Page 22

Chapter 4

THE LONDONER

At last, the world has the name they’ve been searching for. Questions have swirled, cloaking society in the same fog that rolls over the darkened streets inhabited by the man whose identity everyone longs to know.

V. Lovelace

Every muscle in Malcom’s arms ached. His biceps and triceps bulged and screamed in protest.

Sweat dripping from his brow, he shoved himself up another fraction, using the wood bars to lever himself higher. And then he held himself there, suspended.

And even that torturous exertion was preferable to the man droning on behind him. Or attempting to. Since he’d let the fancily clad old man in nearly thirty minutes ago, the servant had done more stammering than speaking.

“My lord.” Sanders, the aging man-of-affairs Malcom had inherited some several months back, sifted through yet another stack of papers. “I—”

“I told you not to call me that,” he said coolly as a bead of sweat slipped down his forehead and hit his eye.

“But youarethe Earl—”

Malcom silenced the rest of that protestation with a look.

Even if Steele had laid a paper trail that could stretch the length of London with proof of Malcom’s claim to the Maxwell title, Malcom wanted nothing to do with the earldom. With any of it. It might be his past, but that was precisely what it was ... his past. At that, one he didn’t have a single recollection of. “It’s enough that I’ve accepted my rightfulclaimto the damned title.”

He blinked back another bead of sweat from his eye, the sting of discomfort transmuted by the strain he put his body through. God, how he despised the blighter. The reason—and the only reason—Malcom forced himself through the old man’s company was to spare himself from having to oversee the mess he’d inherited. “I also advised at our last meeting—of which there had already been too many—that we were done,” he gritted out through the strain of his efforts, fixing his gaze over the top of the older man’s head. Everything Malcom had gleaned about his new circumstances changed nothing. Or he’d been determined that would be the case.

“That is also true,” Sanders said with more aplomb than he’d shown since he’d entered. “However, my ... Mr. North,” he amended, and then grimaced as though the reduction in title, even in speech, were physically painful to concede. “I also informed you that there would be matters that came up.”

“Matters came up when Steele came to me,” he muttered, inching his frame along the parallel bars.

“Yes.”

“And the following week after that.”

“Yes, but given the extreme nature of the circumstances, it was to be expected that—”

“And then when you came to me, each week thereafter.” Malcom may have dwelled outside the world of Polite Society, but he knew enough what the servant had done—he had set himself up weekly appointments with the intention of tricking Malcom into taking a role in his newly inheritedbusiness.

Footsteps sounded from the hall. A moment later, the door opened, and Giles let himself in. The only person in London who’d dare that insolence, and yet, here they were.

Sanders paused midsentence, his gaze lingering on the empty place the larger man’s left hand should be.

Catching that horrified focus, Giles raised the empty nub to his forehead in mock salute.

Sanders’s skin was leached of color, his throat moving frantically before he shifted his focus back over to Malcom.

“You were saying?” Malcom asked coolly.

His man-of-affairs swallowed loudly. “I—I understand your concerns—”

“If you understood them, then you’d not be wasting my time now.”

“However,” the older man went on with a tenacity that even Malcom was hard-pressed not to admire, “there are certain responsibilities that come with your new station that cannot simply be left undecided, my lord.”

Shoving himself up with one arm, Malcom looped himself around, facing the opposite direction, giving both men his back. “And why not?”

That question was met with a shock of silence. And he could all but see the gears of the old servant’s mind as they came to a grinding halt. “Because ... well ... because you are the—”

Malcom swung himself around and leveled Sanders with a single dark look that brought him to silence once more.