Page 13 of To Sketch a Scandal (Lucky Lovers of London #4)

Warren returned to the Fox with a sense of unreality clinging like the mist. He was shaky from the brush with disaster, hardly daring to believe they’d both gotten away.

He tried to muster up some indignance. That fool should have gone back to the club when Warren suggested it. While a raid was worse than a brush with patrol—harder to run like that—they were far less common. Matty should have known that even better than Warren did.

Of course, Warren couldn’t kid himself for very long.

He hadn’t exactly followed Matty out to coax him home for a cuppa and a sweet chat by the fire.

He’d gone for exactly what he almost got.

Sure, he’d briefly rethought the idea, but not very emphatically.

They were both fools in the end, and they’d both nearly paid for it.

But they hadn’t paid. In fact, shockingly, Warren suffered no ill consequence at all. When he got back to the Fox, he found everything exactly as he’d left it. Miles, it turned out, had managed to keep the bar going in his absence with no trouble.

“I’ve played stranger roles,” he said cryptically as he handed over a paltry collection of tips proportionate to his own stores of congeniality.

Warren pushed the pittance back; he’d feel like a miser if he accepted such a sad little sum. “Forester been looking for me?”

Miles shook his head. “No, he was busy. One of the newer chaps took faint. Not used to the corset.”

And so Forester never found out about Warren’s escapade at all. In fact, once the drama with the corset was done, Forester came down to take a turn at the bar himself, so Warren could go upstairs and catch the last hour of the party.

Against all odds, there was only one lingering problem.

Matty Shaw’s smile.

The thought of it, given so suddenly right at the end of their adventure, was haunting.

It would not leave Warren alone. Matty looked so different when he was lit up in amusement—the mild eyes brightened, the scruffy face glowed, the perfect contours cracked into a set of charmingly crooked dimples.

And it was probably just the thrill of escape that did it, but the sight was recorded in Warren’s memory as the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

Very annoying, really, considering he would never see it again. Forester made that perfectly clear while they were cleaning up the next morning.

“I do feel bad, not being more hospitable,” he said. “He’s a good chap, I think. But keeping him at arm’s length is definitely for the best.”

“Do you think he’ll come back?” Warren asked, casually as he could so as not to give away which answer he was hoping for.

“Nah,” said Forester. “He’s too savvy to make the same mistake twice.”

Fortunately, while the weekend’s work did nothing to save Warren from the pathetic condition of wondering how he might get lucky enough to make the same mistake twice, once he got home, the distractions became plentiful.

He got to the house to find cheerful voices pouring out of the parlor before he’d even opened the door.

Harry, it seemed, had made it home in one piece after all.

* * *

Warren’s brother was neither Sikh, nor pirate, though he’d kept company with both and it showed in the way he’d snatched the righteousness of the former and the swagger of the latter for himself.

Time and travel had added lines to his face and gray to his temples, but Warren would know that self-aggrandizing, roguish grin anywhere.

When they all noticed Warren come into common room, there was a general shout of surprise and happiness so loud it might have come from a group twice as large as the one actually present: Harry and Mother, along with two neighbor women and another younger one whom Warren did not know, but surmised must be Harry’s new wife, Anjali.

Harry himself wasted no time. Dressed in an eccentric combination of a tidy kurta, a peacockish silk coat from who-knew-where, and clompy boots that had either seen better days or a lot of adventure, he sprang up like he was still seventeen and yanked Warren into a real collision of an embrace.

“My brother!” Harry clutched Warren’s shoulder and looked him over in amazement.

“Bloody hell, when I left, you were…” He broke off with a laugh, turning to the young woman.

“Anjali, can you believe this? Every time I tell you about him, I talk like he’s some little boy, only to get here and find I’m introducing you to a proper man. ”

The woman—who was eccentrically dressed in men’s trousers and sailing boots, same as her husband—smiled. And Harry, seemingly driven by forces greater than himself, dragged Warren into another overly-enthusiastic hug and kiss on the forehead. He looked Warren joyfully but seriously in the eyes.

“You’ve done brilliantly, Warren,” he said.

