by Erica Ridley
“Under no circumstances.” Max’s expression was hard and final. “If they don’t want me, I don’t want them. And be honest. You’re not surprised they don’t want me.”
Bryony grit her teeth together.
His smirk was answer enough.
Blast it all. There must be a way. She wanted to ask when he had applied. After his fame and fortune as ruler of the Cloven Hoof, or before it became the most sought-after gaming hell in London?
But he was right. It wouldn’t have mattered.
He had no title, no aristocratic blood. He had climbed as high as someone from his background could go. And it still fell short. Nothing he might do or achieve would make him good enough to move in her circles.
“They are opinionated, insular idiots,” she said at last. “It doesn’t matter what they think.”
“I know,” Max said, his gaze even. “I didn’t expect them to allow me in.”
She frowned. “Then why…”
“I wanted to force them to have my name on their lips,” he said fiercely. “To speak out loud from the sanctity of their club why I wasn’t worthy to join them. And then drive their fancy coaches with ancient family crests over here to my door in order to beg entrance into my world.”
She straightened. “You blackballed them?”
“Best day of my life,” he said with satisfaction.
Bryony grinned back. “Good.”
Her smile faltered when she realized it meant her own father was likely one of the men who had voted against him. One of the many privileged gentlemen who believed he could then walk into the Cloven Hoof as if he owned the place, only to be turned away at the door.
Perhaps that was the real reason why Max has been disgusted to learn she was a Grenville.
She couldn’t blame him.
His story gripped her heart. He had been born into poverty. Raised by his mother. Worked on the docks. Made more of himself than anyone of his acquaintance ever thought him capable of achieving.
Not only wasn’t he searching for some rich, high-class savior to bestow greatness by association and thereby elevate his worth…. He didn’t need a savior of any kind.
Or her.
Her chest thumped in sudden understanding.
She wasn’t sitting across from him at this desk because she had broken in, because she had been his first investor, because she owned the deed.
She was here because he hadn’t blackballed her.
It was she who’d had to prove herself to him. To be worthy of his time. Of his trust. All her contributions were incidental. The journals spread out before her proved how competent and clever he was completely on his own.
She looked around the meticulously ordered interior. This was his dream, not hers. If she cared about him at all, she ought not stand in his way.
He deserved the deed.
She had no right to keep it from him.
That he didn’t already possess it was a technicality. Her presumptiveness, her self-interest, was all that kept her from giving in. She was so afraid that once he possessed the deed, he wouldn’t need her anymore. No, not fear. It was the truth. She was delaying the inevitable.
Her throat tightened.
Giving Max his land was the right thing to do. She might wish to be part of the Cloven Hoof, but he needed the Cloven Hoof.
And as for Bryony?
Perhaps there was something else out there for someone like her.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
She dropped her gaze to the journals. “Nothing. Arithmetic.”
“You haven’t scribbled a single number in the past quarter hour.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms.
Bryony went with a half-truth. “I was thinking about Almack’s.”
He flinched and immediately shuttered his expression. “You’re thinking about ensnaring a titled gentleman?”
“I’m thinking about burning Almack’s to the ground and remaking it in the Cloven Hoof’s image.” She squinted into the distance as she imagined how wonderful it would be. “Instead of rigid rules for entry, I would let everyone in. Perhaps then love matches wouldn’t be so rare.”
“And… that is why no one will ever allow you to become a Patroness.” His posture relaxed.
She shrugged. “I know.”
“It is an interesting idea,” he admitted. “An assembly room wherein everyone is allowed to assemble. But I doubt it would have the effect you intend. Those who prefer exclusivity and showing the world how much better they are than others would not attend.”
Bryony wrinkled her nose. “Would you want them to?”
“I think you’re very unusual,” he said softly. “You are able to see much more of the world than just the sliver visible to most people.”
She stared back at him. What she cared about most was the fearless, bullheaded man right before her eyes.
“I brought something,” she blurted.
His gaze turned suspicious. “What is it?”
Something she’d been carrying about for a week, undecided on whether to give it to him. Something meant to be square, and meant to be beautiful, and meant to prove exactly how much he was starting to mean.
Instead, her grand gesture was ugly, lumpy, and indeterminate in function. Perhaps a little too on-the-nose for a gift that reflected the heart.
Pulse racing, she pulled the misshapen cushion from a bag at her feet and placed it on his desk.
He stared at it for a long moment without blinking. “It’s…”
She took pity on him. “A pillow.”
He nodded sagely. “For me?”
She nodded. “There’s more to the story. You may find it difficult to believe that this is the first sewing project I’ve ever completed in my life.”
“I’m flattered to be the recipient of such a unique honor,” he murmured. “Was it meant to be a pillow all along?”
“It was meant to be a sampler,” she admitted. “But the pattern was bigger than anticipated and the seamstress significantly less competent than one might desire, which culminated in the resulting work being a bit too… asymmetrical to fit in any frame. So I added a backside and stuffed it with feathers.”
“I like backsides,” he said. “Especially yours.”
