Page 28 of A Gamble on the Duke (The Gambling Dukes #4)

Georgiana

I probably should never have entered into a bet with the most curious man in England. Trouble was, I hadn’t met him yet.

London was too hot. That was why we had retreated to the manor house for the week; the lake was beckoning, its translucent aquamarine color dancing elegantly across the chairs that had been placed there by one of the footmen.

I sipped at my wine in the shade. “I still think I made the right decision.”

Someone snorted to my left. Markham, I was sure. Technically the Duke of Markham—the name so rarely went by his first name, Peregrine, that at times I forgot it. My friend was always ready to critique anything I did; that was what made him my friend, I suppose.

“You’re a fool, Georgiana,” he said, a dark eyebrow raised as one of the footmen handed him a glass of white wine, crisp from the cellar underneath the Tudor manor my friends and I had bought just months ago.

“I am not a fool. ”

“You may consider yourself an expert in the law?—”

“ The expert in the law,” I interrupted crisply.

Well, I wasn’t about to permit him to speak like that to me, was I? Six and twenty, widowed after my husband—chosen by my parents and fifty years older than me—had died last year, and appointed the official legal expert for the Gambling Dukes, the club I’d helped co-found.

And of course, I’d demanded duchesses be permitted to joined to. The very idea that ladies would not be able to join!

I wasn’t going to ever show my friends—any of them—just how desperate I was to prove myself.

Not just a part of The Gambling Dukes because I was the Dowager Duchess of Cartice.

Because I had earned it.

Markham rolled his eyes. “My point is, you should have ignored those letters. Damned journalists always disappear after a while.”

“He’s right, you know.”

I glanced over to my left, shifting slightly to examine Kineallen. The official head of the Gambling Dukes club; at least, that’s what he wanted us to believe.

Kineallen. More properly Alfred, Duke of Kineallen, and all-round killjoy.

“Don’t you start,” I said calmly.

That was the benefit of taking charge of the legal side of things in our club, I supposed. No matter what my idiot friends did, even if my friend Lilah sided with them, I was the one who had studied the law in the privacy of my late husband’s library far more than the rest of them combined.

I was the one they had to listen to. Mostly.

“—and if you simply had ignored?—”

“I have the matter under control,” I said succinctly, pushing my golden hair out of my eyes. It was too hot to have this conversation; had we not retreated from the city to avoid such drama? “The journalist is looking for dirt, and as there is none to be found, it’s all quite simple.”

“What’s simple?” said a cool, liquid voice with the self-assurance of a queen.

Markham and Kineallen rose in delight to welcome Lilah, looking absolutely stunning as always in a floor length emerald gown that would have looked more at home at Almack’s than at the country estate we all co-owned.

Really. I was fortunate, I knew as I rose with a smile, that I actually liked my friend. Devastating beautiful, elegant at all times, and frustratingly intelligent, it would have been far too easy to push her in the lake and watch her perfect dark hair unravel.

Delilah, Dowager Duchess of Rotherwick. My oldest friend.

“Lilah!”

“Georgiana, you darling,” said Lilah with a grin. “Thank you.”

Without even asking, she took the mostly undrunk wine from my hands and placed the glass between her perfect lips.

After a long sip, she beamed. “My favorite.”

I had to laugh. There was only one Lilah, thank God.

“That was actually Georgiana’s drink,” said Kineallen, nodding at one of the footmen, who immediately turned to retrieve another.

Lilah’s eyes opened wide. “Why didn’t you say?—”

“She’s took busy saving the club from disaster,” said Markham with a laugh, stepping out of the saloon with a glass of wine in each hand. “Hullo, Lilah, you witch.”

“Hullo you bastard,” said Lilah without missing a beat as I settled myself back onto my chair and watched the two youngest members bicker happily. “I hear you’re alone again, that young Miss Edgars stopped accepting your advances? Finally saw sense?”

“I think we need to focus on what is important here,” interrupted Kineallen, pulling a pocketbook out of his waistcoat. “The fact our club is about to be dropped into the?—”

“Kineallen!”

“Well, you know what I mean,” he said darkly.

I sighed heavily. My friends were always so dramatic; anyone who said women were the emotional ones had never met these two.

Kineallen, the eldest. Far too handsome for his own good, wound up so tight I had never seen him relax for more than a minute.

Markham, the baby of the gang. Always seeking to prove himself, and never managing it.

