by Erica Ridley
About women, about cards, and especially about surprise endings.
He had been fond of her ever since, although he thought of her more like a little sister than a marriageable woman.
Nonetheless, Bryony had failed to correct her mother’s inaccurate assumption that a few exchanged words with the duke might become the basis for future matrimony. It would break Mother’s heart to know that Lambley’s true desire was for Bryony to teach him how to memorize the cards between every shuffle.
“When is the next masquerade?” she asked.
“In a fortnight,” he answered. “Shall I save a place for you in the cardroom?”
She shook her head. “If I can make it, I will elbow my way in.”
He bowed.
No sooner had Lambley left her side then a new shadow fell into Bryony’s path.
“Talking to dukes now, are we?” brayed Phineas Mapleton, the most self-important member of the ton.
He was a bully and a gossip. The sort who made rude, outlandish statements just to get a reaction. The only reason he was accepted anywhere was because his aunt was a Patroness and he was related to those with titles.
“Was that a duke?” she replied in a bored voice. “So good you were here to eavesdrop. Never say you don’t have someone to stand up with you this set, Mapleton.”
He snorted. “The only way a duke would stand up with you is if you were in disguise at one of Lambley’s masquerades and they didn’t know any better.”
Bryony cut him a flat look. “Who have I been dancing with, phantoms? This is the first rest I’ve had all evening.”
“They just feel sorry for you,” Mapleton scoffed. “How many Seasons have you had? You’d be married by now if anyone were interested.”
She clenched her teeth to keep the retorts she did not dare say aloud from escaping her mouth.
There had been plenty of interest. Just not from Bryony’s side. She’d participated in several flirtations that had never lived up to her hopes, endured a handful of passionless kisses, and carefully dissuaded the cleverest of the lot from offering for her hand and ruining her life forever.
She was unmarried because she’d wanted to remain unmarried for as long as possible. And she certainly did not require the opinions of random men on the topic.
She gave him a flat look.
“Ooh,” he cooed in a falsetto. “Has the truth hurt your feelings? Perhaps you haven’t found a match because there is no match for you. I’ve heard you discussing commercial businesses and acts of Parliament. What sane gentleman would seek a bride with such a mannish personality?”
To the devil with him. The man she chose to be her husband would be happy with the arrangement, indeed.
“Imbecile.” Bryony glowered at Phineas Mapleton in disgust. She didn’t mind being who she was. He was the one who could not be tolerated.
“Don’t wrinkle your nose at me,” Mapleton said in pique. “Ladies should mind their attitudes. A tongue as sharp as yours is at its most attractive when hidden behind a violin.”
“You’ll never know,” she snapped, as she curled her shaking hands into fists. “You have just lost the right to attend this coming Grenville musicale as well as all future Grenville functions of any kind.”
“You shrew!” he gasped in outrage. “When I tell my friends—”
“Anyone who sides with you on this matter loses their invitation as well,” Bryony said coldly.
He reared back in horror. “I cannot be the only one not in attendance. I shall be pitied!”
“I thought you were a stallion among pups,” she replied innocently, referring to an unflattering caricature that had made the rounds a few weeks earlier, mocking him for boasting he was better than his peers.
He flung himself about and marched off, nose held high.
Bryony didn’t let her placid smile drop until he was well out of view. She had won that round, but it still felt as though she had lost. Mapleton was an insufferable blackguard and a plague on humanity.
But what if she couldn’t find the right man before her parents chose for her?
Chapter 5
One of Max’s favorite moments each day was the feeling of peace and pride in anticipation in the hour before the Cloven Hoof opened for business.
He didn’t see his gambling salon as an empty room, but as the twilight sky just before the stars appeared. It was not the calm before the storm or the last flicker of light before being engulfed in darkness, but a nexus of possibility, of promise, that rumbled through the walls and reverberated through the very air.
When the hack dropped him at the stones just in front of the Cloven Hoof, Vigo was already guarding the door. A movement at the window indicated at least one of the other employees was inside readying the interior for an influx of patrons.
“Did you make it to Vauxhall?” Max asked in lieu of a proper greeting.
Vigo’s eyes lit up. “That I did. We adored the balloon launch. Thank you for suggesting it.”
“Who doesn’t love balloons?” Max asked with a smile.
Vigo raised his brows. “Did you attend?”
“Next time,” Max promised and let himself through the door before there were any more questions.
The large, burly watchman guarding the entrance to the Cloven Hoof was almost as infamous as the club itself. Due to the requirements of his post, Vigo rarely exchanged a word of conversation with the hundreds of gentlemen—and not-quite-gentlemen—who entered these walls or were turned away at the door.
He was its drawbridge, its gate and keeper. Omnipresent, feared, and respected.
Max doubted it had occurred to anyone who had come in contact with Vigo to wonder what the man did when not lurking next to the gambling den’s entrance. He suspected “attending balloon launches with a French poet” would not be high on the list of guesses.
