“It’s very simple,” Octavia explained, taking a deep breath. The carriage chose that moment to hit a rut, and so she fell against the side, grasping the edge of the velvet-covered seat. “I’ll take care of everything.” She spoke with her usual confidence, though she did not feel her usual confidence. But perhaps that was just due to the shaking carriage. “I’ll arrange the selling of the house and its contents. We should be able to get a substantial amount of money.”
No response from her companion. To be expected, she supposed.
“The money will go toward paying what I owe Mr. Higgins.” She scowled as she thought about him; she’d done research when she was considering borrowing money, and he did offer relatively reasonable interest rates (for a moneylender), but he also offered extremely prompt retribution if his funds were not paid in full on time.
She’d already received two visits from the gentleman himself, assuring her he would break all her limbs and ruin her life if she didn’t make up for the payment she’d already missed.
Or perhaps it was the other way around—ruin her life and then break all her limbs.
“And which of my limbs did he threaten?” she asked. Again, no response. “If he means to break one of my arms, then that would be difficult, but not impossible. The leg, now, that would be more problematic. I can learn to write with the opposite hand, if need be,” she explained. “But moving about on only one leg could prove problematic.” She gave an annoyed huff. “But what was I to do?” she said, holding her hands out in supplication. “I believed I saw an opportunity, and if I see an opportunity, I should take it. Despite the risk.”
Since Octavia was part-owner of and ran a gambling house, it stood to reason she would take a risk—a gamble, if she was being coy—when she was so certain the reward would be worth it. Hence the debt.
“It should be simple,” she repeated, lifting her chin defiantly. Which made her bonnet hit the back of the carriage, sending it tilting over her eye. She straightened it with a fierce gesture. “Father left a will, and with a little searching, I should be able to find it.”
It was at this point that Ivy, Octavia’s sister, would usually point out some flaw in Octavia’s plan.
That she hadn’t considered that they hadn’t seen or communicated with their father for over five years, so they had no idea what the house and its contents might look like; that Octavia shouldn’t bother about their father’s holdings because they were doing all right on their own; that they wouldn’t even have known that their father had died unless Ivy had chanced to see a paper from their village in Somerset that shared the news.
If Octavia was currently speaking to her sister, that is.
But she wasn’t. And it wasn’t that there was a disagreement between them; Ivy and Octavia got along exceedingly well, remarkable considering that both women had strong opinions.
No, it was because Ivy was not there. Instead of being in London, where the sisters had lived for the past six or seven years, Octavia was sitting in a well-appointed carriage bouncing on the road to Greensett, a place she hadn’t been to since she was fourteen years old.
“You are a much better listener,” she said in a soothing voice to her companion. If Ivy had been there, Octavia would not have been able to speak at length for such a long time. Ivy was presumably safe at home with her husband, unaware of Octavia’s departure.
Her companion was Cerberus, her Italian mastiff, who slept on the opposite seat, a distinct circle of drool marking the velvet upholstery. Theoretically, she was speaking to him, but since he was asleep as well as being canine, she couldn’t expect a response. Though she would have welcomed one.
She had spoken to Ivy earlier that day, but she had not said anything she was saying now. Her sister had arrived early that morning to share the news about their father’s death—discovered by accident in a newspaper Ivy had intended to use for her and her husband’s dogs—and Octavia had listened, which was rare.
Usually, Octavia spoke and Ivy tried to interrupt.
The sisters had cried together, remembering a time when he hadn’t put his own passion for gambling ahead of his family. Long before the estrangement. When he’d promised them he’d always have a home for them, even when his fortunes were low.
They’d cried because of what they had lost, and would never have now: a father who loved them. Who cared for them.
And then they’d wiped their tears, and a plan had begun to unfurl in Octavia’s mind. He’d promised them he’d always have a home for them. That had to still be true.
Their father had died just a month before. Although he and his daughters were estranged, Octavia’s fellow gambling club owners and workers kept her apprised of her father’s activities. Just a few months earlier, she’d heard he’d bet on a race between a cow and a frog—she hadn’t heard who’d won, but the very nature of the wager made her appreciate her older sister Ivy’s taking her away from it all. But perhaps his luck had changed; there was no telling what might be in the house. Never mind that the house itself was also valuable.
What if, by his death, he was finally able to do something good for his daughters?
