Page 9 of A Bet with a Duchess (The Gambling Dukes #1)

NINE

Fynn

I stared at the piece of paper in front of me, blinking, hardly able to believe it.

But there it was. Black and white. Lines and lines of numbers that anyone else might have skipped over, bored, believing they would be impossible to find.

I closed my eyes, screwed them up, shook my head as though shaking sense into it…then opened them again.

The details were unchanged. In fact, the longer I looked at them, the more they made sense. The more impressed I was that I hadn’t found them before, hidden as they were so carefully at the back of the very last cabinet.

Blowing out a heavy sigh, I leaned back in my chair.

I was alone in the room; it was my last day here at Dalhurst Manor, and Georgiana hadn’t thought it necessary to chaperone me. I’d kissed her senseless, but it hadn’t been enough to make her stay.

Now I was glad.

Markham Cartice---￡150

Markham Cartice---￡140

Markham Cartice---￡250

Markham Cartice---￡1750

Markham Cartice---￡140

On and on it went, line after line, the proof I had been searching for from the very beginning.

Markham, the Duke of Markham, Georgiana’s own friend, was stealing from the club. Not a lot; not when it came to wealthy dukes, at least.

But enough. Again and again, small amounts transferred, made to look like nothing but entirely separate from the rather generous incomes I had discovered each of the members drew from the club.

My heart was racing, but this wasn’t the hedonistic glorious rhythm I had indulged with Georgiana.

Oh, damn and blast it.

This was completely different. He was stealing from?—

“Discovered any great secrets yet?”

I immediately closed the folder as Georgiana placed a lingering hand on my shoulder. I hadn’t even heard the door open. She sat on the desk, bright eyed and mischievous, all the passion I adored in her brought out by my mere presence.

“I hope you don’t mind me dropping in,” she said with a laugh. “I couldn’t stay away, I'm afraid.”

I smiled weakly, then forced the smile to expand, knowing I was doing a terrible job keeping a poker face.

Really terrible.

“What’s wrong?” Georgiana frowned, her blue eyes dark in this low candlelight, piercing me. “Fynn?”

I took a deep breath, but no words came out. How could they? My stomach churned at the very thought of revealing what I had discovered.

For she didn’t know. She couldn’t know. I looked at Georgiana, her innocence, her trust, her complete belief there was nothing to find, no point in me being here…the idea that any of her friends could betray her, betray them…

It hadn’t even crossed her mind.

I didn’t want to take that trust from her.

But I had to say something. She had the right to know…before she saw the headlines.

“I…Georgiana, I found this,” I said quietly, opening the folder.

A smile still danced on those trusting lips, lips that brushed across my forehead before she slipped effortlessly into my lap, curling into me as she turned to look at the piece of paper.

My eyes shut. I wanted to enjoy this moment of peace and innocence, luxuriate in it, try to recall it when all hell had broken loose.

It did not take long.

“It isn’t true,” Georgiana said quietly.

I swallowed. “I found the records in?—”

“You didn’t find these,” she said, eyes flickering down the page. “No. No, Markham would never—he has no need of money!”

Her voice was strong, unwavering, yet I could see the panic in her eyes, feel the taut tension in her arms as she leaned forward, inspecting of my findings.

Guilt swept my heart and I knew then, as I had never known before, that I could have just walked away. I could have closed this folder, never bothered to tell anyone. A few hundred here or there, who would miss it?

No one was at the moment.

Georgiana rose out of my lap, stepping away from me. “You’re lying.”

And the guilt was replaced by rage. “Lying?” I repeated, disbelievingly.

She nodded, her fingers sweeping a strand of golden hair out of her eyes. “Markham is not stealing from the club.”

“You—Georgiana, you saw the ledger,” I said, standing myself. How could she think that I would—“You think I falsified the records?”

“Anything can be done with a pen and paper,” she shot back, eyes narrowing.

“You’re joking!” I thrust a hand toward the folder. “This is your folder, Georgiana, your ledger, your records!”

“Kineallen is our leader, he would have spotted?—”

“It’s taken me six days to find even a snippet of what’s been going on, and I’ve been looking !” I dragged a hand through my hair. “Georgiana, I am not lying!”

My heart was pounding but it wasn’t the passionate beating of a heart about to make love. It was a heart ready to run, to flee, to escape this nightmare that I had created for myself.

And for her. Georgiana.

She was staring at me as though she had never seen me before. “Markham has worked as hard as the rest of us to build this club?—”

“I'm not saying he?—”

“—and the very idea he would steal from us…” Georgiana took a deep breath. “It’s a mistake, an accounting error, that’s all. I mean, it isn’t even that much money!”

I stared, a battle within myself that I knew I would lose, my better judgement overruled by my moral stance.

The moral stance Georgiana had been attracted to.

“Georgiana, it’s hundreds of?—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” said Georgiana, turning away from me, striding toward the door, then halting. She turned back to glare and I almost stepped back, her ire devastating. “Markham has always looked out for me, always stood by me. He stood by me when Paul died?—”

“Just because he supported you then, that doesn’t make him innocent now,” I said darkly. “Plenty of people have believed in me, and?—”

“I don’t want to hear your sob story,” Georgiana snapped, eyes fierce. “This is my family we’re talking about, not yours. They are more than friends to me. We don’t betray each other—not like your family.”

