The Lady Risks All (4 page)

The man who stood before her was a conundrum.

She had no experience dealing with such as he, but following her instincts had got her into this—perhaps they’d get her out. Tipping her chin higher, she held to her hauteur. “I’m here to rescue my brother.”

One dark brow slowly arched. “Rescue?”

Undefined warning shaded the word. She ignored it. “Precisely. You cannot be so distanced from the polite world not to know that association with a man of your . . . propensities would be ruinous for my brother, should such an association become widely known.”

No reaction showed in the hard planes of his face. An instant ticked by, then he said, “My propensities?”

She refused to be intimidated. “Your business. Your activities.” She glanced at the front hall, then looked at him. “I’m unsure what form of entertainment you and your patrons are indulging in tonight, but if you would be so good as to let Mr. Clifford know that I am here and require his escort home, you will not be troubled by either him or me again.”

Far from showing any inclination to accede to her request, he regarded her steadily, his dark eyes—she couldn’t tell what color they were, but she didn’t think they were black—studying her eyes, her face. His expression was unreadable, utterly uninterpretable.

“Tell me, Miss Clifford,” he eventually said, his deep drawl almost a purr, “just what forms of entertainment do you imagine I provide for my . . . close acquaintances in the privacy of my home?”

Yes, she was in the wrong venturing into his house like this, but she’d be damned if she allowed a gambling king to patronize her. “I have no idea, and less interest, but the two that leapt to mind when I realized that Roderick was coming here were a private gambling party, or else an orgy. Regardless, I believe attending will not be in my brother’s best interests, just as I know that associating with you will definitely not be to his advantage.”

His heavy lids flickered, fleetingly screening his eyes. “Are you accusing me of corrupting your brother, Miss Clifford?”

She refused to quake at his quietly steely tone. “Are you?”

“No.” But she wasn’t the first lady to view him as a corrupter of innocents; perhaps that long-ago echo was why Roscoe felt compelled to prove her wrong. To open her eyes to her misjudgment of him, to make her acknowledge it, and apologize, now, tonight.

He wasn’t normally so sensitive; some part of his mind found it strange that she, a lady he hadn’t previously met, had so quickly got under his skin sufficiently to needle him in such a very private spot. A spot he was surprised to discover still tender. Regardless . . .

“I suggest, Miss Clifford, that you come with me.” Stepping back, he waved her to the corridor leading off the far end of the gallery.

She viewed the corridor with open suspicion. “Why? I can just as well wait here until you send Roderick to me.”

“Ah, but I have no intention of embarrassing your brother in such a way.” He started strolling toward the corridor.

Three strides, and she huffed out a breath and came after him. “Where are we going?”

“To a place from where you can watch our proceedings without any of my guests being aware of it.”

“No!” She halted.

When he didn’t stop walking, she hurried to catch up, then tipped up her chin and breathlessly amended, “That is, there’s no need for me to see—”

“Oh, but there is.” He kept his expression utterly impassive, but inside he was smiling.

Reaching a door set in the paneled wall, his hand on the knob, he halted and faced her. “You would have to possess a remarkably peculiar view of such things to imagine I would host an orgy in my library.”

She blinked. “I would?”

“Trust me—I hold no orgies in my library. So the worst you’re going to see is eight men gambling, although in fact it won’t even be that.” He met her gaze, open challenge in his eyes. “You followed your brother here intent on discovering what he was about—are you going to turn tail and run at this point, or are you brave enough to face the truth?”

He was enjoying himself, and despite his best efforts some glimmer must have shown. Her eyes slowly narrowed, then, lips firming, she nodded. “Very well. Show me.”

Opening the door, he waved her in.

Head high, she stepped over the threshold. He followed her into the first-floor gallery that circled the library proper, on the ground floor.

She clung to the shadows by the book-lined walls, staring down at the seven gentlemen seated about the central table. Ledgers and notebooks at the ready, they were waiting for him to open the meeting, meanwhile trading the usual social conversation gentlemen of their ilk used to pass the time.

The gallery was thickly carpeted, allowing Miss Clifford and him to move without attracting attention. Lifting a large armchair, he set it down by the gallery railing and waved her to it.

