by Wicked Wager
How was he to rescue the fortunes of his family—and safeguard the retainers in his care?
Well, he might be a farce of a “hero,” who’d puked his stomach dry before every engagement and barely been able to hold the reins, his hands shook so badly before the charge, but somehow he’d managed to get through years of war with most of his troopers alive. Even better, England held no adversaries wishful of putting a bullet through him.
Except perhaps, he thought with a grin, Jenna Fairchild.
As if his thoughts had conjured her, suddenly he saw in the distance a lady whose graceful carriage on horseback proclaimed her identity as loudly as a herald’s trumpet. Signaling Pax to slow, he gave himself up to admiring her.
A little voice whispered that Lady Fairchild’s fortune would go a long way to restoring his shattered finances. But attractive as the idea might be of wedding—and bedding—the delectable Jenna Montague, he couldn’t imagine a fortune hunter in London who’d have less chance than he of getting his grubby fists on the Montague wealth.
Though he might—depending on just how dire was the news soon to be imparted to him by the family solicitor—be able to stomach cozening up to some Cit’s daughter more interested in his title than his person, Jenna Montague’s kindness, valor and integrity demanded more in a partner than a half-crippled man with a sordid past. She would want another Garrett, a man of substance, courage and impeccable reputation—none of which virtues Tony had any pretense of possessing.
Best to think of her as his battlefield angel and leave it at that. As he’d learned long ago, depending too much on one’s paragons was a mistake.
A memory suddenly flooded back, bringing a slight smile to his lips. He hadn’t thought of Miss Sweet, his much-older sister’s governess, in years. Probably because the young man he’d become after leaving childhood had not been looking to angels for his model.
She’d been the only friend he could remember from his lonely childhood, scolding when he tormented his timid tutor, challenging him to prove he could learn Latin and Greek, praising his efforts, laughing with him.
Listening to him.
And then one winter night, Miss Sweet had suddenly left Hunsdon Park without a word of goodbye.
Gathering his courage, he’d inquired about her, prompting his father to a diatribe on the perfidy of females in general and Miss Sweet in particular. Giving almost no notice, the ungrateful jade had abandoned them, his father said, to accept a better-paying position.
Tony had been devastated.
Yes, admiring from afar allowed one to focus on the inspiring illusion that perfect goodness existed. Heaven knows, he could use some inspiration.
Despite the sensible conclusion that he ought to keep his distance, as always, something about Jenna drew him irresistibly. Knowing no one would forestall his approach—her groom was grazing his horse at the opposite side of the park—he couldn’t help but follow her.
She was riding a different mount this morning—surely not her own, for even now that she’d reached the open expanse of Rotten Row, the placid beast seemed disinclined to exceed a trot. Wondering how long so intrepid a rider would content herself with so stodgy a pace, he had to grin when, a moment later, she gave the mare a light tap with her riding crop.
The smile faded when the horse jerked to a halt, then reared up, lunging and bucking as she attempted to unseat her rider. Before he could even shout a warning, Jenna tumbled sideways out of her saddle and landed facedown on the rocky path.
CHAPTER SIX
SPURRING PAX TO A GALLOP, Tony reached Jenna before her groom even noticed his mistress had fallen. Quickly he secured his horse and limped as fast as he could to where she lay, still ominously unmoving.
Awkwardly he lowered himself to the ground, the familiar taste of fear bitter in his mouth. “Jenna!” he called, patting her shoulder. “Jenna, can you hear me?”
There was no response. He touched her wrist, overjoyed to feel a faint pulse against his shaking fingers. Though she lay with her face in the mud, he dare not move her until he knew the extent of her injuries.
Detachment settling in, he traced down her limbs, then up from the base of her neck. Relief flooded him when he determined that, as best he could tell, the spine appeared intact and no bones had been broken.
By this time the thunder of approaching hoofs told him the groom must have finally seen his fallen mistress. A moment later, a panic-faced lad skidded to a stop beside Tony. “Cor, m’lord, be she dead?”
