Fortune Favors the Wicked (26 page)

Hugo bridled. “
Pet project
is hardly the way one ought to refer to a private hospital with the potential to save many lives. And why should I not set off on my own and have both the acclaim and the reward?”

“Because that would be horrid of you. And if you have the acclaim, you won't need the reward.”

His brows lifted. “So you say. Another thing I won't need is the scandal of being thought to have abducted an ungrateful whelp.”

“I give you my word, I won't tell a crowd of strangers you're trying to abduct me. As long as you don't try to abduct me,” she added. “Again.”

Abduction.
God
. This was his thanks for rescuing her from a crowd that, if they recognized her as a gently-bred young woman, would have turned on her every way imaginable.

“If you accompany me to Strawfield,” Georgette added, “I shall behave properly.”

Feigning docility, she lowered her eyes. Light eyes, like the pale of a summer sky. Pale hair and skin too. Seeing her among the endless shelves of Frost's Bookshop, Hugo had always thought she looked as though she were half-faded into the pages of a story.

A fanciful observation. Most uncharacteristically so. Especially since, as his visits to the bookshop stacked in number, he saw how hard and how prosaically she worked. As Hugo was a friend of her brother's, she seemed not to regard him with the formality she would a stranger. In his presence, she carried garments for the laundress, scooped up her cousin's wayward toddlers, marked accounts, stacked books—and so on, in ceaseless motion.

“Do you want to search for your brother, Miss Frost? Or for the stolen coins?”

She considered. “First the second thing. Then the first thing second.”

“I should have guessed,” he murmured. “Do explain to me. My family already disapproves, and my would-be patrons have already declined. How would notoriety for finding stolen coins increase my credibility in medical circles? And better still, how would it translate into financial support for my hospital?”

“Finding the coins would make you
ton
nish. Then everything you said and did would be all right with people of influence.” She spoke matter-of-factly, as though this were obvious.

And maybe it should have been. These people of influence—of which his father was one, and of whom his family was constantly aware—were unimpressed by logical argument. By tales of infection, of suppuration, of dirty wards, of lives that should have been saved.

Accompany me to Strawfield
: the words painted a lovely picture such as he had not seen for years. A wide sky, absent the caustic smell of chloride of lime and the heavy odor of ill bodies, often beyond help. People who listened to him simply because they thought him worth listening to. Not because they
had
to, because his father was a duke. Not dismissing him, either, as a younger son with wild ideas that trespassed against the upper class's notions of suitability.

When influenza broke out among the dukedom's tenants, Hugo's own father, the Duke of Willingham, had called Hugo mad to quarantine ill tenants away from their healthy relatives. Everyone knew that influenza came from an imbalance of humors, said his father. But when the spread of illness was halted and the outbreak ended almost as soon as it began, the duke granted that perhaps Hugo had been right.

Not right enough to support his other medical ideas, though. Not right enough to grant that Hugo's chosen field was a worthwhile way to spend one's life.

“Think of all the people you could help with your hospital,” Georgette coaxed.

Hugo folded his arms. “One. You.”

She beamed. “You only fold your arms when you're about to change your mind.”

“I do not.” He unfolded his arms, but they snapped back into a cradle about his midsection. “How did you—why . . .”

“I learned such signals working in the family bookshop. When to push someone a bit harder. When a bit more coaxing would help me to make the sale.”

She had sorted him out, that was true enough—though he wasn't quite prepared to tell her he'd give in. Despite himself, his mouth curved up at one corner. “All that fluffy blond hair covers a diabolical mind.”

Her brows knit. “What is diabolical about both of us getting what we want?”

To this, he had no answer: only a question. In this agreement, would he be the devil, or poor Faust who sold his soul?

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Copyright © 2016 by Theresa St. Romain

 

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ISBN-13: 978-1-4201-3865-8
ISBN-10: 1-4201-3865-0

ISBN: 978-1-4201-3865-8