Minerva and Diana were right! My father is a self-centered, manipulative, lying, duplicitous, gambling, crooked scoundrel to his core! I hate him now! Hate him! Hate him with the fire of a thousand suns! But I hate myself more for wasting so many years pathetically hoping that my dear sisters were wrong. Why am I always so pathetically gullible …
—from the diary of Miss Venus Merriwell, aged 17
Gal caught her by the elbow and whisked her outside in case the blabbermouth Nelly told her he had been wearing a groove in the floorboards all morning while he awaited her return. He didn’t have a speech rehearsed so much as a series of points that, frankly, petrified him, but he still felt compelled to say. He was also as nervous as hell and didn’t want to stumble through them with an audience.
Because Venus was already blushing and the tips of his ears were burning, he decided it was safer all around if they just kept walking, so he offered her his arm and steeled himself for the few initial moments of awkwardness as she shyly took it.
Lord, but she looked lovely again today. Lovelier than he had ever seen her despite wearing the exact same sensible coat as she had worn when she had arrived at his inn yesterday, complete with the same silly little reticule. So gorgeous he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Gal blamed the kiss that had thoroughly bewitched him. He hadn’t been able to think straight since it happened.
Conscious he was staring like a starving dog at a butcher’s window, he tugged her toward the seafront. “How did your meeting go?”
“Good…”
“You don’t sound too convinced.”
She forced a smile that did not quite meet her eyes. “It was good. Mrs. Leyton-Brown left the orphanage seven thousand pounds in her will.”
Gal whistled, impressed. He’d had an inkling it was a tidy sum from Mallory’s outrage at it but hadn’t managed to dig into any specifics. “That is a lot of money. You could do some substantial good with that. Starting with that leaky roof—but I sense a but? Was there a restrictive caveat of some kind? Or has she put the money in a trust so it arrives in an annoying trickle over eternity making it as good as useless?”
“Neither. There are no caveats, thank goodness, and the full amount should be winging its way to our bank in London as we speak.”
“But?”
She shrugged, troubled, but not—he was convinced—by him or by their spectacular kiss. At least no more than he was. “But, while the money is marvelous and seven times what we were expecting, we were hoping to expand. The orphanage urgently needs bigger premises and we had been led to believe, by Mrs. Leyton-Brown herself, that she would be leaving us a building so that we could expand immediately.”
The orphanage plans on moving?
Clearly this was Gal’s lucky day in more ways than one. First this fascinating and beautiful woman was still on his arm rather than recoiling in horror at her unfortunate nocturnal “mistake,” and now he wouldn’t need to tackle the awkward issue of his club and her orphanage coexisting as neighbors. Not in the long term anyway, so that made everything easier.
“You can buy a lot of rooms for seven thousand pounds, Venus. Probably quadruple the number you currently have and in a much better state, too, so what’s the problem? In fact, with that much ready money at your disposal, you could get a seriously good deal on a decent building with a solid roof and maybe even a garden for those little rascals to play in.” Once she did, he could assist in replenishing the orphanage’s coffers by offering to buy the old building from them when they had found a place to move to. The archetypal win for everyone from whichever way he looked at it. For him, her, and all the orphans she adored so much. “Trust me, the lady did you a favor. Money to buy your own building is so much better than having some rickety old place in the back of beyond donated to you. You’ll be in control. You get to choose exactly what you want, where you want it, and exactly what it needs to be like for those children to thrive.”
“Maybe.” She didn’t look convinced—more daunted by the task at hand.
Thinking on his feet, Gal decided to sell her the dream before he offered to purchase. “My grandpa always told me that a good business went hand in hand with a good location, and while your orphanage isn’t a business per se, those same principles apply. Covent Garden is the perfect place for a theater or a tavern…” Soften the ground first. “… because it’s got that sort of reputation. Same as here.” Gal swept his free arm toward the town in the distance. “Exactly like Brighton, Covent Garden is where people go to have a good time. That’s just dandy for them, because they can find all the fun they crave in one handy place, but it isn’t really the place to raise children. It’s too close to all the debauchery to raise the ones, like Billy, who have been damaged by it. Wouldn’t it be better to raise boys like him in fresh air and space? Away from all the crime and the poverty that makes crime appealing?”
