Page 17 of Duke of the Underworld (Regency Gods #2)

CHAPTER 17

P ersephone woke to the sun in her eyes. She winced, momentarily confused.

She threw a hand over her eyes. Her arm grazed against something unexpected and it all came rushing back.

The day of anticipation . Hugh’s return home, the way he was so sweet with the girls. His gift, the delicious erotic torment that followed, and then, finally, the lovemaking.

Falling asleep in his arms and Persephone , love .

She sat upright in a bolt.

The sun was in her eyes because she was in his bedchamber, not hers.

She was entirely naked still—except for the necklace, which still hung warm against her neck.

And she was alone.

Except, that couldn’t be right, could it?

“Hugh?” she called, pulling up the sheet to hold it over her breasts, an impulse that she couldn’t ignore even though it was certainly ridiculous at this point. “Hugh, are you here?”

For a few seconds, she truly expected him to come in from the antechamber, or perhaps to emerge from the bathing room.

She felt stupid for hoping when he didn’t.

The sun, she reasoned to herself, was exceptionally bright. Maybe it roused Hugh early. Or maybe he’d gotten hungry. He’d certainly worked extremely hard the night prior.

Yes, that was probably it.

A quarter hour later, she learned that was not at all it.

“Daphne?” she asked when she stumbled upon the younger woman reading in the front parlor. “Have you seen—have you seen the duke?”

Daphne had, overall, a much lighter look than did her elder brother. Where Hugh had black hair and eyes that held only the tiniest hint of brown when viewed in full sunlight, something Persephone only knew from staring—ahem, looking closely— at him the day they’d picnicked in the park with the girls, Daphne’s hair was a lighter brown that revealed flashes that neared blonde when she was, as now, in the warm bright light of the summer sun. Her eyes, too, were a lighter shade of brown.

When she arched an eyebrow, as she did now, however, she looked just like Hugh.

“The duke?” she teased.

“Your brother?” Persephone tried.

“Better,” Daphne allowed, setting aside her novel, “but you do know that if you just call him ‘Hugh,’ I shan’t collapse from the shock of it, right? You’re his wife.”

Persephone gave an uncomfortable shrug and took a spot on the settee across from her sister-by-marriage.

“Not all marriages have such leeway,” she said. “My parents, for example, persistently use one another’s titles.”

Daphne tried and failed to stifle a wince.

“That sounds…polite?” she said.

“What a fascinating pronunciation for the word ‘bleak,’” Persephone returned brightly. “And yes, it was rather dreadful. I don’t know that I really understood how bleak until…” She trailed off, suddenly embarrassed.

Daphne, however, looked positively delighted. “Until you came here? My goodness, good for us. ‘Happy family’ is one superlative rarely applied to the Lightholders. I feel I should write to my cousins to celebrate—by which I mean brag.”

“I’m so pleased that you’re pleased,” Persephone said back snippily—though she was rather happy about it, all told. She liked Daphne, and she liked this, liked having a peer, an equal with whom she could joke and tease and still know that it was all in good fun.

Persephone hadn’t realized, not until now, the ways that her father’s gambling had affected her beyond the financial. Those burdens, the ones that left the family fretting over how they would pay the staff, and then how they would pay the grocery’s bills—the burdens that had led them to plan to sell their London townhouse, no matter that it had been in the family for six generations—those burdens had been bigger than any other, of course.

But the years that her father had suggested, with casual hints and vague insinuations, that she and her mother stay in the country, those had cost her, too. Staying in their remote country estate had kept her away from other young ladies of her class, which had precluded her from making friends.

She’d known other young women, of course. But they’d been village women, the daughters of farmers and merchants, and they’d been friendly—but they hadn’t dared risk a close, truly intimate friendship with the daughter of the local lord. She hadn’t blamed them, not when her father controlled the rents that determined their livelihoods, but…

But she’d been lonely. She recognized that, now.

And it felt ever so good to see Daphne playing the fool, clasping her hands beneath her chin.