She hesitated, then crept forward and sat. He waited while she settled her cape and set her reticule in her lap, then, standing behind the chair, he leaned over her and whispered by her ear, “Unless you stand up, they won’t see you. Unless you make a loud noise, they won’t hear you. You, however, can see, and you’ll be able to hear every word said about that table.”

Ruthlessly suppressing the intense, unprecedented, and unnerving sensations that deep voice murmuring in her ear, his breath stirring the tiny tendrils of hair dangling about her nape, evoked, Miranda tuned her ears to the conversations about the table and discovered he was right. The gallery was perfectly positioned acoustically; she could easily make out all that was said, even though the men were speaking relatively quietly.

Roscoe was still hovering over her—close, too close; his warmth, his strength, his scent—everything about his nearness made her senses seize. Her lungs felt so tight she could barely breathe; with an effort, she managed a nod.

Satisfied, he started to draw back, paused, then returned, lowering his head to murmur, again maddeningly in her ear, “Incidentally, we call ourselves the Philanthropy Guild.”

She blinked.

Before she’d fully processed his words, he’d slipped back to the door and left.

R
oscoe joined his fellow Guild members around the library table, apologized for keeping them waiting, then opened the meeting and fought to keep his mind on the business he and the other seven had gathered to discuss.

Their organization was straightforward. They ran charitable projects, with each member having oversight of one project at a time and reporting to the group on progress at each meeting. Normally they met once a month, but lately they’d been evaluating and embarking on several new projects—Roderick’s, given he’d only recently joined the group, and two others replacing completed projects—so had stepped up the frequency of their meetings.

Each project was financed through a fund administered by a finicky, dour solicitor. Each of them contributed however much they wished, but the minimum contribution of five thousand pounds a year kept the membership exclusive.

Ro Gerrard, Viscount Gerrard, had been the first real member. Ro might have made an excellent gambler, but his heart had never been in it. However, the same incisive mind that would have proved an advantage juggling odds was even better at gauging risks and potential outcomes of more human-based investments. Venturing into the arena of philanthropic endeavors, Ro had stumbled across Roscoe, and, after getting over his surprise, had—as Ro was wont to do—asked questions, and offered suggestions, and persisted until Roscoe had agreed that joining forces was a sensible move.

From that small beginning, the Guild had grown.

“The young women at the academy seem to be responding well to Mrs. Canterbury’s methods of instruction.” Sebastian Trantor, relatively recently recruited after he’d married Ro’s sister-in-law, continued with his assessment of progress at a Guild-funded school in Lincoln that taught selected female orphans the necessary skills to become ladies’ secretaries.

Roderick followed with the latest information on the project he was assessing—a small bailiff-run school in Battersea. It was a straightforward proposal, one the other members felt would help Roderick cut his teeth. “I’m not yet entirely satisfied with some of the suppliers the school wishes to continue to use. I believe we should hold firm to our principle of not allowing firms owned by relatives of those running the establishment to be engaged—not unless they are the only supplier available.”

“Hear, hear,” Max Gillard said. “We instituted that rule early on, and it’s saved us—or rather our blunt—countless times.”

Roderick nodded. “I’ll tell Hendricks, the head bailiff.”

“If I were you,” Roscoe said, “I’d also have a quiet word in Father . . . is it O’Leary’s? . . . ear. He’s on the school board, and while he might not feel the prohibition is necessary”—with a cynical smile, Roscoe looked around the table—“telling him that our considerable experience will not allow the Guild to invest in any project that doesn’t adhere to such rules will almost certainly be sufficient to ensure he sways all the other board members. No need for you to waste time trying to argue them around when he can do it for you.”

“I second that,” Hugh Bentley put in. He met Roderick’s eyes. “It’s not simply a matter of getting them to do things our way—the trick is to leave them feeling that it was their wisdom behind it.”

Roderick grinned, nodded, and jotted a note in his journal.

The reporting continued around the table, with Roscoe briefly detailing the progress of his own current project—an endeavor to teach young boys from the dockside slums enough to allow them to become apprentices in the nearby shipyards; the Guild already worked with the shipyard owners to oversee the training and subsequent placement of the apprentices into paying jobs.