“Well, of course it would, but…”
“You need to stop thinking so small, Venus! You’ve got seven thousand to spend!” He took her hand and spun her to face him, excited for her at all the opportunities the sum presented. “Take it from someone who has been watching the London property market closely for the last year: Anything within the bounds of the capital comes at a premium. But if you venture a little farther out, twenty minutes west of Mayfair by carriage to one of the pretty outlying towns or villages, you get so much more for your money.”
Gal could tell she was picturing such a place by the wistful look in her lovely eyes. But so was he. Conjuring a place that would have been a sanctuary for him when he had been a lost boy in dire need of one. “There, I reckon you could easily get yourself a big ol’ country house with grounds and still have change left over. One with outbuildings and land to spread out away from all the smoke and clutter of the city. Room to expand enough to help over a hundred orphans, and then some, without breaking a sweat. Room to build a proper school, too, and plant a cottage garden. Places to teach those children all manner of trades that give them options in their futures—options that don’t involve picking pockets or living hand to mouth, far away from the streets that would gobble them up.”
The way the sea breeze played with her hair as she smiled made his heart yearn. “You certainly know how to weave a pretty dream, Galahad. But I fear, as your grandpa knew only too well, that our location, although not ideal for raising children in, is good for reminding the rich to be philanthropic. They will send that philanthropy elsewhere if they cannot see us, so as much as a sprawling place in the country works in the short term and in your pretty dream, dreams alone cannot sustain us indefinitely.”
“What you call a dream, Venus, I call forward planning. You’ve always got to look ahead and adapt to the circumstances.”
“Is that what you do?”
“Always.” Plans kept you going when the world beat you down. Forced you to get up in the morning. To keep fighting. Keep moving. Keep hoping. “I’m a voracious planner. What can I say? I keep one eye on the present while the other scans the horizon for something better. You need to do the same. A better home for all those orphans is a dream that you now have the means to make a reality—and you are too smart not to think of a way to make it financially sustainable.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to offer to bite the bullet and buy the place—now if need be despite that being a huge gamble—but the wind caught her bonnet and pushed it backward, so he reached out to right it but found himself caressing her cheek instead. “Because dreams do come true, Venus—if you want them badly enough. I’m living proof of that.” In that moment he realized, no matter how reckless and terrifying it was, he wanted her to be part of his dream, too. No matter how complicated it made things or how vulnerable it left him. Unsettled, he bent his head to kiss her again and smiled against her lips as she kissed him back without hesitation.
Yet exactly like last night, she was the first to end it. She offered him another shy smile as she took his arm again. “All right then, Mr. Property Genius, in your informed opinion and assuming I do figure out a way to make it pay for itself, exactly how much would that promised land of milk and honey cost?”
“You could easily get a place half the size of Giles’s or Hugh’s stately piles with a few acres for around four thousand in today’s market.”
“Four thousand!” Instantly she dismissed that. “Four thousand is over half of what Mrs. Leyton-Brown left us. We can’t spend all that in one go. It would be irresponsible without the guaranteed means to replenish it—which we certainly do not have at present. Especially with Mrs. Leyton-Brown and her generous annual stipend now gone. We might have a lot of pennies, but they are finite so we have to count them carefully.”
“But…” He nudged her with his elbow. “That would be a seriously huge house and a smaller one would be cheaper, but I’m betting you are forgetting to factor the property you already own into your calculations.” He sucked in a calming breath as despite the enormous risk involved, this felt like both the right time and the right thing to do. “In the current market, and even with its leaking roof and shabby exterior, it’s worth at least two and a half thousand. Because Long Acre is such a prime spot, the right idiot might even give you three if he was prepared to pay an arm and a leg, in which case you’d only be eating into a thousand of Mrs. Leyton-Brown’s money if you bought huge.”
Galahad would have to use everything he had left in the bank if he bought and renovated that building, too, and he would be left high and dry if his new club was slow to take off. But he had more than a sneaking feeling already that she was worth it. They were worth it. They were at least worth a try.
