Because it’d been so long since he’d been so lost.
“Have any of you heard of the Stags of St. James?”
Ash and Argent shook their heads, but Dorian nodded. “Noble women pay fortunes for their sexual services. Madame Regina, who runs my brothel, suggested we recruit a few from Henrietta Thistledown.”
Morley cleared a gather of shame from his throat. “Well, I was out one night, just about three months ago…”
“Being a vigilante?” Dorain asked.
“Investigating,” he corrected.
“No one else investigates with a mask, but do go on.”
Once again, he let that go. “My investigation of some murdered men took me to Miss Henrietta’s, where they’d worked as stags. I was in the garden and Miss Goode sort of…mistook me for…” He couldn’t bring himself to say the bloody word.
Ash’s mouth fell open. “A prostitute?”
“Is she blind?” Dorian’s nose wrinkled as he raked him with a disbelieving glare.
Morley sat back in his chair, cursing himself for saying a damned word to any of them.
It was Argent who leaned forward, his expression fascinated. “And?”
“And…we…” Morley flicked his hand out in a gesture that could have meant anything.
“Holy fucking Christ, you didn’t,” Dorian shook his head as if begging him to deny it and hoping he wouldn’t.
“I need to sit down.” Argent groped for the chair across from his desk and settled his hulking frame into it.
“I need a drink.” Ash went to the sideboard next to the door.
Dorian stayed where he was, staring at Morley. “You deflowered a Baron’s daughter, no, a Commissioner’s daughter—your boss’s daughter—before her wedding and got her to pay you for it? Christ, Morley, I’ve misjudged you all this time. Color me bloody impressed.”
“Don’t,” Morley warned.
“Oh, don’t be cross.” Dorian waved his leather-gloved hand at him. “I’m certain you did it properly and thoroughly as you do everything else and then made up for it with piles of guilt and self-flagellation and sleepless nights and all that rubbish.”
Morley crossed his arms. “I’m not discussing this with you further.” He never flagellated himself, bastard didn’t know what he was talking about.
Ash stepped forward, a drink in hand. “Don’t heed Dorian. Pearls before swine and all that.”
Dorian feigned outrage. “Speak for yourself, I’m not the one rolling in the dirt with betrothed debutants.”
They all looked at Morley and lost their battle with mirth.
“I didn’t know who she was at the time,” Morley explained darkly. “Or I’d never have touched her.”
Ash came behind the desk where Morley sat, and put a glass in front of him. He leaned a hip on the edge and poured Morley a healthy snifter from his own decanter before patting him on the shoulder. “I, for one, am delighted,” he said, encouraging him to drink. “You were living like a monk, and let’s be honest, you never were very good with women.”
“A monk?” Dorian scoffed. “I was worried he was a bloody eunuch.”
“Or had a terrible predilection,” Ash added.
“That wouldn’t bother me so much,” Argent cut in, declining a drink with a wave of his hand as he sipped his coffee. “I never trust a man without a dark side.”
Dorian’s shoulder leaned against the wall and he crossed one foot in front of the other, a cruel gleam in his dark eye. “All this time I worried you took no other lovers because you were still in love with my wife.”
“Enough.” Morley tossed his whisky back and slammed the empty glass onto the table with a bang loud enough to be heard by the occupants of the floor below them.
For a man who didn’t believe in miracles, he knew he was witnessing one now as they all blinked at him in blessed silence.
Wouldn’t last long, he thought bitterly.
They’d been taciturn villains all, before their women had made them happy.
Happy men never seemed to tire of conversation.
Except Argent, who only spoke when words were absolutely required.
“So angry, Morley,” Dorian tutted. “Struck a nerve?”
Ash tossed a disapproving look over his shoulder at Dorian. “A low blow, Dorian, even for you. We are all of us angry men. It is that anger that drives the best of us to succeed.”
“Au contraire, mon frère,” the Blackheart of Ben More twisted an imaginary villainous mustache, ever unrepentant. “Cunning. Cunning is how we do what needs done.”
“This isn’t a bloody lark, it’s my life,” Morley grit out from between clenched teeth. “She’s seen me as the Knight of Shadows. We engaged in a scandalous affair for a night. And now she’s down there having quite likely