“She breathes still—no thanks to your diligence,” Tony said acidly. “Help me turn her—gently!”
Tony discovered, as he’d suspected, a purpling contusion on her temple. Her even breathing and steady pulse reassured him somewhat, but he knew a brain injury could be as dangerous as a fracture to the spine. She might also have suffered other, not yet apparent hurts.
Though he was tempted to wait for a carriage to convey her home more gently, his battlefield experience argued that the longer she lay on the cold ground, the greater the danger that she might never recover consciousness or that the chill might settle in her lungs.
Horseback it must be.
“You—” he gestured to the boy “—fetch my horse, over there. Once I’ve mounted, you must hand Lady Fairchild up to me as gently as you can and lead us back to Fairchild House. I don’t want to jostle her any more than necessary, but we must get her home as quickly as possible and summon a physician. Return for her mount later.”
While the lad did as he was bid, Tony thanked God he had his horse available. With his arms well-developed from wielding a saber, lifting Jenna from the groom and balancing her before him in the saddle proved easy enough a task. He knew he’d never have been able to support her weight, slight as it was, were he on foot.
For an instant Tony wondered why Jenna’s seemingly docile mount had suddenly turned so fractious. Far too worried about her condition to spare more than that moment on the thought, he hugged her limp body to his chest.
The transit home seemed to take an age. By the time Upper Brook Street came into view, he was sweating, even his well-trained muscles strained by the effort of holding her as motionless as possible.
Just as they reached the townhouse, Jenna moved at last. Eyes still shut, she murmured and nestled against Tony, as if snuggling into his warmth. Or as if, slowly rousing from sleep, she were seeking her lover.
His body stirred at the thought and, despite his worry, he had to grin. Often as he’d dreamed of having Jenna Montague in his arms again, he’d never envisioned it happening quite like this.
Finally a Fairchild servant noticed them. “Someone from the house will assist us now,” Tony called to the groom. “Ride with all speed for the doctor.”
A moment later, a procession of servants began streaming out, among them Sancha, the Spanish maid who had accompanied Jenna all through the Peninsula.
“Madre de Dios, mi pobre señora!” she cried as she ran down the steps toward them. “What happened?”
“She fell from her horse,” Tony answered.
As the maid’s gaze lifted from her mistress to the man holding her, her eyes widened. “The Evil One!” she gasped.
So much for Sancha’s good opinion. But concern for Jenna outweighing his chagrin, he continued, “Get her into a warm bed as quickly as possible. A doctor was sent for.”
After carefully handing Jenna to a stout footman, he dismounted to follow. “Nay!” Sancha cried, stepping forward to block him and making the sign of the cross, as if to ward off the Evil Eye. “You may not enter!”
Before Tony could remonstrate, Lane Fairchild trotted down the stairs. He paused for a moment as the footman carrying Jenna passed him, his grim gaze scanning her pale face, then proceeded to halt before Tony.
“What outrage is this? If you have harmed my cousin, I shall call you out, even if you are a cripple!”
“Lady Fairchild fell while riding,” Tony said, ignoring the jibe about his condition and trying
to hold his temper in check. “I assisted in carrying her home.”
Fairchild raised his eyebrows. “Jenna fell from her horse? Do you really expect me to believe that?”
Tony shrugged. “I don’t give a damn what you believe. Question the groom about it—indeed, I’d like to ask him myself how such a thing happened. But for now, Sancha, go to your mistress. The doctor should be here any moment.”
Fairchild looked as if he would comment further, but chose to refrain. “I do thank you for seeing her home,” he admitted grudgingly. “Now I must tend to my cousin.”
With that, Fairchild ran back up the stairs. As the front door shut behind them, the rest of the servants dispersed. For a few moments Tony stood alone, debating whether or not to continue up the stairs and demand entry. But given Fairchild’s plainly demonstrated animosity, it was unlikely he’d be able to inveigle his way in. Though it galled him to leave before finding out how she was, there seemed little point in remaining.
