Page 13 of Duke of the Underworld (Regency Gods #2)

CHAPTER 13

H ugh should have gone to bed. He should have listened to what Persephone had said—not that the circumstances under which she’d suggested turning in was anything less than a brutal indictment of Hugh’s capability as a husband.

Instead, he went to Underworld.

He felt like the worst kind of scoundrel for turning her away. It was a decidedly ungentlemanly move to show interested in a lady, then to push her away when she reciprocated, treating her as though she’d misread the signs.

In the moment when Persephone had kissed him, he’d felt nothing so strongly as a desire to kiss her back. It would have been a kiss with promise, one that would have ended with the two of them tangled around one another in bed, him wrenching sweet cries from her as she?—

He could not think about it. He’d lost the right when he pushed her away.

“You’re here,” Martin said in surprise when Hugh appeared in the doorway of the casino manager’s office, which was second in size and splendor only to the owner’s suite.

“And the sky is blue, hm?” Hugh snapped acerbically before he could stop himself.

Martin raised an eyebrow but looked otherwise unbothered by Hugh’s show of temper.

“So it is,” he agreed mildly.

Hugh cursed himself mentally, though he didn’t make any move to apologize for the words. Lord knew that Martin didn’t deserve his ire.

Nobody did, except Hugh himself.

He pulled himself away from the doorway to Martin’s office before he could say something to make it worse.

Part of him was still back in that library, still looking at Persephone as she shimmied in her seat with happiness over something as simple as scotch and soda. It was still an abomination of a drink—he hadn’t changed his opinion on that—but she’d been so happy over something so small.

She always was, though, wasn’t she? And she took those small things and made them better, brighter, more beautiful.

And devil take him if that didn’t scare the hell out of him.

He was not supposed to want her like this. Persephone…she was supposed to be something he’d done to make his life easier, to make things better for the girls.

Likely that was his own fault. No, amendment: that was definitely his own fault.

Because Persephone wasn’t a thing , designed to make his life better or anything else.

She was a person. A lovely person.

It made him dizzy with panic how lovely she was.

Because their day…it had been oddly perfect, even though all they’d done was walk to the park, and even though his arms would not thank him tomorrow for carrying nine stone of dead weight across the length of St. Regent’s Park.

“Want to talk about what that was?”

Blast, now Martin was in Hugh’s doorway. Christ, this was a mistake. He should have stayed home, should have drunk several more fingers’ worth of scotch and then put himself to bed. Hopefully that would be enough liquor to knock him out so that he didn’t spend hours and hours listening to see if he could hear his wife through the walls.

“No,” he said flatly.

Martin came in the room, closed the door behind him, and sauntered with an impossibly confident swagger over to one of Hugh’s chairs.

He steepled his fingers under his chin and looked at Hugh expectantly.

This was what came from having friends.

Or, in Hugh’s case, friend.

“Go away,” he said. It was something of a relief that he now could be annoyed with Martin without feeling guilt over it.

Martin tapped his fingers together.

“How’s the new wife, then?” he asked mildly.

Christ, the man was lucky that Hugh didn’t break his nose.

“None of your bloody business,” he said, pushing to his feet and slamming the record book that he’d opened absently. He was in no mindset to check sums and debts, anyway.

He ignored how deucedly amused Martin looked as he stalked out of the room.

Not that this had much of an effect. Not for nothing was Martin the kind of man who could arrive in London with little more than the clothes on his back only to find himself, a handful of years later, the second-in-command at one of the most lucrative private clubs in the city.

Most of the time, Hugh found this attitude admirable. He was not at all certain he could have done the same in Martin’s situation, after all. Hugh, too, had climbed his way back up—but there was no greater head start than being born into a ducal title.

Most of the time, Hugh liked that Martin would not be cowed by him. It was a good thing for a man to have a trusted associate who would always tell him the truth, even when that truth was unflattering or unpleasant. Hugh had been raised, as had the rest of his cousins, to view their grandfather Cornelius like nothing less than a minor god—but as Hugh aged, he wondered if Cornelius oughtn’t have listened to others a little bit more and heeded his own opinion a little bit less.

Just now, however, Hugh wished he were a bit more like Cornelius Lightholder, who, whatever his sins, could send anyone fleeing for cover with a mere look.

That would be a dashed useful skill to prevent Martin following him back out onto the balcony.

“Do you care to talk about it?” Martin asked with that same infuriating mildness.

“I care to talk about how I’m going to sack you if you don’t shut your mouth,” Hugh told him.

Martin laughed. Laughed . Hugh considered throwing him over the balcony.