What if she were to go to Greensett herself and see what he’d left to her and Ivy? It would remove her from London, out of Mr. Higgins’s reach, and it would definitely yield some money, hopefully enough so that Ivy might never know of Octavia’s risky venture. She’d pay Mr. Higgins back without anyone being the wiser.
Octavia had originally wanted the money to make improvements to the gambling club she and Ivy co-owned. The club was making money, true, but Octavia believed it could make so much more, given proper investment. And at first the new tables, expanded playing rooms, and additional personnel had increased revenue.
But then the business faltered thanks to a combination of horrible weather and a distracting political crisis, and Octavia was staring at the possibility of being broken-limbed and ruined.
Or the other way around, she wasn’t certain.
“It will be fine,” she assured her still-sleeping dog. “Father must have left a will. And we will inherit everything. I’ll be able to scrape up enough to pay Mr. Higgins. Just the house itself should take care of it. Ivy never has to hear of this.” She spoke with a confidence she told herself she felt.
Cerberus opened his eyes, looked at her, and promptly went back to sleep.
“I would have thought feeding you would count for some loyalty,” she said with a smile, leaning forward to pat Cerberus’s head. He only made a snuffling noise and shifted on the seat.
She leaned back against the seat cushion and gazed out the window, wishing she could be there right now rather than in five hours.
Patience was not her strong suit. Nor was caution. Nor, for that matter, doing anything but being her obstinate self.
A benefit when it came to being a woman in a field usually reserved for men, but not so much when it came to navigating life in a rural village.
Thank goodness she had been able to get out of London so quickly—she had recalled that her frequent, and frequent losing, customer Lady Montague was sending her carriage to fetch her niece from school. It was only a matter of asking the good-natured lady to have her carriage make a tiny detour.
Which meant she had no way of returning if she needed to get back just as fast.
But she didn’t anticipate any trouble once she arrived.
She never did.
Gabriel raked his hands through his hair as he surveyed the chaos that was his new house.
Mr. Holton had died close to a month ago, but Gabriel had been busy sorting out the details of his own father’s estate.
Like Mr. Holton, Gabriel’s father, Mr. Fallon, was a gambler. Unlike Mr. Holton, however, Mr. Fallon was very, very lucky. He’d transformed his modest holdings into a vast network of property, liquid assets, shares in a variety of companies, and several items that couldn’t be assessed properly because they were unique.
Something brushed against his calf, and Gabriel looked down and smiled. “I know you’re hungry,” he said to Nyx, one of the unique items. She yipped in reply, then trotted off to sniff the leg of a chair whose upholstery had faded to an unpleasant brownish-gray color.
A tiny, fluffy Pomeranian, Nyx had been part of a parcel his father had won four years earlier. Mr. Fallon hadn’t wanted to keep the dog, but Gabriel had hidden her in his satchel and brought her back to school. By the time Mr. Fallon discovered his son’s duplicity, it was too late—Nyx was already a favorite at Gabriel’s boarding school, and Mr. Fallon valued his access to Gabriel’s schoolmates’ parents so he couldn’t just get rid of her.
“Those lords are always easy to fleece,” he’d confided to Gabriel during one of the rare occasions he’d spoken to his son. “Think they will win just because of who they are.” He snorted. “When it’s what they do and how they play that makes all the difference.”
As parental advice it wasn’t much to go on, but Gabriel had embraced it, determined to make himself into someone who would succeed by his actions, even though his origins were merely respectable, at best, and infamous, at worst, thanks to his father’s machinations.
And the final machination before he’d died had been to win Mr. Holton’s house. He’d tried for years to best the other man, at one time even winning his daughter in a bet, but losing to that very same daughter only a few hours later.
Gabriel’s father had been so triumphant about finally winning the house that he’d drunk more than usual and tipped over a candle, setting his house ablaze with him in it.
Thankfully, no one else was in residence at the time; Gabriel had gone to inquire about a rare manuscript, and Mr. Fallon’s servants didn’t live in the house because Mr. Fallon didn’t trust anybody. Not even his son.
Gabriel had mourned his father, as anybody would, but he had been most sorrowful of what the elder Mr. Fallon had missed out on—his father had been so busy playing cards he’d never played with his son. Hadn’t risked opening his heart to another person because he was risking pounds and pence in stakes.
Gabriel had been happily surprised when he’d gone through his late father’s papers to find the scrawled piece of paper declaring Mr. Fallon was now the owner of Mr. Holton’s house.
