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ONE

Lilah

I was the queen of winning hearts, I told myself. I was in complete control.

I took a deep breath and plastered a smile on my face.

They didn’t need to know how desperately I needed this to go well. How my shoulders ached with leaning over a desk all last night. How I had agonized over my choice of jewelry in the desperate hope it would impress.

Impress. Who was I fooling?

The Count of Guadalencia and his retinue, all the way from Spain, wasn’t going to be impressed with my pearl necklace and my diamond earbobs.

Well. That particular gentleman would.

But the rest? They wanted to see the numbers, discuss the probabilities, be confident that we would pay up if the Gambling Dukes lost…

Interrogate me. For over two hours.

I did my best not to glance at the longcase clock in the corner, but I could hear its tick, slowly crunching away time .

“So, Lady Rotherwick,” said one of the gentlemen whose names I had already forgotten. “This is it, is it?”

Doing everything I could not to cringe, I stepped forward from the sofa where I had been seated, and moved over to the table where the Spanish Count and two of his most trusted advisors were seated.

Slowly, slowly, I allowed myself to slip into the fourth chair, conscious of the way two of them watched my form appreciatively.

But not the Spanish Count. He was more attentive to the notebook in his hands where he had been jotting down his thoughts throughout our conversation.

“It?” I repeated, as lightly as possible. “You mean your chance to triple your initial investment within eighteen months, should you win the wager? Yes, this is it.”

All too late, I saw one of the five people in his retinue who had come to the Gambling Dukes to consider placing a wager raise a suspicious eyebrow.

Damn. I should have known to play it cool rather than go in hard.

That was the trouble with the Gambling Dukes. I knew it was unusual, a lady earning her own income, and doing so with three friends was perhaps even more unusual still.

But what was the London Stock Exchange, if not a gambling den of their own?

Four friends. Four widowers. Four poverty-stricken nobles.

It had seemed the cleverest idea in the world to establish a gambling club to earn a little coin…but the Gambling Dukes—I had wanted Duchesses, but had been shouted down—had become so successful, earning us such impressive incomes, that now others wanted to join.

After a great amount of debate between the four of us—the Duke of Kineallen, the Duke of Markham, the Dowager Duchess of Cartice, and myself the Dowager Duchess of Rotherwick—we started to accept members.

Nobility only, of course. Gentlemen like the Count of Guadalencia.

Who I was currently in the process of embarrassing myself before.

I could feel the heat rushing into my cheeks and tried desperately not to care that I was blushing in the middle of a meeting.

Blushing? Really? I couldn’t get through one meeting without allowing my flushing face to take over?

Kineallen was going to kill me.

And it was my friend’s irritated response that I just knew I was going to receive the moment I stepped out of our drawing room—that was, the drawing room in his London townhouse which acted as the base for our Gambling Dukes club—that put me on edge even more.

That was the trouble with running a gambling club with your friends. It was all too easy to argue when things went wrong.

With a great effort, I managed to pull myself together. The smile returned, my cheeks I think were only now a light pink, and I smoothed my hands down my skirt.

I was Lilah, the Dowager Duchess of Rotherwick.

I was one of the Gambling Dukes, the friends who had built one of the most successful wagering clubs in London—in just a few years.

I had an income of eight thousand pounds.

I had spent the better part of my life ensuring that nothing and no one could ever hurt me; a persona of utter cool, calm, and collection. No one, not even my friends, knew just how much I was terrified of these sorts of meetings.

And I was only leading this meeting because my friend Markham had to be thrown out of the club—for thieving.

Long story.

“No, I meant are these the numbers? Your forecasting is impressive, Lady Rotherwick, and it’s clear to see that you know your stuff when it comes to a wager,” said the same gentleman whose name I still couldn’t remember. “The trouble is your reputation.”

I flinched.

Dear Lord, I really had to overcome this hatred of the way Society demanded a woman’s reputation be just so. It had been what, three years? Three years, and I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him . For all I knew, he’d left London.

Part of me hoped that he had. Spending any more time with William Parry…

But that wasn’t what they’d said, I told myself fiercely, trying to keep calm. No one had mentioned the bastard who had broken my heart.

No, they’d talked about my reputation.

The one weakness of the Gambling Dukes.