The words echoed around the drawing room, bouncing off the walls, repeating over and over again. Or was that just my mind? My heart, unable to stop listening to the anger in her voice, the substance of her words.

“This is my family we’re talking about, not yours. They are more than friends to me. We don’t betray each other—not like your family.”

I stared; the first woman I had ever truly cared about, though I had not admitted that to myself, or her. Now I never would.

The fire sparked and died in her eyes. “I didn’t mean?—”

“Yes, you did,” I said dully.

So it came to this. Two people who cared about each other, without a doubt, though I was unsure just how deep her affections were. I really didn’t know now.

But I had hoped…foolish hopes. Hopes that included Georgiana coming back with me to London, us walking in Hyde Park in the summer heat and laughing about the week I had spent at her family home, trying to find secrets that weren’t there.

But they were. And I’d found them.

And I hadn’t been able to keep them to myself.

I picked up my satchel. “I’ll leave?—”

“Back to London?” Georgiana stared as though I had betrayed her, and I had, I knew, but I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t found the truth of what I had known, instinctively, was there.

I swallowed. I had to ensure my voice was strong. “Back to London.”

Georgiana folded her arms before her chest. “Then I suppose I have the answer to the question I was going to ask.”

There was such sadness in her tones, I wanted to wrap her in my arms and kiss away the pain. But it was pain I had brought, clearly, and pain that I was only going to exacerbate when I returned to London.

To my editor. To the newspaper.

“Question?” My curiosity got the better of me as I took a step toward her.

Georgiana laughed bitterly as she stepped back. “It doesn’t matter now. A foolish idea, I don’t know why I even bothered to think of it. You only want your scoop, that’s all you care about.”

“That’s not all I—Georgiana!”

“Everything we shared, all our conversations, our—our kisses, it all means nothing to you,” she said, eyes meeting mine and there was such pain there, I could almost have cried out. “Nothing.”

“It didn’t mean—you don’t mean nothing,” I said urgently. “I would never lie to you, Georgiana, I’ve been lied to before and I never will again.”

A dark, wry smile creased her lips. “And you won’t lie now? You won’t hide the truth, for me?”

I hesitated. It was a tempting question. She didn’t need to bribe me, my heart was closely tied to her to make me want to give her everything, tell her I would destroy the ledger, burn it, only I would ever know about it.

But that wasn’t the truth. And the truth was something we both valued…perhaps more than each other.

“You once told me that you studied the law because you wanted to do what was right,” I said softly. “What is the right thing to do here?”

I tried to ignore her beauty, focus only on her pain, but as Georgiana stepped toward me hope I had not permitted myself to feel started to rise.

She stopped right before me; I could smell her perfume, breathed in her loveliness?—

“I want you to leave.”

I blinked. “What?”

Georgiana’s face was serious, her eyes fixed on mine. “I want you out. Out of here, out of Dalhurst Manor…and out of my life.”

Georgiana

I picked listlessly at the salmon and asparagus on my place. Neither tasted—well, of anything.

Cook hadn’t suddenly lost all ability in the kitchen, of course. It was me.

Fynn had left yesterday. The weekend was here, Saturday, the last day before we all returned to London. The heatwave had finally broken and around the table my friends were chattering eagerly about what they were most excited to get back to the city for.

“—my townhouse will be baking, I’ll have to air the thing out?—”

“—market has the best flowers, I simply haven’t found anything to compare?—”

“You rotten liar, Markham, you haven’t!”

I flinched. I couldn’t help it.

“Markham has worked as hard as the rest of us to build this club ? —”

“I'm not saying he ? —”

“—and the very idea he would steal from us… It’s a mistake, an accounting error, that’s all. I mean, it isn’t even that much money!”

I hadn’t spoken to my friend about the accusations Fynn—Mr. Monroe had made. I couldn’t bring myself to.

It had been a full hour after Fynn had left yesterday that I had been able to return to the drawing room and open up the ledger. What I found there, right where Fynn had found them, were records upon records of…

“You quite well, Georgiana?”

I glanced up at Markham’s concerned face and my stomach twisted. “I'm fine.”

He was about to say something else, something I braced myself for, but he was distracted by a question from Lilah and turned away from me.

“He’s gone, then?”

I glanced to my left and tried to smile. “Yes. He’s gone.”

Kineallen nodded sagely. “For the best, I suppose.”

“I suppose.” My voice was listless, but I couldn’t force life into it. My emotions for Fynn were complicated; untangling them would take a long time. I didn’t know whether I would ever be entirely sure of what I had lost.

“You must be relieved to see him go,” Kineallen persisted. “After he was here for so long.”

Here for so long? I almost smiled but the burden of knowledge, of knowing the lies and deceit in our own club, weighed on me too heavily.

So long? It barely felt as though Fynn had been here; he had come and gone before I had really registered just how much I needed him. Wanted him.

