The duke’s face remained as stony as the statues outside the pillars of his townhouse. “Sit,” he ordered, gesturing to the button-tufted Chesterfield sofa situated at the center of the room. “There are… matters we’ve to discuss.” As if on cue, the hulking figures moved to take the leather library chairs flanking each side of that sofa.
“Matters,” Leo repeated slowly.
His uncle nodded once.
Vague. Cryptic.
Unease immediately stirred, a primitive response that had saved his arse—both literally and figuratively—in the time he’d served as an agent to the Brethren. However, he’d been removed from his last case: investigating the Cato Street Conspiracy that had nearly seen all the prime minister’s Cabinet killed by commoners. “Is this in reference to my last investigation?” he quizzed, refusing the indicated seat in favor of the French wine liquor cabinet. Yanking the doors open, he rummaged through and availed himself of a bottle of brandy and an engraved glass goblet. His bounty in hand, he at last joined the trio. “I’ve told you all that I believe I’ve stumbled upon something where the Cato Street Conspiracy is concerned.” That plot had shaken England to its core—particularly the lords who spent their days in Parliament. Society, polite and otherwise, was content with the assurances that the plan had been thwarted and the risks were gone.
The trio exchanged looks. It was Leo’s uncle, however, who spoke. “This is about a plot of noblemen attempting to sow unrest to establish support for an oppressive agenda?”
At the heavy skepticism there, Leo set his jaw.
“What proof do you have, Tennyson?” Rowley diverted Leo’s attention his way.
“Ah, Rowley, my ever-practical mentor. Driven by fact-based details only,” he said with a jeering edge. Leo lifted his glass in mock salute. Most men and women relied so heavily on having proof in hand that they failed to trust their gut instincts.
“I am not your bloody mentor. I am your damned superior. And you answer to me, you insolent cur.” Lord Rowley peered down his hawkish nose. “Either way, I take your reply to mean ‘none.’ You have no proof.” Almost two decades older, proper, officious, and well respected by the peerage, Rowley could not be more different from Leo. The viscount looked over to the still-silent Delegator… always assessing. “It is as I told you. Rubbish. It is an overall waste of the agency’s time to unearth a nebulous threat that has offered up not one single suspect to investigate.”
That cold unfeelingness had driven the other man’s wife to seek comfort in Leo’s bed… many times. Refusing to rise to the pompous bastard’s bait, Leo stretched his legs out and crossed his ankles. “Is that what this is? Tattling on me to my uncle?” Color suffused the viscount’s cheeks, and Leo pressed him. “And for what? Because I’m attempting to ensure the safety of the people?”
“The people,” Rowley sneered. “Let us not forget on whose behalf you work.”
Leo sipped his drink. “Crown and country.” He arched an eyebrow. “Though, at times, I appear the only one to remember my allegiance to anyone outside the nobility.”
Rowley scoffed. “You do not remember anything beyond the contents of a bottle and whatever whore you’re currently bedding.”
With a cool grin, Leo again lifted his glass. “Oh, come. ’Tis hardly polite to refer to your wife in those crude terms.”
The viscount’s eyes bulged.
With a thunderous bellow, he surged forward.
Leo’s uncle and Higgins immediately moved to restrain him, grabbing him by the shoulders.
“You bastard.”
Leo smirked.
Rowley only renewed his struggles, fighting to get to him. “You are a wastrel, a lecher, unfit to do the work of the Brethren and unfit to move amongst Polite Society.” The viscount spit, catching Leo squarely on the cheek.
He stiffened. It was an offense that would have seen most men meeting over pistols at dawn. Leo, however, had been the recipient of every vile—and oftentimes accurate—insult, where they’d simply ceased to matter.
A thick tension instantly blanketed the room.
Removing a white monogrammed kerchief from inside his jacket, he dabbed the folded cloth at Rowley’s spittle.
“Are we done?” Uncle William snapped.
“We are.” Leo lifted his head. “That is, unless Rowley cares to further discuss his wife?”
