Wicked Wager

His body stirred at the thought and, despite his worry, he had to grin. Often as he’d dreamed of having Jenna Montague in his arms again, he’d never envisioned it happening quite like this.

Finally a Fairchild servant noticed them. “Someone from the house will assist us now,” Tony called to the groom. “Ride with all speed for the doctor.”

A moment later, a procession of servants began streaming out, among them Sancha, the Spanish maid who had accompanied Jenna all through the Peninsula.

“Madre de Dios, mi pobre señora!” she cried as she ran down the steps toward them. “What happened?”

“She fell from her horse,” Tony answered.

As the maid’s gaze lifted from her mistress to the man holding her, her eyes widened. “The Evil One!” she gasped.

So much for Sancha’s good opinion. But concern for Jenna outweighing his chagrin, he continued, “Get her into a warm bed as quickly as possible. A doctor was sent for.”

After carefully handing Jenna to a stout footman, he dismounted to follow. “Nay!” Sancha cried, stepping forward to block him and making the sign of the cross, as if to ward off the Evil Eye. “You may not enter!”

Before Tony could remonstrate, Lane Fairchild trotted down the stairs. He paused for a moment as the footman carrying Jenna passed him, his grim gaze scanning her pale face, then proceeded to halt before Tony.

“What outrage is this? If you have harmed my cousin, I shall call you out, even if you are a cripple!”

“Lady Fairchild fell while riding,” Tony said, ignoring the jibe about his condition and trying to hold his temper in check. “I assisted in carrying her home.”

Fairchild raised his eyebrows. “Jenna fell from her horse? Do you really expect me to believe that?”

Tony shrugged. “I don’t give a damn what you believe. Question the groom about it—indeed, I’d like to ask him myself how such a thing happened. But for now, Sancha, go to your mistress. The doctor should be here any moment.”

Fairchild looked as if he would comment further, but chose to refrain. “I do thank you for seeing her home,” he admitted grudgingly. “Now I must tend to my cousin.”

With that, Fairchild ran back up the stairs. As the front door shut behind them, the rest of the servants dispersed. For a few moments Tony stood alone, debating whether or not to continue up the stairs and demand entry. But given Fairchild’s plainly demonstrated animosity, it was unlikely he’d be able to inveigle his way in. Though it galled him to leave before finding out how she was, there seemed little point in remaining.

He’d return later after the physician had examined her, he decided. He’d done all he could for Jenna, save keep vigil until the doctor came. What happened now was in the hands of her maid, her physician—and Jenna herself.

“Fight like the good soldier you are,” he murmured. And then, shoulders aching, he mounted Pax and set off.

TWO WEEKS LATER, Tony sat in one of the new hells off Pall Mall, an untasted drink at his elbow as, hand after hand, he raked in the guineas of his opponent, a lad too drunk to count the cards in his unsteady grip.

He felt a bit ashamed, relieving this castaway stripling of so much blunt. But the grim news imparted by the family solicitor when Tony had finally consulted him, after being turned away three times from the Fairchild mansion after Jenna’s accident, made the necessity of finding an immediate source of income starkly clear.

The earnings from the Nelthorpe estates, financially crippled like so many farming communities after the war’s end, had diminished to a trickle that would barely pay to seed this year’s crops. Not attempting to hide his disapproval, the solicitor told him that his father had sold or gambled away the investments left by Tony’s grandfather, mortgaged nearly every property it was possible to mortgage, and was in arrears in paying back even the interest.

Like his father, the solicitor advised him to head off the disaster by marrying an heiress. At least this man had the grace to remain silent when Tony, angry and despairing, snapped back at him to ask which fair flower of virginity had a rich Papa, still in possession of his senses, who might agree to offer Tony her hand.

Perhaps something could be worked out, the man had said weakly. On that hopeful note, they’d parted.

He’d gone back to gaming to pay off the most pressing bills he’d found stuffed in his father’s desk. Thanks to a merciful Providence, thus far, he’d been winning.