Max would have to think of a way to include Vigo more. His post had to be lonely. Max sighed. There was so much still to do before the Cloven Hoof was perfect.
The original goal behind this particular den of vice might have been to create a gentleman’s club so exclusive even the aristocrats far outside Max’s league would prostrate themselves trying to gain entrance. The secondary goal of ensuring men of high and low background interacted within these walls as equals had succeeded far better than Max had dared to hope.
And yet there were so many people still left out in the cold. The not-quite-gentlemen with deep enough pockets to gamble at the same table as viscounts and earls might be treated as temporary colleagues, but the man who guarded the door, the man who poured the ale, the man who swept up cigar ash and broken wine glasses, all of them were still invisible.
Maybe it was not possible to cross such lines. Perhaps it was a foolish dream. But Max would keep trying, keep pushing, keep smudging the boundaries that segregated people from each other.
Further on the list were men like himself. Men who didn’t even count as not-quite-gentlemen. Sons of seamstresses and dockworkers, with the same amount of brains as anyone else but only enough coin in their pocket for a single round of loo.
Max’s father had been a dockworker all his life. Every penny he owned, he’d given to the family, then gone right back out in the rain and the wind and the sleet to try to earn another coin. In the end, it had killed him. Never a day off, never an increase in pay. The titled nob who owned the dock never bothered to check on his condition until it was too late.
Their mother was the reason his sister had learned to sew. More than that, Mother was the reason there had still been broth to drink after their father had died and his meager salary had stopped coming. She had cried the morning Max left to work on the docks himself, but had no choice but to let him go. There wasn’t enough money to go around, and he was big enough to earn a halfpenny of his own.
And now he was halfway to his dream.
It wouldn’t happen overnight, of course. Nor was the current salon big enough for everything he hoped to accomplish. That w
as why he had bid on both this building and the neighboring property, which had been under the control of a different landowner and left empty to rot.
Max was happy to step in. In order to create a communal crossroad between the workers and the wealthy, the guests would need plenty of room in which to intermingle. Significantly more space than what the current venue could offer. Purchasing both was an elegant solution.
The slender addition was smaller than the current property, but the shared wall dividing the two meant that expansion was not only possible but inevitable. He would open the other side as a slightly less exclusive annex, and then create interior walkways between the two to encourage visiting both sides.
Combining the two venues into the sort of establishment he’d always dreamed of running would be visible proof of success in an unfriendly world that had held his family down every step of the way.
But to do so, he needed both deeds.
Somehow, his extremely generous offer for the Cloven Hoof’s land had been outbid without any prior indication of outside interest. Overnight, Max’s straightforward plan had turned from a certainty into a disaster. The new landlord refused to sell, and the neighboring property was too small to serve as a replacement.
He needed both, and was determined to make it happen. But until then, he needed to keep his plans for expansion a secret.
If the silent investor had any idea, he would refuse to relinquish the deed at any price. Either to keep Max beholden to him financially, or to ensure such a mix of classes and backgrounds could not occur so close to the fashionable set’s front doors.
Max headed straight to his office. He would write yet another letter requesting an audience with the owner.
His friend Heath Grenville had brokered the original contract that had enabled the establishment of the Cloven Hoof, and was the only person who knew the identity of the man whose purse strings had both granted Max’s childhood dreams and stood in the way of achieving something new. Somehow, Max needed to break through.
He pushed open his office door. Familiar darkness greeted him. He lit the interior sconce just inside the door with one of the candles lining the corridor, then slipped inside for a few moments of peace before the day’s work began.
“Minus ten points for failing to be punctual,” came a bored female voice from the direction of the settee.
Max whirled to face the same woman in lad’s clothing from the other night.
“Are you judging me like a horse?” he asked in disbelief. “Minus twenty points for disguising your body but not your voice, and minus one hundred for daring to return without an invitation.”
“Fair enough,” she agreed. “But I get a hundred-point bonus for realizing I was never going to receive an invitation and having the fortitude to come anyway. It all evens out.”
“It’s not even at all,” Max spluttered. “How did you get in? Do not attempt to say the door was unlocked.”
“The door was very locked,” she assured him. “So locked that I couldn’t get out. I sneaked in with the late crowd before closing and fell asleep on your sofa.”
His jaw clenched shut. He supposed he should be grateful the person pointing out unexpected holes in his security was a young lady, not an arsonist or a murderer.
He did not feel grateful.
First thing tomorrow, his staff would suffer through a very displeased warning about checking the club carefully before locking up for the night.
“You should not be here.” He loomed over her as menacingly as possible. Although she was obviously an eccentric and seemed to be harmless, she did not belong anywhere near his club.
She peered up at him with a sunny smile. “Says who?”
“Says the world. This is a gentleman’s club.”
“Mm, but isn’t it your gentlemen’s club? If you say I can be here, then I can be here.”
“An astute observer might notice that I have said no such thing,” he countered.
She lowered her gaze. “Do you want me to leave?”
“Yes,” he said icily. “The lack of invitation was deliberate. Good-bye.”
