Chapter Two
Where trouble arrives sealed in vellum.
Earlier in the evening, 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 building not on 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 done everything to save him.
Love was the devil’s own riddle, it truly was.
Which was why he’d resolved to avoid any more of it—love or trouble.
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—”
In his first show of temper all evening, Griff slammed his tumbler onto the desk.
“Dominic, I’m more than loath to hear another blessed apology, if that’s where you’re headed.
You’ve been in this business with me almost from the start, studying the numbers, spotting opportunities I’d have missed, controlling expenses.
That’s not charity, it’s partnership. We’re a team, a family, no matter the past.”
Dom’s fingers clenched around his glass, the gulp he took to drown the remorse he could never quite shake making him choke.
To hell with it. To please Griff—his desire always—he left unsaid what they both knew: that his reckless gambling had nearly tossed the Kent viscountcy into the rubbish bin and driven his brother into dealings with Shoreditch knaves.
What viscount even knew a man named Jimmie Beans, much less met with him regularly? Yet Griffin Alastair Beckett, fifth Viscount Kent, now seemed to relish his brush with the underworld. Even just a little.
Griff spun his tumbler in a slow circle on his thigh, his expression thoughtful. “Dom, I wouldn’t change a thing, not a second, because it might alter my trajectory. Where would my life be without Willie and my boy, can you tell me?”
Even to satisfy his brother, he wasn’t going down that path. Once Griff started talking about his wife, Wilhelmina, and infant, Henry, it wasn’t long before he’d get teary-eyed—emotions Dom had no capability to understand or govern.
“That reminds me,” Griff said, his voice betraying no small amount of amusement. With his pinky, he nudged a sealed envelope resting on the desk. “Are you going to open it?”
Dom grunted and slumped lower in the armchair. No.
Laughing, Griff flipped the letter until Dom was forced to catch it or watch it tumble to the Aubusson rug.
Holding it between two fingers as though it burned, a fast breath shot through his teeth.
He recognized the Lyon’s Den crimson seal, the bold script scratched into vellum, which is why he hadn’t wanted to touch it earlier.
Bessie Dove-Lyon, the Black Widow of Whitehall, was trying to track him down.
Griff stretched his legs with a groan of what sounded like pure pleasure.
He was enjoying this, the cur. “She’s forgiven you, or close to it, which was hard for her because you look so much like the Colonel.
She’s very fond of you, Dom, no matter her difficulty admitting it.
Even unruly behavior won’t break the bond.
She got over my duel, though it took about as long as it did for the injury to heal.
Months, that.” He hummed beneath his breath.
“I can’t even remember her name now, the chit I fought over.
And my shoulder still aches when it rains, a fact Willie is none too pleased to recognize. ”
“It’s the gray,” Dom murmured, running his hand through his overlong strands, his gaze fixed on the missive he had to acknowledge at some point. “Makes me look old.”
“Distinguished,” his brother clarified.
“Knightsbridge thought I was you when I stepped from the carriage on Curzon last week.” Dom wiggled his finger beneath the flap and popped the Den’s elaborate seal. “Said I looked exhausted, as if I’d fought a battle with that headstrong wife of mine.”
Griff dropped his head to his hand, bending fully into his delight. “I’ve got to tell Willie. Headstrong is right!”
“There’s seven years between us, Griff. A bit of an insult to be thought the older one.”
“Knightsbridge was father’s solicitor until he toppled down the staircase at White’s. He’s seventy if he’s a day. He can’t see beyond the end of his nose.”
Dom wasn’t convinced. He felt older, but not a minute wiser. Regret clung like a weight he couldn’t shed, perhaps the very thing that had produced the silver threads streaking his hair, growing in number by the day.
Sitting up, Griff poured another dram into their tumblers. “Put me out of my misery and open the thing.”
Unable to deny his brother, Dom slipped the sheet loose.
The note was concise, yet commanding—Bessie’s style.
It took him longer to read it than it should, a disgrace he’d never get over.
His mother and father had made sure he wouldn’t.
Resolute, he folded the foolscap lengthwise, then shoved it back into the darkened interior of its packaging.
Reclaiming the glass balanced on his knee, he took a drink.
