Before he left the shop—Longman’s on Paternoster Row, she believed it was—he’d paused to glance through the lead-paned front window, his expression steeped in quiet dejection, a sadness she hadn’t caused yet ached to soothe.
He was kind. A person didn’t lose such innate kindness, did they?
Mrs. Dove-Lyon coughed tactfully, drawing Louisa’s gaze back to her. “Dominic looks more like my Colonel the older he gets, dear Sandstrom, with that dusting of gray at his temples so very early in life. Distinguished scoundrels, both.”
Louisa didn’t mention that she’d seen Dominic recently, sprinting across Bond Street, dodging carriages and puddles with lithe grace.Gorgeous, she’d thought. But it wasn’t his looks that drew her. It wasintuition, a gut certainty she could never quite ignore—an attraction that had seeped into her veins and still pulsed there, like a kettle left on a low flame.
“I see you’ve resolved upon this course, my lady. I shall endeavor to arrange a meeting, though I can’t guarantee Mr. Beckett—or your father—will agree.”
“My father will agree,” Louisa whispered, understanding her family’s desperation to see her married off better than her matchmaker did. “But promise me, no one must ever learn this was my idea.” She couldn’t bear the humiliation if Dominic refused her.
Plan in place, Mrs. Dove-Lyon rose with a brisk shake of her skirt. “Viscount Kent once told me, after I arranged his marriage, that I have a knack for finding those who are well-suited. As I have time to think on this, and I shall, during my short walk to the Lyon’s Den, I begin to wonder if you might be just what Dominic needs.” She tilted her head, her veil shifting with the movement. “He’s gone too far in the other direction, forever atoning for the harm he caused his family. Staid to the point of discontent, perhaps. Someone needs to bring him back to life.”
She tamped down the quake near the region of her heart.Practical, not emotional, Louisa.She must remember the plan. “The only revival I can offer is my dowry and the sort of trouble that tends to end with singed clothing.”
“The world seldom grants us our dreams, dear. But sometimes what begins as practicality grows into something more. If you can accept that chance, this arrangement may serve you well.”
Louisa watched the matchmaker depart, her veil shifting with each step, leaving behind the lingering trace of lavender—and with it, the suggestion of possibility, the sort of hope Louisa had long since learned to distrust.
However, her family had taught her this lesson the hard way: to invite emotion was to invite peril.
Chapter Two
Where trouble arrives sealed invellum.
Earlier in theevening, at a railway investors’ dinner he’d attended, Dom had been introduced as “the Honorable Dominic Beckett.”
Though he doubted anyone in the room believed it.
Least of all him.
“Quit brooding,” his brother murmured from his cozy spot behind the sleek desk in his study. Blessedly, Griff hadn’t felt the need to keep their father’s massive Chippendale monstrosity, a reminder of the brutal outbursts that had plagued this space. “The meeting went well. The comparison piece you created for the Stockton and Darlington Railway was bloody brilliant. You’ve a splendid mind for business strategy, Dom.”
A gift that had been the root of his troubles, from the time he’d started counting cards with reluctant talent during whist tourneys at Eton. If reading had come as easily, he might not have been rusticated without hope of return his first year at Oxford. Letters never stayed in their proper order, sliding about on the page like startled fish, making reading ofttimes near impossible.
Numbers, on the other hand, were like art—each falling into magnificent place.
With a sigh, Griff opened a lower drawer and returned with an unlabeled bottle and two cut-crystal tumblers. “This is the rough stuff, the thing portentous moments call for. And you, my friend, look in the mood for it.”
Dom sank into the armchair opposite, the scent of molasses and caramel teasing his senses before the rough spirit scorched his tongue. “Bloody hell,” he whispered and dragged his wrist across his lips. “I think I lost my vision for a moment.”
Griff bit back a grin, his tumbler shooting prisms over the papers scattered across his desk. “Demerara, from the colony in South America. Highly prized but heavily taxed. Getting this draught into England is solid proof of a smuggler’s connections and drinking it evidence of a man’s daring.”
Dom stared into his glass, wondering if he should remind Griff that he was no longer the daring one. He walked the fine line of uprightness like a man recently released from Newgate, with apprehensive precision. “So, we’re smugglers now?”
Griff shrugged a broad shoulder, a man at ease with himself and life. “It’s a low-risk venture. Jimmie Beans had a distributor who needed a warehouse to store deliveries, preferably a buildingnoton the Customs officers’ examination circuit. Half a dozen casks are there for two days a month before being removed between midnight and dawn, disappearing like London’s vapor across the Thames. I typically never see them in transit, coming in or out.” His gaze cut Dom’s way before roaming off, a telling gesture. “I would have mentioned it, but recently, you remind me of a mother hen, when it should be the other way around. The elder sibling is supposed to be the worrier.”
“A viscount’s warehouse rouses little suspicion, is that it?”
Leaning back, Griff stacked his polished boots upon the desk, his smile blinding. “This damned title had best be good for something.”
Dom sipped, his chest tightening as it often did when he spent time with his brother. Affection, concern, even the biting and clearly unjust feeling of being left to deal with their father after Griff returned to university, circled like a wolf with bared teeth. When, in actuality, Griff had doneeverythingto save him.
Love was the devil’s own riddle, it truly was.
Which was why he’d resolved to avoid any more of it—loveortrouble.
Dom glanced to the hearth, unable to say the next while staring into eyes almost as notable as his own. The damned Beckett blues. “I’ll say it again, though I know you’re loath to hear it—”
