Chapter
One
COVENT GARDEN, LONDON, MARCH 1819
“Idon’t know how you do it, Windham. There isn’t a gentleman in London who wins at the gaming tables as often as you do.”
Cass let the door of The Deuce slam shut behind him. The heavy thud of the wood hitting the door frame echoed in the darkness around them, announcing their presence as surely as a pistol shot to any scoundrel who happened to be lurking in the shadows. That there was some version of scoundrel lurking nearby went without saying.
This was London, after all, but tempting fate had become one of his favorite pastimes.
“You’ve got the devil’s own luck at Hazard.” Hayward shoved his hands into his pockets and began to make his way down Maiden Lane as if he were taking a stroll down Rotten Row during the fashionable hour instead of skulking about the darkened streets of Covent Garden. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“How dare you, Hayward? It’s skill, not luck.”
“Skill, at Hazard?” Hayward snorted. “I think not, my friend. But you don’t look pleased, Windham. Indeed, for a man whojust left a gaming hell several hundred pounds richer than when he entered it, you look downright grim.”
“I don’t care about the money.” Cass fingered the stack of notes he’d tucked into his coat pocket. “Only a fool frequents the gaming hells expecting to get rich.”
“Only a fool frequents gaming hells at all, but you’re hardly a stranger at The Deuce. Everyone from the banker to the lowliest clerk greets you by name.”
“One might say the same of you, Hayward.”
“Yes, well someone has to keep an eye on you, don’t they?”
Alas, there was no disputing that, as much as he would have liked to, but the truth was Hayward had been pulling him out of one scrape after the next since their Eton days, much as a more responsible elder brother might have done, even after Cass’s harmless boyish pranks had given way to a grown man’s far more worrying vices.
It was a mystery why Hayward bothered with him at all anymore.
“I go to pass the time.” Although there always seemed to be more of it, no matter how much of it he wasted. “What do you suppose has become of the carriage?”
He’d left it…somewhere.
Bedford Street, maybe. Or had it been St. Martin’s Lane?
Damned if he could remember, but no matter. Massey would find them. He always did. The man was a magician when it came to locating lost earls, but then this wasn’t Cass’s first jaunt through Covent Garden in the wee hours of the morning. Massey had had a good deal of practice.
Hayward let out a long-suffering sigh. “It’s on Garrick Street. I swear, Windham, you’d lose your own head if it wasn’t sitting on your?—”
“Shhh, Hayward.” Cass paused in the middle of the street, the hair on his neck prickling. “Did you hear something?”
“No.” Hayward paused, glancing around them. “Like what?”
“It sounded like footsteps.” He peered into the darkness. It was as thick as a blanket around them, only a few dim rays of moonlight peeking through the heavy layer of London haze, but every inch of his skin was thrumming, and his senses tingling with warning.
Someone was there in the darkness, waiting.
“I think someone followed us from The Deuce. Quickly, Hayward.”
“I don’t hear any—” Hayward broke off with a grunt and dropped onto his knees on the cobbles. “What the devil!”
“Hayward! Are you—” That was as far as he got before a thick, muscular arm snaked around his throat, jerking him off his feet.
“Don’t. Bloody. Move.”
Cass shifted, his muscles flexing instinctively, but the arm around his neck tightened like a noose and the man wrenched him backwards with such brutal force if he hadn’t had his walking stick he would have landed on his knees on the filthy cobbles beside Hayward, who was grappling with a shadowy figure roughly the size of a tree.
Cass kept his feet, but it did him no good. When he tried to throw the arm off it pressed against his windpipe, choking him.
