Page 14 of A Lady’s Guide to Scoundrels and Gentlemen (The Harp & Thistle #1)

I t was weeks before Dantes was able to safely access his flat and assess the damage. And when Victor and Ollie led him in—along with their insurance adjuster and a member of their fire brigade to ensure safety—he felt he could collapse.

The living room was destroyed. Every single exposed surface that hadn’t burned away had either turned carbon black or became gray ash. He located the table that held his parents’ tintype and found nothing atop it but a smoky, black rectangle. It was the only photograph the brothers had of their parents, and under his care, it had been destroyed.

He couldn’t bring himself to touch it. That would make the disaster real.

“Maybe it can be fixed,” Ollie said quietly, no doubt hoping it would help.

“Don’t bother. You’ll only upset yourself.” Dantes nudged a pile of soot that, he assumed, had once been a small, wooden table before heading over to his paintings.

There, he was met by an equally terrible sight, and he shouted out a string of curse words and threw a heavy but unrecognizable object across the room in anger. He couldn’t care less about anything else in the flat, save the tintype, of course. And his paintings. And here they were still hanging on the walls but completely black from soot and smoke. The scene was a mockery, like a monument to his destruction. Looking at them in their sorry state, it felt as if a part of him had died.

“I don’t care about the rest,” Dantes said to the group of men hovering by the door as he trudged through the mess and left for the pub below. No one followed him as they continued looking around with the adjuster, so for a while, he sat alone on the floor behind the derelict bar with a bottle of whiskey that had managed to survive unscathed. He took a few swigs but lost interest quickly. It wasn’t hitting him the way he would have expected.

But then he remembered something.

For the first day since the fire, he’d worn the same trousers as that fateful night. Fortunately, he’d been able to otherwise collect a few pieces of clothing from Victor and Ollie to hold him over, only throwing these old fire clothes on when the extras had been sent out to be laundered. He shoved his hand in his pocket with a small shred of hope. His fingertips immediately felt the texture of lace and he pulled the black scrap out. In the madness of his life as of late, he had forgotten all about it. He often carried it with him, an admittedly strange habit, and by some stroke of luck had happened to have it with him the night of the fire. Otherwise, it too would have been lost forever.

He held the piece of black lace in his hands, rubbing it gently between his fingers. A few days ago, he’d received a letter from Vivian and she’d written that she missed him, something so simple, so innocent. And yet, he hadn’t been sure what to make of it.

It caused a minute flutter in his heart that had sent him into a panic, he couldn’t stop thinking about her letter and what it meant.

And after her absence, the happiness her letters had brought him, that final letter from her, forced him to realize the fluttering in his heart was a growing affection for her.

But the fact remained their entire relationship centered around her finding a husband. A gilded, aristocratic husband who would be happy to go riding in Hyde Park with her, go to balls, yachting, all those events she may not have liked but would be required to attend. Dantes had only been on a horse a few times, didn’t know a thing about boats, and didn’t want anything to do with all of that socializing. And unlike her, he wasn’t expected to join in. And he was quite content with that fact.

She knew he wasn’t in love with her. She knew he wasn’t remotely interested in ever marrying. And that was what she was looking for.

So to tell him she missed him? It was torture to his heart.

Confused and unsure of what to say, he hadn’t responded. But what was he supposed to do? Ignore her letter entirely? Admit he missed her too?

But that would be a lie—he didn’t miss her. He ached for her. And this made him exceptionally vulnerable, a dangerous spot to be in. He needed to keep his distance.

All of this ran through his head while he sat on the floor with her lace scrap, with the memory of her cheek in his hand as she’d stared up at him with wide, beautiful eyes.

He lifted the lace to his nose, but it had lost Vivian’s scent and now smelled like smoke.

He swore to himself and stuffed it back in his pocket.

“Dantes.” Victor’s voice echoed across the room. “We need to talk.”

That didn’t sound good. Dantes fingered the lace scrap in his pocket one last time for the comfort it provided and stood up from behind the bar. Victor was waiting for him, alone.

“Where’s everyone else?” Dantes asked, feeling uneasy.

“Out back.”

They met in the middle. “I’m going to get right to the point.” Victor looked around the derelict room. “Insurance is not going to cover your flat.”

Dantes felt like he were being shoved underwater. “ What ?”

Victor shifted with discomfort. “I said—”

“I know what you said.” Dantes rubbed the inner corners of his eyes. “You need to explain why.”

“Insurance only covers the pub, the actual business.”

“But that is part of the business. It’s part of the whole building we own. As a business.”

“Yes.” Victor nodded and finally met Dantes’s gaze. “But because you decided you’d prefer to crawl upstairs after work and not buy a proper home like Ollie and me, and pay me a monthly rent for the flat and not a nightly rate like one would for a saloon, it’s a separate entity. Not part of the business. A home. A personal dwelling.”

Dantes’s heart galloped with panic, but the dread was quickly replaced by a boiling anger. He stepped forward and stuck a finger against Victor’s chest. “When I took that place, you were constantly after me about paying rent. You didn’t need it, the business didn’t need it. I had no money of my own, as my part of the railway sale went entirely into the pub, and I wasn’t big in boxing yet. You had already been working for years, had some money already. And you wouldn’t give me a break to help me out.”

“I know.”

Dantes turned away, raked his fingers through his hair, then turned back to his brother, now half-crazed. “Do you remember that time of my life? I had just been kicked out of Oxford. Eleanor left me. And you, my own brother, wouldn’t help me. And now you’re telling me after all of that, I’ve lost everything again? Because of you ?”

“Look, if you need money—”

Dantes got into Victor’s face. “I don’t want your filthy money! It’s going to cost me a ridiculous amount to get clothes again, to find a new place to live, to get furniture, to rebuild everything! But I’m confident I will manage it. The thing is, there isn’t enough money in the world to bring me back the photograph of Mum and Dad, or my paintings. Those are irreplaceable. And I will never forgive you for losing them.”

Victor frowned. “I had nothing to do with that part of it.”

“I don’t care.” Dantes poked Victor in the chest hard enough to make him step back. “You like to bill yourself as the patriarch of the family, the leader, the one who runs everything. Mr. Responsibility. Then you should have put a stop to those blasted fireworks a long time ago.”

Dantes turned, unable to stomach Victor’s fallen face, and stalked toward the exit. He was going to hire a hansom out on the street, as there was only once place he wanted to be right now. However, he paused to call back over his shoulder. “You can take care of the cleanup. I’m never stepping foot upstairs again. And then, when you rent it out, the money goes directly to me.”

“We always survive, Dantes,” Victor shouted after him. But Dantes was already out the door.