He was bloody well sure that Westhouse wasn’t a member of the club; in fact, he would bet his life on it. Yet there it was, clear as day.
It was an innocuous bet, something about a horse race next week, but it was the name that sent him into a fit of rage and frustration.
Perhaps the other person initiated the bet. He scanned the page for the name: Lord Wolfston. But it was not common for a patron to wager against a non-member.
He made a mental note to ask John later. If Westhouse had darkened the door of Temptations, John would know. Nothing got past John; that was the reason Heathcliff, the Viscount Kilpatrick, had employed him as butler for his day job. He was the most secure individual one could ask for. A sniper, he was injured in the war against Napoleon and lost his memory. But his injury had an odd side effect. While the poor fellow couldn’t remember a thing about his life before the injury, he could remember every single detail since, with perfect clarity. Add in his lethal training and he was a formidable foe, or a great friend.
Thankfully, they all counted him as a great friend.
He would be invaluable at Heathcliff’s town home, especially with the duke’s wayward daughter returning as Lady Kilpatrick.
Ramsey leaned back in his chair, closing the wager book. He had questioned Heathcliff’s plan of returning to London. He had encouraged his friend to wait a few months, hoping the Duke would take time to cool his temper. But Heathcliff had been insistent, saying that his ward needed to debut.
Ramsey couldn’t understand what a few months, hell, a few seasons would do to harm the newly gained ward. But it wasn’t his business, and he wasn’t in any position to care. Rather, he just hoped it didn’t affect Temptations.Because certainly then itwouldbe his business. Equal partners, Heathcliff, Lucas, and Ramsey himself were all staked in the exclusive club, owning it, sharing it, and using it to hide for various reasons.
Ramsey thought back to almost a decade ago, when in his second year at Eton. What a bloody mess he’d been. He could see it now, but then, at the time, there was no other way to understand how life worked. There were those who succeeded in life, and those who did not.
There was no in-between.
No second chances.
And once a failure, you had no hope of ever rising above it.
Thus was his life, his mantra, his chains.
His father had sent him to Eton as soon as he came of age, and it had been a welcome escape from Glenwood Manor and the iron control of his father’s cool calculations and demand for perfection. Eton had represented freedom, a chance to have some sort of privacy. But what he imagined was not what was to be. His father kept close correspondence with several of the professors at the institution.
Ramsey discovered it on his first holiday home, and the reckoning that followed.
He’d never been a particularly bad child; he just hadn’t been perfect.
And perfection was the only acceptable trait.
He’d come back to Eton a few days later with a new respect for following each and every rule. He took to memorizing them, much like his Latin biology vocabulary, and like proverbs, he’d speak the rules over situations.
This, needless to say, didn’t earn him many friends.
It did, however, earn a lot of ridicule.
It wasn’t until he got between Lucas and Heathcliff during a fistfight that he stumbled upon a friendship that was as unlikely as it was ill fated. But even against all odds, the relationship stuck. And Ramsey accredited that friendship to saving his sanity, and even saving his life.
Ramsey took a deep breath and pushed back from his chair, slamming the wager book shut with a final slap of the binding. It was enough reliving of the past.
“I’m not who I once was.” He repeated the words to himself quietly, allowing them to wash over him like a cleansing rain. He closed his eyes for a moment, mentally shaking off the chains of his past and leaving them on the table . . . when they whispered enticingly for him to pick them up, to hold on to everything they represented.
Old habits die hard.
Old lies refuse to fade away.
And somewhere deep in his soul the memory of his father whispered:history will always repeat itself . . .
And worse than the lies and the habits, that was what chilled him most.
Because the only way to keep from repeating the past is to learn from it. But what does one do when the past is now just a secret buried with the man who owned it?
Ramsey could answer the question. Because it had been the only truth he’d ever been utterly sure of.
What does one do? One fails.
He would fail.
Because deep in his soul, as much as he wished to deny it, he knew that only two options were possible in life.
Perfection and failure.
And he was the second.
And would always be.
