Never Say Never to an Earl (Heart of Enquiry Book 5) Page 5

  Why can’t I bloody remember?

  He gripped the sill in frustration. The dream—or memory—was already slipping from him.

  With an oath, he pushed away from the window, prowling back and forth across the bedchamber. He couldn’t stay here much longer. A sane man would be driven mad here. Nothing to do. Doing nothing but…

  Hiding.

  The fact had been festering in him like a piece of shrapnel. Stephan had always said he was too reckless, and, by Jove, he saw that now. But as wild and wicked as he’d been, he’d never hurt someone weaker than he—and, worse yet, run from it like the lowest of scoundrels.

  He was no coward. He couldn’t continue like this. Even if his father could snuff out the scandal, something egregious had happened that night—and Sinjin needed to know his part in it for his own peace of mind. To satisfy his honor.

  We must act before he awakens.

  Surely, that was a clue. A place to begin his quest for the truth.

  Voices cut through his thoughts. He returned to the window, looking out. In the distance, he saw two attendants escorting a patient out of a gated villa, one that Mrs. Barlow had expressively told him was off-bounds. The resident was wearing a strait-waistcoat, a contraption that kept his arms strapped at his sides.

  In the moonlight, the man’s red hair was glistening wet. He was softly weeping.

  A vise clamped around Sinjin’s throat. The scars on his back tautened in instinctive empathy… at the same time that fear flooded him. He strode to the desk, lit the lamp with hands that shook. Fumbling for parchment and pen, he began to compose a letter.

  Chapter Five

  Five days after Sinjin sent the letter, his papa had still not responded.

  With each passing day, desperation mounted in Sinjin. A fear that he didn’t want to give into but which clung to him like fine dust to a traveler. Dark thoughts burrowed themselves under his skin, digging deep, the roots spreading. Papa’s glad to be rid of you. He loves Stephan and Theodore, not you. He’s going to leave you here to rot.

  He told himself the duke would come, but he couldn’t convince himself. His thoughts built on one another, a vortex of suspicion that made it impossible for him to relax, eat, or sleep. In the looking glass, a stranger with shadowed eyes and a bristly jaw stared back at him. He knew he needed to rest, but he couldn’t quiet his racing mind, the buzz of energy through his veins.

  Bloody hell, he could handle this—but he needed a drink. A fuck. Something.

  Perhaps the duke had been delayed because he was trying to locate the man with the deep voice whom Sinjin had wrote to him about. Sinjin tried to calm himself. Not even the locket helped. Frustrated, he flung the blasted thing across the room.

  Time slowed, bogged down by restless waiting.

  That night, Sinjin’s patience snapped. If His Grace wasn’t coming for him, then he would just bloody leave. At the gate, the two guards had the audacity to prevent his passage. He insisted that he was a guest, here of his own volition, but they wouldn’t listen. When they tried to take his bag, he resisted. When they tried to manhandle him, he used his fists. The hours spent sparring at his boxing club hadn’t been for naught. He took them down and made a run for it—only to be blocked by more guards.

  They dragged him, thrashing and shouting, back to the villa and locked him inside.

  He spent the night pacing like a caged animal. By dawn, the tide inside him had ebbed, but he could still feel its dark, churning energy. When the door opened a few hours later, he tensed, ready to fight his way to freedom.

  His sire entered. Tall, immaculately dressed in iron grey broadcloth, Jeremy George St. John Pelham, the sixth Duke of Acton, emanated an air of command that had grown more imposing with age. Regal silver veined his dark hair, and time had honed the sharpness of his features.

  “You look like hell,” His Grace said.

  Sinjin experienced a jumble of emotions. The anger and relief made sense but the longing? Pure stupidity. If he hadn’t won the duke’s approval in six-and-twenty years, he sure as hell wasn’t about to do it now when he was accused of assault and hiding in a madhouse.

  “Where the devil have you been?” he gritted out.

  “I’ve been endeavoring to clean up your mess.” His Grace ran a gloved finger along the table, his expression distasteful as he examined the clinging specks of dust. “I expected better of Mrs. Barlow.”