She flushed with pleasure. He was looking at her like he wanted to kiss her again. There was nothing she wanted more. Well, almost nothing. First, she wanted him to accept his gift. It meant more to her than he knew. She bit her lip.
He had yet to so much as touch the pillow. Either because he feared it far too delicate to be manhandled or because he was afraid it carried leprosy.
She hoped her nervousness did not show in her eyes.
“Are those horns?” he asked politely. “The red bits in the middle?”
She pulled a sheet of foolscap from her bag and set it beside the pillow.
“I took the liberty of preparing a legend to aid in interpretation.” She pointed at the center of her needlework. “This part says ‘Cloven Hoof.’ These over here are horns, as you correctly noted. Over there is a forked tail. This is a glass of ale. Those are playing cards.”
“And the…” He wiggled his fingers at the tangles of thread demarking the perimeter.
She nodded. “The gray curlicues at the top are smoke and the orange ones at the bottom are hellfire.”
“It’s beautiful,” he pronounced. “Much too beautiful to use. It is a work of art that should be displayed prominently, so that all might enjoy it as much as I do.”
“If only Mother were here,” Bryony murmured. “I told her it was art.”
He gingerly picked up the pillow and carried it to his bookshelf, where he made a place for it between Walpole and Wollstonecraft on the topmost shelf. A focal position, where anyone entering the office would have no choice but to bask in its glory.
Bryony grinned to herself. The dear man would be explaining his choice in artwork for the rest of his days.
“Perhaps I have a future as a sea
mstress,” she mused aloud.
To his credit, Max did not choke with laughter. “Perhaps you can apprentice Frances.”
“She is too smart for that,” Bryony admitted.
She returned her gaze to the numbers before her, but her runaway thoughts were now on Max’s sister.
That Frances did not wish for her brother or any man to run her life was something Bryony very much understood. Yet a woman in Frances’s position had few options. It would be difficult to divine an acceptable way out.
Fortunately, Bryony had a gift for difficult calculations.
Chapter 16
Three days later, Max still caught himself gazing across his perfectly organized office at the hideous pillow up on his shelf. It looked like she’d fed a cat spools of colored thread and affixed the resulting hairballs to fine linen.
Never had he seen anything more misshapen in his life.
But Bryony had made it for him, so it held not only a dedicated place in his office, but also in his heart.
Even if he could never tell her so himself.
He slid his gaze to the far side of his desk. She had sent him a letter just that morning. A letter he had been studiously ignoring, and simultaneously obsessing over.
She had met his sister and wanted him to meet hers. The note was an invitation to the St. Giles School for Girls. Some sort of activity they were planning for two o’clock this afternoon.
It was currently a quarter past two.
He could blame his absence on being too busy at the club. It wouldn’t open for a few more hours, but there was always more to be done than time in which to do it. She would not be surprised by such an excuse at all.
Nor would she believe him.
Max glared at the invitation. He had been adamant about not getting too close. Not crossing the line. Ever since that afternoon in front of Gunter’s Tea Shop, he had sworn off public encounters altogether. With Bryony, anyway.
But this was not public. It was a private boarding school. In the middle of a rookery. A world away from the fashionable and the wealthy.
As much as he was trying to keep from entangling himself further by dreaming of a life they could never share… He would love to meet Bryony’s sisters.
Max had known her elder brother Heath for many years. Despite being heir to a barony, he had never once put on airs or attempted to put Max in his place.
The other sisters sounded even more unusual, particularly for their class. Now that he knew Bryony’s full name, he’d done some investigating of his own. Her oldest sister had caused an enormous scandal by choosing to become an opera singer. And the middle one had apparently opened a high-quality school in the lowest-class part of town.
A rookery was about as neutral a location as Max was likely to get.
Thus decided, he pushed away the pile of accounts he’d been failing to tally and headed outside to flag a hack. In no time at all, the carriage wheels were clomping past Seven Dials and coming up on the old abbey that now held the St. Giles School for Girls.
After paying the driver, Max alighted from the carriage and cautiously approached the front door.
His knock was answered not by Bryony or a butler, but by a twelve-year-old moppet with ginger plaits, a wrinkled pinafore, and a scowl to rival Vigo’s when he guarded the Cloven Hoof.
Max cleared his throat, unsure of the next move.
She gazed up at him sullenly.
He met her stare with his own.
At last, she gave an exaggerated sigh. “Calling card?”
Max clenched his empty fingers.
Calling cards were not an affectation he possessed. He had no reason to call upon anyone who might request one of him. Had, in fact, not anticipated being challenged thusly on the broken cobblestones of a rookery.
Even here, he failed to meet expectations.
“Maxwell Gideon,” he announced instead, imbuing his voice with his usual confidence and swagger.
“Card room,” she muttered bitterly. “Everyone but me. Butler duty is a travesty.”
Max blinked and bent his knees to match her height. “Did you say, ‘card room?’”
“This way.” She made an about-face and strode off down a corridor without waiting to see if he would follow.