“In between scolding me for getting married a world away, Mother’s been telling me how well you’ve managed things all these years.

I thank you from the very bottom of my heart.

I truly could not be more thrilled to tell you that your reward is here, and your toil ends now. ”

If the world started lurching on its axis, Warren could not have been more upended than he was now, staring into the face of the brother he had assumed as good as dead.

The Harry he remembered was a self-destructive bullshitter, propelled this way and that by mad dreams, hot air, and a bizarre notion that it was merely their father’s devotion to a particular company that had made sailing miserable for him, rather than the fact that it was not his passion in the first place.

Determined to right this supposed ancestral wrong, he left Warren—sixteen years old, forced to become man of the house and half the woman too, considering how poorly Mother’s health was at the time—and while he’d talked of coming back someday with riches for all of them, every word had rung false.

It had been nothing more than a socially acceptable excuse to run away and explore the world without feeling bad about what he’d left behind.

And maybe it had been just that, back then. Warren didn’t think he’d misjudged his brother at that time.

But today?

Neither the light in his eye nor the sparkle of the gold rings he’d put in his ears seemed false in the slightest.

As Harry draped an arm around his shoulders and brought him to meet his wife, Warren’s instincts told him it was all true even before Harry got into the details.

He’d done it. He’d secured a good amount of money.

Was it a fortune by London standards? Not quite, it seemed.

He would not, for instance, be getting a house in Grosvenor Square and a seat in the Commons with it, that was certain.

But it was enough. And, more shocking still, he would share it with his family, just as he’d promised in his self-important letters.

It should have made Warren happy. Mother seemed happy— though she eyed her new daughter-in-law with grave suspicion. The neighbors were happy—eyeing Warren more favorably than ever for their granddaughters. Anyone would be happy, wouldn’t they?

But even as Harry discussed his investments and properties and deals (“not just one company, never one company”); even as he told them of the accounts and annuities that would take care of all the Bakshis in England (and a few others back in India), Warren could not seem to dig up any happiness through the thick layer of dread.

Everything he’d built for himself and his mother was about to go right out the window for good.

* * *

Harry did do one thing right: he agreed with Warren that their room was too small for four adults.

Unfortunately, he took it a step further, claiming it was too small for two adults as well. He’d see to it that they rented the best house the neighborhood had to offer.

“Nothing that nice over here,” said one of the neighbor women. “You should go to Westminster, lots of beautiful homes there. New built.”

“And raise our children up knowing only English bankers?” Harry laughed softly. “I see no need to uproot my family from where they’ve grown comfortable and have community, just for the sake of a finer house. They’re fine enough for our purposes right here, I think.”

Warren appreciated that. The women, however, seemed skeptical.

“Westminster would be closer to the gentleman’s club where your brother has been working,” one of them pointed out. “Your mother says he does very well for himself over there.”

“I forgot that’s what you were doing.” Harry’s brows scrunched up as he clearly struggled to remember all the bor ing things other people got up to while he was adventuring. “Which club is it again?”

“White’s,” Mother said proudly at the same time as Warren sputtered “Brooks’s.”

An uncomfortable silence fell thick upon the room.

“I thought it was White’s?” she said.

Damn. Warren could have sworn he’d told her it was Brooks’s.

That said, all he’d cared about at the beginning was making sure the club name he dropped was nice enough to explain the amount of tips he brought home, and ensure it was somewhere too exclusive for the neighbors to ever check up on whether he actually worked there.

After the first couple of months, though, he’d softened the blatant lie in conversation, referring to his place of employment only as the club .

“Did you?” said Warren carefully. “Sorry, Mother. What I think I was trying to say is that it’s very much like White’s.”

“You said it was White’s,” she repeated darkly.

“Either way,” Harry interrupted cheerfully, clearly hoping to make this tension between them vanish and get the attention back where it belonged: on himself. “It hardly matters, does it? You won’t be needing a serving job anymore, will you?”

The casual waving off of that half of Warren’s life struck him silent. Harry seemed to think it was a happy shock, and went on to decimate the other half: “Won’t be the only one helping Mother at home, either.”