  “Damn Mrs. Barlow. And damn you. They wouldn’t let me leave last night—are you aware of that?” Sinjin injected his tone with scorn, hating the slight quiver beneath. “I’m not a prisoner here. I’m not a bloody lunatic. I never agreed to—”

  He cut himself off as Lady Regina, the Duchess of Acton, crossed the threshold. She was followed by her son Lord Theodore Pelham. Both were slender and fair-haired, with high-nosed countenances. Sinjin could not claim an inordinate amount of affection for his stepmama and half-brother; the feelings, he knew, were mutual.

  The duchess’ ice blue skirts swirled as she sat in the chair that the duke held out for her.

  “Hello, Revelstoke,” she said with a cool nod.

  “Your Grace,” he said shortly.

  Theodore, seven years Sinjin’s junior, sauntered to his mama’s side. His contrived air of ennui seemed to be the only thing he’d picked up thus far from his time at Oxford.

  “Aspice quod felix attracsit,” he drawled.

  Make that two things the prat had picked up: smug languor and a tendency to use Latin in a damned annoying way.

  “Spare me the schoolboy doggerel,” Sinjin snapped. “You’re the one who showed up uninvited. Why are you here?”

  “Perhaps I want to visit my fratis ventrus?”

  “You can’t. Stephan’s dead,” Sinjin said flatly.

  Theodore’s throat worked above his ostentatious cravat, grief shining for an instant through his foppish veneer. Sinjin knew a moment of grudging connection. Noble and caring, Stephan had been everyone’s favorite, the glue that held the family mosaic together. Without him, the Pelhams were naught but disparate pieces, their sharp edges slicing relentlessly into one another.

  “Enough, the two of you,” the duke commanded. “Now, Sinjin, what’s this about you trying to escape last night?”

  “I wasn’t trying to escape. I’m a guest here, remember?” Sinjin shot back. “I can leave whenever I want.”

  “That was not our agreement. You were to stay put until I sorted out your troubles.”

  “And have you?” Sinjin said evenly.

  The duke’s blue gaze—the one thing he and Sinjin had in common—held steely discipline. “These things take time. You’ve left me many fires to put out, and if you’re seen traipsing about, you’ll just add fuel to the flames—” He broke off in a fit of coughing.

  The violence of the fit startled Sinjin. His father had always seemed impervious to the weaknesses of the human condition. Uncertain what to do, he took a step toward the duke, but his stepmama beat him to it and waved him aside.

  She hovered next to her husband. “Are you all right, Acton?”

  “I’m fine.” His Grace blotted his mouth with a handkerchief.

  “Perhaps you ought to sit and have some—”

  “For God’s sake, Regina, don’t fuss,” the duke said curtly.

  Mouth pinched, Her Grace turned her pale gaze to Sinjin. She’d entered his life when he was six, a year after he’d lost his mama, and even then he’d known that she would never think of him as her own. For Stephan, she’d had the occasional smile, but for Sinjin, she’d reserved a reproving notch between her fair brows, which had since etched itself into a permanent line.

  Serves her right for being a cold, judgmental bitch.

  “Your papa has been working tirelessly to clean up your mess. He’s lost sleep over it,” she said in the customary tones of accusation that Sinjin despised. “The least you could do is hold up your end of the bargain. It is not so much to ask, is it? To spend a few weeks in the absence of dissip
ation?”

  “That might be impossible for Sinjin, mater.” Bending to the floor, Theodore straightened with a smirk on his face, the silver locket dangling from his finger. “In the time since he became Revelstoke, he’s elevated himself to the status of a deity. They call him the God of Revelry, don’t you know, and he has to fight off hordes of ladies and trollops alike.”

  The duke’s gaze latched onto the swinging pendant, his mouth tightening. “Damnation, Sinjin, why must you insist on continually displaying such coarseness and depravity?”

  Because it rattles your goddamned cage?

  Their Graces had inquired about the locket when they’d first seen it, hoping, no doubt, that some witless virgin had given it to him and wedding bells were in his future. Sinjin had taken great satisfaction in informing them of the truth: that the locket was, in fact, a reminder that freedom held far more appeal than the shackles of matrimony.

