Make thattwothings the prat had picked up: smug languor and a tendency to use Latin in a damned annoying way.
“Spare me the schoolboy doggerel,” Sinjin snapped. “You’re the one who showed up uninvited. Why are you here?”
“Perhaps I want to visit myfratis ventrus?”
“You can’t. Stephan’s dead,” Sinjin said flatly.
Theodore’s throat worked above his ostentatious cravat, grief shining for an instant through his foppish veneer. Sinjin knew a moment of grudging connection. Noble and caring, Stephan had been everyone’s favorite, the glue that held the family mosaic together. Without him, the Pelhams were naught but disparate pieces, their sharp edges slicing relentlessly into one another.
“Enough, the two of you,” the duke commanded. “Now, Sinjin, what’s this about you trying to escape last night?”
“I wasn’t trying to escape. I’m a guest here, remember?” Sinjin shot back. “I can leave whenever I want.”
“That was not our agreement. You were to stay put until I sorted out your troubles.”
“And have you?” Sinjin said evenly.
The duke’s blue gaze—the one thing he and Sinjin had in common—held steely discipline. “These things take time. You’ve left me many fires to put out, and if you’re seen traipsing about, you’ll just add fuel to the flames—” He broke off in a fit of coughing.
The violence of the fit startled Sinjin. His father had always seemed impervious to the weaknesses of the human condition. Uncertain what to do, he took a step toward the duke, but his stepmama beat him to it and waved him aside.
She hovered next to her husband. “Are you all right, Acton?”
“I’m fine.” His Grace blotted his mouth with a handkerchief.
“Perhaps you ought to sit and have some—”
“For God’s sake, Regina, don’t fuss,” the duke said curtly.
Mouth pinched, Her Grace turned her pale gaze to Sinjin. She’d entered his life when he was six, a year after he’d lost his mama, and even then he’d known that she would never think of him as her own. For Stephan, she’d had the occasional smile, but for Sinjin, she’d reserved a reproving notch between her fair brows, which had since etched itself into a permanent line.
Serves her right for being a cold, judgmental bitch.
“Your papa has been working tirelessly to clean up your mess. He’s lost sleep over it,” she said in the customary tones of accusation that Sinjin despised. “The least you could do is hold up your end of the bargain. It is not so much to ask, is it? To spend a few weeks in the absence of dissipation?”
“That might be impossible for Sinjin,mater.” Bending to the floor, Theodore straightened with a smirk on his face, the silver locket dangling from his finger. “In the time since he became Revelstoke, he’s elevated himself to the status of a deity. They call him the God of Revelry, don’t you know, and he has to fight off hordes of ladies and trollops alike.”
The duke’s gaze latched onto the swinging pendant, his mouth tightening. “Damnation, Sinjin, why must you insist on continually displaying such coarseness and depravity?”
Because it rattles your goddamned cage?
Their Graces had inquired about the locket when they’d first seen it, hoping, no doubt, that some witless virgin had given it to him and wedding bells were in his future. Sinjin had taken great satisfaction in informing them of the truth: that the locket was, in fact, a reminder that freedom held far more appeal than the shackles of matrimony.
Now he grabbed the trinket from his brother and slapped it onto the table where its presence could continue to offend. Petty... but satisfying.
“Really, Sinjin.” His stepmama eyed the necklace as if it were a snake. “Flaunting rubbish given to you by some tart? Have you no respect for polite company?”
Her Grace had been the force behind getting him shipped off to an institution that housed the wildest boys in Christendom, and she’d barred him from his own childhood home… from having any semblance of a family. Yet she expected him to respect polite company—to even know what thatwas?
He was the God of Revelrybecauseof her. Because of her, he’d had to fight for survival, to earn his place at the top of the rabid pack at Creavey. Because of her, he was more at home with rabble-rousers and whores than the strait-laced hypocrites of theton.
“None at all,” he said succinctly.
“Theodore, escort your mama to the carriage.” The duke’s tone brooked no refusal. “I wish to speak to Sinjin alone.”
Her Grace looked as if she might argue, but after exchanging a glance with her husband, she sighed and took Theodore’s arm.
When the door closed behind them, Sinjin bit out, “Tell that bitch to stay out of my business.”