Instead of his earlier show of fury, his superior ripped free of the hold on him. He peeled his lip in a condescending sneer. “Make light all you want, but you are nothing, Tennyson. Nothing. The end of your work for the Brethren is nearly twelve years overdue, and the day you are tossed out on your worthless arse is near. The only reason you ever had a post was because of your un—”
“That is enough,” the duke interrupted, injecting an edge of steel that drained the color from Lord Rowley’s cheeks. “You presume much and know even less.”
Instead of his uncle’s defense, Leo fixed on one utterance made by Rowley. Leo’s days were numbered with the Brethren. There had been the stir of warnings for years about his recklessness being a detriment to the organization. “The Brethren need me in my role.”
“That was the case,” Uncle William said quietly, with even more of his usual somberness.
“Was the case?” Abandoning his negligent pose, Leo straightened. “What is this?” he asked tightly, tiring of their games and the ominous partial statements. He downed his drink in one long swallow. “Whatever you have to say, be done with it.”
At last, silent until now, Lord Higgins spoke. “Rowley is recommending you be cut from the Brethren.”
Life without the Brethren? His stomach muscles clenched. It was all he’d been, and all he was. He searched for his usual flippant reply and came up empty.
“Rowley has doubts that you can change your ways.”
Change? There was a greater likelihood of a leopard shedding its damned spots. With a sound of disgust, he surged to his feet. “My ways are what allow me to move freely about and perform the work I do. The Brethren demanded a cold, callous, ruthless bastard, and that is precisely what I have become.” Nay, it is what you’ve always been.
Lord Higgins drew his gloves off with a meticulous precision. “Regardless of the role you fill, a code of honor must exist… among our members and the respectable members of Society.” He paused, leveling a meaningful stare at Leo. “Otherwise, we are no different from the men and women whom we bring to justice.”
Leo seethed. “You would place carousing, whoring, and wagering in the same category as you would treason?”
Lord Higgins’ silence stood as a resounding answer.
His uncle settled a hand on his shoulder, giving a slight squeeze. “It has become too much, Leo. Too much.”
He gnashed his teeth, wanting to spit and snarl like the beast they took him for.
“We would be done with you if it were not for your uncle.” Rowley’s slight emphasis left little doubt to his opinion on the reason Leo’s position would be spared.
“How very typical of Polite Society to berate me for my wildness while so glibly accepting in their folds one who made a fortune off the backs of men, women, and children,” he sneered in Rowley’s direction. It was a secret to none that the viscount’s dealings in the now-abolished slave trade had left him with a fortune to rival most small kingdoms.
“Pfft.” Rowley flicked an imagined speck of lint from his sleeve. “It was business. And common citizens and do-gooders in Parliament need to stop interfering in honest business, especially when it comes to a trade accepted all over the world.”
Higgins directed his next question to Leo. “You are of the opinion the Cato Street Conspiracy had different groundings?” Where Society had been content to believe it was solely unruly upstarts chafing at the restrictions placed upon them by the Tories, Leo had believed it was more. It was only a matter of puzzling through what the other reason, in fact, was. “You offered two names…”
“I personally know Ellsworth a
nd Waterson,” Rowley snapped. “They are not men to subvert the government.”
Leo rolled his shoulders. “Their political leanings and influence in Parliament marked them suspect.” As had their votes with the Six Acts.
“I’m not here to debate the names that Tennyson’s produced,” he said with an air of finality. “See what you turn up. You are not permitted another misstep. I don’t want so much as a false rumor about you bedding a proper lady or member of the Brethren’s kin.”
“What of the widowed wives and sisters?” Leo stretched out that insolent question.
The Delegator went on as though he’d not spoken. “The Cato case is yours.”
A familiar thrill gripped Leo. This was the reason for his existence… flushing out traitors and uncovering crimes against the Crown. He’d devoted his life to the Brethren with the hope that he would one day ascend the ranks that his uncle had.
“I’ll remind you.” Higgins held up one finger. “One more incident, and you are done. Your work for the organization will be through. Are we clear?”
