Jasper handed his cue to a waiting footman and came around the table. His brother didn’t speak again until he’d stopped a few feet away and given Rhys a thorough up-and-down. “Papa has this strange notion about you.”
Jasper wasn’t known for his small talk.
“Oh?”
“That you’ve left off being a waster.”
Even as he experienced a sliver of annoyance at that glint of doubt in his brother’s eyes, something warmed inside Rhys.
Papa actually believed that of him?
Which was why he said more boldly than he felt, “I have.”
Jasper’s head cocked to the side. “Then what are you doing here?”
“It’s a long story.”
Jasper looked disinclined to relent. “I have time.”
He was calling Rhys’s bluff.
Brothers could do that with one another.
Except Rhys wasn’t bluffing—and he didn’t have time.
In less than an hour, Tilly would be on that street corner—waiting for him.
“Some other time,” he said, his feet itching to be on the move.
His brother, of course, wouldn’t believe him.
Well, if he were Jasper, he wouldn’t believe him, either.
In his nine-and-twenty years, Rhys had done little-to-nothing to inspire belief.
But that was changing.
“You’ll want to avoid the dining room,” said Jasper, holding out a hand for the footman to return his billiards cue to him.
“Oh?”
“Benedict is there.”
Benedict.
Their eldest brother—the heir—who hadn’t had a smile for Rhys in, at least, fifteen years.
Rhys nodded his thanks and pivoted on his heel.
Best he avoided the dining room.
As he made his way up the staircase to the first floor, he decided there would be no more distractions. He reached the landing, turned a sharp right, and headed directly for the room where he knew deep in his gut he would find the man he sought—the gaming room.
At the wide doorway, a slick of perspiration coated his palms. Every cell in his body both demanded he turn around and abandon his plan and demanded he enter and assume his rightful place at the tables—and give in to what was only natural.
So, it was the sharp edge of a razor blade he navigated as he stepped into the room and became both part of its lively milieu and apart from it at once.
The man he sought sat at neither the Faro nor the Whist tables. But then, Rhys hadn’t expected him there. Deeper into the room he moved until, at last, Rhys spotted him standing at a Hazard table.
