“That man you just betrothed me to! What’s his name, damn it?”
“Oh, you mean Trick? Trick Caldwell?”
“All right. Enough is enough.” She glared at them one by one. “I did nothing wrong. No matter what you think it looked like, we were washing a wine stain from my skirt. There’s no reason for me to marry him.”
Her brothers stared at her and then at one another over her head. Individually they nodded.
Then Jason spoke for them all. “Did you choose another of your suitors to marry, then?”
“That again? I don’t believe this. None of mysuitorsare at all suitable, and I won’t marry any of them. You’re finished ordering me around.”
“You’re right about that,” he said. “I’m finished. It’s long past time you wed, and Trick’s as good a man as any.”
“But he’s a highwayman,” she wailed.
“Not anymore,” Jason snapped. The men closed ranks, and nothing else was said for the rest of the ride home.
Seven
TRICK PACEDaround the cottage for a good fifteen minutes, huffing in disbelief, wondering how a simple jaunt to save his props from the rain had ended in such disaster.
When pacing failed to resolve anything, he rode home to Amberley House to dismiss the rest of his houseguests.
Compton, his butler, met him at the door. “Good afternoon, your grace.”
“Is it?” Trick handed him his drenched cloak. “What happened while I was gone?”
Compton frowned, one of his habitual expressions. “Lords Cainewood, Greystone, and Lakefield have taken their leave. A messenger arrived with word that their sister had disappeared. They went off to find you, to enlist your help—”
“They succeeded.”
And turned his life upside down in the process.
Leaving the butler mid-sentence, Trick stalked into his card room. “My apologies, gentlemen, but the party’s over.”
Peeved, he waved a hand in a hopeless attempt to clear the smoky air. The four remaining guests, all aristocrats from neighboring estates, had apparently passed the time by smoking Trick’s small hoard of expensive Virginia cheroots, literally worth their weight in silver.
He coughed and waved some more. “It seems I’m soon to be wed, and I’m in no mood for cards. Besides which, the Chase brothers won’t be returning, so we haven’t enough for two tables—”
“Wed? As in married?” David Fielding interrupted in a puff of tobacco, blinking his brown eyes, which always looked a little crossed. “You cannot be serious.”
“Aye, as in married.” Trick smiled grimly. “And I assure you, I’ve never been more serious in my life.”
The only one without a cheroot between his teeth, John Garrick heaved his paunchy form from his chair. “Amberley, I…I don’t know what to say.”
Garrick, speechless. Imagine that. In general, the man never shut up, lecturing his hapless companions on the folly of their swearing, drinking, whoring, or any other of a number of activities he considered morally reprehensible, an annoying superior smile on his flabby lips.
He flapped those lips now, rather ineffectively, Trick thought. “I…I just don’t know what to say.”
“Then don’t say anything,” Trick suggested.
Striding across the room, he plucked a half-smoked cheroot from Fielding’s lips, then did the same with Robert Faraday and Thomas Milner. They sat there, their mouths in little Os where the brown cheroots used to be, while he stubbed out the burning tobacco in one of the crystal dishes he kept on the card tables for that purpose.
“I’ll send servants to help you pack,” he informed them. “And someone else will have to host next month, as a female will be living here.”
“But…Amberley.” Robert Faraday finally found his voice. He skimmed the long brown hair from his face and rubbed his stubbled chin. “No surcoats, no shaving, no periwigs, no women. You laid down the rules when you set up the card club. And you said then that you’d marry the day the devil settled in heaven.”
“He’s arrived, gentlemen.”