“Abundantly, my lord.”
Exchanging looks, Higgins and Rowley made their polite goodbyes to the duke.
“Well, that went better than I expected,” he said drolly, rescuing the bottle and glass from the floor. Settling back into his seat, he made to pour another drink.
His uncle plucked both from his grip. “That is enough, Leo.” He spoke in his tutor’s tones, as Leo had come to call them over the years.
He sighed. How very… cliché his uncle had always been. Every wicked scoundrel and unrepentant rake was in possession of a disapproving uncle who controlled the purse strings of a gent’s future. It was the very formula for any Gothic novel and a staple of societal expectations and, as such, a perfect cover for Leo’s dealings with his uncle, the Duke of Aubrey.
“You are out of hand.”
“I am a rake,” he said, bored by the increasingly familiar discussion even as annoyance lanced through him. When his uncle had plucked him from the schoolroom, a scholar hiding his love of books, the Brethren had, in turn, shaped him into… this. “It seems counterproductive to have me abandon my ways”—the very ways that had allowed him to ferret out invaluable details from enemies of the state—“when those ways have proven helpful to the Crown.”
“You were not always like…” His uncle waved a hand at him. “This.” While the duke launched into one of his ever-familiar diatribes, Leo took the glass back and sipped at his drink.
Yes, there had been a time when he was scared and crying and sniveling. No longer… and never again. He owed the Brethren, and the organization had his fealty until he kicked up his heels and went on to spend eternity writhing in hell. When his uncle had finished, Leo touched an imagined brim at his forehead. “Thank you.”
“It was not a compliment, Leo,” his uncle said bluntly, claiming the seat opposite him. “If I had known recruiting you for the Brethren would have turned you into a coldhearted rake, without a beating heart in your body, then I would have—” Splotches of color filled his uncle’s cheeks.
“What?” Leo waggled his eyebrows. “Left me as the whipping boy for my dear, departed father?”
Uncle William blanched. “Never,” he said on an adamant whisper.
Worthless, pathetic bastard…
Leo blinked as that hated voice thumped his memory into remembrances he could do without. Needing to put to flight those demons, he climbed to his feet. “I trust we are done here.” Leo forced the lazy steps the world had come to expect.
“Leo?” his uncle called out when he reached the door. “Do not forget… you have one more opportunity to redeem yourself. Do not squander it.”
With that sharp rebuke following after him, Leo left.
Chapter 2
London
Everyone in the whole of London was talking about swans.
Just as they had been for the better part of the year. The topic filled scandal sheets and gossip columns. It was spoken about and whispered of last Season… and with the newly minted one, the talk had remained.
Or not just any swan. More specifically, the muted white swans. Though the number invariably ranged from two to ten to twenty, it was all anyone had spoken of since the Duke of Hampstead had overtaken Mrs. Munroe’s Finishing School and plucked the headmistress, Mrs. Bryant, from the esteemed institution and made her his wife.
All young ladies sighed with wistful romanticism while the matrons and proper mamas spoke of the incident with nothing more than disdain and disapproval.
And though Lady Chloe Edgerton invariably and quite effortlessly avoided all hints of gossip, this topic of discourse had been altogether different—for it had involved her family. Her sister-in-law’s finishing school for young ladies of scandalous origins and impoverished families had gone from a respected, but still whispered about, establishment… to one that was spoken of in outraged tones.
At five and twenty years of age, Chloe had come to appreciate the dangerous power of gossip and scandal. Forces more dangerous than most acts of nature, they had the power to bring anyone or anything down.
Gossip and scandal resulted in impromptu marriages and hasty arrangements between unlikely couples. And they shattered reputations.
It would seem noble institutions were not exempt from that power. The problem was, in Polite Society, women weren’t afforded a misstep. To the ton, it had been outrageous enough that a marchioness had established a school for illegitimate girls and other students of ignoble origins. For the headmistress of that respectable establishment to be embroiled in a scandal of her own—a gentleman storming the school with carriages full of swans—it was an act that had shaken the still-fledgling school.