“Yes, I shall write about it in the family annals,” she said. “Mark it: today, the third of September, Lady Persephone Blackwood praised the broader Lightholder clan for their welcoming atmosphere, thereby making history whilst also making Grandfather Cornelius roll in his grave.”

“Your grandfather seems remarkably terrifying,” Persephone commented mildly. “But, not to distract from the historicity of this day, but have you seen Hugh?”

“Oh, right,” Daphne said, blinking as though she’d forgotten about this point. “I have not. That usually means that he’s at Underworld, though. That dratted club has no end of emergencies, it appears, and they’re all hideously boring. Give him time. He’ll be home soon.”

Persephone, considering that she was new to the household and Daphne an established entity, decided to trust this advice.

“Right,” she said. “Of course. I’m being…”

“You’re not being anything,” Daphne said kindly. “You’re newly married. It’s fine. Although, I wanted to ask—I am scheduled to have tea with my cousins this afternoon. Catherine and Helen. Would you care to join me?”

Persephone found that she was incredibly touched by this offer—so much so that she felt it almost a fair distraction from her husband’s absence.

And she did have a lovely time taking tea with Catherine and Helen, the latter of whom regaled them with tales about her exploits in finding oneself suddenly a duchess—and a Lightholder duchess at that, though Lady Helen’s situation was a bit more extreme than Persephone’s, as she was married to the head of the family.

“Oh, the changes are swift indeed,” Helen said, chuckling. “They hear my accent—” Lady Helen had the broad tones that spoke of a Northern origin, a rarity among ladies. “—and practically throw me out on my rear, then they see Catherine come in behind me—” She nodded at her sister by marriage, who was demurely hiding her grin behind her hand. “—and suddenly put it all together. Then it’s all ‘Your Grace’ this and ‘Your Grace’ that. It’s utterly bizarre, even after a year.”

“Oh, good,” Persephone said, genuinely relieved. “I had begun to worry there was something amiss with how twitchy I get every time I hear it.”

“There would be something amiss with you if you didn’t,” Helen reassured her.

After the meeting, Persephone found herself in an extremely cheerful mood.

This mood waned as the evening went on and Hugh did not appear.

Persephone spent hours that night staring at the door that connected her bedroom to that of her husband’s. Part of her was strangely tempted to go through that door, to sleep in the bed that they’d shared. It was a foolish impulse—the bedding had already been changed by the household’s diligent staff, for one—and she resisted.

It was not easy.

“The gossip pages indicate that there weren’t any major soirees last night,” Daphne reassured Persephone the next morning.

Persephone was starting to feel like a bit of an idiot for needing so much reassurance.

“And that makes the club busier,” Persephone concluded, following the line of Daphne’s thought.

“Just so,” Daphne agreed. “But you should come shopping with Catherine and me today. I’m not out yet, of course, so I’m using you and Kitty as my practice cases for learning about Society fashion. Won’t you come to the modiste with me?”

Persephone narrowed her eyes. “So you’re arguing that I should get a new gown to help you?”

“I am,” Daphne said, entirely guilelessly. “Is it working?”

“Shouldn’t I spend the day with the girls?” Persephone wondered.

“Only if you care to learn about penmanship and your arithmetic tables,” Daphne said sweetly.

“I’m not sure what their governess has planned for today,” Persephone argued, though she supposed the point remained. Thus, she went to the modiste with Daphne and Lady Catherine—Helen demurred, citing plans with her husband and daughter—and found herself bullied into acquiring three new gowns, two day dresses and an evening gown.

“It’s a start,” Catherine said doubtfully. “But you’ll need more.”

Persephone tried to look like she wasn’t mentally calculating the expense in her mind.

“I’m sure that I’m?—”

“I’m sure that you’re not,” Catherine said kindly. “And part of me understands the impulse to not cause trouble as the newest member of the family. But this is how our world works. You’re a Blackwood now—and a Lightholder, by extension—and that comes with a great deal of responsibility. The benefit you get in exchange is nice things. It might seem unimportant, but it’s more about supporting the image that Society demands.”