But he’d gambled too long not to know that, skillfully and soberly as he was now playing, his luck wouldn’t last forever. The blunt he’d accumulated after two week’s play offered a small cushion against immediate ruin, but gaming could be no more than a temporary solution.

His only real chance to recoup their fortune would be, as everyone suggested, to marry one.

However, Tony’s few forays into polite Society had confirmed that his soiled reputation, no doubt reinforced by the activities of his sire, remained intact. Society matrons with marriageable daughters in tow took care to avoid him. His older sister, now Lady Siddons, had distanced herself from her Hunsdon kin immediately after her marriage and could not be looked to for any assistance.

His chances of finding a suitably wealthy aristocratic bride were thus virtually nonexistent. Accepting that fact, he’d started a list of wealthy men in the City who, rumor said, had pretensions of seeing their daughters rise in Society. He still had no idea how he was to wangle introductions to those fathers, much less charm one into gifting him with his daughter and her fortune.

The question of how he’d manage to coexist afterward with a woman who was little more than the prize in this most high-staked of card games, he avoided considering.

As Tony watched his opponent struggle to extract a card, the lad’s face went slack and he slumped forward onto the table. With a resigned sigh, Tony hopped up to catch him before he slid onto the floor, then plucked a coin from the stack before him to give the servant who relieved him of the lad, instructing him to transport the boy home.

Who had ever done as much for him? he asked himself, irritated by the unpleasant taste that still lingered in his mouth as the youth was carried off. He could easily have trebled the bets, come away with a stack of the greenling’s vowels as well as all his blunt. A true Captain Sharp would have done just that.

As he idly gathered up the boy’s coins, his mind wandered back to Jenna. Though he’d called nearly every day, finally coaxing his way into seeing Sancha, he’d never been admitted to Jenna’s presence.

She was recovering, Sancha assured him. She thanked him for his flowers and the book he’d brought, one he’d laughed through and thought she would enjoy.

If only these long nights of smoke and liquor and bad company could earn him a future with a woman like that, a woman he could respect and care about and look forward to sharing his life with, maybe he wouldn’t feel so…alone.

Tony my lad, you’re growing maudlin, he told himself. When, after all, had he ever not been alone?

“Tony Nelthorpe! By heaven, I see you made it out of hospital after all!”

Recognizing the man who’d hailed him, Tony’s melancholy dissolved in a surge of gladness.

“Ned Hastings!” he cried, rising to shake the hand being proffered. “You’re looking well yourself. Fully recovered from that episode in Belgium, I trust?”

“Yes, thanks to your timely intervention. And you?”

“Much better than when last you saw me.”

“Praise the Lord for that! But what are you doing here?” Hastings looked about them with disdain. “Thought if you wished to play, you’d take a chair at White’s.”

Shrugging, Tony offered him wine. “I decided to amuse myself in a setting with a more…varied clientele.”

“Everyone from old aristocracy to jumped-up Cits to Johnny Raws straight from the country.” Hastings’s grin faded as he took a glass. “Too many of our old Oxford mates now forever missing at White’s, eh?”

Leaving it to the jackals who never served.

“And the tulips who remained while the rest of us answered the call, one doesn’t wish to see,” Hastings concluded, giving voice to Tony’s thought.

“Indeed.”

After staring into the distance, Hastings shook himself, as if to break free of the ghostly fist of memory. “So, what are you doing, now that you’re up and about?” Hastings asked. “Understand the earl is up to his usual tricks. Can…can I do anything to assist?”

Tony felt his face flush. Having known him since Oxford, Hastings also knew he was perpetually purse-pinched. Discovering Tony in an establishment that possessed no pretensions to being aught but a gambling den, he could surely guess how things currently stood.

“You’ve already helped enough,” Tony replied. “Pax is a superior mount. Given my recent difficulties in navigating on my own two limbs, I should have been in bad case indeed had you not generously provided me with him.”

Hastings waved away Tony’s thanks. “’Twas little enough, considering that if you hadn’t ridden down the cuirassier who was about to gut me in Quatre Bras, I’d not be here drinking wine with you tonight.”

“If I hadn’t gotten him, someone else would have.”