The Game of Love (The Love Trilogy, #2) Read online

  Then he added, under cover of the general merriment, “She’s five-and-twenty, my friend, but then, I wed from the cradle, you know,” before he adroitly changed the subject.

  All the four discussed in the next half-hour was the state of France these days, the other gamesters in the city of Paris now, their known weaknesses and foibles, and the permutations and combinations needed to win at a new version of pharaoh the baron had been particularly unlucky at learning. When the mantel clock in the salon chimed a second time, the baron looked up, exclaimed his horror at the hour, and claiming his age and infirmity with a twinkling smile, took his leave of them all.

  Roxanne Cobb, left alone with the two gentlemen, rallied with them for a few moments about her own advanced age and poor condition, accepted their gallant denials and compliments, and then, sighing because she’d rather have been left with the one gentleman, and knowing no way to dismiss the other, pretended to realize the impropriety of staying on alone belowstairs with both. Then she took herself off to bed with many a backward glance, both to let them know this, and, as she had made a great point of staying on after the baron had left, also to reassure them as to the fact that she was actually repairing to her bed, alone, and was sure to remain in that virtuous state all night—unless, her wistful smile clearly said as she departed, someone was willing to try to change her mind.

  “Another conquest, Julian?” Arden asked after the door had closed on the hem of her skirt. “A lucky thing I wasn’t keeping count. I doubt I could calculate that high.”

  “If females were money you could,” his friend said, stretching luxuriously.

  “If females were funds, my dear Julian,” Arden corrected him, “you’d be a nabob.”

  “You wouldn’t exactly be a pauper, my lion,” the blond gentleman replied, rising and roaming the room, and, after finding the last of a bottle of wine and downing it thirstily, jesting, “and all those questions about the baron’s black-browed scowling daughter. Can you have formed a tendre there, I wonder?”

  “Have you?” Arden asked casually, looking down at the long legs he stretched out at last.

  His friend paused. This was the way they generally proceeded before one began to stalk a female, to be sure the other wasn’t vying for the same lady’s favors, as had happened once before in Spain. Then they had, unbeknownst to each other, both succeeded with her, but after they’d discovered that, after the laughter and the jests, they’d always been sure to clear the way for each other. For though they were good friends, perhaps precisely because they were such good friends, the idea of such sharing or comparing, either on their part or the lady’s, was distasteful to them both. As it was only a matter of the flesh, it couldn’t be as important as their friendship, which was a much more complex matter of the mind, and though they neither of them were sentimentalists, of the heart.

  They’d been traveling together for less than two years, and had met only a few months before that. But as different as they were from each other in appearance, temperament, and history, and as much as they’d never expected to remain together beyond their passage out of England, it was just as a perceptive friend to both had noted when he suggested they try to take on the world as a team: they suited each other very well.

  The viscount had just done with his seven-and-twentieth birthday when they’d set out from home, and had just lost the girl he’d lately come to believe to be the love of his life, and that only days after he’d lost the lady he’d always believed to have been the dream of his life. In his shock, for he’d never been refused by any female creature before, and in his disillusion, for he’d begun to see that he’d never really loved either of them, but only the illusion of them, and in his exile, for he was a convivial creature, he was glad of company, any company. Even that of an admitted criminal.

  And Arden Lyons, having just observed what he’d said to have been his thirty-first birthday—and there was little reason to doubt that, even though he could impersonate a man of any age—and having to leave England because of Bow Street’s attention to his many illegal activities, had been glad of company as well.

  They’d understood each other very well from the start. Neither had wanted to leave his homeland; both had to—one for the sake of his soul, the other to save his skin.

  Julian Dylan, fifth Viscount Hazelton, had been the adored and cosseted son of a fond mama and papa, and the world had continued to pet and praise him from the moment he poked his perfect nose from out of the nursery. Although his family fortunes had come to ruin, luck and the efforts of a good friend had retrieved much of it for him. But none of it would have been possible without his own hard work. He’d labored long hours at menial tasks despite the scorn of more fortunate fellows who’d once been his noble peers, not even sticking at driving a public coach. Nor had he hesitated to take on any sort of labor until he’d funds to invest to turn his luck again. Because, as those few who’d come to know him well knew and appreciated, the man was as noble and attractive as his incredible face.

  Arden Lyons had a hundred childhoods, and a thousand sires to account for it, and never tired of fondly detailing all of them whenever he was called upon to justify himself. Even his friend Julian couldn’t tell which was true, although he privately believed all were false. But some of the most fantastic things he claimed were undeniably true because Julian had seen them with his own wondering eyes. That Arden had once ruled a significant portion of the London underworld was so; that he could read and ride like a gentleman, and brawl and brangle like a ruffian was, as well. And that he’d received an education as comprehensive at the world’s hands as he had in some superior sort of school was self-evident. But it was also true that the viscount had seldom met anyone as kind, loyal, and completely honest to those few souls on earth he trusted enough to call “friend.”

  They made an oddly well-matched pair. If Julian Dylan had undertaken his exile to complete the process of his growing up, and Arden Lyons had left in order to preserve his life and ensure his growing older, they’d each found an able helpmeet in the other. And more. Of course they joked at times, when on opposite sides of a gaming table, that they were David and Goliath. But in fact, as time had passed, they’d also become David and Jonathan.

