Page 12 of A Lady’s Guide to Scoundrels and Gentlemen (The Harp & Thistle #1)

D antes began to rush toward the kitchen. In the seconds before the living room filled with thick, black smoke, he spotted orange flames crawling across the ceiling, as if the Devil himself were coming for Dantes. He started coughing and as the smoke filled the flat, he heard Vivian coughing somewhere else now, too. The stinging of the smoke in his lungs made it impossible to think, to remember which direction he faced, to remember where Vivian was.

He heard her cry out for him, her voice pierced with terror, but he couldn’t locate the sound. Now unable to open his eyes, but knowing the fire would quickly overtake the flat, he covered his mouth and nose with his shirt and rushed forward with his arm extended, trying to locate the kitchen.

His fingers found the door. It was shut, but because of the heat, the wood expanded. The door was stuck.

“Vivian!” It took everything in him to bang hard on the door and yell out to her and he was punished with the effort with gasping, rib-bruising coughs. Heat crept across his back, and he could hear the wood of the building crackling and roaring, as if they were inside his fireplace. Everything in him screamed to escape posthaste, but he would burn in hell before he would leave Vivian behind.

Dantes shouldered hard into the kitchen door and it flung open and banged against the wall. And then he found her arm, or maybe her arm found his—he never would remember. But he grabbed her hand and blindly rushed where he believed windows were, praying with all of his heart that he didn’t make a fatal error and go the wrong direction. Escaping from the window was dangerous, but there was one window in which a tree grew close enough to attempt to climb down. He had cursed that exact tree more times than he could count because the slightest breeze made it scratch the window at an obnoxious volume. He had been meaning to trim it back but now was quite glad he’d never gotten around to it.

Finding cold glass with his fingertips, he said a silent thanks and shattered the window with one swift kick. The smoke began spilling out into the night air.

“Escape.” His voice cracked and he half-helped, half-threw Vivian out onto the tree. She started up a coughing fit again.

Rapid voices and shouts met his ears from below and he was able to open his eyes enough to see Victor sprint around the back corner of the building, his face sweaty and carbon-streaked. Dantes closed his stinging eyes again. “Victor, get her!”

Then someone grabbed his forearm.

“It’s me.” Through verbal commands, Ollie helped him out of the window and onto a sturdy branch. Dantes mentally promised to ensure no one ever cut down this tree. “Don’t worry, Victor has her.”

Ollie gave Dantes directions on where to set his feet and hands, and Dantes managed to open his eyes for enough short moments to see two branches that would lead him to a safe height to drop down.

“That’s what you get for leaving a fight for a woman.” Ollie seemed to be doing his best to sound upbeat.

Dantes appreciated a shred of humor in the moment and began to laugh but was immediately overcome by coughing.

“Sorry, no more jokes.” Ollie dropped off the branch after Dantes, then pulled Dantes over to the greenway behind their building, explaining along the way one of the fireworks had gone directly into Dantes’s flat.

“How bad is the fire?” Dantes asked, though the overwhelming stench of it told him enough.

Ollie didn’t answer the question, but like Victor, he had streaks of dirt and carbon on his face as well. “The fire is at the front of the building. People are out there throwing water on it until the fire brigade arrives.”

When Dantes collapsed into the brown grass, a stranger, an elderly woman wearing a dark shawl, rinsed out Dantes’s eyes. Though they still felt dry and scratchy, he could finally keep them open. She gave him water, too, which he chugged down and the urge to cough eased. He briefly forgot about the mess around him when he spotted Vivian sitting on the ground nearby. With the fire up front, hardly anyone was back here. The elderly woman went to Vivian and began talking to her. Vivian kept wiping at her eyes but was able to communicate well enough with the stranger that Dantes felt a shred of ease.