“Um,” said Persephone. “Oh. That, ah, makes sense.”

“If Helen were here, she’d tell you that it’s all part of making the adjustment,” Catherine reassured her. “And I guarantee you—Hugh would encourage you in this matter, not object.”

Persephone thought of the flower necklace, thought of the way Hugh had torn her old chemise to shreds.

And then she thought of his absence. It sent a brutal pang through her chest.

“Very well,” she said absently.

That evening, Hugh was still not home. Persephone found herself wandering the house like a ghost when she came upon Daphne once more.

“Oh, apologies,” Persephone said as she interrupted her sister by marriage for what had to be the dozenth time in the past few days. “I was just…”

“Looking for Hugh?”

There was a kind note of sympathy to Daphne’s question that made Persephone feel absolutely terrible. She scrunched her nose.

“Am I so terribly obvious?”

Daphne declined to answer this, which was telling in and of itself. Even so, when Daphne indicated the spot across from her, Persephone sank into the spot on the settee she was beginning to think of her usual place .

It was nice to have a usual place in her new home, though she wished that her usual companion was a bit taller and broader of shoulder, though she meant no disrespect to Daphne, of course.

“I just…miss him,” Persephone said, then cringed. “Lord, that sounds stupid, doesn’t it? I mean, I know we agreed to this marriage out of a sense of…mutual benefit. And it does not benefit either of us to have me sulking around here because he is occupied with his business.” She sighed. “You must think me the most sentimental fool in Christendom.”

“I actually suspect that Hugh is the one being a fool—perhaps not a sentimental one, but an emotional one, to be sure,” Daphne said musingly.

Persephone blinked. “You…do?”

“I do—and not just because it is a sister’s prerogative to torment her brother at every turn, even in his absence,” she added with a smile. “But yes. I think that Hugh is possibly…letting his past affect his understanding of what’s happening now.”

“His past?”

Persephone asked this question with what she felt was an impressively casual air, given that she was desperately, desperately curious. Hugh was a great mystery to her, and she was starving for clues about what made him act in the ways that he did. It baffled her, that he could be so tender in some moments and so distant in the next. She could not comprehend how he could so clearly adore his nieces, yet seem to treat each interaction with them with a strange sense of dread.

And then there were her own blind spots. Was Hugh so baffling to her because he was Hugh or because he was a man? She suspected it was the former—she could not imagine that any other man could be quite like the man she’d married—but maybe this was sentiment again.

The temptation to pry was great, but she felt that it was impolite to do so.

But if Daphne was offering …

Daphne gave Persephone a look that suggested she knew precisely what her new sister by marriage was up to. She really was far too perceptive for a girl of sixteen.

Or maybe Persephone was just that obvious.

“Hugh may have mentioned this,” Daphne began, “but he looks exactly like Grandfather Cornelius. If you go to the portrait hall, you’ll see a picture that looks disarmingly like Hugh but only about two decades older. When I was a girl, it terrified me. I thought it was haunted. Yes, yes, feel free to laugh at me,” she said with her own chuckle when it became clear that Persephone was trying to avoid doing just that. “It was silly, but I was certain. Hugh had to put the portrait in the attic for years.”

And there was that soft side of Hugh again, Persephone thought. This was a man who protected his young sister even from her imagined fears.

“My point with all this,” Daphne said, “is that the people who knew Grandfather tend to expect Hugh to be just like him, because of this resemblance. I never knew the man myself, but by all accounts, Grandfather was…the kind of man who got what he wanted, no matter who got hurt along the way.”

“That doesn’t sound like Hugh to me,” Persephone said absently.

“It doesn’t,” Daphne agreed. “Not to you or to me or to the girls, at least. But everyone else…they see what they want to see. And I think Hugh sees what they see, too.”

Something inside Persephone yanked at this, the rejection of this idea nearly pulling itself out of her mouth without her consent. But she held it back, forced herself to pause, to think.

