Cris.
Beelzebub.He did not wish to see his friend just now. “Tell him I am indisposed.”
The door flew open, and the duke strode past the hulking, hideous butler. “He will tell me no such thing, you bounder. Christ, you look terrible, Duncan.” He paused, raking Duncan with a gaze that saw far too much, he was sure. “Pretty, fetch your master some hot chocolate and a tray of food.”
“Er, yes sir.” Pretty executed a half bow. “Your Grace, sir.”
Having been born in the stews, he had cut his teeth on the life of a pickpocket. One of many Duncan had plucked from a life of misery, Pretty was loyal, diligent, and somewhat uncertain of proper expectations for his position.
Duncan didn’t give a goddamn. He had hired a butler not because he required one but because he had wanted to give Pretty a position at which he excelled. A chance to raise himself above the poverty and misery to which he had been born. The chance Duncan had never been given.
Cris waited for Pretty to retreat, closing the door behind him, before crossing the chamber to Duncan’s desk. He made a clucking sound with his tongue, one more suited to a governess than a duke. “Such a cruel stroke of fate that a man as bracket-faced as he ought to bear a surname of Pretty.”
Duncan took another swig from the bottle, eyeing his friend. The liquor he had consumed made his tongue loose. “Pretty is not his true name.”
Cris lowered himself with negligent grace into the chair opposite Duncan’s desk. “Knowing you as I do, I ought not to be surprised. But somehow, I am. Tell me, how it is that your butler bears a sobriquet rather than his surname?”
“He hasn’t a surname.” Duncan raised his bottle toward his friend in a mock toast before dousing himself with another healthy swallow toward oblivion. He swallowed, smacked his lips. “He was born in the rookeries. Never even knew his mother. He has always answered to ‘Pretty,’ and so Pretty he shall forever be.”
“You are the best man I know, my friend.”
Duncan shuddered as he swallowed too much whisky at once. His stomach balked, but he forced it into submission. “Then perhaps you should consider extending your acquaintances, Whitley.”
Cris smiled with the confidence only a duke could possess. “I have no wish to extend them, having already discovered all I require in one ill-tempered club owner. Perhaps you know him? Tall fellow, dark-haired, with a sudden penchant for hiding inside his home and drowning himself in drink?”
Fuck.
He lifted the bottle to his lips, tilted it, swallowed. Savored the burn down his gullet. Met his friend’s gaze, unwavering. “I know him well.”
“I am worried about you, my friend,” Cris said then, his tone low, his face devoid of expression.
“Worried? About me? Why?” Duncan attempted to keep his expression blank. A hiccup rose in his throat, and he swallowed it down. Damn, this was growing old. Or he was growing old. Too old for this, surely.
Cris raised both brows, raking him with a telling glance. “Need I answer that question, Duncan? According to Hazlitt, you have not been to your club for a month. Pretty tells me you have hidden yourself away here, refusing most sustenance.”
“Hazlitt and Pretty can both go straight to hell,” he growled, knowing his two most trusted men were attempting to help him but irritated by their interference nevertheless.
“What the devil is going on, Duncan?” his friend asked. “You gained Amberley’s vowels, and from what I understand, you have yet to collect. I expected to return from my honeymoon to find him selling off everything he could in an effort to repay you.”
He did not want to talk about it, to relive what he had done. The whisky was just beginning to numb him sufficiently, and discussing the reasons for his self-imposed isolation would only tear open the wounds. “How was your honeymoon, Cris?”
While Duncan was wallowing in his sorrows, Whitley had married the governess who stole his heart. The pair of them were nauseatingly in love. Duncan was happy for his friend, who deserved happiness more than anyone he knew, but he could not stay the stab of envy charging through him whenever he saw the besotted expression on Cris’s face at the mentioning of his new wife.
Precisely how he looked just now, grinning in that lovesick fashion so at odds with the hardened rake Duncan had once known him to be.
“I am the most fortunate fellow in the world, Duncan. The duchess is an angel.” Cris gazed off into the distance, still smiling like a fool.
Duncan lifted the bottle back to his lips, misery unfurling along with the envy and self-loathing already poisoning him. “You deserve nothing less, Cris. I am glad for you.”
“Thank you, my friend.” The duke’s smile turned rueful. “Before Jacinda, I thought love was a fiction invented by fools and poets. She has changed everything.”
Duncan had known such a woman, one who had left him altered. One he could not forget. One who made his heart seize in his chest whenever he thought of her. A miracle sprung from the dark. His for a fleeting moment and then gone.
He stilled, the bottle halfway to his lips, as a horrible realization settled over him.
He loved her.
HelovedLady Frederica Isling.Bloody fucking hell.