“We are not in anything,” I said with a dry laugh. “I have the entire situation in hand. The Investigator ?—”

“The rag?” Lilah finished my wine. “Didn’t they write, asking for?—”

“They are certain they have dirt on us, on the Gambling Dukes,” I said wearily.

It was past six o’clock and I had spent the entire day pouring over letters from ‘the rag’, as my friend called it, and I was tired.

A nice drink, a nice dinner from the cook we’d brought with us from London, then sleep.

The resplendent bedchambers upstairs were already beckoning.

“They’re fishing, they cannot possibly know anything—there isn’t anything to know! ”

“But with the club so recently launched, the merest hint of scandal would be the end of the Gambling Dukes,” said Lilah, her beautiful face creased in a frown.

I smiled calmly. I may not have the perfect olive complexion and liquid amber eyes of my friend, but I still had golden silky sweeping hair and fierce stare. I would not permit my friend to intimidate me.

“I know that,” I said quietly. “And that is why I have invited this journalist, this F. Monroe…here.”

I should have known their reactions; they were all so predictable.

Lilah’s mouth fell open. Kineallen swore under his breath. Markham merely looked as though he had misheard me.

“You cannot be serious,” spat Kineallen.

“Never more so,” I said sweetly, privately luxuriating in their astonishment.

What, did they think making me in charge of any legal mishaps that the club fell into meant I would never make a decision of my own? True, none of us had ever thought, when we’d founded the thing less than a year ago that it would actually happen, but there it was.

I raised a hand and gestured at the manor. “We’ve plenty of room, and she?—”

“You have lost all grasp on reason,” said Kineallen with a frown. “Damnit, Georgiana, the damned journalist has been hounding us for?—”

“And that’s precisely why I have invited them,” I interrupted. Couldn’t they see what a brilliant idea it was? “Here, under my thumb—I’ll give them free rein of the library?—”

“Full rein?”

“—she’ll swiftly see there is nothing to find, no scandal to uncover, no dirt to smear,” I continued smoothly, ignoring Markham’s look of horror. “And to make sure they are thorough, and can leave here and go back to their editor with their tail between their legs, I’ve made a bet. ”

Lilah snorted, her second wine going up her nose, as Markham rolled his eyes.

“Georgiana, you haven’t?—”

“It’s what we do,” I said fiercely.

What we’d always done. We’d gambled, bet on ourselves, fought against the snobbery of Society, and where were we now?

Rich, that’s what. Markham had saved his estate from financial ruin, Kineallen now had a very pleasant chateaux in France that I longed to visit as soon as Napoleon had ceased his nonsense, and Lilah—why, the only reason she had been granted admittance was because she had met against her late husband and secured his hand.

“I’ve made a bet that they won’t find anything, and they won’t,” I said steadily, though my heart had most irritatingly increased a little.

Well, it was not surprising. This was the biggest decision I had ever made for the club; perhaps would ever make.

But I was willing to gamble on this. I knew my friends, knew the ethics we shared. Yes, we gambled, yes, we made wild bets and enjoyed doing so. But there was no scandal here. There was nothing to find.

This idiot journalist would come here, sip the champagne, rootle about trying to find something that wasn’t there, then leave.

It was as simple as that.

“You’re only doing this because you’re bored,” quipped Markham with a sly look as he settled on a deck chair of his own. “You miss Paul.”

Strange; the pain of hearing his name had lessened since I heard it last. How long had it been now? Six months?

I could have had a much worse husband, and in my own way, I missed him. Not that I missed the betrayal that he had attempted.

“Paul is in the past,” I said sharply. I had to make them see, had to make them respect me. My fingers twisted around the pearl bracelet around my wrist. “I'm as happy to gamble as any of you, and I hold all the cards.”

“True,” said Markham with a grin, “but we’ll have to hope there’s no jester in the pack.”

I probably would have responded with a clever quip—or at least, something I would have hoped would have been clever.

But a figure appeared by the French windows in the saloon, one of our footmen stepping over to open the door.

“Ah,” I said pleasantly. “There she is.”

The door opened—and the most painfully handsome man I had ever seen stepped onto the deck.

Fynn

I breathed out slowly as I stepped down from the carriage onto the gravel drive before the manor.

The damned place wasn’t even on maps. That was how rich this club was—and I would prove it had been gained illegally, I was sure. I could smell the scandal in the air, though that could have been the lazy heat pouring onto the luxurious grounds.

My jaw tightened. I had to concentrate, had to take everything in. All my usual tricks were out—at least, that’s what Mr. Jordan had said.