Chapter 20
Ezra was more of a schemer than a fighter; he had always preferred trickery over a swift punch.
Now, he wanted to hit something.
He had made himself flee Letitia’s rooms before he ended up putting a hole in her wall.
He might be bribing the landlady to tell Letitia that the rent was much lower than the true sum—and to never tell Letty that he was the one paying the difference—but he suspected the woman would still object if he ruined her neat plaster walls.
He had bolted before he could let Letitia see how desperately his temper raged at him. She did not deserve that. She had not deserved the pitiful goodbye that he had given her, either, but he was faced with a choice, and he had chosen the one that let him keep his tenuous grasp on control.
His dear, sweet Letty had looked so bleak when she had talked about what Dugley had done to her. So resigned.
And, hell, he didn’t blame her for that. She had no power to fight the whispers of a viscount.
But Ezra had power. He had connections. He could make discreet inquiries.
He might not be able to ruin the man without breaking Letitia’s confidence, but he could make damn certain that no vulnerable young woman ever fell into his clutches again.
And maybe he could ruin the man without breaking his word to Letty. Hope sprang eternal and all that. Ezra could dream.
In the interim, though, he was going to stomp around a bit. The walk home took him more than an hour, but it did little more than waste time. His temper was not improved in the slightest.
He went through the door where he found, for his sins, Hugh and Persephone and their thousands of children were waiting for him.
“Why?” he lamented, looking at his overrun parlor. “What are you people doing here? I didn’t invite you here.”
Persephone looked in his direction with a bright smile.
Hugh used her distraction to shoot Ezra a rude gesture behind his wife’s back.
He wasn’t subtle enough, though; one of the three triplet nieces that Hugh had adopted—Ezra never could remember which was which—saw him, her eyes going wide with mischief and delight.
Hugh would be paying for that later, Ezra realized with pleasure.
He was going to have to give the girl tips on how best to blackmail her uncle.
“Well, we have seen a bit of you recently—at the party, and then Hugh mentioned that you had come to the club—so we wanted to return the favor.”
There was something in her face that indicated she understood that favor was stretching things a bit.
It was very frustrating that Ezra’s cousins kept finding such charming women to marry.
Ezra would have tossed Hugh out on his ass for showing up like this, but Persephone—and the children—were a different matter.
And Hugh’s duchess knew it, damn it all.
“Besides,” she added with put-upon innocence. “The girls wanted to meet their cousin, Iris.”
At the sound of her name, Iris peeked her head up from the center of the knot of children. Ezra had not even realized she was hiding in there.
“Look, Uncle Ezra,” she chirped. “I have cousins! Grace, Lucy, Martha, Corinna, and Nicholas,” she listed, pointing at each one of them in turn.
Ezra had not realized that one of the children in the gaggle was a boy, either. Possibly because he had been covered by ribbons. Lucy—the one who had caught Hugh’s gesture—grinned while she tied another bow around his forehead.
“Are you having fun?” Ezra asked Iris, though he didn’t know why he bothered. He had never seen Iris smiling so broadly.
“Yes, cousins are the best,” she said happily, then giggled as Grace, who had to be about ten years old, grabbed her around the waist and spun her around in a circle.
“Me next!” Corinna cried, clapping her hands together.
As the older girls obligingly lifted the younger children and spun them over and over again, Ezra sighed in defeat.
This was another battle that he had very clearly lost.
All too aware that his disheveled clothing told a story that he did not necessarily want to discuss with his cousin and his wife, Ezra took a seat, resigned.
“Fine,” he said. “You can stay.”
“We didn’t ask for your permission,” Hugh snorted.
“It’s my house,” Ezra shot back before he could catch himself. What was it about this family that made him act like a child? And why did it bother him so much when Hugh looked pleased to have gotten a rise out of him?
“Don’t tease your cousin,” Persephone said, and this time it was Ezra’s turn to look smug. “We just want to be here for you, Ezra,” she said. “You and Iris. And Miss Knightley. Where is she?”
Ezra tried very hard not to let his mind wander back to where he had last seen Letitia, half wrapped in her own bedsheet and gloriously naked beneath.
“She has left my employ,” he said tersely.
Hugh and Persephone exchanged one of those looks only happily married couples shared. This was another issue with the whole ‘likable women’ issue. All his bloody cousins were in love, and they all thought they knew things because of that love.
It was so, so annoying.
