In the Dark with the Duke by Christi Caldwell Page 0,85

mansion to sweeping estates of three hundred—and, in several cases, more—acres of property.

And in the ultimate irony, with everything he now had, it still had proven not enough to secure an invitation to the most attended ball in London.

Hugh tossed down the morning paper, and it hit the far corner of his recently inherited desk with a thwack.

At least not to Polite Society. Polite Society, who’d no intention of allowing an outsider amongst their ranks.

In fairness? Hugh had little interest in being part of that world. Had it not been for Dooley and the questions swirling around the highbrow perpetrators, Hugh would have grabbed himself a map, determined which inherited property was the farthest from this world, and found his way there already.

“Run,” he whispered into the offices that had once belonged to the man who’d been his father.

Clasping his hands together, he rested his chin atop them. At some point, a servant had supplanted the portrait thirty feet opposite the desk of Lord Dudley Nesbitt and his two children with another set of strangers: this one, a finely dressed, hand-holding pair with a boy of two very deliberately positioned between them. The artist had captured an intimate family moment. With one leg jutted out, the curly-headed, dark-haired boy had been caught midflight. All the while, he looked adoringly back at the parents, who stared down lovingly. The father had a hand upon the child’s small shoulder to keep him grounded so the artist might freeze that joyous family moment in time.

Unblinking, Hugh stared at that child upon the canvas.

Nay, not that child. Me.

It was Hugh, inked in oil and preserved there from a long-ago moment in time.

The evidence was there in the curls and the birthmark at the corner of his right lower lip.

And yet the painting may as well have been a work of fiction. One of those books that adorned the thousand-title library Hugh had also seen reverted back to his ownership.

Only one piece of him truly existed on that canvas—his leg. The one bent slightly, poised for flight.

That was what he’d intended to do in the rendering. For that was what he’d always done. The artist had cleverly captured that greatest of flaws amongst his character. He’d always cut ties and run. Apparently, that deficit had always been there, a part of him. It had existed when he’d been the finely dressed, well-cared-for child, fleeing the parents who’d loved him.

Just as he’d left the gang of child fighters without so much as a backward glance.

It was why, even as everything in him didn’t want what was to come when the last of his tormentors was found—more blood on his hands—he’d an obligation to do this. To see it through.

A commotion rumbled outside his offices, the indistinct mutterings and heavy footfalls that grew increasingly sharp in clarity.

“His Grace is not receiving visitors.”

Bragger and Maynard shouldered past the butler. The poor young man, even after seven visits from the London street toughs, had the look of one about to either cry or run off in terror whenever they came ’round.

And as Hugh could be honest, at least with himself, he found himself welcoming their absence. Eager for the conclusion of their relationship when his debt was at last paid and he no longer owed them.

“Not receiving visitors, are ya?” Maynard dragged the scroll-backed mahogany-and-beech wingback chair closer to Hugh’s desk and plopped his large frame down. Lifting up the gossip column there, he waved it. “’ardly seems the way to go making the connections we need.”

It spoke to the other man’s naivete that they still expected Hugh should—or rather, would—be received by the ton.

“I assure you, those who’ve been coming around aren’t the ones who are of any use to us,” he said, settling back in his chair. Reporters, busybodies, people looking to make coin or earn currency in the form of gossip about the Lost Lord. But none of the manner of guests he, Bragger, and Maynard had use of.

Growling, Bragger stalked a path before the mahogany desk, the polished French wood gleaming. “The bloody fuckers.” He slammed an open palm down on the shellacked surface. “Yar a damned duke.”

If his partners hadn’t already gleaned from being used by the upper classes for sport and then abandoned and completely forgotten that there was no place for their sort in Polite Society, they weren’t ever going to learn. “I’m a duke who has lived on the streets.” And what was more, in Hugh they saw the possibility of