Page 22 of Cocky August Rake
“Very well. A month. I’ll allow the doors to remain open until the end of August.”
So thirty-one days then. Hope flared in Rose’s chest, sharp enough to hurt.
Then his eyes came back to hers.
“Don’t mistake that for a change of mind,” he said. “I despise places like this, and I mean to see this one closed.”
Rose swallowed.
He did not understand.
Not yet.
There were things The Domus offered that no ledger could ever convey.
Lord Reginald looked beyond her, toward the people gathered below.
“I appreciate your loyalty to my brother’s establishment," he said, rather stiffly. “But I mean to be plain. I won’t change my mind.”
He then turned away from them.
The room began to stir as everyone returned to their business. Soft voices rose. Chairs scraped against the floor.
Then the man looked back at her.
“You have your thirty days.” His voice was low enough that no one else could hear. “But make no mistake, I am going to close it.”
“Perhaps.” She’d let him believe that. For now.
His gaze held hers for one long moment.
“Thirty days,” Lord Reginald Preston said.
Rose inclined her head.
One month to save The Domus—and show the man who meant to destroy it everything he had never understood about desire and pleasure.
Thirty days.
She would have to make every one of them count.
A LANDLOCKED CAPTAIN
Reginald did not exhale—not truly—until he had closed the office door behind him.
Today was supposed to have been simple.
Unpleasant, perhaps. But simple. Straightforward.
He had always known Malum’s club—now his club, God help him—was beloved by the men who patronized it. London’s gentlemen liked their comforts. Their secrets. Their… indulgences.
What he had not expected was for the people who worked here to look at him as though he had ordered the whole lot to walk the plank.
It was a brothel, for God’s sake.
And yet, those women he had just left had not looked ashamed or grateful or even relieved at his offer to help them find better work. They had looked… frightened.
Angry.
