“And next you’ll tell me the sky ain’t blue and the Bradleys didn’t steal our latest shipment of jackey and set rats loose in The Sinner’s Palace.”
Christ. So that was why Jasper had summoned him. The Bradleys were waging war once more.
“Bloody bastards.” Rafe’s hands clenched into fists he longed to slam into the teeth of one of the Bradley lads. Or their arsehole of a sire, for that matter. “Those shit sacks are determined to ruin us one way or another. If the last basting we gave them ain’t enough to get through their thick sconces, we’ll just ’ave to give them another.”
“First we have to make certain the rat catchers gather all the vermin,” Jasper said grimly.
What a coil. And Rafe could not help but to feel responsible for it. Leaving Hart and Wolf to fend for the gaming hell and look after Lily and Pen had likely been a bad halfpenny. Wolf and Hart were capable, but Pen was a bloody handful, and Lily was still young and wild. To say nothing of the daily running of the hell.
“I ought to be staying there.” Rafe shook his head. “If I’d been at The Sinner’s Palace, no rats or Bradleys would’ve found their way past me.”
“The same could be said for me,” his brother acknowledged. “It ain’t about whose fault this is, Rafe. It’s about what we do next to clean up the mess and make damn sure it never ’appens again.”
“Ever the wise brother,” he grumbled, and not without a hint of bitterness.
As the eldest of the Suttons, Jasper was their leader. There had been a time when he, too, had been full of hellfire, drinking and wenching far too much. But that had very much changed in recent years, and when his twin daughters from a past tryst had come into his life, he had grown more responsible and staid, committed to Lady Octavia and Anne and Elizabeth and their welfare in the same way he had once minded the hell.
Rafe, meanwhile, had not only shirked his duties at The Sinner’s Palace, but he had made a muck of his own affairs as well. He had all but shagged his nieces’ governess the night before.
And he had fallen in love with her.
What to do with this information?
Last night, he thought he had been drunk on quim, the notion occurring to him because all the blood in his body had diverted to his cock. But the feelings were still there, a strangeness in the pit of his belly, a pulling in his heart, as if there were an invisible string tying him to her.
Which was ridiculous, of course. Rafe Sutton did not lose his heart to a set of petticoats. And he had known more than his fair share. He kissed them and pleased them, worshiped their bodies and charmed them and laughed with them until they parted ways. He had never, in all his days, wanted one woman to be the first sight he beheld each morning when he rose and the last he saw every night before slumber claimed him.
Until her.
“Anything rattling about in that knowledge box of yours?”
Jasper’s voice sliced through his musings, reminding him that he was in a carriage with his brother, on his way to the East End.
To where he bloody well belonged. He had been born in the rookeries. In a large sense, it was all he knew. A man could earn coin, acquire an education, purchase the togs of a fancy cove, hang his arse over a chamber pot in Mayfair, but he would never be a lord. He would never truly rise above his station. And he would do well to remember that.
Rafe shook the knowledge box in question. “Only a few puffs of dust and some wood shavings.”
Jasper snorted. “Giving yourself a fat lot of credit, aren’t you? More like nothing but dust. Christ knows that any man with a brain between his ears wouldn’t whip the son of an earl in a bawdy house and expect the act to go unnoticed.”
Well, hell. He stiffened, searching his brother’s stare, so like his own. Wondering just how much Jasper knew.
“Who would do something so bleeding stupid?” he blustered, hoping they might at least leave Persephone out of it.
But he was not to be so fortunate.
“You,” his brother said coolly. “That’s who. Miss Wren spun some pretty lies on your behalf, but I’m not stupid, Rafe. There’s something between the two of you, and I want to know what it is and why you whipped Lord Gregson at The Garden of Flora on her behalf.”
The fury, burning deep inside him from the moment Persephone had unburdened herself to him in this very conveyance, rose. It would not be contained. The story was not his to tell, but he could not sit here in silence and allow his brother to suppose the viscount an innocent man.
“Because he tried to rape her,” Rafe spat. “It ’appened at her last post, and she left without a letter of character just to escape the bleeding dunghill. You must know I’d never attack a lord without cause.”
Indeed, lords were who filled their purses. The Sutton family business was keeping the quality happy, not inflicting
pain and humiliation upon them. The whipping had been a necessity with Gregson, however. The man deserved punishment. He deserved more than what he had got.
“Hell,” Jasper swore fiercely, his countenance going dark with the same rage coursing through Rafe’s veins. Suttons protected their women. “Little wonder she forged the letter from the earl. I had wondered at the reason.”
“Yes.” Rafe exhaled in a rush, unclenching his fists and then digging his fingers into his thighs with painful pressure. “She didn’t deserve what happened to her.”