“Damn your hide, it’s a parrot, not a squirrel,” Cam gritted. “A parrot I strongly dislike, mind you.”
“Pockets to let,” Brandon repeated. “This is bloody news, Cam. Why did you not say something sooner? I’d be more than happy to lend you some funds.”
“This isn’t the sort of debt that can be erased with a mere loan,” Cam said, “though I do thank you for the generous offer.”
“I’ll gift it to you, then,” Brandon suggested. “Your problem is easily enough solved without resorting to nuptials.”
But Cam shook his head, his expression turning mulish. “I don’t want a gift. A man does have his pride, even if it’s all that he has left.”
“Still,” King argued, “you should have told one of us.”
“For what purpose? I’ll not accept alms from any of you. The funds from the Society were sufficient to keep me afloat for a time…until they weren’t. I’m afraid when my father decided to apply himself to the family tradition of being a dissolute wastrel, he excelled. In fact, it was probably the only thing he was good at, aside from bedding light-skirts and making my mother miserable. But even his profligacy pales in comparison to my brother’s.”
Like Brandon and the rest of their inner circle, Cam had no loyalty to his dead sire. They were united in their cause—pursuit of pleasure and the destruction of their fathers’ bitter legacies of unhappiness and destruction. For Brandon, that cause had taken on a new shape. He hadn’t ever supposed he would marry, but now that Grandmother demanded it, he hadn’t a choice.
He wondered idly if he ever had.
Likely not, and it had been the height of foolishness to imagine he’d had the liberty to rule his own life as he saw fit. He’d been born to be the next Duke of Brandon, and nothing had altered him from that course. He could almost hear his bastard of a father laughing from the grave.
“You’re certain you want to marry the squirrel chit?” Whitby asked Cam, retrieving Brandon from his woolgathering.
“Damn you, it’s not a squirrel but a parrot, and I don’t want to marry her, but it seems the preferable option at the moment.”
“Preferable to?” Brandon prodded.
“Selling my soul to the devil,” Cam offered, and not without bittersweet irony.
“I do hate to tell you, old chap,” King drawled, “but you’ve just given the very definition of the parson’s mousetrap.”
“Better the devil you know, et cetera,” Cam said, raising his brandy in salute, his features set in grim acceptance of his fate.
And in that moment, something occurred to Brandon. The devil one knew was decidedly better than the devil one didn’t. He knew Lottie—intimately, if not the depths of her soul. He liked Lottie. Pandy liked Lottie. This was the devil he knew.
She was also the devil he intended to marry. He just had to convince her. He had offered for her once and she’d refused him, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t ask her a second time. He didn’t want to marry a debutante. He wanted her.
“To what must be done,” he said, raising his own glass, “like it or not.”
“To what must be done,” his friends echoed in unison, clinking their goblets together.
“And towhomust be done,” Whitby added slyly to ensuing laughter.
King raised his glass again. “Also, to squirrels.”
“Bloody hell, King, it’s a goddamned parrot,” Cam grumbled.
CHAPTER 11
Lottie woke the next day when her lady’s maid brought in a massive vase of fresh flowers.
“For you, my lady.”
She could understand Jenkinson’s excitement—the woman was practically floating above the Axminster as she glided into the room with an arrangement that was almost the size of a small country.
Lottie blinked blearily at the blossoms, wondering what time it was as she sat up, the bedclothes pooling around her waist. “Thank you, Jenkinson. However, I didn’t ring for you just yet.”
It was a gentle reminder that her slumber had been interrupted.
She’d spent the previous day racing after the giggling, wayward blur that was the Duke of Brandon’s daughter. And her impetuous dog too, of course. By the end of the quite massive favor she’d given Brandon, Lottie had abetted in the thieving of biscuits from the kitchen, in the charcoal sketching of admittedly unrecognizable self-portraits—Lottie’s skill at drawing had waned in recent years without practice—and she had played a game of hide-and-seek that Pandy had inevitably won, thanks to her smaller stature and lack of bustle.