“We have a strong reputation,” I said. It was a complete lie, and I could see on the faces of the Spanish noblemen that they knew it. Still, I had to keep talking. “The Gambling Dukes will soon be known all across Europe for?—”

“As far as I'm concerned, the Gambling Dukes is known across Europe this very moment, and not for the right reasons,” interrupted a gentleman with dark hair and a frown. “Wasn’t your friend thrown out of the business for stealing? From the club itself? Markham, right?”

My stomach lurched, but I repeated the sentence my friends and I had formulated, perfected, and memorized. “A huge misunderstanding. Markham was merely moving club funds to?—”

“Another club account, yes,” continued the gentleman, speaking over me.

Goodness, I hated it when people did that.

“But the point is, none of the rest of you knew he was doing that. You thought he was stealing from you,” said another gentleman quietly, gazing at me severely.

“You were so convinced, you threw him out of the Gambling Dukes, did you not? I don’t just mean you, Lady Rotherwick, my apologies. I mean your whole club.”

I smiled weakly. Well, they were obviously well informed, there was no point trying to hide it. “Yes, we did.”

Blast.

This was what happened when no one in the club had thought to prevent the story from leaking into the newspapers abroad. Oh, we had been careful to ensure that no journalist had heard the story in London…but we should have thought about this. We should have been prepared.

Kineallen—that was the Duke of Kineallen—was my eldest friend, the leader of our little club. He was nice but dull, and enjoyed ordering people about. That was a good place for him.

My best friend Georgiana, the Dowager Duchess of Cartice, had attempted to learn as much of the law as a woman would be permitted. It had been her and her now husband, a Mr. Fynn Monroe, who had discovered Markham’s treachery. Or at least, what we thought was treachery.

Our rascal of a friend the Duke of Markham had been thrown out of our club, only for it to be revealed a few months ago that actually, he’d just been bored. Moving club money about without us finding out? All part of a stupid bet.

God, he was an idiot.

And then there was me. A widow, whose lover had scandalously promised much and then abandoned her three years ago. Oh, I had ridden out that particular scandal…at least, I thought I had.

I smiled weakly. “Look, all of that has been resolved now. We are stronger than?—”

“Has the Duke of Markham rejoined the Gambling Dukes?” the Count of Guadalencia said, leaning forward.

I heaved an internal sigh that Markham had rejected Kineallen’s foolish offer…and then accepted it. “Well…yes. We trust Markham, and even though he offered to leave, we felt that… But he has nothing to do with this particular wager, that has been created completely independently?—”

“But you still let it happen,” interrupted one of the Count’s retinue.

I tried not to glare, but as he flushed and scribbled a note down in his notebook, I could see with a sinking heart that I hadn’t quite managed it.

Well, damn. I could see where this was going. There was only one way it could.

“I want to thank you, Lady Rotherwick, for your time today,” said the Count of Guadalencia smoothly. “I think you and your friends have some excellent ideas, and that is hard to find wagers of this heightened interest.”

I had heard the patter before. This was the third group of potential gamblers I’d met with this week alone, and though it was the meeting which had lasted the longest, it was going to end the same way. I just knew it.

All my suspicions and fears were confirmed as the Count of Guadalencia steepled his fingers and looked at me closely.

“The thing is, Lady Rotherwick, you are fighting a losing battle, and I do not see how you can win,” he said quietly.

I had to put in one last attempt. “If you are concerned about the?—”

“Your competitors do not interest me,” he said with a wave of his hand. “You do, Lady Rotherwick. You and all your friends. You create a good gambling club, yes, but can you successfully run one?”

I winced. Well, it was never nice to have one’s judgement criticized in such an oblique way. “You mean my friend, Markham.”

The Count of Guadalencia shrugged. “If you cannot keep your own friends in line, and from stealing from the club?—”

“He didn’t exactly steal?—”

“I was talking, Lady Rotherwick,” he said quietly.

I swallowed, hating that I’d allowed my passion to get the better of me.

That was the trouble, wasn’t it? The fieriest temper, the Gambling Dukes member swiftest to assume the worst, the one who never wants to believe the best of others.

I had my reasons. I was sure anyone like me would. But that didn’t help me right now.

“Your judgement is in question,” the Count of Guadalencia said quietly. “And for that reason, you must see it is completely impossible for us to consider realistically wagering such large sums with you.”