The Dark Duke was the mysterious, shadowy owner of a gaming hell in one of London’s most dangerous neighborhoods. He was commanding, fierce. And Lord only knew that he was spectacularly accomplished at brooding.

What if he only saw those sides of himself and not the ones where he was caring and kind? What would that mean? How would he think and feel?

Persephone didn’t know.

“I wish…he was kinder to himself,” she said at last. She might have more questions than answers, but she knew that Hugh was not a man who let himself be ruled by his weaknesses.

She had her father as an example of what that looked like, and Hugh was nothing like her father.

“I think…” Daphne paused, and it occurred to Persephone that it might be hard for Daphne to speak about her family’s past, as well. She nearly told the younger woman that she needn’t speak if she felt uncomfortable when Daphne put on a small, determined smile.

“I think things might have been different if Father hadn’t died,” Daphne said with a sigh. “I don’t have many memories of him, either—I was only four when he died—but from what everyone says, he wasn’t like Grandfather. I mean, he was a duke, and a powerful one—nobody suggests that he was a shrinking flower. But if people speak about Grandfather with fear and respect...they talk about Father with admiration .”

Persephone weighed the difference between these qualities in her mind.

“Hugh is admirable, though,” she said with the sense that she was trying to argue with some unseen force. “I mean, there’s the girls to start, of course. And the club… I assume he opened the club in response to some sort of financial difficulties?” She phrased the question delicately. She might be part of the family now, but she was still new, and aristocrats could be terribly protective of their reputations when it came to matters of money.

But she had the sense that it simply couldn’t be anything else. Nothing else made sense. Hugh did not seem the type to relish in the atmosphere of a gambling hell simply for its own sake, and indeed, when she’d encountered him at his club, he’d acted aloof and reserved toward his clientele, not as though he was thrilled to be there. Nor did he seem to be a man motivated by greed, by the vociferous, unquenchable desire for more, more, more .

Persephone knew what that looked like from her own father.

Daphne did not seem uncomfortable admitting her brother’s motivations.

"Just so,” she confirmed. “I don’t know the whole of the matter—Hugh does get so irksomely protective at times—but death duties, changing times, all the usual things.”

She shrugged, and, indeed, Persephone needed no further explanation. Her family name was only a baronetcy, but she knew the way the shifting world affected the aristocracy. And death duties were the kind of things that members of the ton invoked in hushed whispers, like discussing them aloud might bring that dreaded curse down upon themselves.

“And so he opened Underworld,” Persephone said. She was starting to put the pieces together. “And it provided the money. But people began to look at him with fear, not admiration.”

Daphne’s lips pressed together in grim agreement.

“And he became not our father’s son, but Grandfather’s grandson,” she explained. “I see it differently. You see it differently. But the voices of the ton are loud…”

“And so that is what Hugh hears,” Persephone murmured.

“Precisely.”

Persephone felt a wave of emotion; she didn’t know if she wanted to laugh, cry, or punch something.

It just felt so unbearably unfair, especially when she compared her husband to men like her father.

Baron Fielton had gambled away everything his family owned and had not considered his behavior until things were so bad that they could never be repaired. Even then, he hadn’t taken responsibility; he’d called it bad luck , had fired all the staff without a flicker of guilt, and had told his family that they would be heading to London while he sold their townhouse there.

He hadn’t even apologized when Persephone’s mother had started weeping openly at the news.

And then there was Hugh.

Hugh, who had looked at gambling not as a player, but as a businessman, not because he was looking after his own selfish entertainment, but because he knew there were others who relied upon him.

Hugh, who only worried he was a bad man because he was a good one .

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair .

And there was nothing Persephone knew how to do to fix it. She didn’t know how to be louder than all of Society. She didn’t know how to reach him on this matter, which was so far beyond the role he’d asked her to assume.

She just didn’t know.

“I loathe that,” she muttered.

Daphne gave her a sad smile and, briefly, the two women were not new to one another, were not still learning how to be family. In that moment, by contrast, they were sisters as though they’d been so all their lives.

“I know,” Daphne said. “Me, too.”

“Go home.”