A knock sounded upon the door. “Mr. Gideon, there is an issue with today’s delivery.”
Normally, Max would invite his barkeeper in to chat about any issue that affected the club.
Normally, Max did not have an impertinent lady in lad’s clothing reclining upon his settee.
He opened the door a crack. “What is it?”
A frown of confusion flitted across his bartender’s face. “Did I hear voices? I didn’t see anyone else come in. I can come back if you’re busy with—”
“I’m never too busy to correct an issue. What happened with the delivery?”
“We were meant to receive two cases of Rioja and one of Madeira. They have bolloxed the shipment, and sent French wines instead. One Bordeaux, two of Champagne. It has doubled the cost. Should I send it all back? We did not budget for these prices. On the other hand, we cannot run out of wine.”
Before Max could respond, his uninvited guest opened her mouth.
“The higher price is due to the trade situation with France, but that is also what makes drinking French wine so enticing. Accept everything and double the price per glass. Tell your customers it’s ‘victory wine,’ or spoils of war. We beat Boney and will drink his land dry. Every bubbly drop of it.”
Max ground his teeth together.
Bryony had kept her voice low and raspy, but if the barkeeper suspected for one second that the admittedly brilliant solution had come from a woman sequestered in the back of a gentleman’s club—
“’Victory wine,’ sir?” the barkeeper stammered.
“Go with ‘spoils of war,’” Max said firmly. “Play up the plunder angle.”
The barkeeper nodded. And tried to peek about Max’s shoulder. “Who is—”
“My neighbor’s nephew,” Max said quickly, and all but shut the door in his barkeeper’s face.
When he whirled to face Bryony, her countenance was not repentant in the least.
“Plunder! Of course. Far manlier than victory wine.” She nodded at him appreciatively. “We make a great team.”
He heroically refrained from shaking her. “We make nothing together because we are nothing together. You have to leave before clients arrive.”
“No, I don’t. I’m your neighbor’s nephew. If I leave now, while there’s no other clients to distract them, your staff will have nothing better to do than attempt to make my acquaintance before I exit the building. Once the nightly festivities are underway, they will be far too busy tending the crowd to worry about me.”
“And what about the others?” Max growled. “The dozens of drunken men about to fill the gaming salon?”
“They don’t know your neighbor’s nephew is here and wouldn’t care if they did.” She quirked a brow. “The men who frequent places like this are in search of one of three things.”
Max crossed his arms. “Which are?”
“Relief from one’s creditors, power over others, or escape into a bottle. All of which have everything to do with themselves and nothing to do with me.” She smiled. “It will be easier to slip out when capacity is at maximum than when I am the only outlier within.”
Max did not dignify her assertions with a response.
There was no reason to. She was right and she knew it.
He stalked over to the folding screen behind his desk and carried it to where it did not belong on the other side of the room, in order to block any view of the settee from the desk or the door.
“Do not speak again to anyone but me,” he ordered.
“Very well,” she agreed quickly.
Max frowned. Her acquiescence had been too easy. She was after something else.
“Don’t speak to me either unless I ask you a direct question,” he commanded.
“Boring,” she pronounced and propped her arms behind her head to settle more comfortably into the settee. “I am a distraction whether or
not we converse, so we might as well take advantage of the opportunity to get to know one another.”
He cut her a flat look. “What makes you think I have any wish to know you better?”
She arched her brows in amusement. “You are Maxwell Gideon. You own an infamous den of vice straddling the best and worst parts of London. Both fishermen and dukes have been turned away bodily at your door. If you truly had no wish to get to know me better, I would already be out on my ear.”
He glared back at her. “That doesn’t mean I like you here.”
“You don’t know me well enough to know if you like me or not,” she pointed out reasonably. “Let’s change that.”
“No,” Max said simply. “I am everything you say, and the reason I have achieved what I have is because I do not compromise with anyone. I shall not start with you.”
She thought this over. “You may not compromise your values or principles, but you make business arrangements whenever they are advantageous, do you not?”
He’d walked into that trap. “Not with strange women dressed up as fine gentlemen for reasons I cannot fathom.”
“Can you not? I thought you were clever. Although you’re right, I am strange. I’ve been told it’s my best quality. And my worst, if you ask my mother,” she added under her breath. “In your opinion, what should I have done to improve my costume?”
Max did not answer.
Her costume was not the problem. He had believed her to be a lad at first glance, and anyone who caught a glimpse of her from the corner of his eye would think the same.
The gruff tone she adopted when she spoke in no way resembled an adult gentleman, but that too aided her verisimilitude. One could be forgiven for believing her to be a lad of an age where one’s changing voice could not be trusted from one moment to the next.
But he knew better. There were curves beneath the boxy jacket, brains beneath the too-big hat.
The truth was, he was very much intrigued by the mystery she posed. What reason had she to take notice of fluctuating wine prices during and after the war? What gave her the impertinence to command a member of his staff, or the cynical practicality to have come up with such a solution in the first place? And why the devil was she here at all?
