immediately sat back.
Then Charles got to it, the heart of the question that mattered most. “Why do you wish to join?”
And just like that, all the nervousness seemed to seep out of the young man’s wiry frame. Waldegrave’s lips formed one of those affected, crooked half grins that Charles knew all too well. Dropping his left elbow onto the table, the young man leaned forward. “I think that should be clear.”
Charles sharpened his stare on this latest interviewee. Of course, the lad was too arrogant, and too young to lose his grin over it. “Say it anyway.”
The other side of the boy’s mouth completed his smile. “A room full of ladies without the benefits of their mothers present?” And with that, he waggled his eyebrows, holding Landon’s gaze first, and then Charles’s, a young rogue who recognized like company. But he was also too much a fool to know there was a difference between a rogue and a rake.
Charles and Landon looked at one another.
“Get the hell out, Waldegrave,” Landon snapped.
“But . . . but . . .” The young man sputtered, struggling and failing to get his complete thought out in one piece. “I thought this was a way to get men with ladies who have a taste for passion.”
Anger briefly darkened Charles’s vision. “It’s not,” he snapped. “You really think I’m going to stage seductions between men and innocent women in my mother’s household?”
Waldegrave hesitated. “Uh . . .”
“I advise you don’t answer that.” Landon helped the young man out, effectively saving his life. The young baron immediately closed his mouth. “Go.”
Waldegrave jumped up and immediately fled.
“Who is next?” Charles asked before the rake had even gone. Skimming a finger along his sloppy notes, contained within what might have actually been an empty page in one of his ledgers, he settled his index finger on a name. “Beaufort.”
Charles glanced over to the balding young gentleman hovering in the wings.
“This day has proven enlightening,” he said, snapping his book shut. Of the seven interviews they’d conducted thus far, all but one had resulted in the same outcome.
Landon chuckled. “What did you expect? That you were going to have a sea of bookish lords interested in talking philosophy and life? Why, we’re not all that different from any of those other ones.” He nudged his chin at a table full of the gentlemen who’d assembled to commiserate over their rejections. All six of the men glared back their way.
Yes, it was a fair point. They hadn’t been vastly different from all the men whose ulterior motives and interests were solely on interacting in ways that were noneducational with the ladies who made up his club. But neither had they preyed on unwed ladies.
Charles stared, frozen, vacantly at the cover of his notebook.
“Don’t look so glum,” Landon said, pouring him a glass of brandy and pushing it his way until the snifter touched his fingers. He consulted his haphazard notes, then glanced over to the young gent hovering in the wings. “We’ll find the honorable ones. Rare though they are. Why, here is one now!” With that, he held up his hand in greeting, and Charles looked to the approaching lord.
Landon brightened. “St. John! Grab a chair. You’re right on time. Almost anyway.”
The viscount passed a horrified gaze over the cluttered table. “What in helllll is this?”
“Interviews,” Charles explained, raising a hand and staying the approaching Lord Beaufort, holding on to their privacy a bit longer.
“Interviews?” St. John repeated.
Charles and Landon nodded in response. The other man continued to stare back blankly, his brow creased in lines of perplexity, before he at last availed himself of a seat. “Explain,” he said with an ease that could come from only a man with six troublesome sisters.
Lord Beaufort pointedly cleared his throat. All three men shot up a hand, holding him at bay. The young gent, recently out of university, rocked back on his heels and remained there, waiting.
“I think it should be clear,” Charles explained, shuffling through the first stack of papers, evening those sheets, and then arranging the others. “We’re conducting official club business.”
St. John shook his head, then several moments later, continued shaking. “And you somehow decided White’s was the best place for official business?”
“Well, it couldn’t very well be at Forbidden Pleasures. That would defeat the purpose,” Charles said jovially, leaning over to pat his friend on the back. “It’s the easiest way to assemble honorable gents and interested parties. Get them all in one place and—”
“Weed them out,”