No, crushing paying customers was not good business. Martin could live another day.

“Fine,” Martin said. “Have it your way.”

Hugh would have it his way, damn it. He didn’t need Martin’s permission for it. He glowered out over the casino floor.

“Though,” the Irishman went on, “if you’re going to be here, you might as well make yourself useful.” He pointed a long, thin finger to the far side of the floor, over where the lower stakes games were situated. “There’s a group over there that’s brewing for trouble. I’d give them half an hour, perhaps less, before they start something we don’t want in our house.”

Hugh didn’t ask how Martin knew this. His second had a keen eye and good sense, and it didn’t take long in the gambling hell business to learn how to sniff out trouble from a mile off.

“Drinking a lot, playing only a little, and furious when they lose?” Hugh asked, grateful for the change in subject.

Martin tapped his nose. “Just so. I don’t know them; they’re guests of members, not members themselves.”

“Whose guest?”

“Avan Lennox.”

Hugh sighed. The third son of Lord Lennox was an utter popinjay, and a weak-willed one at that, at least socially. He was always falling in with some sort of crowd that transparently was only interested in knowing him for his money or connections—even from a distance, Hugh could tell that much.

Hugh would have denied Lennox membership on grounds of personal dislike alone, if not for the fact that the youngest son in the family had a keen eye for investments and had made himself and his family rich as sin.

Also, the man had the annoyingly decent habit of paying his debts promptly.

There were days when Hugh really hated being a businessman. He had another flash of sympathy for his late grandfather, who never had something so petty as material need standing in the way of quashing his enemies.

No, that was Hugh’s cross to bear.

“Right,” Hugh said. “I’ll show them the door. Perhaps have another word with Lennox about the company he keeps, though I doubt it’ll stick this time more than any other.”

“Well, that’s not what I meant at all,” Martin said, sounding as though he had already resigned himself to being ignored. “I thought more you might go stop a fight before they have to be thrown out.”

Indeed, Hugh was not listening. His body had been thrumming with the need to do something since long before he’d pulled away from Persephone. And while he could not take her to bed as he desired—not when this roiling emotion inside him meant that he could not be controlled, could not keep himself removed, could not be what she deserved—he could do this.

This was something he was good for.

And so, instead of going down and distracting Lennox’s friends with conversation, with a well-placed compliment, with the idea of flirting with one of the women hired to flatter players, Hugh waited.

Instead of deploying the tools of a duke, the ones he’d learned at his father’s knee, he waited.

These were the tools of a predator.

He’d learned that from his grandfather.

He watched as the men grew louder, drunker, more rambunctious. He watched as the dealer, an older man who had been with Hugh for years and who had shown himself to be unflappable in the face of chaos, stopped trying to act polite and instead focused merely on controlling the ruffians. He watched Lennox nervously—and pointlessly—urge his so-called friends to relax, enjoy themselves, be calm.

None of it worked, of course. But Hugh watched and he waited, which meant that the instant one of the ruffians lifted a hand—a planned shove at another player, who had stiffly requested if they might all be kind enough to take themselves elsewhere, as others were trying to play?—

The moment things turned to violence, Hugh was there.

He stepped forward, seized the man by his raised arm, and used his own momentum to spin him around. It wasn’t hard, not with the man three-quarters of the way to soused.

The ruffian blinked, surprised to find himself suddenly facing another direction.

“Who th’ fuck are you?” he asked, the slurring only slightly obscuring his Midlands accent.

Not an aristocrat, then. That was surprising—not because Underworld was full of exclusively members of Society. Hugh had a policy that anyone who could afford it could have a membership, so long as he found no reason to revoke it. It was a good plan, one that earned him coin from the merchant class, who wanted to rub elbows with their social betters, and from the rakish young lords who wanted to brag that they had friends among the lower tiers of society.

The merchants tended to cause less trouble, though. They weren’t as bloody entitled as the aristocrats.

Still, Hugh could eject an upcountry lad as easily as he could a London lord.

He gave the ruffian his iciest smile.

“I,” he said with his own razor-sharp accent, “am the owner of this establishment. And I am telling you that it is time for you to leave.”

“The devil you are,” the man retorted, looking almost comically offended. “I have a voucher for tonight and m’coin is still good. I’m not going nowhere.”

“I’m afraid I must insist,” Hugh said. He was rather glad they weren’t going easily. He was wound too tight for anything but a fight.

