Let Love Find You (18 page)

“You don’t have that kind of blunt, not without selling off half of your breeding stock, which would cripple your new farm, and I wasn’t about to borrow from your uncle.”

“I’m not that pinched, Will. I’ve got assets other than my farm.”

“Assets that you never mentioned?”

Devin shrugged. “I had a small inheritance from my mum that I mostly used to start the new farm—”

“Yes, I know.”

“But there was a house, too, that I don’t want. I just haven’t got around to disposing of it yet.”

“Ah, your mum,” William said carefully. “You don’t still hate
her for dying on you, do you? A natural reaction for a youngun, but you should have outgrown—”

“I barely remember her.”

That was a lie, but Devin had never talked about his mother with anyone other than his uncle, and he wasn’t going to start now. Besides, he didn’t think Will would understand. The kind of pain-induced rage he felt when he thought about his mother—what she had done and what had been done to her—couldn’t be outgrown. It certainly hadn’t gone away, it seemed to be embedded in his soul.

But William was an understanding chap and didn’t press. Instead, he said, “Well, you won’t be selling anything on
my
account. Besides, this was my problem and only a temporary one. Once Blythe is well married, I’ll borrow from her husband and pay him back as soon as I find a rich wife for m’self.”

“Which you should have done to begin with, instead of trying to get her married off first.”

“It’s the bloody timing, Devin. I
was
looking before she turned eighteen and simply had no luck. Should’ve asked you for help with
that
, but I didn’t think it was going to be so hard to find a rich wife I wanted. Met a few ladies I would have been honored to wed, one I even liked a little too much, but they were just as poor as I am.”

“I
do
know someone who I think you’ll like,” Devin said. “Should have introduced you sooner, but you seemed so determined to get Blythe shackled first that I was afraid you’d let the opportunity slide by.”

“You’re probably right. But now that Blythe is eighteen, I can’t ask her to sit back and wait. You know it makes no difference how old we men are when we wed, but it’s a bloody big thing to a young woman. She just doesn’t know how pinched
we really are, and I don’t want her to know. I don’t want her accepting the first proposal she receives just to help me out, when she might not even like the chap. Would you do that to your sister if you had one?”

“You borrowed to get her decked out for the Season. The invites are coming in for her. Your plan was already in motion. Why did you make it worse by borrowing even more?”

“We needed a dowry for her. Can’t have her going into a marriage with nothing.”

“Many do exactly that these days. Dowries lost their importance at about the same time arranged marriages did. It’s what these Seasons are all about, a means to get young people together so they can make their own choices.”

“I can’t deny her a dowry, even if it isn’t de rigueur. She has to feel she brings
some
worth to the table.”

It was hard to argue with simple pride. “How much did you borrow?”

“Not much, just a few hundred pounds.”

Devin shook his head. “You’ll have to give it back. Nothing is worth dealing with people who could do something like this to you.”

William closed the one eye with a sigh. “I agree. Really didn’t see this coming.”

“So when did you get stabbed? Before or after your face was kicked in?”

“Stabbed?” The little color that had returned to William’s cheeks after drinking the wine drained away. “I don’t recall that, but it couldn’t have been while I was being pummeled. There’s no reason for them to try to kill me. They won’t be getting their money back that way.”

“Yet you were stabbed twice in the lower right side of your abdomen, and by the looks of it, from behind.”

“The lender’s bruiser never got behind me other than when he tossed me out into the street.”

“Could you have been hurting too much to even feel it?” Devin asked.

“Could prob’bly have got run over by a team of horses and wouldn’t have felt any worse than I already did. I’m not sure what the devil happened after I told the driver to get us the hell out of that neighborhood. I remember tumbling over face-first to the floor of the coach, and I must have been out cold because the next thing I knew I was lying on the cold ground somewhere. I remember getting up and walking dizzily through empty streets for a time, and then I must have blacked out again. I suppose a thief from that area could have seen me leaving the moneylender’s house and thought my pockets would be full. Or I just appeared to be an easy mark, as beat up as I already was.”

“But where was Donald’s driver when all of this was happening? How did you get back here? Did you walk? And where is the coach now?”

William shook his head. “Don’t know, but I don’t doubt things like that happen all the time in that seedy part of town.”

“
Were
you robbed?”

William sounded as if he were trying to laugh but quickly cut it off. “Of what? My pockets were already empty. I gave everything I had on me to the lender. So I get stabbed for some coin and the thug gets none? Is that a bright side I should be looking on? Yes, I suppose it is.”

Devin wouldn’t call it a bright side, but an attempted
robbery was the only thing that made any sense. A fancy, crested coach in an area riddled with thieves. Any one of them could have jumped on the back of the coach and waited until the driver turned onto a deserted street before getting rid of the driver, then entering the coach to find William unconscious on the floor. Anger at finding Will’s pockets empty could have caused the blackguard to stab Will and toss him out of the vehicle before driving off with it.

Donald’s driver pretty much confirmed that scenario when he returned to the house soon after dawn. He told Devin and Donald he’d been surprised from behind and kicked off his perch, cracking his head in the fall, so he’d spent most of the night passed out at the side of the road. But at least he’d found Donald’s coach on the way back. It had been abandoned in a better part of town, which was probably the only reason no one else had hied off with it.
That
, Devin thought, was the only bright side to the night.

T
HE DAY AFTER THE
Hammonds’ ball Amanda was still furious at Devin Baldwin and his loose tongue. That had been a short truce, if it could even be called that. She didn’t have to listen to just one lecture because of what he had said within earshot of her cousin at the end of the ball, she’d had to sit through four! He’d had no right to utter that warning about Robert Brigston’s dragging her into a scandal simply because she’d scoffed at his advice.