  Now he grabbed the trinket from his brother and slapped it onto the table where its presence could continue to offend. Petty... but satisfying.

  “Really, Sinjin.” His stepmama eyed the necklace as if it were a snake. “Flaunting rubbish given to you by some tart? Have you no respect for polite company?”

  Her Grace had been the force behind getting him shipped off to an institution that housed the wildest boys in Christendom, and she’d barred him from his own childhood home… from having any semblance of a family. Yet she expected him to respect polite company—to even know what that was?

  He was the God of Revelry because of her. Because of her, he’d had to fight for survival, to earn his place at the top of the rabid pack at Creavey. Because of her, he was more at home with rabble-rousers and whores than the strait-laced hypocrites of the ton.

  “None at all,” he said succinctly.

  “Theodore, escort your mama to the carriage.” The duke’s tone brooked no refusal. “I wish to speak to Sinjin alone.”

  Her Grace looked as if she might argue, but after exchanging a glance with her husband, she sighed and took Theodore’s arm.

  When the door closed behind them, Sinjin bit out, “Tell that bitch to stay out of my business.”

  “Watch your tongue—she is your stepmama.” Weariness settled upon the duke’s features, and he sat heavily in a chair. “Let us not argue about pointless matters. I came to update you on my progress. Suppressing the scandal you caused has not been a simple matter. The whore has agreed to maintain her silence, but Corbett is refusing to cooperate.”

  Andrew Corbett was the eponymous owner of the bawdy house where the trouble had taken place. Corbett’s offered first-rate pleasures at commensurate prices, and its proprietor was known to be an exacting man who was ruthless when crossed. Anyone permitted entrée into Corbett’s exclusive domain knew his rules—and that they would pay for any violations. That Corbett did not take kindly to one of his wenches being beaten half to death didn’t surprise Sinjin.

  Stomach churning, he said, “What does Corbett want?”

  “To bring the matter to the magistrates. But there is no case without the whore’s complaint. And I’ve convinced her to stay silent—at least for now.”

  In other words, the duke had bribed Nicoletta. The fact that Sinjin was party to yet another injustice made him feel ill. But was Nicoletta an innocent victim in all of this… or was there something more sinister going on?

  “Did you get my letter?” he said abruptly.

  The duke gave a terse nod.

  “And you read it? The part where I remembered that someone else was in the room—a man?” We must act before he awakens. That has to mean something,” he went on eagerly. “Why didn’t Nicoletta mention him?”

  “What are you suggesting happened?”

  “I don’t know exactly.” He raked a hand through his hair. “But I do know that something’s not right. Why can’t I remember anything? Believe me, if there’s anything I excel at, it’s holding my liquor. I’ve drank far more than I did that night and still remembered everything the next morning. I’ve been thinking perhaps that…” He expelled a breath and along with it the suspicion that had taken root in his mind. “It’s possible, isn’t it, that I was drugged?”

  “You really believe that you were drugged?” The duke’s eyebrows arched.

  Sinjin hated that particular expression of his father’s, which conveyed louder than words what His Grace thought of his second son. One would think that a lifetime of receiving such looks would make Sinjin inured to them, yet they never failed to draw his blood.

  Fighting self-doubt, he insisted, “It’s possible. I had three glasses of whiskey before Nicoletta and I went upstairs. Perhaps someone drugged one of my drinks.”

  “And even if it were true, this supposed drugging, to what purpose would this nefarious plot have been undertaken?”

  “I have enemies,” he said warily.

  “Who?”

  The list of potential suspects wasn’t exactly short. His raucous lifestyle and make-no-apologies attitude had garnered him his share of detractors. Men he’d had disagreements or altercations with… women he’d refused or who’d wanted more than the casual bedding that they’d agreed to at the outset. But who hated him enough to try to make his life a living hell?

  “Langley,” Sinjin said. “He’s had it in for me for some time.”

  “Viscount Langley?” The duke did not bother to hide his incredulity. “Why on earth would he want to see you tried for assault?”

