town proper, tucked into Drummond Street between the University of Edinburgh and the infirmary. A generally respectable address, Rafe had told her. Not a fancy townhouse in New Town but not nearly as ramshackle as the tenements beside the castle either.

  Sophie blinked her weary eyes. She had experienced one of those nights where one arises just as tired as one went to bed. So many thoughts churned through her mind, it rendered sleep elusive—Rafe’s concerns about those mysterious missives and the horrors of their trip to the South Pacific; her own anticipation for today and calling upon Dr. Ross; the reality that she would likely part ways with Rafe after their visit to the doctor. After all, their journey complete, there would be no reason to remain together.

  And what did it say about the state of her feelings that the thought upset her more than she would have supposed?

  Somewhere during the long night, she had come to the rather startling realization—

  Foolish woman that she was . . . she had begun to forfeit her heart to Lord Rafe Gilbert.

  Had she learned nothing over the past four years?!

  This trip had begun as a journey to find herself—to go back to her beginning and piece herself back together, bit by bit—but she had never anticipated that this would be the result.

  All of it had kept her tossing and turning for hours.

  Though given the dark circles under Rafe’s eyes, he had likely experienced a similar night.

  Morning light washed the street as carts clacked over the cobblestones. A faint mist rose from the damp pavement where the sunlight hit, giving the city a hazy, otherworldly appearance.

  Rafe offered her his arm before taking the stairs to the front door of the townhouse.

  They both had such high expectations for the visit today. Sophie still longed to know the identity of her natural father. But her small wishes paled in comparison to Rafe’s quest, and so the bulk of her prayers now rested with him. She desperately hoped that Dr. Ross could recommend a true cure for the duchess, anything to help the lady escape the cage of her marriage.

  If anyone deserved a miracle today, it was Rafe and his mother.

  As if sensing her mental pleading, Rafe shot her a strained grin before rapping the knocker.

  He had opted to wear his kilt again today, choosing to blend in more as a Scotsman than to stand out as a wealthy, London gentleman. A dark length of plaid wrapped around his hips and chest. Jamie’s Tartan, Rafe had called it, a fabric woven in memory of the lad who had sacrificed his life for theirs. It spoke to the heart of the Brotherhood that they would cherish Jamie’s memory so.

  A shuffling sound came from beyond the front door, followed by the snick of the lock being thrown.

  An elderly woman in a mobcap and apron opened the door, strands of gray hair escaping here and there.

  “May I help ye?” she asked, brows drawn down, gaze taking in Rafe’s great kilt and Sophie’s elegant London finery.

  “Aye,” Rafe replied, deploying his most charming smile, dimples popping. “We seek Dr. John Ross. Is he at liberty tae receive us?”

  The woman blinked, as if momentarily stunned. Sophie could hardly blame her. Lord Rafe’s smile at full force felt a bit like a blast of summer sunlight—deliciously warm and dazzling.

  “Dr. Ross, ye say?” she finally said. “I dinnae ken that will be possible as Dr. Ross hasnae lived here for at least a year.”

  Sophie’s heart hiccupped at the news.

  Truly? Again?

  Where had the man gone this time?

  But Rafe held his smile.

  The woman blinked again and then shook her head, as if to clear her scrambled wits.

  She moved to shut the door. “I bid ye good day.”

  “Wait, please.” Rafe held up a staying hand, somehow deepening those dimples.

  Heavens, he was potent when he wished to be.

  The woman wavered, the dimples doing their work.

  “It is urgent that we speak with the doctor.” Rafe’s tone took on a cajoling edge. “Do ye know where we might find him?”

  The woman licked her lips. “I cannae rightly say.”

  She shot Rafe another look before beginning to shut the door, though more hesitantly this time.

  Rafe held out his other hand, a gold sovereign in his fingers. “Would this assist in loosening your tongue?” He punctuated the question with another blast of dimpled charm.

  The woman stared at him and then the coin. She darted a cautious glance behind her, as if ensuring the hall was empty. Then, she took a half-step out the door, joining Rafe and Sophie on the stoop. She snatched the sovereign from Rafe’s fingers.

  “Dr. Ross is like to be living with his sister in the Highlands, west of Aberdeen,” she murmured, slipping the sovereign into her apron pocket. “Drathes Castle, just outside Aboyne—”

  “Margaret!” A crotchety man’s voice rang down the hall. “Are you yammering away with that wee Alice again?”

  Unlike Margaret, the man’s voice held a gentrified, English edge.

  The woman startled and practically jumped back inside the house.

  “Never ye mind, Robert!” she called back, hand on the door. “’Tis none of yer affair—”

  “Of course, ’tis my affair, woman!”

  A tall man with a ragged mop of white hair strode out of a doorway to the left of the entrance hall.