It took Hugh a moment to react. When he did, he blinked blearily up at Martin. Had he…been asleep? Or was he merely so exhausted that the difference between sleep and wakefulness was growing increasingly hard to discern?

His bafflement must have been clear on his face, because Martin rolled his eyes in a way that Hugh, even with his weariness, could tell was excessive.

“Go,” the Irishman repeated, “home.”

Hugh dug deep and summoned a shred of ducal authority. “You,” he said, striving for acidity, “are not in charge of me. In fact?—”

Martin rolled his eyes again. Bollocks, he was dramatic.

“In fact, you’re my employer, a duke, and probably God on high Himself,” he drawled. He did, however, make the sign of the cross, as if this undid the previous blasphemy. “That doesn’t mean I am wrong, however. Drag your ducal arse home. You look like you’ve been kicked in the teeth by the oldest nag in the stable and lost the fight anyhow.”

“Evocative,” Hugh offered.

Martin didn’t seem impressed.

“Fine,” he huffed. “If you are not motivated by your own sake, consider the bloody club. You’re making the staff nervous. You’re making the lordlings nervous. Go home so we can make some bloody money, won’t you?”

Hugh was at the goddamn end of his thrice cursed rope. He did not need someone to tell him—well, anything, really.

He’d left his bed—and the warm, welcoming embrace of his naked wife—in the wee hours of the previous morning, when it had occurred to him that Persephone had officially given him everything that he had asked of her when they’d agreed to marry.

After all, she clearly had the girls well in hand—indeed, she was transparently better with them than he was. And that was good. He would give her increasing rein with them—though the thought of those three precious children in any kind of peril still shook him to his core, he could not deny that his trust in Persephone’s instincts grew with each day. The triplets obviously adored her. Daphne had spent the week catching up on the entertainment she’d been giving up the past two years while she tended to the children. It was all working out precisely as Hugh had planned, not that he found very much comfort in that in this particular moment.

And while it was technically true that Persephone hadn’t yet given him his heir…

Well, their events last night meant that an heir was a distinct, imminent possibility. Surely the gentlemanly thing to do would be not to bother her again until they had a sense of whether or not his seed had taken root. She hadn’t seemed resistant to his attentions, but that didn’t mean…

Christ, he couldn’t think. He’d been awake for too many hours. And prodding at the spot in his mind that had to do with Persephone felt like stabbing a needle into the spot behind his own ear.

He wanted more of her lushness. He wanted to hear more of her cries as she found her pleasure, as she let him take his pleasure within her.

He wanted more than bedsport. He wanted…

He wanted. He wanted. He wanted .

And he could not have any of it.

If he let himself have the things he wanted, he would not only ruin his own plans, but he would harm Persephone and the girls—and that he would not do.

The whole plan had been to marry so that he could put distance between himself and the girls. It was for their protection—for Daphne’s, too. Now, Persephone was added to that list.

The best things he could give them were his name and his absence and not one single thing more.

“I’m not interfering with anything,” he told Martin. He had to fight. The other option was giving in and ruining everything. “I’m up here tending the books.”

“Oh, don’t you give me that,” Martin scoffed, giving off the distinct impression that he viewed Hugh as a misbehaving child. Having a friend was such a bloody trial. “You’re up here now . But earlier you practically started half a dozen fights. Don’t fool yourself into thinking the staff is more afraid of you than they are of me. They told me everything. One of them worried that you were suffering from some sort of malady of the mind, that’s how strange and difficult you were being.”

Hugh glared. “Was it Colm Donnelly?” The lad, no older than eighteen and one of the newer members of the staff, was distressingly prone to flights of fancy.

“Aye, yes, fine, it was. But do you really want to be a man whom anyone— even Colm Donnelly—worries is going actually mad? Because I would not want to be in that position myself.”

Hugh supposed not. The fight was still all he had, though, and, as the many near brawls had shown him, this was not an attitude that he could bring to the gaming floor.

Fuck, he wanted to go home.

“Don’t start,” he warned Martin.

