Lady Derring Takes a Lover - Julie Anne Long Page 0,7
distilled into a man singular, and perhaps deadly, of purpose.
Lord Kinbrook stared at him, loathing thinly veiled.
“Come,” he cajoled with a sort of menacing tenderness. “Look into my eyes. Do you think I ever say anything I don’t mean, Lord Kinbrook?”
Kinbrook looked.
Whatever he saw there made him quickly look away.
He swallowed.
Tristan heaved a sigh, and thunked his brandy glass down on the table.
“Derring,” Kinbrook muttered tersely.
“Is that a compliment? An epithet?”
“The Earl of Derring. He snuffed it in that chair over there two weeks ago.” He gestured with his chin. “Doubtless you’ve heard about it. Not every day an earl dies in public, surrounded by young loobies, without issue. I got the cigars from Derring. I don’t know where he got them.”
The chair in question was occupied now by a young man leaning forward laughing, mouth wide open, hands on his knees, at another man who was pantomiming riding a horse, slapping his own arse and tossing his head.
Tristan stared at that. How on earth—why on earth—was that amusing? Tristan was thirty-six years old. He sometimes felt he’d lived a thousand years and a thousand lives. If one started out life in St. Giles you either grew old quickly or didn’t grow old at all. It would never occur to him to slap his own arse for any reason.
“Convenient to blame a dead man,” he said idly to Kinbrook. “Wouldn’t you say, Massey?”
“Seems a bit facile, guv,” he said regretfully, to Lord Kinbrook.
Tristan spared a single arced brow for the word facile.
The grim line of Kinbrook’s mouth suggested he did not like the word guv.
But both he and Massey knew that most roads led to Derring.
“Nevertheless. I got the cigars from Derring. If you’re wondering what the Fourth Earl of Derring would be doing mixed up in such an affair, well, desperate men to desperate things.”
“In what way was a man like the Earl of Derring desperate?”
“He liked fine things, didn’t he? Rumor has it that he was up to his eyebrows in debt. I wasn’t privy to all of this. I do know his property has been snaffled up by creditors. Thought I might have a run at his widow. I always rather envied him his young, beautiful wife. Mine is getting on, you see.” He paused, as if waiting for some sign of approbation from either of the two men. “Derring’s widow . . . penniless, pretty, quiet, pliant, used to a certain lifestyle . . . doubtless she’s quite frightened right now.” He smiled as if this was a charming thing for a woman to be. “She should be easy pickings.”
Tristan stared at the man thoughtfully, idly imagining what it would be like to lean over and perhaps violently head butt Lord Kinbrook.
His own head was made of granite, both figuratively and literally.
But Tristan had not risen to Captain of the King’s Blockade though superfluous applications of violence to members of parliament. He was not a legend in certain circles for impulse.
He was, however, usually one step ahead of anyone who thought they could get away from him and his men.
Not this time.
It maddened him.
“How thoughtful of you to consider Lady Derring’s welfare.”
“I am at heart a decent man,” Kinbrook said. Piously. He laid down his cigar butt in a tray on the table. The smoke, vile yet somehow enthralling to aristocrats, curled from it.
“Well, certainly now that you’ve unburdened your conscience, you can resume believing so, Lord Kinbrook.”
Kinbrook looked at him sharply.
Tristan wondered about Lady Derring, this pretty, frightened widow, and whether she would become a burden or a servant to some relative, or some man’s desperate mistress, and how the weight of fate tended to displace people.
The way the cigar butt displaced Kinbrook’s brandy when Tristan plucked it up and dropped it in.
It seeped into the tablecloth as he and Massey took their leave of him, Kinbrook’s oath ignored.
Chapter Three
The world turned in woozy circles for a second when Paul, her driver, helped her and Dot from the carriage outside of 11 Lovell Street.
Which is when she realized she hadn’t eaten a thing all day, and Dot likely hadn’t, either.
The darkness around them was alive. It, and its noises, was mysterious, but did not feel immediately menacing, any more than the woods at night did. It was interrupted by the glow of lanterns through windows of shops and pubs and presumably dwellings where humans lived, stacked upon each other in little flats. A hundred feet or so away from where they stood hulking buildings rose;