Page 1 of Dallying with the Diamond

1

April, 1826

Gentlemen’s Private Apartments in Albany

London

“We’re buggered.” Leo Atherton tossed back the last of his breakfast brandy and turned from the sideboard to face his three oldest friends. “I mean no offense, CB.”

“And I take none,” his friend replied from his customary place in the horsehair chair before the fire. “However, perhaps you could elaborate on why and the precise nature of our…buggerment?” He raised his arms to allow Prinny, Leo’s portly orange tomcat to settle onto his lap.

“Good word,” Sythe said. He’d managed to take up over three-fourths of the settee, which left poor Col, the fourth member of their band of reprobates, sprawled precariously half on the settee and half on the threadbare three-legged ottoman.

“Thank you.” CB raised his own glass of brandy in salute before he took another measured sip of the second-best brandy on the battered sideboard.When the devil had they all managed to raid his meager liquor stores?They’d only arrived mere moments ago. In the blink of an eye, they’d burst into his rooms in full cry, raided his brandy decanter, and draped themselves over his sparse furnishings like last night’s evening clothes.

“You’re looking not quite the thing, Ath. Is something amiss?” Col pushed at Sythe to no avail. He dropped his now empty glass to the thick rag rug beneath his feet and tried to adjust his position across two pieces of furniture whilst working not to dislodge Nelson, the one-eyed tom perched on the edge of the ottoman.

“Something had better be amiss.” Sythe rummaged around in the detritus on the tea table and came up with a lemon biscuit. “He’s summoned us here at eight in the morning, ungodly hour for a gentleman.” He shuddered dramatically and with no attempt at the subtlety with which he performed in the courtroom. Stephen Forsythe, Esquire was one of London’s foremost barristers and wielded drama the way DaVinci wielded a paintbrush.

“Especially a gentleman who has spent most of the nightentertaininga duke’s lonely widow.” CB’s comment was a rude reminder as to why Ath had called them together.

“Is that what we’re calling it now?Entertaining?” Col addressed his comment to CB, but his eyes never left Ath’s face. His life as a bloody Bow Street Runner made Archer Colwyn too clever by half when it came to reading another’s expression.

“Well,” CB said. “Entertainingismore genteel thanfucking like a pair of rabbits.” Lionel Carrington-Bowles—whom they all called CB because as Col so succinctly put itBeing heir to a bloody fortune doesn’t mean I must take all day to call your name—had a gift for the elegant use of the English language, most of it obscene and not fit for any but the lowest of company. In other words, the four of them.

I need more time, dammit. More time to slow the thundering beat of his heart. More time to calm the ever-increasing panic he’d been fighting since he’d realized precisely how much trouble they were in. Less than two hours past. He turned back to the decanter and sloshed another portion of brandy into his glass. After downing the amber elixir in one draught, he faced the room and leaned against the sideboard for support.

“Dammit, Ath, when are you going to obtain some decent furnishings for these rooms? You’re living in Albany, not a Seven Dials flophouse.” Col launched an attack on Sythe’s hip with his fist.

“Ouch! Prinny’s bollocks, Col. That’s myarseyou’re punching.”

“Now children,” CB started. “Remember, wearegentlemen.”

“Bugger you,” Col said amiably.

“Sorry, love, but you’re not my type. And I know where that cock has been, thank you very much.” CB threw a leg over the arm of his chair and slouched to one side in order to dodge the lemon biscuit Col tossed at him. Prinny settled onto CB’s other leg like a sphinx, eyes closed against the mayhem that habitually accompanied the arrival of Leo’s friends.

“I wanted that biscuit.” Sythe said. “Not as much as I want Ath to purchase a decent settee, but—”

“Our journal is gone.”

Not the most deft handling of the announcement, but it had the virtue of ending all laughter and awarding him the room’s undivided attention. Silence was not their natural state, and it would not last, but the pause gave him time to restate the terrifying truth he’d learned only this morning. “Our journal. Is gone.”

His friends came to their feet as one and turned toward the other side of the room where the life-sized statue of Aphrodite stood behind an ornately carved mahogany music stand, anemptymusic stand. Disgruntled cats scattered as the three men crashed through his sitting room like a herd of young bulls and upended furniture on the way. He watched as CB rocked the stand back and forth. Sythe lifted the stand and Col actually looked underneath. Had the situation not been so dire, he would have laughed. When the three of them began to rummage through his desk in the corner and ransack the bookcases along the wall he’d had enough.

“Itisn’there,” he said over the din.

“Are you saying,” Sythe said as he dropped a book to the floor and prowled towards him. “The journal in which we have recorded our sexual adventures for over a dozen or more years—”

“Naming names—” Col continued.

“And writing out intimate details,” CB added. “Is gone? As in lost? Absconded with?”

“That is precisely what I am saying.” he ran his hand through his hair. “I sent Cheddars to Hatchards with the latest box of books from my mother.”

They all nodded in brief commiseration. His mother’s proclivity for sendingimprovingbooks every month from the library of the man he’d always believed to be his father had yet toimprovehim in the way she hoped, but their salehadimproved his finances.

“What has that got to do with—” Sythe went white as a virgin’s come out dress. He staggered around the settee and dropped like a rock onto one end whilst Col stumbled onto the other. CB appeared ready to swoon. He collapsed into the chair behind the desk and scattered papers, books, and sketches from the desk onto the floor.