His second in command’s expression softened with sincerity for a moment.

“Hugh,” the man said. This was as clear a sign as any that Martin was being straight with him. He so rarely used Hugh’s given name, though Hugh had given him permission to do so long before. “What’s amiss?”

It was uncommon, too, for the two men to be so openly expressive with one another. Generally, they scrapped and sniped in a way that Hugh had always felt was brotherly, though he’d never behaved in quite the same way with his own brother. He and Norman had never been close enough to argue and fight. Indeed, Hugh had only ever really started feeling close to his brother after he’d died, and the girls had come to live with him. He saw Norman most clearly through the children he’d left behind.

Martin, though, had been kin nearly from the moment they’d met. Their bickering made Hugh feel comfortingly young. It had been so long since he’d let himself feel anything but the adult, responsible man he needed to be.

Every so often, though, the sincerity of the affection they held for one another came through to the surface.

Normally, such moments affected Hugh powerfully.

Today, though, he could not allow for any such weakness.

Not when the stakes were so high.

“Don’t,” he said.

He was so, so tired. He’d tried to sleep, first on the settee in the room, later in the suite of rooms he kept upstairs, but he hadn’t been able to do anything but lie there, feeling the ache of Persephone’s absence. He didn’t know why he suddenly couldn’t sleep without her; he’d only ever slept with her for a few hours.

But he found that he couldn’t, which simply meant that he hadn’t slept. It had been nearly two days, and before that he’d caught only a handful of hours.

“If it’s a matter of difficulties with your new bride,” Martin went on, “staying away won’t fix it. You need to?—”

“ Don’t talk about my wife,” Hugh said with a snarl. He found himself standing. He hadn’t planned to stand. His legs felt wobbly beneath him. He needed sleep.

It was just one more thing he couldn’t have, apparently.

Martin had never been intimidated by Hugh and now was no exception. He drew himself up from where he’d been lounging in his usual irksome fashion against the doorway to Hugh’s office and gave his friend a serious look.

“Growling at me won’t fix things, either,” he said. “Stay here if you want—as you say, it’s your club. But you’ll mind your manners. I don’t care if you’re a duke. I’ll not be treated poorly just because you’re in a foul temper.”

And then he pushed away and out of the room before Hugh could respond—which, naturally, had been Martin’s plan, as it left Hugh feeling properly ashamed of his reaction without any recourse for amending things.

Martin knew perfectly well when to speak up and when to let others stew in their own mistakes. It was what made him so bloody good at managing a gambling hell.

Hugh shoved the books he’d been pretending to manage away from him. He felt like utter shite.

I want my wife .

He choked the tiny voice inside him until it shut its bloody mouth and watched absently as the candle on his desk burned itself down. From downstairs, he heard the occasional cheer or groan come from players as they and their companions won or lost. Night had come around again, it seemed.

And he, the Duke of Nighthall, was good for nothing.

He must have drifted off at some point, for when he returned to awareness again, there was a gentleman standing in his doorway, one Hugh hadn’t heard approaching. He rubbed quickly at his eyes as he pushed himself fully upright.

“My apologies,” he said to the man—or, more likely, the boy, given his slender stature. He hoped the lad wasn’t young enough that he had to send him away. It wasn’t good for business and the young sprites were always so terribly argumentative about it, as if by putting up a fuss they’d make themselves seem like men fully grown, instead of quarrelsome children in the schoolroom. “You’ve caught me at less than my best, I’m afraid. Just give me a moment and—what in God’s name do you think you’re doing here?”

His efforts to gather himself vanished in a flash as the young gentleman stepped forward and revealed himself to not be a young gentleman at all—but instead bloody Daphne wearing a full suit of men’s attire .

She gave him an insouciant grin that he’d never before seen on her as she stepped into the room. “What do you think? Impressively incognito, wouldn’t you say?”

“The hell I would.” He lurched to his feet and surged around his desk, grabbing his sister by the arm and dragging her more fully into the office before slamming the door shut behind her. “What possessed you? Have you taken leave of your senses?”