Chloe stood outside her sister-in-law’s office. Jane Edgerton, the Marchioness of Waverly, had started the school. Chloe pressed her palms together and quickly ran through the details of her upcoming meeting. Having been the fourth-born Edgerton, Lady Chloe Edgerton had learned early on the importance of timing.
As a child with a notoriously cruel—thankfully now dead—father, she’d found that fleeing an empty room was oftentimes the difference between a violent beating and a pain-free evening.
As a young woman, the only thing to stand between Chloe and a determined matchmaking mama and potential suitor was her skill of timing.
As such, this particular meeting she’d arranged with Jane was nothing short of meticulously planned and scheduled. And yet, here she stood, still searching for her most convincing argument.
“Jane,” she silently mouthed. “I’ve come solely with the intention of solving the problems with your institution.” She grimaced. Egads. No. She gave her head a shake. Having plotted and planned for the better part of two months—since their return for the London Season, to be precise—she’d time aplenty to prepare the opening statement of her argument.
Jane had been unable to find a suitable replacement for the former headmistress who’d quit her post for the role of duchess. A woman who’d had all the freedom, security, and stability without the fears or worries of a husband had gone and thrown it all away—on swans and a duke.
The fool.
Fueled by that determination, Chloe plastered a smile on her lips, raised her hand, and rapped once.
“Enter,” Jane called out.
Pressing the handle, Chloe admitted herself. “Ja—” Her smile withered and briefly died as she settled her stare on the unexpected addition to this meeting.
Blast, damn, and double damn.
Her overprotective brother Gabriel, the Marquess of Waverly, who’d done his best to see her married over the years, gave her a droll smile. “No.”
“I didn’t say anything,” she muttered, closing the door behind her.
“You didn’t need to,” he drawled.
She lingered with her stare on the doorway, attempting to right herself, and fought back the sense of betrayal that her sister-in-law would include Gabriel in this exchange. Her mind rac
ed. In the orchestrated meeting, she’d not intended on having to deal with Gabriel. Not yet, anyway.
She turned and faced him.
Alas, she could tell from the suspicious glint in Gabriel’s eyes that he knew her well too well.
Chloe smoothed her palms down the front of her lavender satin skirts.
“Well?” Gabriel urged in a wholly un-Gabriel-like manner.
She frowned at that insolence. He’d always been high-handed. Marriage had softened him, but that nobleman’s veneer he’d perfected would always be part of him. Gain control of yourself, Chloe. She wasn’t supposed to be off-balance. Gabriel was. None of this plan would work if he were the one in control. “It is a fortunate thing for you that Mother is visiting Alex and Imogen,” she chided. “She’d hardly tolerate such rudeness.”
He had the good grace to flush, but he remained as obstinate as always. “Nor do I believe your precise timing with Mother just leaving for the country is any manner of coincidence,” he returned with such a direct wryness, she scrunched her mouth.
Well. In all her scheming, she’d not anticipated this forthrightness from her once-stodgy brother. Marriage to Jane had changed him. In only good ways, of course. What Chloe had not anticipated, however, was just how greatly he’d been affected by his falling in love. And how dratted inconvenient it was for her.
She sighed. Very well. When presented with an unanticipated parry, one thrust. “I would like to serve as headmistress at Mrs. Munroe’s,” she said calmly, directing that request at her sister-in-law.
Despite the heavy silence that descended over the room, Jane held her gaze. Her stoic countenance gave no hint that she’d either heard or disdained such a request, and Chloe took faith from—
“What?” Gabriel blurted.
Upended, just like that. The only way to be with one’s opponent. Angling her shoulders so all her attention was reserved for Jane, Chloe reached inside the pocket sewn along the front of her gown and withdrew a small, folded page. “It is my understanding that Mrs. Munroe’s once again has a vacancy for the post of headmistress.” She slid the neatly clipped article across the small rose-inlaid table to the couple seated opposite her.
The Lady Who Loved Him Page 2