  And, in the process, wealthy almost to the length of their wildest dreams.

  In their time abroad they’d done things that had earned them a great deal of money, as well as gratitude. For they undertook tasks others would not—whether through fear or lack of enterprise, or lack of knowledge or daring. And though they were determined to stay within legal limits, Mr. Lyons having given up his life of crime and the Viscount Hazelton unwilling to embark on one, these were often things they didn’t care to mention. They were tasks performed just this side of the law, and that side of sanity.

  If certain French jewels or papers or persons escaped from Russian hands one winter, and other Russian treasures, animate or inanimate, later somehow turned up in France the following spring, and emigrants animal, vegetable, or mineral somehow managed to cross borders that changed as rapidly as their prices did in the unstable world of international politics all through that year of Napoleon’s escape from Elba, the odd duet might well have been behind it. Or so it was rumored.

  No one could be sure. Sometimes it was a gigantic old man and a comely youth responsible for some bizarre and successful scheme. Sometimes it was later discovered to have been a strapping young peasant and his smaller father behind some profitable treason or madness, at times it was an elephantine dandy and his mincing friend that were spoken of. And once, a time that reduced the viscount and Mr. Lyons to laughter so long it almost turned to tears whenever they were asked about it, when there’d been a shipment of arms meant for Napoleon’s army gone astray, it had afterward been hinted that those responsible might have been a great gawk of a German boy and his beautiful fair-haired blushing bride. Who had, on closer inspection, poor child, tended to develop whiskers, fine golden ones to be sure, but whiskers nonethel
ess, as evening fell, before darkness and a convenient carriage had hidden them from sight forever.

  Mr. Lyons and the viscount always vigorously denied the tales, whenever, that was, anyone dared to broach them to them. But they were nonetheless famous in certain quarters, and wealthy in all sectors, and never far from events both interesting and daring.

  Now Arden looked down to his boots after his exaggeratedly innocent question, and his friend raised an eyebrow before he replied, just as innocently, “Me? And the Widow Devlin? Lud, Arden, did you see that look she shot us? I’ve eyed vermin in my bed with better grace. She’d eat me alive. You’re the Shakespeare fancier; I’ll leave the shrew to you. Are you so jaded that you’ve tired of willing wenches?”

  “Oh,” Arden said, grinning then, “there’s many a slip twixt the yen and the sheets, laddie. Any thoughts about that little pretty she’s guarding, Julian?”

  The viscount paused in thought. It was a deep game the Colossus was playing this time, and it tickled him. He’d no thought of indulging in his favorite sport with either female. For they both were too well-guarded, one by her parents and propriety, the other by her attitude. No, at this time in his life, as unresolved as he was about so many things, he preferred easier courtships, and since he was usually the one being courted, he preferred saying yes and yielding, to trying to persuade someone else to his desire.

  “No, no,” he replied, acknowledging this. “Handsome as they are, they’re not my usual style, since they’re too much effort, both of them. I’ve given up the chase, for now. I’ll leave the storming of citadels to you. My desire is usually for whoever has already said yes to me. But both? My friend Lion, I stand in awe of your appetite, to say nothing of your pride.”

  Arden winced at this familiar pun.

  “Which goeth,” he murmured softly, “before a fall, as I recollect.”

  “Oh, but before you tumble,” the fair-haired young man said negligently, although his handsome face grew grave, “I’d remind you that the papa of one is an English nobleman, and the parents of the other, however lowly, are rich as they can stare, and both here as well—standing behind, beside, and in back of her.”

  “That would make three parents. She’s a wonder of nature, but not that marvelous,” his friend rumbled, “and the parents will endorse any suit brought by a gentleman and a Midas, which I shall be for them. As for the other omnipresent papa, it makes no matter we’ve broken bread together if we break open a pack of cards with him. The baron is an English nobleman, but an ardent gamester too, quite a different story. He’s as sick with it as a man might be with galloping consumption; it consumes him entirely. Make him an enticing wager and he’ll give up his daughter, his honor, and his life all together, and then propose dicing for his shroud. In fact, I believe he likes the losing as well as the winning. There’s no problem that I can see in either case. Unless, that is,” he asked softly, too softly, “you resent my thinking of attaching an English nobleman’s daughter, my lord?”

  “Thank you,” Julian said too sweetly, “for your confidence in me. If I haven’t minded your attaching a marquess’ daughter, a duke’s wife, and a countess and her daughter in the past,” he went on with a trace of rising temper, “it makes perfect sense that I’d suddenly stick at your casting your eye on a mere baron’s get, doesn’t it?”

  “Then,” Arden exclaimed with a show of great gladness, “it’s a moral point our lad’s come up with it, isn’t it? Thank the Lord,” he sighed, “all those Sunday lessons didn’t go in vain, Mother.”

  But his friend didn’t smile.

  “We’ve befriended the baron, gamester or no, and his dark-eyed widowed daughter is as impoverished as she is sour. And the pretty chit is an angel, but she’s an infant, Lion, up for trade, not loan—a ring for a night in heaven or nothing. But you know this. This isn’t like you.”