“Have you?” she returned archly. He blinked down at her. Surely it could not just be these many sleepless nights. This was not at all like his sister’s usual good cheer.

For a moment, his mind flashed to Persephone. He was tempted to blame her for…whatever this was that Daphne was involving herself in, but a second’s worth of consideration caused him to push back against this line of reasoning. Yes, Persephone had done precisely this, had shown up at his club—twice! But he thought of the protective sweetness she displayed toward the girls and could not imagine her encouraging Daphne—who was not a child anymore, not truly, but who was not even out in Society yet—to undertake such a dangerous, foolhardy mission.

No, his Persephone might be reckless with her own safety, but she was unerringly cautious when it came to other people. After all, hadn’t this whole mess started because she was so concerned with the happiness and reputation of her bastard of a father?

Alas, he could not blame his wife for Daphne’s sudden turn into recklessness. This meant that he could not use it as an excuse to go back home, to try to talk some sense into Persephone. And if that led to other interactions between then, more enjoyable interactions, well, then, he couldn’t be blamed for that, could he?

But none of that mattered, because Daphne was here clearly of her own accord. He just had to get her to leave.

“Daphne,” he said, each hour of the past several days weighing heavily upon him. “What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you,” she said, as though this were a reasonable explanation for an underage girl showing up at a gambling hell in Whitechapel at—he glanced at the clock— two in the morning . In what, on closer inspection, appeared to be a modified version of a footman’s uniform with the more obvious signals of that position obscured. He didn’t even want to know where she’d gotten the rest of her clothing.

“Then wait until I come home,” he said sharply. “I’m ordering you a carriage immediately and?—”

“When will that be?” Her interruption was pointedly sweet, a hand propped pertly on one hip. Nobody would mistake her for a man with that posture. Christ, this was bad. He had to get her out of here.

“When will what be?” he asked distractedly. Where had he put hid damned jacket? He couldn’t go downstairs in his shirtsleeves.

“When will you be coming home?” she asked with the tone of someone who felt they were winning an argument.

“I don’t know, Daphne,” he said irritably. “I often stay at the club when I’m working; you know that perfectly well.” Hell, when he’d first opened the club, he’d often gone a week or more without stepping foot in his home, as he’d been too inundated with things to do and too lacking in funds to hire more people to help him do them.

She gave him the same unimpressed look that Martin had given him earlier. Daphne didn’t even know Martin. Hugh was struck with the sudden sense that one got in the moment after slipping on uneven terrain—that stomach-twisting, plunging feeling of losing one’s balance. Only, instead of a misstep on a muddy path, this was his entire life that felt like it was falling out from beneath him.

“You aren’t working,” she told him. She sounded almost sad about it. “You need to come home, Hugh.”

He didn’t have a good argument for the first part of this; he could not have looked less like he was working if he tried. She’d literally come upon him half asleep at his desk. He didn’t have a looking glass in the office, but he felt unkempt.

Most people would have looked at the Dark Duke in his wildest state and begun stammering excuses, begun backing away without ever showing him their backs.

Daphne reached out and touched his arm gently.

“Come home,” she repeated. “This place doesn’t need you any longer. You don’t need it any longer. You restored the dukedom.”

Hugh blinked. “I—” He’d tried to hide as much as he could of their troubles from his younger sister. It was bad enough that he’d made her a de facto parent to the three little girls that had suddenly arrived on their doorstep. He hadn’t needed to burden her—then a girl of only fifteen—with even more of the problems that plagued them.

She correctly interpreted his surprise and rolled her eyes at him. He really needed to make sure she and Martin never encountered one another.

“Hugh, I am about to tell you a very important secret,” she said. “I am not an idiot.”

“I never thought?—”

“I am not an idiot,” she repeated, talking right over him, “and neither is your wife. “Do you think that Persephone really believes there was some sort of sudden gambling crisis? Or do you perhaps think she knows perfectly well that you are avoiding her?”

