Sweet Rogue of Mine (The Survivors #9) - Shana Galen Page 0,1
send you to an institution right now. Mayne and Fortescue managed to talk him out of it and arranged to have me sent instead.”
Nash considered. The Duke of Mayne would have done the talking as he was the negotiator of the group. Stratford Fortescue would have decided to send Rowden. Fortescue was always the strategist.
“Why you?” Nash asked. Seeing that Mayne was the negotiator, it would have made more sense for him to come.
“I needed the blunt.”
Nash winced and set the pistol down. That hurt. His father was paying Nash’s friends to intervene. He expected as much from his father, who had given up on Nash a long time ago. But his friends...still, what could he expect when he had shot Duncan Murray this past summer? That misstep was bound to have repercussions.
“I’m coming in,” Rowden said, his tone one of warning. The latch lifted and the door opened. In the flickering candlelight, Nash made out a dark form. Of course, he remembered what Rowden looked like. He was broad and stocky with short brown hair and coal-black eyes. He had a pretty face, or he would have if his nose hadn’t been broken so many times. Nash remembered what every man he had ever served with looked like. His memory was more of a curse than a blessing, though, as he remembered every woman and, yes, child he had ever shot too.
“You look like hell,” Rowden said, still standing in the doorway.
“I wish I could tell you the same, but I can’t see worth a damn.”
“Still feeling sorry for yourself, I see.”
Nash’s hand itched to lift the pistol again, but he was not hot-tempered. He would not have lasted a week as a sharpshooter if he had been. “What do you want, Payne? To what do I owe the pleasure of a visit from one of Draven’s Dozen?”
Rowden pulled out the chair at the opposite end of the table and sat. Nash saw only a gray, amorphous shape but his other senses filled in the missing information. “Considering you’re one of us, I’m not sure why you’re surprised. We Survivors take care of our own.”
It was a lie, but Nash decided not to point that out. Not yet. The Survivors were a troop of thirty highly skilled military men who had been recruited as something of a suicide band to kill Napoleon or die trying. Eighteen had died trying. Twelve had come home. They had been brothers-in-arms, but Nash did not feel any fraternal affection now. The others were moving on with their lives, while he would be forever alone, locked in a world of darkness.
“You’re thin,” Rowden observed. To a stocky fighter like Rowden Payne, thinness was a liability. “Don’t you eat?”
“You must need my father’s money badly if you’re playing nursemaid now,” Nash said.
Shot fired.
“I want to keep you alive, and no one has to pay me for that.”
Missed target.
“I’m alive.” But Nash knew that wouldn’t be enough. Not after the accident with Murray a few months before. Nash had known some intervention was coming. He supposed he should be glad the Survivors had convinced his father to send Rowden before the men from the asylum. Very little frightened Nash anymore, but the prospect of the next fifty years locked in an asylum drove a spike of fear into his heart. He would put the pistol in his mouth and pull the trigger first. “What do I have to do to keep the asylum at bay?”
“So you haven’t completely pickled your brain yet.”
“What do I have to do?” Nash repeated. He would do what was required and then, hopefully, the world would leave him alone. After all, he’d given his sight for King and Country. Why couldn’t they leave him in peace?
“I don’t have a comprehensive list,” Rowden said after a pause, during which, Nash assumed, he was looking about the dining room. “Off the top of my head, I would say this old pile needs some repair. It looks like there was a fire at some point.”
Nash did not comment.
“And clearly you need to ingest something other than gin.”
Nash lifted his empty glass. “This was whiskey.” At least he thought it had been whiskey. Maybe it had been brandy.
“You need staff.”
“No staff,” Nash said.
Rowden let out a quiet grunt. “We’ll discuss it. But suffice it to say, I can smell you all the way over here. When was the last time you put on a clean set of clothes or took a bath?”