But that was stupid—lust was not a good enough reason to keep a man like that here. Why, I thought darkly, he’d be in the newspaper offices right now, right this moment, spilling my family’s secrets to his editor.

I’ll have to check the newspapers tomorrow, I thought with a lurch of my stomach. I didn’t know how quickly these things got turned around.

For the rest of my life, until it happened, I would be waiting to see our disgrace printed in black and white.

“Georgiana?”

My gaze focused. Kineallen was looking at me with great concern, had obviously been talking to me but I hadn’t paid a blind bit of difference.

“You feeling quite well?” My friend asked quietly.

Not quietly enough.

“Is Georgiana feeling unwell?” Lilah asked from across the table, speaking over Markham. “Georgiana, you’re unwell?”

“I am not unwell,” I said reassuringly.

Well. Perhaps not reassuringly enough.

“That’s the last thing we need as we start to prepare the final details for our next big gamble,” said Markham jovially.

I shot him a glare I knew he both did and did not deserve. “Is that all that matters? The gamble, not the fact that I may be ill?”

“I—Georgiana, I didn’t mean it like that,” said Markham awkwardly.

A strange sort of chill had descended on the room and I only realized after a moment that it was me.

“I'm leaving.”

I looked up as Kineallen rose from his seat. “What?”

He shrugged. “I want to get back to London. I’ll take the curricle, if no one minds?”

“Well I'm staying to look after Georgiana,” said Lilah staunchly.

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at that. “Lilah, I don’t need?—”

“You just do what you’re told,” she said with a wry smile. “Neither of us are very good at it, to be sure, but you do it, and you’ll have fewer people clucking over you.”

There was nothing I could say to that. She was right. The last thing I wanted was a fuss, to be asked again and again what was wrong.

Not when I hadn’t decided yet what I was going to do about Markham.

My eyes were drawn to him, above all my friends, as both the men got up to leave the table for one reason or another.

“—fit everything in my trunk?”

“Oh, the valet will manage it?—”

“—get some shut eye if I’m going to White’s tonight?—”

And then the door closed, and I was left alone.

Well. Alone with Lilah.

“You’ve barely touched your food, you know,” my best friend said quietly. “You only went off your food last when…Paul.”

My lungs tightened, every breath a challenge, but I forced myself to keep taking them.

Yes, Paul. He had put me off my food, at least for a time. But Paul had done everything right, on paper, been everything right. The right kind of family, the right kind of man, the right clothes, income, connections.

His betrayal, and then his death…it had been painful, but it hadn’t felt like this.

I couldn’t untangle precisely why this had ended my appetite, my ability to laugh, to smile. Perhaps it was the double betrayal; Markham and Fynn.

I don’t know why, but even though I had known —ha!—that there was no scandal to discover in the Gambling Dukes’ records, I had thought after Fynn and I had shared…

Well. Hide it. Forget about it. Pretend he had never seen it in the first place.

It was a rather disconcerting challenge to my own moral compass, which was probably why I hated it.

But underneath it all, the reason that Fynn’s betrayal in the first place, was Markham.

Oh, Markham. What had he done?

“Georgiana.”

“What?” I said, my head jerking up.

My best friend was looking at me with a soft kindness I knew I didn’t deserve. Hadn’t I bedded the very man about to ruin us all?

“Georgiana, you know you can talk to me about anything,” she said quietly. “Anything at all.”

I tried to smile. Yes, I knew that, and Lilah would try to understand. But how could she? She was perfect, never putting a foot wrong, never second guessing herself. Never at a loss for words, or friends, or men.

How could Lilah even comprehend what I had done?

“I may be the Chief Legal Counsel,” I said with a dry laugh, “but sometimes I wonder…whether what I have done, if I could do it again?—”

“We’re talking about Mr. Fynn Monroe, then,” Lilah said dryly.

A heavy sigh escaped my lips. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

I picked up my fork and turned it slowly in my fingers, a piece of salmon still speared on the end. I didn’t want to talk about this with anyone, let alone Lilah. Had she ever been betrayed by a man—by anyone? Not likely.

And my stomach twisted painfully. Except she, like me, had been betrayed, and by someone we would never have expected.

Our own friend.

“If you really like him,” Lilah’s voice cut across my thoughts, “you could always look him up in London. It wouldn’t be hard to find him, the newspaper offices will be easy to hunt down.”

I laughed bitterly. Oh, my best friend could not even imagine how little I wanted to go anywhere near that place.

Besides, I had bet on the wrong horse. I had been sure that my attraction to him, my desire to be with him?—

“Eat me.”

A flush tinged my cheeks. So sure I was right that I hadn’t stopped to consider his loyalties were not to me, but to himself. I was a founding member of the Gambling Dukes, a widow, a dowager duchess…and I had allowed myself to be overwhelmed by a handsome gentleman.

A gentleman who had left here yesterday with all the information needed to ruin me. Ruin us. And he’d taken my damn heart with him.

“You told me you’d stack the deck.”

“I told you to throw out the deck and make your own.”

I could almost laugh. I had been so determined then, so sure of myself. So sure of him. So sure of my best friend, our friends.

And I had been wrong.

How could I ever be sure again?