Listening to the easy way that Daphne referenced Persephone and her thoughts caused an ache inside Hugh to bloom, bright and painful.

He again chided himself for his foolishness. Persephone might not come from a family like the Lightholders (not that there were other families like the Lightholders), nor even one like the Blackwoods. But she was a baron’s daughter, now a duchess, with nary a mark on her reputation. She’d spent her life in the country practically right up until they’d married. She was exactly the kind of person that he wanted Daphne to associate herself with, precisely the kind of bandage needed on the gaping wound that Hugh had rent into the family’s good name. He wanted them to become close.

But he was jealous. There was no other word for it. He was jealous of both of them, frankly, because he would have to keep his distance from both his wife and his sister if he hoped for Daphne to find a suitable, respectable match. And he would have to continue to do so until all three of the girls found their ways in the world. It would be another dozen years, at least. Perhaps more—Martha, after all, showed all the signs of a bluestocking in the making. Perhaps she would be the kind of girl who grew up to be studious, who didn’t look to marriage until after she took her learning as far as girls of her social status were permitted to do, before settling down with some nice, reserved, equally scholarly fellow.

If that was what the girl grew up to want, it was what she would have. Hugh would not put his desires ahead of theirs. Not ever.

“I am not avoiding Persephone,” he said. “I’m just attending to business. This is what men do, Daphne. Ladies keep the home; it is their husbands’ duty to provide for that home.”

Whatever teasing edge there had been to Daphne’s cajoling died away at his words. Now, when she looked at him, he just saw sadness.

“You really do believe that, don’t you?” she asked, speaking so quietly that he wasn’t certain the question was for him, instead of for herself. He answered anyway.

“It’s—it’s not a belief , Daphne,” he said. “It’s just what is. Perhaps the world is not always how we would hope for it to be. But there is little to be done to change things. It is what it is. And if the world is hard, if I must throw myself between you and it in order to keep you safe, I will.”

He’d grown increasingly vehement as he’d spoken; by the end of it he sounded like one of those revivalist preachers begging his acolytes to see sense. Hugh had always considered himself a very regular sort of man when it came to matters of religion—he attended services when required but felt no qualms when duty drew him away from his pew—but he felt a sudden intense connection with the men who so fervently pleaded with others to see what was so obvious to the speaker.

But, like a reluctant parishioner, Daphne looked confused rather than compelled. She shook her head sadly, looking, in that moment, very, very young. He had a flash of Daphne at eleven, trying to hold back tears over a skinned knee, feeling herself too big to cry over such a scrape any longer. This memory cut to her at fifteen, putting her arms around three little girls, now orphaned. She’d looked at Hugh then with determination, but he’d been able to detect her fear beneath it.

“All right,” she said after a long moment. “I suppose I’ve said what I came here to say. I still wish you would come home. But if I cannot convince you, I suppose that I cannot.”

Her voice was quiet and sad, and he wanted to give in. He wanted to accompany her home, wanted to promise to give her whatever she desired.

But sometimes protecting someone meant hurting them in a smaller way first.

“Let me call you a carriage,” he said. He sounded no less defeated than she.

She nodded. “Yes, that sounds as though it’s best.”

The two siblings did not speak any more to one another as Hugh led them down the back staircase. This was likely for the best; while this portion of the club was less crowded, it was not entirely abandoned, and Daphne’s guise as a man would have been given away the instant she spoke or even looked someone in the eye. Shadows were doing the majority of the work when it came to disguising her sex, and still, the thing was flimsy.

But when he summoned a driver, one of the fellows he paid to hang around and deliver home Underworld’s clientele without letting harm befall them when they were worse for the drink, Hugh wished he had said more. He offered a subtle hand up into the vehicle—disguising herself as a man had not made Daphne any taller, and she still needed assistance—and searched for the right words.

He could not find them.

“Go home,” he said eventually. “I’ll be back when it’s time.”

She nodded, just once, then closed the carriage door with a slam.

He watched the hired hack rattle away and thought privately that the time for him to return would not come for a much longer than either he or his sister might have hoped.