Quickly, he stepped across the school’s threshold, closed the door behind him, and hurried after the disgruntled redhaired lass stuck on butler duty against her will.
She led him around a staircase and through a wide chamber with a dais that could easily double as a stage and ballroom, then into a secondary salon where at least thirty people sat cross-legged on the floor amidst a hailstorm of fluttering playing-cards.
“Card room,” his guide announced and immediately stomped back to her post without properly introducing him.
It was just as well. Max could not tear his gaze from the mêlée within.
Most of the faces he glimpsed belonged to a range of girls as young as six and as old as fourteen. However, this level of chaos had not been caused by children alone. By his count, at least five grown adults were instigating the anarchy.
Heath Grenville, he knew at once. Bryony, of course. The soprano sister, he recognized from the caricatures. The Earl of Wainwright, her husband and a frequent visitor of the Cloven Hoof. And a dark-haired woman who—using his astonishing powers of deduction—must be the sister who had founded the school.
There.
That comprised the entirety of the logical conclusions Max could deduce from the illogical scene before of him.
What the devil they were doing, if indeed there was any method to their madness, was quite beyond his ken. The object of the game appeared to have more to do with keeping cards in the air than in play.
“Max!” Bryony exclaimed in delight and scrambled to her feet.
Given she was in a dress and not trousers, she did so quite elegantly.
He inclined his head in greeting.
She pointed to the dark-haired woman in the center of the room. “May I present my sister, Mrs. Dahlia Spaulding.”
When the sister scrambled to her feet, Max caught a brief glimpse of trouser bottoms beneath her gown. He could not think of an explanation for such a sartorial choice, and decided in this case it was perhaps best not to seek answers.
Mrs. Spaulding dipped the most flatteringly low curtsy Max had ever seen in his life.
Come to think of it, he wasn’t certain anyone had ever curtsied in his direction before.
He knew that the proper response for a gentleman was to make an elegant leg of his own. As he had never previously been treated as a gentleman, he had not bothered to practice the maneuver.
He regretted that choice now.
Awkwardly, he dipped a little bow toward the headmistress and hoped it did not offend. “My pleasure.”
“Children!” Mrs. Spaulding called out. “Pay your respects to Mr. Gideon.”
Thirty little girls scrambled to their feet at once and performed picture-perfect curtsies in unison.
Max found himself bowing yet again. His mind fogged at the unexpected turn of events. He had gone from never-been-curtsied-to-before to curtsied-to-by-thirty-women-at-once in the space of a breath.
Bryony headed straight toward him with a sister attached to each elbow. “You’ve now met Dahlia, the headmistress of this circus. I’d also like you to meet Camellia, whom you may know as Lady Wainwright.”
The countess immediately dipped him an even more impressive curtsy than her sister had.
A countess.
Curtsying to Max.
He desperately wished he had any idea how to make a proper leg.
Somehow he managed to bow without disaster.
“Come,” Mrs. Spaulding said, motioning him to join the others on the floor. “It’s perfect timing. We’re just in the middle of a game of cards.”
Max hesitated. This truly was an organized game of some kind? And they wanted him to join?
His eyes met the commiserative gazes of the sole t
wo men amongst the roomful of women.
With a knowing look, Lord Wainwright called out, “You’ll get used to it.”
“I invented this game myself,” Heath Grenville added proudly.
“New rule!” shouted a girl who had just tossed an impressive quantity of playing-cards into the air. “It’s Mr. Gideon’s turn next.”
That was a rule?
Before Max could properly discern what was happening, half a dozen students in plaits and pinafores dragged him to the middle of the room, sat him on the carpet, and presented him with a bent pile of playing-cards.
“Er…” he said brilliantly. He ran a gaming hell. He could do this. “How many cards am I meant to deal each person?”
The girls laughed at his apparently ridiculous query. “Molly’s rule was to abolish specific counts of any sort, and Beatrice’s rule was to get rid of dealing altogether.”
“It was?” Max said faintly.
The girls pointed at the pile of playing-cards in his hand. “Louisa’s rule is that the number of cards you get is however many you are handed.”
“Of course.” Defeated, he turned his gaze toward Bryony in supplication.
“Whoever wins a round gets to make a new rule for the game,” she told him, eyes sparkling. “That was my rule. Winners are also allowed to toss their playing cards in the faces of their opponents, who may then do the same. The girls have decided that it is your turn. Go ahead when you’re ready.”
Max gazed back at her in consternation. When he was ready to what, exactly? The alleged explanation had given him absolutely no insight into the actual mechanics of the game.
He turned his cards face up.
All of the girls immediately did the same.
He fanned them in one hand to hide their face value from his dozens of nosy onlookers.
All of the girls did the same.
He narrowed his eyes.
The six-year-old closest to him narrowed hers right back.
Max grinned. Someone’s rule must have been, copy whoever’s turn it is. This could be fun after all. He closed the fan of cards in one sharp movement, creating a crisp rectangular stack, and then placed the entirety atop his head in perfect balance.
With shrieks of merriment, the girls attempted to do the same.