“Are you scared of a little scandal, sweetheart?” he asked.
“Terrified.”
She angled her head just so and saw two men lingering in her periphery. From the look on their faces and the way their bodies were angled, she assumed the men wanted to speak with Dorian.
“Two lords wish to speak with you,” she whispered. “Seems business-related.”
Dorian looked over his shoulder and gave the lords the briefest of nods. Before going to them, he took her hand. “Before the next set starts, you’ll have a string of partners to dance with.”
Her brow arched. “You shall arrange that? And here I thought you did not want to see me with anyone else.”
“I don’t,” he confessed, “but you deserve to enjoy the night. Besides, before they get to you, I have already put the fear of God in them. They won’t touch you more than what is necessary.”
“And if they did?” she asked piquantly.
“The Devil will have to stand by and take notes while I get my vengeance,” Dorian promised her, then nodded to the stairs. “Now, go have your fun.”
The conversation with the two men was over quickly enough, as they only wanted to see if he had any openings for more investments.
“…it appears as if you truly are Midas,” one of the gentlemen said. “Gaming hells are notorious for crumbling in due to bad management, but from word around town, yours is the opposite. The stock has increased threefold in the last week.We want in.”
“He is right, you know,” Drake ambled up to him, one hand in his pocket, the other adorned with a glass of brandy. “You have a sense of duty and ethics uncommon among most lords. Then again, you are not most lords, are you?”
Dorian narrowed his eyes at the backhanded compliment. “What are you blathering about now?”
Drake nodded over the railing to where Ellie was whirling around with some lord or another—one of the men Dorian had ordered to keep her dance card full until he returned.
“Her,” Drake pointed his chin. “Does she know yet?”
“Know what?” Dorian asked cagily.
“Don’t be dense,” Drake challenged him. “You know what I mean, or rather,whoI mean. What are you going to do when she finds out about your dirty little secret? The one you buried so long ago?”
It took Dorian a hair longer than he should have to catch up on Drake’s words, but when he did, his heart sank to his feet. A memory he’d buried so deeply surged to life as if it had been at the forefront of his mind all along.
Dorian’s heart lit aflame with fury. “If you dare utter a word—”
“Now, why would I?” Drake asked calmly. “It is Carrington you ought to worry about. While you are digging around for his dirty secrets, he might let slip yours.”
Rattled, Dorian strode into the billiards room and directly to the bar. He poured a glass of brandy and swallowed it all. The secrets he’d kept in his past were ones he’d never planned on ever letting out… especially not to the woman he craved more than his next breath.
He didn’t have to cross the floor again to look at Evelina. He swallowed thickly. She was so pure in the cerulean blue, her dangling curls framing her sweet face.
For the first time since he’d met Evelina, he truly felt like a rat who had crawled out of the mucky gutter—that any touch to his wife would smear her with his slate of inescapable, unspeakable sins.
“You might want to beat him to the bullet and tell her,” Drake added. “Maybe she will take it easier from your lips than from his.”
“She would not understand,” he grated.
“The boy is dead,” Drake’s voice was low. “You killed him.”
Dorian’s hand closed around the glass hard enough that the thick crystal trembled. Dark memories of that moonless night, in the stews of Whitechapel, whirled back to him. “Do not speakabout things you have no knowledge of. I am warning you,” he muttered tersely. “Keep your mouth shut.”
With that, he walked into the dark shadows of the billiards room and found a chair. He pressed the glass to his throbbing temple, unsure of what to do about the sudden problem he had hoped to leave in his past. It was not Drake that was onto this blot from his past—but Investigator Teller was on the trail too.
One day, the truth would get out. Should he get ahead of it… or try to shove it back into the darkness?
It wasn’t just the lovely ambience in the ballroom that Ellie was enjoying, but Dorian had followed through on his word. She had not stepped away from the dance floor since the new set had begun.