  “Now see here, Robert, I was just helping these fine people with some directions.” Margaret turned to the older man, shooing him away with flicking wrists. “No harm done, as ye can see.”

  Rafe hissed in a breath at Sophie’s side.

  The elderly man similarly froze, eyes drilling into Rafe.

  And then he shifted to look at Sophie. He rocked back a step, as if in surprise. But he recovered quickly and took two strong strides forward, eyebrows rapidly drawing to a ‘V.’

  He stopped beside Margaret, nostrils flaring, eyes dragging up
and down Rafe’s kilt.

  Rafe had gone still as a statue beside Sophie, all smiles gone, his arm steel under her hand.

  “Lord Rafe,” the man said, tone chilly.

  Shock chased Sophie’s spine.

  Lord Rafe?!

  “Beadle,” Rafe replied, the name spat like a curse.

  Who was this man?

  “How may I be of assistance, my lord?” the elderly man—Beadle, Sophie supposed—asked.

  Rafe shifted the weight on his feet. “I believe that we have all that we need—”

  “Pardon,” a new voice said behind them. A deep, menacing sort of voice that made the hairs on the back of Sophie’s neck lurch upright in alarm. “Do yous lot need anything in truth? Or should I assist ye in taking yerselves off?”

  Sophie turned to find another man behind them, standing on the walk between them and their carriage. Unlike Beadle, this fellow was younger and stocky, built like a pugilist. He wasn’t dressed in a kilt, but the red wool bonnet on his head proclaimed his nationality before he opened his mouth. The man’s eyes, however, were anything but welcoming.

  Rafe froze further at Sophie’s side, every muscle tensed for action.

  What was going on? Who were these people? How did they know Rafe?

  “Your father is well, I trust?” Beadle asked, bringing their attention back to him. The unknown thug remained at their backs, a threatening presence.

  “Kendall is well,” Rafe replied, though his clipped tone clearly added the word unfortunately to the end.

  Kendall? Beadle knew Kendall? How was the duke involved in this? Sophie swallowed, hand tightening on Rafe’s arm.

  “Give him my regards when next you see him.” Beadle’s sharp gaze darted to her, something hard and unyielding there that set Sophie’s skin to crawling. This Beadle fellow looked at her the same way Kendall did.

  Who was this man to the duke? Who was he to Rafe?

  And why the looming bruiser behind?

  “I will. Thank you for your time,” Rafe finally replied. “Good day.”

  He nodded at Margaret, before turning around. He stared down the pugilist behind them, before leading Sophie back to the waiting chaise.

  Sophie allowed Rafe to hand her into the carriage, noting that Beadle and Margaret remained on the stoop, watching them, the unknown man saying something, his distinctive red hat bobbing even at a distance.

  “Walk on,” Rafe ordered the postillion before climbing in beside her.

  Rafe waited until the chaise turned a corner before sinking his head back with a low groan, letting loose a stream of profanity that went on for a solid minute.

  What just happened?

  Rafe’s expletives and the tense reactions of everyone involved were a rather clear indication that he considered the situation a catastrophe.

  “Damnation! Of all the blasted, rotten luck!” Rafe shook his head, over and over. “This is an utter disaster. How is this even possible! Beadle?! Bloody hell!”

  He rattled away for another moment.

  “Rafe?” She placed a hand on his arm. “Who is Beadle?”

  “Mr. Robert Beadle”—he spat the man’s name—“was the butler for our Mayfair townhouse for over twenty years. He began as a valet to my father when my sire was abroad on his Grand Tour. Eventually, Kendall made him butler over his entire London household. Beadle retired three years ago. I had no idea my father had pensioned him off in Edinburgh.” He shook his head one more time. “Beadle will surely report seeing me to my father, the bastard.”

  Oh! “That is truly awful. After everything you’ve done to hide this trip—”

  “Precisely! There is no doubt that Beadle is currently penning a letter to Kendall. Beadle has always been my father’s man. He’s impossibly loyal. If I had shown up kitted out as Lord Rafe, perhaps inquiring after Beadle’s health and seeming solicitous as a family friend, maybe Beadle would have been slower to mention it. But arriving dressed as a Highlander, asking after Dr. Ross, clearly not expecting to see Beadle . . . it’s far too suspicious for him not to report it immediately.”

  Rafe’s voice drifted into cursing again. He leaned his head back against the seat, pounding his skull against the soft cushions, eyes staring sightlessly at the carriage roof overhead.

  “Everything we’ve done to hide this trip from my father . . . demolished.” He made an exploding gesture with his hands. “My sire is too intelligent not to immediately understand that I am attempting to thwart him. He’ll ask questions, threaten my mother . . .”

  Rafe pressed his palms into his eye sockets, suppressing a frustrated growl.

  Seeing his obvious distress did something to Sophie’s chest. How was this the same rake she had disdained not even two weeks before? No longer a Rakus lasciviosus, but a Virum nobilis—a noble gentleman who simply wanted his mother’s happiness and the freedom to govern his own life.