He’d return later after the physician had examined her, he decided. He’d done all he could for Jenna, save keep vigil until the doctor came. What happened now was in the hands of her maid, her physician—and Jenna herself.
“Fight like the good soldier you are,” he murmured. And then, shoulders aching, he mounted Pax and set off.
TWO WEEKS LATER, Tony sat in one of the new hells off Pall Mall, an untasted drink at his elbow as, hand after hand, he raked in the guineas of his opponent, a lad too drunk to count the cards in his unsteady grip.
He felt a bit ashamed, relieving this castaway stripling of so much blunt. But the grim news imparted by the family solicitor when Tony had finally consulted him, after being turned away three times from the Fairchild mansion after Jenna’s accident, made the necessity of finding an immediate source of income starkly clear.
The earnings from the Nelthorpe estates, financially crippled like so many farming communities after the war’s end, had diminished to a trickle that would barely pay to seed this year’s crops. Not attempting to hide his disapproval, the solicitor told him that his father had sold or gambled away the investments left by Tony’s grandfather, mortgaged nearly every property it was possible to mortgage, and was in arrears in paying back even the interest.
Like his father, the solicitor advised him to head off the disaster by marrying an heiress. At least this man had the grace to remain silent when Tony, angry and despairing, snapped back at him to ask which fair flower of virginity had a rich Papa, still in possession of his senses, who might agree to offer Tony her hand.
Perhaps something could be worked out, the man had said weakly. On that hopeful note, they’d parted.
He’d gone back to gaming to pay off the most pressing bills he’d found stuffed in his father’s desk. Thanks to a merciful Providence, thus far, he’d been winning.
But he’d gambled too long not to know that, skillfully and soberly as he was now playing, his luck wouldn’t last forever. The blunt he’d accumulated after two week’s play offered a small cushion against immediate ruin, but gaming could be no more than a temporary solution.
His only real chance to recoup their fortune would be, as everyone suggested, to marry one.
However, Tony’s few forays into polite Society had confirmed that his soiled reputation, no doubt reinforced by the activities of his sire, remained intact. Society matrons with marriageable daughters in tow took care to avoid him. His older sister, now Lady Siddons, had distanced herself from her Hunsdon kin immediately after her marriage and could not be looked to for any assistance.
His chances of finding a suitably wealthy aristocratic bride were thus virtually nonexistent. Accepting that fact, he’d started a list of wealthy men in the City who, rumor said, had pretensions of seeing their daughters rise in Society. He still had no idea how he was to wangle introductions to those fathers, much less charm one into gifting him with his daughter and her fortune.
The question of how he’d manage to coexist afterward with a woman who was little more than the prize in this most high-staked of card games, he avoided considering.
As Tony watched his opponent struggle to extract a card, the lad’s face went slack and he slumped forward onto the table. With a resigned sigh, Tony hopped up to catch him before he slid onto the floor, then plucked a coin from the stack before him to give the servant who relieved him of the lad, instructing him to transport the boy home.
Who had ever done as much for him? he asked himself, irritated by the unpleasant taste that still lingered in his mouth as the youth was carried off. He could easily have trebled the bets, come away with a stack of the greenling’s vowels as well as all his blunt. A true Captain Sharp would have done just that.
As he idly gathered up the boy’s coins, his mind wandered back to Jenna. Though he’d called nearly every day, finally coaxing his way into seeing Sancha, he’d never been admitted to Jenna’s presence.
She was recovering, Sancha assured him. She thanked him for his flowers and the book he’d brought, one he’d laughed through and thought she would enjoy.
If only these long nights of smoke and liquor and bad company could earn him a future with a woman like that, a woman he could respect and care about and look forward to sharing his life with, maybe he wouldn’t feel so…alone.
Tony my lad, you’re growing maudlin, he told himself. When, after all, had he ever not been alone?
“Tony Nelthorpe! By heaven, I see you made it out of hospital after all!”