“What did you do to her?” Persephone asked.
“I didn’t do anything,” Ezra protested. “She wanted to go. I let her go. It’s as simple as that.”
Another one of those stupid looks.
“You definitely did something,” Persephone said.
That was it. Ezra was going to throw them all out. The children could come back once he had a decent governess back in the house.
He was all ready to tell them to leave. Instead, something else entirely came out of his mouth.
“She’s frightened of someone,” he admitted. “A gentleman who didn’t want to take no for an answer.”
He kept his voice quiet enough that the children could not hear him, but made certain that his tone was casual enough that they wouldn’t realize that there was something the adults didn’t want them to know.
Persephone went very still, a furious glint in her eye. Hugh clenched both his fists where they rested on his knees.
“Then why isn’t she here where you can protect her?” Hugh demanded. “Why would you let her go out on her own?”
Ezra shot his cousin a poisonous look. “Oh, right. Because I didn’t think of that.” Hugh tilted his head in acknowledgment. “Of course, I wanted her to stay here. But I wasn’t going to force her. And the man—Dugley, a viscount, nobody I have heard of—lives in Belgium.”
“Which is why she wanted to stay in England,” Persephone said. She had put that together a lot more quickly than Ezra had. That was properly humbling. He decided to never admit it.
“Precisely,” he said. “And she says that she doesn’t want to engage the man, doesn’t want him to spread rumors that he had threatened to spread.”
“Bastard,” Persephone muttered under her breath, making Ezra like her even more.
“Just because she doesn’t want to fight him,” Hugh said menacingly, “which I understand, I truly do—but just because she doesn’t want to do something doesn’t mean that we can’t do something.”
Ezra was heartened by that we. For the first time in a long time, he did not feel an instinctive desire to reject any help from his family.
He should have suspected that Letitia’s power was enough to make him reconnect with his family, even without her presence. She didn’t even need to be in his life to change his life.
God above, he missed her already.
“I need information first,” Ezra said to distract himself. “I want to know what I am getting into. So that I can destroy him.”
He watched Hugh and Persephone carefully as he added this last piece. They seemed willing to help him for now, but he needed them to understand what they were getting into. He wasn’t planning to give this Dugley fellow a stern lecture, as he had with Bassett. He wanted Dugley to regret being born.
Neither of them flinched. Hugh even gave him an approving nod.
“I will make inquiries,” he began. “See who knows about the wretch. I—”
“You need not do all that,” Hugh interrupted, looking genuinely baffled. “Just ask Xander.”
Ezra must not have hidden his grimace quickly enough, because Persephone laughed and pointed at his expression.
“That is exactly what you look like when someone suggests you ask Xander for help,” Persephone crowed, jostling her shoulder against her husband’s. “Poor Xander. What did he ever do to get such a reaction?”
“He is annoying,” Ezra said at once.
“He likes to be in charge of things,” Hugh said with the same lack of hesitation. “So if you ask for help, he’s going to try to take over. It’s irritating.”
“He is barely older than I am, but he still acts like he thinks he is my father,” Ezra complained. “It is infuriating.”
“And he’s not ‘poor Xander,’” Hugh added. “He has scads of money and a family he adores. He’s so happy that it’s annoying.”
Persephone looked between them, clearly amused. “So, in summary: he’s annoying, irritating, infuriating, and happy, which is also annoying.”
She seemed to think that they would back down from this assessment now that she had heard it laid out. Instead, Hugh and Ezra exchanged a look and then nodded.
“Yes, that’s pretty much it,” Hugh said.
He and Ezra exchanged a grin as Persephone rolled her eyes at the two of them.
“Idiots,” she grumbled.
They only grinned wider. Ezra felt a sense of kinship. It was comforting.
“I recognize that the fact that Xander is annoying is not a good enough reason to avoid asking for his help,” he admitted with a sigh. “Besides, Helen liked Letty—”
Letty, Persephone mouthed gleefully to her husband.
Fuck, Ezra thought.
“Helen liked Miss Knightley,” he amended, although he knew the damage was already done, “so I am sure she will want to help.”
“Knowing Helen, she will want to murder this Dugley person herself,” Hugh murmured.
“It’s a risk I am willing to take,” Ezra said dryly.
“Mama, Mama!” Nicholas bounced over, so festooned with ribbons by this point that it was hard to believe that there were any remaining in England. “Look at me!”