“Sell the orphanage?” As he could practically hear the cogs in her mind turning, he realized that was something she had never considered.
“You have to speculate to accumulate, Venus.” Just as he was doing. Speculating wildly. Recklessly. But he didn’t care because his hardened heart was light again, beating again, and that felt too good to ignore.
“Is that another one of your grandpa’s wise old sayings?”
“Probably.” Definitely. Grandpa had always been a firm believer in risk. In trusting your gut. He often reminded Gal that you couldn’t fly unless you jumped first. “But he’s right. He was always right.” Even though this wasn’t so much a jump as a leap into the unknown. A huge, foolhardy gamble—with his money, his future, and his heart at stake.
But happy to leap and take that crazy bet, he kissed her again. “Dreams, like plans, should always adapt with the circumstances, especially if the circumstances allow them to get bigger and better, and some risks are worth taking.” He said that last bit more for himself than for her because he was feeling giddy and off kilter again. The ground beneath his feet was shifting as wildly as all his long-laid and meticulous plans.
“I don’t suppose you know any idiots who want to buy a shabby building with a condemned roof for an arm and a leg in Covent Garden?” She was being flippant, likely to cover the pretty blush his latest kiss had caused, but without realizing it she had given him an opening into the necessary part of the conversation that he had been dreading.
“I do, as it happens.” To celebrate that fact, he tugged her into his arms and kissed her again, feeling giddy at the huge significance of what this all meant. “Me.”
Her giggle told him she didn’t believe him. “Why on earth would you want to buy a shabby old orphanage with a leaking roof, Galahad?”
“Where you see a shabby old orphanage, I see the perfect venue for my new club.”
“I thought you had found premises? Has that all fallen through?” Her sympathetic frown told him she genuinely cared about his future, too, and that filled him with joy.
“So that’s the darndest thing, Venus—I have and I’ve got the deeds to ’em packed in my satchel back at the inn. And they are right next door to you!”
“What?” He had expected surprise, perhaps even some irritation, but not the icy chill that came alongside it. “You have purchased the building next door!”
Gal forced a sunny smile and squeezed her suddenly rigid hands. “All three of them, actually, so the orphanage would make the set complete.” He realized straightaway he had said the wrong thing because she yanked her fingers away as if they’d been burned.
“You own them all? Mallory sold them to you? The deeds to all three buildings are already yours?” She practically snarled those three questions.
“Yes, yes, and yes, but…”
“But! Don’t you dare but me, Galahad Sinclair! How is that possible when Mrs. Leyton-Brown hasn’t even been dead a month?”
Perhaps only total honesty was the way forward?
She deserved that.
They deserved that.
“Because I happened to be here in Brighton when she passed, and because I keep an ear to the ground. I heard a rumor Mallory was spitting feathers that his aunt hadn’t left him any cash but had instead saddled him with a hefty portfolio of properties to unload—half of which were wrecks dotted around Covent Garden. And because I had worked out years ago that the best place to put my club was Covent Garden, I followed him back to town to inquire about them. Once he’d shown them to me, I made him an offer on the spot.”
Behind her spectacles, her eyes narrowed to magnified slits.
“I swear, on my life, that when Mallory and I shook on the deal I had no idea that your orphanage was next door. I didn’t realize that until…”
“You mysteriously collided with me on the street outside it a little over three weeks ago.”
As that was also the truth, Gal nodded, only to have all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse unleashed upon him.
“You devious, slippery snake, Galahad Sinclair!” She jabbed the air between them, incensed. “You planned this whole thing just to get your wicked way! You wanted our building, too! Didn’t you? That’s why you spouted all that poppycock about space and kitchen gardens and dreams coming true! You wanted the set! Of course you had an ulterior motive!” She prodded his chest this time. “Of course you did! Because don’t selfish men always?” She marched away with her arms waving, at such speed he had to jog to catch up with her. “I am such an idiot! Always such an idiot where men are concerned!”