Recognizing the man who’d hailed him, Tony’s melancholy dissolved in a surge of gladness.
“Ned Hastings!” he cried, rising to shake the hand being proffered. “You’re looking well yourself. Fully recovered from that episode in Belgium, I trust?”
“Yes, thanks to your timely intervention. And you?”
“Much better than when last you saw me.”
“Praise the Lord for that! But what are you doing here?” Hastings looked about them with disdain. “Thought if you wished to play, you’d take a chair at White’s.”
Shrugging, Tony offered him wine. “I decided to amuse myself in a setting with a more…varied clientele.”
“Everyone from old aristocracy to jumped-up Cits to Johnny Raws straight from the country.” Hastings’s grin faded as he took a glass. “Too many of our old Oxford mates now forever missing at White’s, eh?”
Leaving it to the jackals who never served.
“And the tulips who remained while the rest of us answered the call, one doesn’t wish to see,” Hastings concluded, giving voice to Tony’s thought.
“Indeed.”
After staring into the distance, Hastings shook himself, as if to break free of the ghostly fist of memory. “So, what are you doing, now that you’re up and about?” Hastings asked. “Understand the earl is up to his usual tricks. Can…can I do anything to assist?”
Tony felt his face flush. Having known him since Oxford, Hastings also knew he was perpetually purse-pinched. Discovering Tony in an establishment that possessed no pretensions to being aught but a gambling den, he could surely guess how things currently stood.
“You’ve already helped enough,” Tony replied. “Pax is a superior mount. Given my recent difficulties in navigating on my own two limbs, I should have been in bad case indeed had you not generously provided me with him.”
Hastings waved away Tony’s thanks. “’Twas little enough, considering that if you hadn’t ridden down the cuirassier who was about to gut me in Quatre Bras, I’d not be here drinking wine with you tonight.”
“If I hadn’t gotten him, someone else would have.”
“Perhaps, but you did, and I shall never forget that.” Hastings took a sip before saying diffidently, “My father’s investments in the India trade prosper. Should you find yourself a trifle under the hatches, I’m sure he—”
“No need. I shall come about shortly. As soon as I decide which tender virgin to honor with the offer of my hand,” he added, trying to keep bitterness from his vo
ice.
“’Twould be a sensible solution,” Hastings said with a nod. “Have you anyone in mind?”
“I’m still, shall we say, reconnoitering the ground.”
Hastings’s eyes brightened and he set down his glass. “You remember ‘Guinea’ Harris, don’t you?”
“That corporal in first company who could shoot the center out of a yellow boy from fifty paces?”
“Yes. I saw him just last week. His father’s some sort of banker in the city, full of juice, if rumor can be believed. Perhaps you ought to call on him. Mr. Harris might be able to suggest suitable bridal candidates for a man who, like his son, survived Waterloo.”
Probably Banker Harris, like most people awed by the great and terrible victory over the French, thought “Waterloo survivor” was synonymous with “courage.”
Tony knew he didn’t qualify. But he couldn’t afford to be too finicky about honor. An influential City banker would be of great help in finding him an heiress to marry.
And so, despite his discomfort, he made himself say, “If the opportunity should arise, I’d like to meet him.”
“I’d be happy to arrange it. Mayhap ‘Guinea’ Harris’s papa can send some golden coins rolling in your direction!”
Tony murmured his gratitude. He ought to feel encouraged—and virtuous, that he’d made himself take this first step toward the solution everyone was recommending. A solution that was both logical and commonplace. Most men of his station married to secure alliances and fortunes.
Hadn’t he, once upon a time, urged Jenna to make just such a match—with him? Though, he recalled with a grin, the bargain had been rather one-sided: her fortune for his somewhat tarnished title. Ah, what a coxcomb he’d been!
But though he had certainly coveted her fortune, there had been something about Jenna, something beyond an undeniably strong physical attraction, that had drawn him and made the idea of marrying her compelling even to a man who scoffed at the notion of love and fidelity.