  “Nor you,” Arden said quietly.

  “It’s only that it isn’t in our usual style”—Julian spoke roughly, as though impelled—“seduction of the innocent or the oppressed.”

  His friend sat upright and stared at him. In the time since they’d met, in all the hours they’d passed together, the viscount had never seen him so genuinely amazed. Then the dumbfounded look passed and genuine amusement set in, as the gentleman again earned the nickname his familiars used for him. For he looked very like a lion indeed as his great tawny-maned head went back and his white teeth gleamed in his tan face and then he roared with full-bodied laughter.

  “I’d forgot. I forgive you,” he managed at last. “After all, you’ve only lately grown a conscience, and like all new things, I imagine it occasionally pinches.”

  “And you’ve none to trouble you? This isn’t like you,” Julian insisted.

  “I feel like the ninety-year-old parson accused of fathering the milkmaid’s brat: I don’t know whether to be insulted or flattered,” Arden said gently then, sobering at seeing the viscount’s rigid back and unsmiling face. “But for the sake of our friendship, I think I’m flattered—at least that you think it possible I might succeed. For all my charms, Julian, I’m not precisely a young maiden’s dream, or a young widow’s neither.”

  “You have been in the past,” Julian said calmly.

  “No, never a proper young maiden’s,” Arden answered seriously at last, “nor a decent widow’s, nor any decent female’s, my friend. Just so.” He nodded as he saw his friend’s concentration give way to dawning understanding. “We don’t meet up with many, do we? And the fact that you’ve forgotten that makes my point exactly, for it may be we’ve both been at our game too long. But I remember them from childhood fairy stories, at least, and do recognize the breed. So respect your elder’s fancies and fantasies and don’t jump to rash conclusions, my boy,” he said as he rose and stretched until his hands grazed the high ceiling, “for amazing as it sounds, I’m barreling into mid-life, and it might be that respectability would be an amusing new game.”

  “But before you order up either a stack of fuzzed cards or a sack of rice for me,” he warned, “recall that I’m not at all sure of what I want, at least not just yet, or what there is to want just now, for that matter, or even if this yearning for domesticity all isn’t some distempered start brought about by boredom. Napoleon’s snug on another island now. The world’s settling down from his interesting deeds of great infamy to its usual petty squabbles. So it might just simply be time for us to sail southern seas and get a look at those little yellow birds you used to go on about,” he added, clapping his friend on the shoulder.

  “Lord,” Arden said around a huge yawn, “I must be aging rapidly, at that. I find I quite welcome my bed tonight, even though it’s to be as empty as poor Mrs. Cobb’s, alas,” he added, tilting a knowing smile to his friend.

  “And her cot will stay as narrow and pure as a nun’s if it really is so,” Julian replied pointedly. “At least she stands, or lies, in no danger from me. She’s a pretty, merry eyeful, and I wouldn’t mind at all, if that’s what’s on your lecherous mind, Arden, but I don’t know enough, that’s the point. And I’d like to know just how fatherly the baron is toward her, you see. But I thought you’d be off to Paris yourself now, and not your own bed. It’s only an hour’s ride, and Madame Marie-Anne probably has kept a lamp in her window burning for you.”

  “No, I don’t think she’s taken to hanging out a red lantern, not just yet,” Arden mused, thinking of his sometime mistress, and remembering that practical but promiscuous lady, he added thoughtfully, “She may well be one of the reasons for my turn of mind too, for she’s very good at what she does, but yet I find that though she’s mistress of a hundred ways to please a man, I have interest in only five or six of them anymore…well, perhaps nine or ten, actually…but none tonight.” He sighed over his friend’s laughter. “I fear I grow old.”

  “At any rate,” he said in heartier accents, “we’ve an early morning, I recall, playing tour guides for the baron and the fillies. Speaking of which, shouldn’t you be
off to your latest mademoiselle now—the curly-headed one in the Palais Royal, if you want to be back by dawn?”

  “Oh,” Julian said negligently, swallowing the last of some port he’d found and looking regretfully at the empty glass and bottle, “she isn’t mine any more than she’s yours or anyone else’s who is in funds. And she’ll keep. I’m to bed, and alone too. The novelty might kill me, but the ride to Paris and back would do it faster tonight, I think. You’re not the only one aging, you know.”

  Arden stopped at the door to the salon and turned round to stare, “Ah, yes,” he agreed gravely, “nine-and-twenty, best order up some milk and sops for breakfast, the teeth are the first to go. But do you know,” he said, with his head to one side, studying his friend carefully, “I believe you’re going to be one of those disgusting creatures who take on more looks as they grow older. You’ll pare down and look ethereal into your dotage, so that all your granddaughters’ friends will fight to visit and write bad poetry to you. There’s no justice in this life,” he grumbled, “and little hope of earthly pleasures in the next. Where is the fairness in it that you should resemble something that ought to be standing naked in a garden with a lute strung over one stone shoulder and a pigeon perched on the other, while I look like the uncut block of marble they carved you from?”