CHAPTER5
“You ain’t going on the floor looking like that.”
Hart eyed his eldest brother and leader of the Sutton family. “You don’t tell me what to do, Jasper. Why don’t you go back to your drawing room in Mayfair and order your bleeding butler about instead?”
“Easy, brother. No need to get glimflashy, now.” Jasper’s gaze flicked over his rumpled, day-old shirt and trousers, apparently unperturbed by his outburst. “Does this have something to do with the rum doxy you’re hiding in your room?”
Hart ground his molars at the description of Lady Emma as a doxy. “Who the devil is pattering now?”
If it was Wolf, he was going to give him a basting. Wolf knew how important secrecy was where Lady Emma Morgan was concerned. Now that their eldest brother had married into the quality, Jasper would never allow Hart to ruin the daughter of an earl, not even for Loge’s sake. Hart didn’t like keeping things from Jasper, but in this instance, it was for the best. He needed time for his plan to proceed without interruption or interference. And in the end, when it left them with answers about what had happened to Loge, they would all thank him, Hart had no doubt.
“Randall told me you’ve a moll in your chamber when I arrived this morning,” Jasper said, raising a brow. “Apparently golden-haired, wandering about in bare feet and a transparent night rail. You know I’ve eyes and ears when I can’t be about.”
Bleeding excellent.It would be the guard who would receive the drubbing, then.
“Randall is an arsehole, and I’m going to plant my fist in his bowsprit,” he told Jasper.
Yes, a nice, satisfying fist to that crooked nozzle of Randall’s should do fine. Mayhap it would ease some of the rampant frustration and irritation raging within Hart, too.
“He’s a good cull, and a damned fine guard, and you’ll not be touching his nose or otherwise,” Jasper countered sternly.
“She ain’t a doxy,” he bit out before he could control his wayward tongue.
He was still in a state over what had happened between them this morning, and he was having the devil of a time reining himself in. Saint Hugh’s bones, she had been in tears. He had never made a woman weep after making her come off before, and it did not sit well. Not at all.
“Ah,” Jasper said, as if he suddenly understood everything with perfect clarity. “You’re in love with the wench.”
He almost swallowed his tongue. “Christ, no.”
“You’ve never brought a woman to The Sinner’s Palace before,” Jasper pointed out calmly.
Hart could not argue the point. “I need her here.”
Jasper shook his head. “That’s how it begins, you know.”
His eldest brother, once the wildest of them all, was now a happily married man, living a proper gentleman’s life in Mayfair with his wife and daughters, another babe on the way. And while the change in circumstance had softened Jasper and undeniably made him into a better man, that did not mean everyone else wished to follow in his footsteps to the parson’s mousetrap.
Quite the opposite.
“It ain’t like that between her and I,” he said.
“Hmm.” Jasper made a noncommittal hum and moved to seat himself at the desk in the office now shared by all the siblings.
He was nettled by his brother’s suggestion. Nettled, too, by his reaction to Lady Emma. She was nothing like he had expected her to be.
When he had plotted and planned, he had not thought about her. Had not imagined he would find a beauty with the fortitude to rival any man he knew. Or that she would be so bold, daring him to take what he had paid for. That she would be broken inside, the vulnerability hidden beneath her daring visible in the moment he had seen those tears sparkling in her magnificent eyes.
And although he had known the pleasure he had given her had been real, his cockstand had instantly died at the reminder that she was not in his bed because she truly wanted to be there. No, she had been in his bed, naked and at his mercy, because he had paid for the privilege.
If he had been a gentleman, he would have given her a handkerchief to wipe those bleeding tears. But he wasn’t a nob. And so he had stalked from the chamber as if the devil himself were at his damned heels.
Now he was here, in yesterday’s duds, being judged by his bleeding older brother.
“You don’t believe me,” he said into the silence that had fallen as Jasper began looking over the ledgers laid out on the desk.
“No,” Jasper said blithely, sifting through the neatly inked pages as if he hadn’t a care.