The ruffian scoffed. “D’you hear that?” he asked, tone snide. “’I’m afraid I must insist.’” His imitation of Hugh’s accent was, frankly, excellent. If the fellow ever decided to seek a change in careers from general nuisance to actor, he could make a killing on the stage. “Does this fancy-bred bastardf think he can tell the Shandon brothers what they can and can’t do?”

“Not a chance, Johnno,” contributed one of the other ruffians—a trio of brothers, apparently—his voice at least as slurred as that of his brother.

Avan Lennox appeared at Hugh’s elbow, looking as though he was about to throw up.

“I’m so sorry, Your Grace,” he murmured anxiously. “I should never have—what I mean to say is?—”

“I’ll deal with you later, Lennox,” Hugh growled. He would let Lennox keep his membership, at least for now. After all, he had brought Hugh the very thing he had needed tonight.

As Lennox and his hand-wringing melted back into the crowd, which was inching slowly away from the brewing confrontation in their midst, Hugh turned his attention back to the trio of brothers.

“Last chance to leave of your own accord,” he told them. It wasn’t a threat; he didn’t bother to make it sound like a threat.

It was simply the reality. They would comply and depart, or he would make them do so.

God, he hoped they chose the latter.

The good thing about drunk ruffians was that they could nearly always be depended upon to choose the more idiotic option. This meant that Hugh was not at all surprised when Johnno, who seemed to be the trio’s ringleader, took a large, sloppy swing at Hugh’s head.

Hugh ducked and socked Johnno right in the gut.

After that, it was pandemonium.

Hugh supposed, when he looked back, that the fight ultimately only lasted for two or so minutes. But as he fought, dodging another blow from another brother as Johnno bent over and gasped for breath, staggering back from a wild punch from the third, he thought nothing of passing time.

He did not think of his responsibilities. He did not think about how he needed money to keep his estate going, and he did not think about how his only way to make enough money was this, this messy, ugly underside of London.

He did not think about what his profession, such as it was, would do to the girls when they were old enough to understand it.

And he did not, blessedly and for once, think about Persephone. He didn’t think about her softness or her sweetness. He didn’t think about how she’d come undone beneath his tongue, the way she tasted of promise, hope, and pleasure. He did not think about those bloody embroidered flowers on her wedding dress.

He just swung, blocked, brawled. He landed a blow that likely broke one of the brothers’ noses, took an elbow to the face from an unknown source. It hurt, of course—it hurt a lot.

But it was the hurt that made the fight all-consuming, and it was, in Hugh’s opinion, well worth the price to get a few moments of bloody peace inside his own goddamned brain.

Hugh had fully disabled one of the brothers, who was sitting on the floor, clutching his nose and moaning piteously, and had nearly subdued Johnno, who had given up fighting with his fists in favor of just sort of thrashing around like a fish on a line, when Martin had to spoil the fun.

“All right, all right, enough of that,” Martin said, his thick Irish brogue sounding disgusted. He directed several of his men—who, Hugh supposed, had been hired for precisely this purpose—to seize each of the bleeding, battered brothers by his collar and begin hauling them toward the door.

In a flash, it was only Hugh and Martin left standing there. All around them, the players returned to their games, the allure of gambling greater than the spectacle of the fight.

“Are you pleased with yourself?”

Martin dangled a handkerchief in front of Hugh’s face. Hugh took it automatically, though his blank expression must have indicated he didn’t know why he needed it. Martin’s expression grew even drier—something Hugh would not previously have thought possible—and he gestured toward his lip.

Hugh dabbed and—lo! He was bleeding.

“I am, actually,” he said in response to Martin’s question, though, damn, it hurt to talk with his bloodied lip.

No matter. Hugh felt more relaxed than he had in days.

“Can’t you just take up fencing or some other dainty pasttime like the rest o’ yer fine-bred lot?” Martin complained. “Or at least keep the blood off the carpets? Think of the poor maids, man.”

Hugh grinned. That hurt, too, but to hell with it. At least there wasn’t that anxious energy twitching through his bones anymore.

“We’ll give them a bonus,” he offered.

“Give them a bonus,” Martin echoed with a disgusted shake of his head. “Fine. You’re going to owe me a bonus, too, after all of this, you know.”

“We’ll talk about it,” Hugh said, nearly laughing. The rush of the fight was leaving him now, a weary satisfaction taking its place. He might have agreed to anything just then—good business or no.

He really was a lucky bastard, to have Martin on his side. He could see that, now that he wasn’t about to vibrate out of his skin.

Martin looked his employer up and down, then gave a rueful little shake of his head.

“Marriage,” he said as though the word were some kind of foul oath. “It’s the strangest bloody thing in the world.”