Page 2 of The Fortune Hunter’s Gamble

“You’re to be married?”

“Well, yes, eventually.” She frowned at him. “Won’t you?”

Victor Rowden, at the raw age of eighteen, contemplated something that had been obligingly pointed out to him very often by his schoolmates at St. Bart’s in Newbury, far more than he liked from his uncle, and nearly daily, when they were in company, by Soph. He was a dunderhead.

She was seventeen years of age. She was her father’s heir, modest as the estate might be. She was intelligent and of sound mind, her mother’s family could boast of several-high ranking titles and royal favorites in their lineage, and she had overnight turned from a spitfire of a girl into a woman. Of course they intended her to be married.

Very well. Rowden called upon his wits to assert themselves. Thinking was not, at this point in his life, his most fruitful pursuit. He was quick on his feet but a dull student and learned his lessons best by the rough blows of experience or, barring that, the grind of repetition. But he could use his brainbox when pressed, and this seemed a matter worth the exertion.

“I will, I suppose,” he said, to answer the marriage question. “Giles will be pressed to produce an heir, but I s’pose my uncle will want a spare stashed somewhere.” Giles was his ineffectual cousin, and as much as his uncle hated Rowden, he would fear the end of the Denford title even more. Rowden cleared his throat, doing some math.

“I’m to university in the fall. You know that.” He forestalled her retort, seeing her open her mouth to assert her entire knowledge of Rowden’s life, from past crimes to future doings. “Three years at Oxford. Or four.” As he was not a fast learner, and Oxford reportedly had many distractions, he gave himself the liberty of an additional year to take his degree. Moreover, he would have the benefit of added diversions as he would not be compelled to look after Giles, since Giles would stay at home with a tutor. Rowden was hardy enough to bear the knocks of public schooling, but not Giles.

“Then the Grand Tour,” he reflected. For that, Rowden knew, he would be appointed Giles’s guardian, companion, and nursemaid, but he would take the opportunity to escape British shores however he must. “That’s two, three years more.” What was he up to by now? Seven? Eight? “So around ten years, I s’pose, m’uncle will want the leg shackle on me. Age of thirty?”

The sums didn’t add up, but Soph had the head for numbers, along with everything else. She would see his point, surely.

But his capacity for speech seemed to have broken down. It did, lately, in the face of magnificent bosoms. It was a sad character flaw he struggled with and hoped he might, with age and maturity and a great deal of constant exposure to bosoms, overcome.

Soph simply stared at him. He had the awful sense that, though she often read his thoughts—whether or not he wanted her to—and just as often was a leap ahead of him in their discussions, his mind had all of a sudden become as blank and dark as a cavern wall to her.

“Bully for you,” was all she said.

He nodded, thinking things settled, and left. He wouldn’t stand about and watch the portrait be finished for her future husband, not when he was that man. And she looked so unlike herself, with those hips and that waist and those bosoms and those lips wearing a faint smile he couldn’t tell was self-mocking or rueful. Perhaps both. He never had to read Soph’s expressions, transparent though they were; she simply blurted out what was on her mind at any moment.

Not this time.

And so he had supposed things settled between them. He had laid out his map for his future, hadn’t he? In eight years, ten, it would be time for him to marry. She need only wait until then.

But he didn’t say it: Wait for me. Because he never supposed that she wouldn’t.

He was home with the Baron’s household from London, the Season at an end with summer approaching and Parliament breaking up as the MPs returned to their various jurisdictions and the Lords parted for their hunting or their house parties or a retreat to the family seat, when Rowden stopped in at Foxleigh to inquire after Sophronia.

She hadn’t called with Aunt Edmons to welcome his uncle home, a courtesy visit to remind his lordship of the minor gentry who wanted his friendship and favors. She wasn’t at their fishing hole on the Kennet, and he hadn’t seen her in the market nor any of their usual haunts about Hungerford or its environs. He fancied he still knew, despite the depredations of the Season upon his faculties due to many late evenings and far too many bottles of wine, what her favorite haunts were.

Prue, answering the door, informed him that Miss Edmons was not within, but Aunt Edmons sat in the small parlor, looking plump and pleased with herself as if she, too, had been well fed through the Season. She sifted through a box of thick vellum with the happy sighs of a woman in love.

“Where’s Ro?” he stuck his head in the door to ask, using the name only he ever used for her, and would be offended if anyone else thought to borrow his innovation.

“Out with Mr. Hinton, I suppose. He wants to buy her a house nearby, so they are visiting likely sites.” Aunt dipped her pen in the inkwell and crossed an item off the list of paper on her desk.

“Who’s Hinton?” Rowden demanded.

Soph, in the rare letters she enclosed with a chatty missive from her aunt, had mentioned once that she had been going about a great deal with a visitor to town, and Rowden, in his ever rarer returns, had never thought to require a name, much less an accounting. But now a slow creeping horror overtook him, and he drew near the box as Aunt Edmons, a woman he had always trusted never to betray him, lifted a thin page of tissues off the stack of printed invitations as easily as if lifting the stiletto to plunge into his heart.

“Those aren’t…” But he could read well enough. The entertainments of the Season hadn’t addled his wits wholly. “That can’t be,” he said again.

But it was. “Would you like yours now?” said Aunt Edmons, that traitor—for she had planned this, she had manipulated Sophronia while Rowden was away, pried her from the safe routines of her life and their friendship into the clutches of a fiend named Hinton. Whom Ro, if the printed invitations were to be believed, was to marry. In celebration of which there would be a wedding ball at Standen Park. His house. Well, the Denford seat, but Rowden lived there.

They had conspired together to commit this evil. All of them.

The date was August. Two months hence.

Medusa turned men to stone with a glance. Daphne had become the laurel with a plea to the goddess, her feet frozen into roots in the earth. Narcissus had died slowly, pining for his own reflection. Acteon had died more swiftly, torn apart by his hounds, his punishment for looking upon a goddess.

Rowden was Julius Caesar, stabbed in the back by the ones he trusted, watching his plans for an empire slip away with each drip of his blood.

“Married.” A surprise he could talk; his lips felt strange. He was Socrates now, the hemlock taking him from the toes to the tips of his ears. “Sophronia.”