Ollie gave Dantes a squeeze on his shoulder as Victor approached. Victor dripped with sweat, and his face was stony. He rubbed a fist over his forehead, where black hair stuck with sweat. “The front of the building caved in. Your living room”—Victor met Dantes’s eye—“is probably ruined. The pub is buried under rubble and water. Luckily, despite the sheer size of the crowd, no one has come up missing yet. Because the flying explosive went into Dantes’s home instead of the pub, it gave enough time for everyone to evacuate before the ceiling collapsed.”

“Thank God,” Dantes replied. Human life was far more important than anything else. But he also knew Victor was more worried about their business than Dantes and Vivian, however, so when his brother immediately rushed away after stating the facts, he didn’t stop him.

Later, with the help of the fire brigade, they would be able to assess the full damage and go through his belongings with their insurance company. Dantes clenched his jaw at this, thought about the tintype of his parents, his art collection, and hoped they had somehow survived the inferno.

“You’re lucky.” The elderly woman appeared again with more water. “That you and your lady escaped.”

Unsure of what else to do or say, he thanked her and she left, likely to head back out front. Once the stranger was out of sight, Vivian came to sit closer to Dantes, though she kept a cautious distance. Not that he could blame her. If he ever saw her again after tonight, he would be surprised.

They watched in silence as thickening smoke rose into the night sky. He hoped that meant the fire brigade had finally arrived, but it also meant everything inside his home was burnt to a crisp. At the snap of a finger, his life had been completely turned upside down. Again.

And to make it worse, he’d acted like a complete cad. But the way Vivian had studied his home, his art, his books, not realizing she’d been seeing inside his soul… Few people aside from his brothers had been allowed into his personal space. But those who had been had never taken the time to look or study. They’d been there to take, to use him. Vivian was the only person who’d seen Dantes for who he was and hadn’t laughed. She hadn’t laughed at his art, she hadn’t laughed at his books, she hadn’t laughed at his face or his scar.

And when he realized this, he had the sudden urge to take her in his arms.

Which, of course, he didn’t and couldn’t do.

And it was distressing. One day, she would be gone, this woman who treated him like a human being. She didn’t care for him as anything more than a friend and never would. And while his mind battled with itself and he came to understand this, he reached out to touch her one time.

He cradled her cheek in his hand, expecting her to be disgusted, secretly hoping she would be happy by this gesture.

But her eyes shuttered, and she looked away.

And thus, he let go.

Vivian began coughing again and guilt tore through him. If it weren’t for him and his bad luck, she wouldn’t have gone through this. She would have been at home, safe and sound, if he hadn’t been so selfish as to bring her to the pub with him.

He really should have known better than to allow himself to get close to someone. He knew better. He knew better!

Handing Vivian water the stranger had left behind, Dantes watched her gulp it down with greed. “I know you’re not all right,” he said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “So I’m not going to ask that question.”

She was sitting in the small patch of grass, her green skirt spread like a circle around her, and he noted the way her eyelashes stuck together from her tears. But she didn’t respond or even look at him.

If she hated him in the moment, he wouldn’t blame her one bit.

“I’m sorry, Vivian,” Dantes said. “I don’t know what else to say. But I mean it.”

She let out a sigh, shook her head with irritation. “Ignoring the fact that we nearly died just now, I don’t know what game you’re trying to play. I wasn’t going to say anything, but now I’m in a rather sore mood and I’m not going to keep my mouth shut about it.”

“What ‘game I’m trying to play’? What do you mean?”

She let out an irritated huff. “You keep… You keep doing things that don’t make any sense to me. I’m not the most experienced woman in the way of the world and it is very confusing to me.”

“What things?”

She looked over at him with exasperation. “I thought we were becoming friends. But then, you touched me in a way I’m rather sure is not a way friends touch each other.”

He swallowed, not knowing what to say.

“Why do you do that, Dantes?”

Clenching his jaw with shame, he turned his attention back to his building. If she had her reasons to be confused, well, he had his own. Such as her choosing to go up to his flat, and her use of his nickname, something rather personal, while in the midst of telling him to give her space. “It won’t happen again,” he responded darkly.