  Rubbing the back of his neck, Sinjin muttered, “A while back, I was paying a visit to his lady when Langley came home unannounced.”

  “Damnation, Sinjin,” His Grace exploded, “you were bedding another man’s wife?”

  At the time, Sinjin hadn’t thought anything of it. Audrey Langley had been the one to instigate the affair, after all. The sultry brunette had approached Sinjin at a ball, coyly informing him that she and her husband had an “understanding.” As Langley kept a string of mistresses and had a legion of by-blows, Sinjin saw no reason to question her assertion. When Langley had returned home unexpectedly and caught them together, however, it had become blazingly clear that Audrey’s understanding and her lord’s were two different things.

  What was sauce for the gander was not for the goose, after all.

  Sinjin would have gladly sorted out the problem with pistols at dawn (it wouldn’t have been the first time). But Langley, the blustering fool, hadn’t called him out. About a week later, however, a wheel had come loose on Sinjin’s carriage, and Sinjin’s driving skill had saved him—just barely—from a dangerous crash. In examining the damage, he’d found that someone had tampered with the axle. Although he had no proof, his gut had told him who was responsible.

  “I misunderstood the nature of the arrangement between the Langleys,” he said finally.

  “What goes on between the viscount and his wife are none of your business! Devil take it, Sinjin, since you took on the title, I have done everything in my power to reason with you. To make you desist with your degenerate ways. Yet you persist with it all: the wenching, drinking, and reckless behavior. Worse yet is the fact that you refuse to take any responsibility for your actions.”

  The lecture was as familiar as the twin surges of resentment and shame. “I am trying to take responsibility. That’s what I’m telling you. There was a man there—”

  “When Stephan was Revelstoke,” His Grace cut in, “he knew his duty. What have you done? Have you even visited your estate?”

  He hadn’t—because the notion of taking his brother’s place made grief howl inside him. He’d never wanted the title; it belonged to Stephan, the good brother. The brother who deserved to be alive.

  “I’m not Stephan,” he said tautly.

  “No, you’re not.” A lifetime of disappointment dripped from the syllables, but His Grace had more insult to add. “We both know who you take after.”

  She who was never mentioned by name. Catherine Pelham, his mother and disgrace to the Acton name. Th
e woman who’d cuckolded her husband and abandoned her sons before meeting her end in the cold depths of the English Channel. As always, the thought of her caused a knife to twist in Sinjin’s gut.

  “I make my own choices,” he gritted out, “and I don’t give a damn if you don’t like them.”

  “Your reckless behavior is a choice? What about these delusions that someone else is to blame for your actions? You haven’t changed one whit. You’ve always lacked self-discipline and moral fiber. You’ve been given everything, yet you make nothing of yourself—”

  “What have I been given, precisely?” Inside him, the black devil pounded its chest in sudden rage. “The years of hell at Creavey Hall?”

  “That was your own fault. You set fire to the Headmaster’s office at Eton, by God. No other school would take you after that. Creavey had a fine reputation for training boys of a high-strung nature—”

  “By beating them into submission.” Sinjin’s hands balled. “You knew what was happening, and you kept me there. Wouldn’t even let me come home for the sodding holidays.”

  “The school recommended pupils remain in a disciplined environment.” Straightening his lapels, the duke said stiffly, “That is in the past. I will not stand here now and listen to you blame me and everyone else for your problems. I see now that the truth is your only hope of salvation.”

  “What the devil are you talking about?”

  “I’ve consulted with Mrs. Barlow. She believes that you would benefit from the treatments here.”

  Blood rushed in Sinjin’s ears. “Fuck what Mrs. Barlow believes. I’m not staying.”

  “If an affliction caused you to beat that whore, to behave as you’ve been behaving, treatment will help you.” The duke’s judgement fell like a gavel. “Once I’ve dealt with the Corbett problem, we’ll revisit the issue. Hopefully, by that time, you’ll have come to your senses.”

  “You’re the one who needs to come to his senses. There’s no way in hell I’m staying in this madhouse. And I told you: I didn’t hurt Nicoletta.”