“About that shipment of stone from the Portland quarries, your steward says the barge was delayed on the tide, and the masons are threatening to idle the men until it arrives. I’ll schedule a meeting to handle the negotiations. ”
“Oh, for the love of—” Rising from his chair, Griff leaned over the desk, and ripped the envelope from Dom’s slackened grasp.
“I’m not doing it,” Dom growled before Griff could state his opinion.
Because older brothers always had one.
Griff made quick work of Bessie’s request to meet with one of her clients, his lips parting in startled glee. “Lady Louisa Radcliffe. That’s Branscombe’s daughter, isn’t it? The wallflower who paints those dreadful watercolors?”
“No, she’s the hellion who almost burned down Baron Van-Meager’s manse last year. The artist is her sister.” Why Dom knew this, he couldn’t rightly say, he simply did.
Griff rolled the tumbler across his lips, a humming assessment escaping. “Ah, yes, the beautiful one. The so-called chemist.”
Dom polished off his rum, thinking it was fortunate liquor had never been his problem, though games of chance had.
He didn’t yearn to roll the dice of life ever again and that included matrimony.
Though he often got an itch between his shoulder blades when his world got too calm, a predicament he hoped to someday conquer.
“She’s calamity in silk. And if you don’t recall, I’ve had enough chaos. ”
“It wouldn’t hurt to meet her.” Griff held back a yawn Dom wasn’t certain was genuine. “Bessie is only asking for tea, not blood.”
Dom eyed the envelope Griff tossed on the desk, a shiver of foreboding skating down his spine. The Radcliffe daughters were heiresses, each and every one of them—four, if he had it right. Or was it five?
Funds they could use.
The Hertfordshire estate needed a new roof, the village they supported repairs to the schoolroom, the roads. He and Griff had a maintenance list for the London townhouse, too. Titles were notoriously expensive to sustain, when he’d, once upon a time, sought to hemorrhage their legacy.
However, marrying for money over affection was a forbidden topic.
Griff’s union with Willie was a love match, through and through. If Dom ever considered wedding for reasons other than blind devotion, he’d best keep it to himself. His brother might have agreed to that before—but not now.
Anyway, it was only a simple affair at a duke’s Cleveland Row residence.
Another inane tea. An hour lost. A favor to appease an aunt he hoped to coax back into his good graces.
Too, maybe he was being unfair. He’d never met Lady Louisa, only read about her explosive escapades in the scandal rags.
Possibly they were exaggerated, overblown fiction for society to peruse over crumpets.
Frowning, he tapped his glass against his thigh.
Though most of his editorials had been remarkably accurate.
Even the time he’d followed Griff’s lead and had a brief affair with an unusually indiscreet widowed baroness.
Because he was a man, his mind drifted into sensual waters. It had been months since he’d experienced a night of raw pleasure, so he closed his eyes and pictured it: a beautiful arsonist draped in silk sheets, her sighs carrying through the darkness.
What would that kind of rebelliousness be like in bed?
“Fine,” he said, setting his empty glass atop the invitation, the heavy vellum a gauntlet thrown, daring him. When he’d once loved a dare. “I’ll go. I’ll be polite. I won’t stay long. I would like to make it up to Bessie for the trouble I caused at the Lyon’s Den.”
Griff grinned, seeing he’d won a round with the keenest cardsharp in England. “Are you allowed back?”
Doubtful. Though Dom didn’t intend to step foot inside a gaming hell ever again.
Restless, the heat of Griff’s regard scorched him as he rose and crossed to the window, rum lingering on his tongue, the taste not wholly unpleasant.
Outside, a gust rattled the panes—sharp, cold, carrying the piquant scent of the Thames and the promise of rain.
The city sprawled before him, lamplit and unrepentant.
It reminded him of other foul-weather days, all of them ending in some manner of regret.
He tapped his knuckle to the leaded glass, realizing this was the only one in the room his father hadn’t managed to shatter with his famous temper.
Somewhere out there, casks of illegal liquor arrived and departed, nourishing London’s thirst for vice. And somewhere else, perhaps in a warm, well-appointed drawing room, a woman with a reputation for bedlam quietly considered which man might suit her.
It wouldn’t be him.
However, for his family, he would go. But he would be careful.
Because mayhem had a way of recognizing its own, and he feared Lady Louisa Radcliffe would take one look at him, see the ruin beneath the man, and try to mend what could not be mended.