“See that it doesn’t.”

Humiliation coursed through him. Maybe he deserved it. “You’re one of the most powerful women in the country,” he began. “With more money than I could imagine. Every time I go somewhere with you, people stop what they’re doing to watch you walk by. You could literally have any man you could ever want on this planet. A duke? A prince? A king? The president of America? Probably married, but if you went up to him, he’d stammer like a fool and do anything you asked.”

“What are you trying to say, Dantes?”

He ran his hands through his smoke-smelling hair and felt small and insignificant. “Forget it.”

Vivian let out a single laugh, but it lacked humor. “Well, it’s not at all like that, believe me. And even if it were…” There was a long pause. “I chose to come here tonight, Dantes.”

It was tempting to ask what she meant by this. Obviously, she meant as a friend, but saying those words after his claim she could have any man she chose?

It was tempting to continue this conversation and clarify it. But it was also pointless. For so many reasons.

But would their friendship be salvageable after tonight? He wasn’t sure of that, either.

Vivian handed over the water and Dantes accepted it to take another deep gulp. A breeze kicked up, and the stench of burnt wood singed his nose.

“I was engaged once.” He forced the words out before he could change his mind. “A long time ago.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her head swing toward him.

A long silence. “Oh?”

“Yes. To Miss Eleanor Crosby.”

“Mr. Thomas Crosby’s sister?” Her voice hitched.

“Yes.”

A pause. “Do you still love her?”

Dantes looked directly at her, concern pulling at his brow. “Christ, no.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“Because it feels like something I should tell you.”

She seemed to mull this over but offered no other comment and changed the conversation. “What did your brother have to say about the damage?”

Dantes glanced up at the smoke again. “The front partially collapsed. A firework hit my home directly.” Panic rose, but he forced it back down. “It’s all gone. My home. My business. Everything.”

Outside of his brothers, Dantes had never told anyone about his paintings before. He’d had the paintings because he liked them, because they’d felt familiar and real, and that had been that. He didn’t really want to talk about them otherwise.

He hadn’t possessed anything wildly famous—no Claude Monet, no Berthe Morisot, nothing like that. His favorites had been by Gustave Courbet, a French artist known in the art world, but most people passing by on their way to work wouldn’t recognize his style.

The artist had been extremely controversial. Over his career, Courbet had been frequently called a narcissist and had shocked French society with dark subject matter, as opposed to the sickly-sweet romanticism paintings of his predecessors. Dantes had found himself drawn to the man’s work, perhaps a bit humored by the man as well. But the art was just…realistic. He’d shown working-class people, he’d shown death. So many people lived each day in a desperate ignorance of the realities that made Dantes a gutter rat instead of a high society gentleman, but Courbet had captured the essence magnificently.

The last few years of Courbet’s life, the two men had exchanged letters. Dantes had seen Courbet’s painting A Burial at Ornans , a depiction of a rural French funeral. It was dark and bleak, evoking a feeling of despair and ugliness, and critics had despised it. But it had reminded Dantes of Whitechapel, of his own mother’s funeral. It had hit him so deeply that he’d written to the artist about the painting’s effect upon him, opened up about his strange life that had begun under a laudanum-addicted mother, to living as an orphan on the streets, to boarding school with Britain’s richest sons. Courbet had responded and ignored the comments about A Burial at Ornans , hadn’t said a thing about Dantes’s life, yet despite the seeming lack of care, had continued to write Dantes until his death. During that time, Dantes had bought and acquired a few paintings from the artist, none of which had ever been displayed to the public.

There’d been other paintings, too, that had not been by Courbet, but Dantes had loved each one for its own reason.

Now they were all gone. Forever.

Dantes thought about this as he met Vivian’s eye. “Almost everything can be replaced. But the photograph of my parents, and my paintings? I’ll never get over losing them.”