As Hugh—Lord Hugh Bentley, the Duke of Raythorne’s second and rather more brilliant son—took center stage, Roscoe sat back and wondered what his uninvited and disapproving guest in the gallery was making of the meeting.

Of the eight men about the table, seven—Ro, Sebastian, Marvin Grayle, Edward Bremworth, Hugh, Max, and Roscoe himself—were scions of noble houses. The only exception was Roderick. While nobility of birth wasn’t a criterion for membership in the Guild, the simple fact was that, other than in exceptional cases such as Roderick’s, most of the money available for charitable works lay in the hands of the aristocracy.

Considering their secret observer, Roscoe wondered if she was squirming yet. He hadn’t known Roderick hadn’t told his family about joining the Guild, but given his sister’s overbearing protectiveness—given Roderick was twenty-three and in sole charge of his considerable fortune—it was understandable that Roderick had wanted to do something entirely on his own. A declaration of independence, as it were.

Despite the fifteen years and the lifetime of experience that separated Roderick and him, Roscoe could nevertheless appreciate that.

His mind returning to the hoity Miss Clifford, he wondered if she would.

M
iranda sat through the meeting in absolute silence.

The men’s voices reached her clearly, their every word sinking her deeper into a quagmire of embarrassment heavily tinged with mortification.

But how could she have known?

Even before Roscoe had appeared in the library to take his chair at the head of the table, she’d picked up allusions to the social status of the other men. They knew each other well enough to refer to each other by name rather than title, but while trading jocular remarks several had called one of the others “lord” and in one case “viscount.”

Alerted, she’d looked more closely at their features, all of which confirmed the likelihood of their belonging to the aristocracy, including, once she saw him in better light, Roscoe himself. There could be very little doubt that features like his derived from noble progenitors, but in his case said ancestors had presumably engaged on the wrong side of the blanket.

Regardless, that face . . . held her attention effortlessly. While she heard the various reports and absorbed the implications, her gaze remained, not on whoever was speaking, but on Roscoe. At no point did he glance up at the gallery, leaving her free to indulge her now rampant curiosity and study—examine—him.

It wasn’t every day she got the chance to so closely scrutinize any male, let alone one of his caliber. One who embodied the devilish attraction she’d spent all her life being warned, in dire terms, against.

He wasn’t prettily handsome; he was too old for that, and there was a touch of harshness, of sharply edged hardness, in the sculpted planes of his face. His finely shaped lips often held a cynical twist, while his heavy lidded dark eyes—she still wasn’t sure what color they were—combined with his frequently impassive expression, hinted at world-weariness and distance.

If his face, with its suggestion of veiled strength and reclusive personality, intrigued, his body fascinated. She’d been impressed enough in the gallery, but being able to measure him against other men left her even more appreciative of his height, his long-limbed grace.

He moved in a manner that transfixed her senses. He leaned back in his chair, listening to one of the others speak, and she drank in the pose, one that spoke of a male in his prime who was utterly at ease in his large, powerful body.

Only when the meeting broke up and he rose and, with the others, left the library—still without glancing her way—did she blink free of the spell and finally turn her mind to other things.

The instant she did, the import of all she’d heard rushed into the forefront of her mind.

No matter how she viewed things, what she’d learned through the meeting made it abundantly clear that in suggesting that Roscoe was corrupting Roderick, she’d transgressed. Badly. She would have to apologize.

Sincerely.

Roscoe might be a noble bastard, might be London’s gambling king, but beneath his hard, aloof, and powerful exterior lay a thinking and caring man. A man who deserved her applause, not her censure.

He might not be a gentleman, but clearly he was accepted by others within the pale, and as long as Roderick’s association with him remained discreet, no matter from what angle she viewed the situation she couldn’t see any valid reason to interfere. Roderick would come to no direct harm through interacting with Roscoe in his role as chairman of the Philanthropy Guild. Indeed, Roderick most likely would learn a thing or two from London’s gambling king—a conclusion that was faintly discombobulating.