Thanks to the fire, Gabriel didn’t have anywhere to live. He’d taken rooms in the village, but three weeks of the innkeeper’s meat stew was an exquisite torture he thought Prometheus would have refused in favor of the whole “bird pecking out an organ” torture.
He’d arrived that morning, dropping the satchel containing his books, linen, and other items of clothing in the main hallway. It sent a cloud of dust into the air, making him and Nyx sneeze.
It was clear that if Mr. Holton had had any servants, they hadn’t spent any time cleaning.
But Gabriel wasn’t afraid of hard work—he liked manual labor, it kept his hands occupied as his brain sorted through his research.
“This place would make Hades flinch,” he told Nyx, who had given up on food and was lying on a crumpled piece of fabric in the corner of the room.
Gabriel had walked through the entire house, assessing what needed to be done.
Everything.
In addition to the dust, it seemed a robust family of mice had taken residence in the library. The bottom bookshelf’s books were uniformly marked by teeth, and when he’d entered, he’d heard a frantic scrabbling indicating the mice were retreating to wherever they lived.
There was a hole in the roof in at least one of the attic rooms, and the upstairs bedrooms were competing with one another as to which one was the worst.
The kitchen was an equally disgusting mess, streaks of grease on the walls and a dubious-looking stove.
But unless he wanted to endure more of Mrs. Packham’s beef stew, this was where he would be living.
Having a house to himself, turning that house into a home, would be deeply satisfying. His father had sent him to school, then hadn’t cared when Gabriel wanted to continue his studies. Gabriel had lived in rented rooms near the British Museum in London, poring over ancient texts as he worked to create a more lively, more modern version of a slew of Greek myths.
He saw the promise of the house, of what it had been when Mr. Holton’s wife had been alive and their two daughters had lived there as well.
After her father staked his oldest daughter in a wager against Gabriel’s father, the daughter, Ivy, had had the audacity to challenge Mr. Fallon to a wager, staking her younger sister.
Gabriel’s father had wanted the sister, Octavia, to marry Gabriel, even though nobody had consulted either one of them. Why his father had wanted him to marry the younger Holton girl was a mystery, but then again, most of what his father had done was a mystery to Gabriel.
Thank God Ivy had won.
And promptly left that very night for London, taking her younger sister with her.
“Enough of that, though,” Gabriel said to Nyx as he strode from the kitchen back to the main entrance. He undid the buttons of his shirt as he walked, yanking it up and over his head as he stepped outside into the early evening air.
The day had been warm, and he hadn’t been able to resist moving a few pieces of furniture, making him sweat.
He’d spied a small pond in the back of the house when he’d looked out a smoke-smeared window.
“We’re going for a swim, girl,” he told Nyx as he circled around to the back. He dropped to the grass, sliding his boots and socks off, then stood back up to remove his trousers and his smallclothes.
Nobody was here, nobody would come here, and he’d be damned if he’d walk around in damp underclothes.
He plunged into the water, a blessedly cool relief on his heated skin. Nyx followed, her little head bobbing up and down in the water as she paddled.
It was peaceful. He was alone, which he relished. He had a purpose, which he craved. And he now had plenty of time, funds, and a house, all of which would further his work.
He wanted and needed nothing else. He wanted and needed nobody else.
He floated onto his back, stretching his arms out to his side, when he heard an enormous splash, and lifted his head to see a gigantic black dog barreling into the water, with a woman running behind, yelling at the dog to come back.
“Cerberus!” she shouted, her attention focused on her dog. Gabriel jerked upright and grabbed Nyx, holding the tiny dog to his side as the other dog—Cerberus—continued his quest toward them. He instinctively thrust Nyx nearly behind him, protecting her.
And then the woman saw him.
Her eyes widened, her mouth dropped open, and she yelped, making an “eep!” sound. As though he was the interloper, and not she.
Gabriel gritted his teeth, keeping a wary eye on her enormous dog, who could have swallowed Nyx as a snack.
“I don’t know who the hell you are,” he said in a fierce tone, “or what you are doing here, but you need to control your dog.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Cerberus wouldn’t want to have anything to do with your dog. Would you, Cerberus?” she said to the dog, who was steadfastly ignoring her, now sniffing at the edge of the water, thankfully far away from Nyx.
She turned her gaze back to him. “You are the trespasser,” she said in a firm, righteous tone. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “And who are you?”
“I could ask the very same of you,” Gabriel replied. “Since you are on my property.”
“Your property!” she echoed. “It is most certainly not.” She raised her chin. “This is my house.”