Jamie didn’t begrudge Nick his happiness, for he understood like no one else the courage it must have taken to attain it. In fact, in a highly unusual move that had caught the attention of the gossip rags, Jamie had split all unentailed properties and monies down the middle with Nick. It was only fair, that was what the rags didn’t know. Nick had suffered through the same wretched childhood as Jamie, full of all the humiliation and neglect two self-centered and uncaring parents could offer. Nick had earned his share.
His eye caught on the Bow Street Runner’s report keeping the place in his book. It replaced the lie—a lie that had come directly from Father’s mouth—he’d believed of Mollie Rafferty these last fourteen years with the truth. Every time he so much as glanced at the thin slip of paper, he felt gutted and betrayed and like the world’s biggest fool all over again.
Mollie hadn’t taken Father’s money and run. The report in his hands attested to that fact. Instead, she’d suffered a fate much different from the one he’d imagined all this time.
Anger and shame roiled in his gut, turning it to acid and eating him from the inside. He was finding it difficult to live with this new information that he was powerless to change. It wasn’t so long ago that he would have found the bottom of a brandy bottle and not come up for air for a fortnight.
He snorted. He didn’t right understand why he hadn’t imbibed yesterday or today. After all, drink was a known numbing agent for anger and shame. He knew from experience, however, it didn’t cure either condition. Better to keep sinking into his role of teetotal recluse, a role he had no intention of climbing his way out of. Except…
Now that he was no longer a wastrel heir, he wasn’t precisely sure what to do with himself.
He scanned the floor-to-ceiling bookcases on the opposite wall. The library had been filled by one of his forebears a few generations back as its stock of scientific journals, essays, treatises, and tomes reached as far as two centuries in the past. Not much else to do these last several months, he’d taken to reading through it. But one could only maintain so much interest in the lambing ease, high fertility, and plentiful milk yields of the Black Welsh Mountain variety of sheep and similar, yet disparate, topics.
Still, he couldn’t help feeling the time was fast approaching when he would have to venture out of Asquith Court and fashion a life for himself as the Marquess of Clare, one with some semblance of meaning, possibly. It was a life that could easily carry him along on its current from one obligation to the next, if he would simply allow it and leave the past be. Why was he resisting? Why had he stirred the waters and sought out information about Mollie Rafferty after all these years?
On a burst of agitation, he shot to his feet and strode to the window overlooking St. James’s Square. And, now, there was the matter of his recently departed visitor.
Nick had hired the woman to spy on him.
And she’d left here thinking Nick’s brother wasn’t an impressive man.
That his blood didn’t boil at the very notion. He should dismiss and forget it. Why bother about what some slip of a woman he would never see again thought of him? Her opinion amounted to nothing.
Yet, somehow, it did. The woman didn’t hold him in awe. A fact he found both annoying and strangely enlivening.
And those extraordinary eyes of hers, they might see through him.
Nay, notthroughhim.Intohim.
And they found him lacking?
The question poked at a place deep inside him that he never let others see, and rarely even himself. His entire life, his titles—past, present, and future—had been all that had given him distinction in the world’s eyes. But behind that façade, he suspected a different truth.
There wouldn’t be enough to him without them.
And that woman, well, she’d seen him—the true him—and it wasn’t a flattering likeness, but one rather unimpressive.
His eye caught on a figure crossing the square. A slight figure. No thicker than a shadow…
Her.
Of course, she was leaving. He’d demanded as much. But…
Where was she walking with such a sure step?
Where did a woman like her go?
He started moving without consciously willing himself to do so. Within a minute, he was inside his dressing room and shoving one foot into a boot, the other hastily following. Then his arms were sliding into his greatcoat, and he was placing a topper on his head.
On his way out of his bedroom, he snatched a few cuts of meat from the late supper board near the door. As his appetite had been erratic these last few months, his butler, Stinton, had taken to placing various bits of food around to tempt him. The house would be teeming with rats soon if Jamie didn’t put a stop to the practice. Tonight, however, he was grateful, for he was ravenous of a sudden.
He hadn’t the faintest notion what he would discover about that blasted woman, but no matter. For the first time in months, curiosity moved through his body, invigorating him, spurring him forward. As the firstborn son and wastrel heir, his world had been limited to the pursuits of his rarified set, which had mostly amounted to drinking and carousing. A life that wasn’t nearly as exciting as it was made out to be. Then once he’d inherited the title of Clare, his small world had shrunk even smaller to the four walls of Asquith Court in his self-imposed exile.
Tonight, he found that neither world suited him.
Tonight, he wanted to experience a different world.
Herworld.