Rupert delivered his lecture on the way home that night. “I’ll allow that you might not have heard the gossip before you danced with Brigston, but for Cupid to warn you off, you must not have been paying attention.”

“He’s got a name, it’s not Cupid,” Amanda mumbled under her breath.

“Don’t change the subject, puss. You
did
see that Lord Robert was asked to leave the ball? How often does someone get kicked out of a ball, eh? I’ll warrant you’ve never seen it happen before.”

“I didn’t see it happen this time either,” she was quick to point out.

“I did,” Rupert said. “And it implies that what was flying through the gossip mill tonight has some basis in fact.”

“It implies nothing of the sort. Maybe a message arrived that summoned him home for some reason and our hosts merely delivered it to him. Or maybe he got a little too foxed before the end of the evening. I have seen men asked to leave for
that
reason before.”

“Don’t make excuses for this boy. He caused a major stir. It was all anyone was talking about. And if he has no intention of marrying yet, then he shouldn’t have been trying to charm every deb in sight tonight. He’s not for you and you know it. Even if none of it’s true, he’s now got a scandal attached to him. So you’ll be keeping your distance until that goes away—if it goes away.”

“That’s not fair!” Amanda looked to Rebecca for some help, but her old friend was giving her a stern look, too, so she obviously agreed with her husband. Very well, so it looked bad for Robert Brigston, and Amanda couldn’t blame them for their concern, but it still wasn’t the least bit fair!

“Perhaps not,” Rupert allowed, “but that’s what Uncle Preston will want to know about.”

“Rue, don’t you dare!” she gasped.

But his lips were set mulishly. She knew he would tell her father, that nothing she could say would deter Rupert, because it didn’t even matter if that gossip was true, it only mattered that Lord Robert had a scandal brewing about him. Which for the time being made him absolutely unsuitable for her.

Then her brother arrived today, just in time to prevent her
from leaving for the promenade in Hyde Park and making sure she missed it completely. And
he
was furious.

“Have you taken leave of your senses?” Raphael shouted the moment he walked into her bedroom. She was surprised he even knocked first and waited until she called out that he could enter. She was already dressed for the park and was about to put on her coat and gloves. His face was red with anger, and he only had to look at Alice once to get the maid to hurry out of the room.

“I didn’t do anything except dance once with the man!” Amanda shouted back.

“So you know exactly why I’m here? ’Course you do. Well, that will save time, won’t it? Don’t ever speak to Brigston again.”

“We could discuss this reasonably if you’d stop shouting. I thought you, at least, would keep an open mind, particularly when nothing has been proven yet.”

“The fool proposed to three young women last night just to seduce them. That’s something that doesn’t make the rounds without some substance.” Raphael paused when he noticed the blush climbing her cheeks. “Good God, you, too? I think I need to kill him.”

“You don’t need to do anything of the sort. They were also saying he doesn’t want to marry a’tall.”

But Raphael continued to grouse as if he hadn’t heard her. “
Were
you the third? Bloody hell, I’ll wager you were a fourth proposal, weren’t you, that no one has heard about yet? Admit it.”

Amanda started to laugh. “Will you listen to yourself? Which is it, he doesn’t want to marry or he wants to marry everyone in sight? Those are contradictory rumors, Rafe, which
just proves there’s not much substance there. You more’n anyone should know how gossip can get out of hand.”

“What I know is that scandal attaches by association, truth or no truth.”

She didn’t miss his point, it just infuriated her that he was making it. “Am I the only one to realize Brigston was just teasing? Good grief, how could those silly girls think he was serious? How could
you
think it was anything other than harmless flirtation? Have you never made some outlandish statement to a woman—prior to Ophelia, of course—that was just an exaggeration intended to be amusing? And it
did
make me laugh.”

“Beside the point.”

“There’s no scandal yet, Rafe, but what is scandalous is how he’s being slandered like this, all because he’s a prime catch and the rest of the young lords are green with jealousy. There wasn’t any real competition until he showed up. And they’re trying to make sure it remains that way by blackening his name before he even gets his foot in the door. Until everyone actually got a look at him last night, the gossip about him wasn’t the least bit nasty, just the opposite. That alone supports that jealousy turned it bad.”

“Why do you defend him? I swear, Mandy, if you think
he’s
the man you’ve been waiting three Seasons for, you will put that notion out of your head
right
now.”

There was no talking to him when he took this brotherly protective stance, so she tried to assure him in another way. “I don’t think that. In fact, Larissa and I finally figured out what my difficulty has been.”

“Pray tell?”

“Love at first sight. Don’t laugh, but that’s what I was
expecting to happen. And when it didn’t happen with all of the young men I’d met so far, I just assumed none of them would do.”

“You aren’t joking, are you?”

“No, I wish I was. Look at how much time I’ve wasted just because I was under such a wrong assumption. For instance, Lord Peter last year, he was adorable, but—”

“Mandy, a word of advice. Don’t
ever
tell a man he’s adorable.”

She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t. I wouldn’t. But my point was, he was very pleasing to look at, yet I ignored him because I didn’t fall head over heels for him immediately. But if I had pretended interest long enough to get to know him a little better, then I might not have found him to be so boring after all and could have slowly fallen in love as I should. But of course it’s too late now, he married someone else that very Season.”

Raphael rolled his eyes now. “Don’t take this new notion of yours too much in the reverse. Don’t try to pretend something is there when it really ain’t.”