  “Who was the other man? The one who came up behind us on the front stoop?”

  “The brawny looking fellow? I have no idea. I have never seen him before, but that means little. My father likes to hire former pugilists as grooms to enforce his demands.”

  “Well, the man certainly felt threatening. His red bonnet seemed emblematic of his temper. Bruiser of a man, that one.”

  “Bruiser? Fitting.” Rafe flashed her a fleeting smile. “Bruiser isn’t even the worst of it, though. Beadle saw ye—”

  “Me? Why should that matter?”

  “I think he recognized ye.”

  Sophie frowned. “How would your London butler of years past know a younger daughter of the Earl of Mainfeld upon sight? I look nothing like either of my supposed parents, and our fathers give one another a wide berth.”

  Rafe remained silent, his hands still over his eyes.

  “Rafe?” she prompted. “Why would Beadle recognizing me upset you? What aren’t you telling me?”

  Nausea climbed Rafe’s throat. Of all the damned abominable luck.

  Robert bloody Beadle.

  “I feel that I am missing a critical piece of this puzzle, Rafe. Please tell me,” Sophie said again, shifting on the seat beside him. The carriage bumped over cobblestones returning to New Town and Alex’s house.

  Rafe huffed a soft laugh.

  What a tangled web.

  He couldn’t very well tell her the full truth: Well, you see Sophie darling, I have loved you quite madly for at least four years now. My father, ever astute, realized this eons ago. Last time he caught us together, I was banished to the far side of the planet. What will he do this time?

  Somehow, someway, Beadle had recognized her. Beadle had made it his business to know Rafe’s life. The old butler had probably followed Rafe one day, seen him with Sophie. After all, his father had always had an almost uncanny knowledge of Rafe’s comings and goings. Hence the need for such an elaborate disguise on this trip north.

  All for naught.

  That nausea churned in his stomach, a toxic mix of frustration and impotence and blinding, seething rage.

  What was he to do?

  The chaise rocked onward. The press of Sophie’s body beside him, the comfort of her presence . . . a haunting glimpse of a future he would never have, never experience.

  Bitterness and anger washed over him, acidic in its fury.

  How dare his sire commandeer his future like this? How much longer could he tolerate this? How could a man live such a life, forever bound to one he so hated?

  He pressed his shaking hands over his face, sucking in deep breaths, trying to force down his more savage thoughts.

  The ones that whispered terrible things like . . . a convenient accident, his father’s death, and no one would ever know.

  Pity he wasn’t prepared quite yet to enact a Greek tragedy. Rafe was too much his mother’s son. She had raised him to be a better man than this. No matter how convenient Kendall’s untimely demise would be.

  “Rafe?” Sophie’s voice, soft and low.

  As ever, just the sound of h
er voice was a lit fuse down his spine, sparking the nerves in his body.

  “There’s no help for it, Sophie.” He let his hands fall. “The damage has been done. My father will find out about this particular escapade, and the consequences will be spectacular.”

  “Will he hurt your mother?”

  He laughed, a bitter sound. “Perhaps. Just enough to hurt me, the bastard. And then he’ll demand even more, put me on a shorter leash. Force me to marry—”

  “Marry?!”

  “Aye. He has it in his head that I will marry Miss Sykes—”

  “Lord Sykes’s daughter?”

  “The very same. I do not wish to disparage Miss Sykes, but marriage should be based on more than a handshake between our fathers.”

  “I had thought arranged marriages a thing of the past.”

  “So had I,” Rafe snorted. “And even if I can escape the matrimonial noose, I will remain at Kendall’s beck and call. He relishes giving me distasteful tasks . . . evicting tenants, enacting punishments, anything to sully my soul.” A knot settled in his stomach.

  “That is truly terrible, Rafe.” Sophie frowned, fingers tapping. “Moreover, I cannot seem to reconcile with this level of a coincidence.”

  “Pardon?”

  “It seems nearly impossible that your father’s devoted servant resides at the same address where Dr. John Ross once lived. There is no connection between the two men, is there? Between Kendall and Dr. Ross?”

  Intelligent lass.

  Rafe pursed his lips, his own frown deepening, mind churning.

  “I’m an eejit,” he said, nodding slowly. “I had never heard of this Dr. Ross until Alex mentioned him, but the puzzle is even deeper than that.”

  “How so?”

  He drummed his fingers, forcing himself to think through the frustration seething in his brain. What was going on here?

  “Robert Beadle, as a long-time loyal lap-dog, would have received a pension,” he said. “The key piece of my father’s pension promise is almost always a house of the servant’s own. The dukedom owns thousands of properties throughout the country.”

  “So why wasn’t Beadle sent to one of those?” Sophie asked. “Why a townhouse in Edinburgh instead?”