“Venus! Wait. It wasn’t like that.” He caught her elbow and she glared at his fingers as if they were something unpleasant until he withdrew them. “I didn’t plan this to get my hands on your orphanage. I simply bought three buildings that happened to be alongside it. I swear I had no clue about the orphanage until you pointed it out. That was why I was so stunned when we met that day outside it. You remember that, don’t you?”
Her eyelids fluttered fast as she revisited that memory and for the briefest moment she appeared to waver, until the outraged schoolmistress returned with a vengeance as she folded her arms and tapped her foot. Glaring as if everything about him disappointed her now. “Maybe so—but that doesn’t explain your total silence on the matter both then and since when you have had ample opportunity to say something. If you didn’t have an ulterior motive, kindly explain to me why you neglected to tell me that you had bought all those buildings the day we collided outside them and why this is the first I am hearing about it?”
“Clearly that was a mistake.” One Gal bitterly regretted now. “But at the time I thought…” Maybe honesty wasn’t the best policy as, judging by her incendiary reaction, the truth would now sound damning. Because now it was damning. “I thought…” Think, Galahad! Think! “I thought…”
Venus snarled with venom. “You thought, quite correctly, that I wouldn’t take kindly to having Sodom and Gomorrah move in next door to the orphanage. Especially when relations between us have always been so strained.” She unfolded her arms to fist her hands on her hips. “So you embarked on an offensive to sweeten me up before you told me and before you tried to charm the last of ‘the set’ from me!”
“It wasn’t quite as mercenary as you are making it sound.” Although now that she said it, it sounded pretty darn mercenary to him. “I’m a businessman—and with my business head on…”
“What you call business, I call selfish duplicity! Either way it explains why you suddenly wanted to bury the hatchet and declare a truce at the Rokebys’ when you’ve never cared that we hated each other before. Why you kept turning up like a bad penny when usually I never see you from one changing season to the next. Why you came to dinner and stayed to play cards when you rarely come to dinner and never stay for anything! And why you suppressed your usual obnoxiousness to make me warm to you.” He found his head bowing in shame like Tommy Claypole’s because what she had said was all true. He had been selfish for the sake of his business.
Initially at least. But he could see how she wouldn’t believe that everything that had happened between them since hadn’t been driven by his business.
“That explains why you happened to be in Hatchards, too, doesn’t it? Behaving all decent and noble when it was all plainly another one of your acts. And why…” Her fingers shook as she pressed them to her lips, and he watched in panic as her clever mind put two and two together to make three hundred and twenty-seven. “… And why you kissed me.”
The hurt in her eyes almost killed him. “That isn’t why I kissed you, Venus. I kissed you because…” She pushed him so hard he landed on his butt in the slush.
“You were acting all of it, weren’t you?”
“Not all.” He scrambled to his feet. “To begin with, I’ll admit I was putting my business first, but things changed the second we waltzed and…”
She backed away, her hands raised to ward off evil and her lovely eyes swimming with the tears he had put there. “God, I really am the world’s worst judge of a man’s character! As if you—you!” She spat that with such acid it burned. “Wouldn’t have had an ulterior motive to be nice to me!”
Then she was off again, her incensed heels tearing up the yards between them at such speed, it took him until she reached the inn to catch her.
“Venus, please…” He stayed her arm but she thwacked it with her silly little reticule.
“Touch me again, Galahad Sinclair, and I swear it will be the last thing that you ever do!”
“I appreciate that this looks bad.” Especially to all the lunchtime patrons in the inn and Nelly at the bar, who were all staring at the pair of them open-mouthed. “And I’ll admit that initially I was trying to soften you up a bit before I told you that we were going to be neighbors. But I swear, last night when I…”
“Ah, there you are, Vee!” The Reverend Smythe appeared on the landing beaming. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” He smiled at Galahad as he descended the stairs, oblivious to all the gaping patrons below. “The bags are loaded, and my wife has been sitting in the carriage waiting for us for the last ten minutes.” Unaware of the awful, fraught atmosphere, the vicar smiled at them in turn. “But I am sure she won’t mind waiting a few minutes more for you two to say your final goodbyes.”
“No need.” Venus gave Gal one last disgusted look before she took the vicar’s arm. “We’ve already said them.”