Cassian grabbed his hand. ‘It was truly never about the bet. But since you ask, it was my greys. That is, I have a matched pair of—’
Daizell sat up, jolting Cassian’s head off his chest. ‘Your greys? You don’t mean the Duke of Severn’s greys?’
‘Mygreys. Yes. Leo wanted it to be a stake that counted. Which it did,’ he added with a grimace. ‘I trained them myself, and they are a wonderful pair.’
‘But you’ve lost them!’
‘Rather them than you,’ Cassian said. ‘If I had delayed, and you had been convicted and gaoled or whipped while I dallied— No. If letting Leo have my greys is the price of finding you then I count it cheap. But I don’t want him to give them to Vier.’
‘Sir James? Why would he do that?’
‘He lost a great deal of money to Vier at cards. He thinks, no doubt correctly, that the horrible man will take my greys in settlement: he covets them. I will not let him have them while there is breath in my body, so I shall have to – ugh. I don’t know what I can do. Leo won’t take my money.’
‘Really?’
‘My uncle always bent over backwards to avoid exploiting his position as my guardian.’ He sighed. ‘It was a difficult path to tread, and hard for my cousins too – growing up inluxury that wasn’t theirs, with their shrimp of a cousin as the special one. Other people might have been resentful about it, or greedy. Leo is, oh, punctilious. He absolutely will not take my money, and if that ends up being painful for me, as now – well, I can understand why he might feel justified in a little jab here and there. But if my greys suffer for it, that would be my fault, and I can’t have that.’
‘Could you not explain that to him?’
‘Leo isn’t sentimental about horses. He thinks they’re just animals. And he does owe Vier a great deal of money, so he’s in rather a bad position. Although given Vier probably cheated to win it—’
‘What?!’ Daizell yelped.
‘Oh goodness, I haven’t told you. I had a time of it in your absence.’ He outlined the meeting with Miss Beaumont, and the revelation of Vier’s system of cheating, through which Daizell choked and spluttered with outrage. ‘I left them at Louisa’s house,’ Cassian concluded. ‘Lord knows what’s happened since. But never mind Leo or Miss Beaumont either: what are we to do about us?’
Daizell flopped back on the bed. ‘That – I want to say, it’s up to you. You’re the one with responsibilities, and power, and money.’
‘No. That won’t work. You can’t feel as though it’s my life and you’re an addendum to it, still less that I have all the power. I don’twantall the power. If I wanted someone who would do exactly and only what I choose in a way that suited me, I could have paid for that.’
‘You could,’ Daizell said. ‘You could have paid someone to give you a rude awakening at any time, come to that. Why didn’t you?’
‘Because—’ Cassian had to stop and think through it.‘Because that wasn’t an act I wanted performed for the sake of it, not really. It mattered because of how you did it. Because I could trust you with it – telling you a secret truth, believing you would not abuse it. Because you wanted to do it for me. Because it wasyou.’
Daizell stared up at the ceiling, silent, for a long moment. ‘And what about marriage?’
Cassian had heard that men conducted their own ceremonies, sometimes in a spirit of misrule and sometimes in one of seriousness. He wasn’t sure about that. ‘Um, it’s not legal? But if you want that—’
‘What? I meant you, you fool. You’re a duke, you need heirs. Haven’t you an arrangement lined up?’
‘Ihaveheirs.’ This at least was solid ground for Cassian. ‘My Uncle Hugo and his two sons would all do as well as I. And there will be no arrangement. I have never in my life inclined to women, and I may be obliged to distort my own life to fit round the edges of Severn, but I’m cursed if I inflict that on someone who has a right to expect better. I will not make vows of love and fidelity to another person and before God, when I have neither the ability nor the intention to keep them.’
‘People will expect it.’
‘Then I will disappoint them,’ Cassian said rather crisply. ‘The men of my family tend not to marry early anyway, and my father inherited from his own uncle, it’s hardly unusual. I will happily put off all enquiries as too early till I’m forty, and then move seamlessly into being a confirmed bachelor. I would rather be disappointing to matchmakers than an unfaithful husband to a wife and an unfaithful lover to you.’
Daizell’s lips parted. Cassian rethought what he’d said. ‘Uh, that made a number of assumptions.’
‘It did a little.’
‘I really am not asking you to sit in a cottage, or a London house, waiting for me to call. You already said you wouldn’t want that; I don’t want it either.’
‘Which brings us back to what you do want. How this might work.’
‘It works when we can be together,’ Cassian said. ‘I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but I know it requires you to have your reputation back.’
Daizell lay there unblinking, then rolled over and propped himself on an elbow. His bronze and copper chest hair was unbearably delicious; Cassian stopped himself from burying his face in it, or at least postponed that thought. ‘Say that again?’
‘You need to return to society. You should not be cast out because of what your father did. And everything else is Vier’s spite, and I don’t see why his opinion of you should count for more than mine.’
