To Win a Wicked Lord (Shadows and Silk #4) - Sofie Darling Page 0,2

feeling around until he located the source on the far side of the room: a woman, veiled and dressed in all black. Number 9’s madam, presumably.

Unease began a slow crawl through him. Most of the madams he’d encountered in his short tenure as the Savior of St. Giles possessed a certain bearing, a brazen flash of the eye, a daring pout of the lips, and a view toward the winning angle. None of them hid behind layers of black lace.

Yet he detected a litheness to her figure suggesting freshness and, confoundingly, youth. In his experience, madams were neither fresh nor young.

The prickling sensation spread. It could be interpreted as a physical response to intrigue, but, in truth, it felt not unlike the initial stir of desire. He instantly tamped it down and pursued the other interpretation. What was her game?

“Dingo?”

Dingo. His nickname from long past Eton days. Blast.

He half pivoted to find Chauncey Talbot-Spiffington, otherwise known as Runt, waiting with an expectant look on his face. When Percy glanced back, he found the woman gone.

A beat of silence went on a tick too long. Runt’s bushy eyebrows drew together and released. The man’s feet shuffled with unease. “Just arrived in Town, have you?”

“It’s been a few months.”

“And you didn’t call on me?” Runt asked, hurt running through the question.

Percy barely contained a snort. He hadn’t the time or inclination to soothe a grown man’s wounded feelings.

“Your scar,” Runt began and trailed.

Percy felt himself go tight about the mouth.

Runt, ever the sensitive one of the old Etonian pack, must have noticed, for he continued in an obsequious rush, “It’s quite fashionable and . . . and da-dashing!”

Percy wouldn’t touch his fingertips to the scar, its silvery length running along the ridge of his right cheekbone, put there by the single slash of a French saber, his last memory before a well-aimed—or poorly, depending on one’s point of view—cannon shot blacked out his world.

“Of course, we’ve all heard tattle about your exploits, Dingo.” Runt’s expression turned commiserative. “Wouldn’t have expected such behavior from Olivia, though.”

Percy clenched his jaw. Olivia. The woman who had once been his wife. The wife he’d left on this side of the Channel for a dozen years, letting her—and the world—think him dead. Once she’d been alerted to his continued existence, she’d petitioned Parliament—with the assistance of his own father, the Duke of Arundel—to set the marriage aside and succeeded, rendering the daughter he’d never met, Lucy, a bastard.

Lucy.

The pang of guilt hit Percy with its familiar swift, sharp jab to the gut, as it always did when he thought of his daughter.

No, Percy wouldn’t be discussing Olivia or any of his family with Runt. He would only have to defend them—for they were absolutely in the right. Runt was determined to revisit the past. So, let them, and be done with it. “Where is Chippers?” Percy asked. This was the nickname for Lord Phineas Featherstone.

“Checking the betting books,” Runt supplied.

Percy plowed on with his line of questioning. “And Bongo?” Lord Jarvis Smythe-Vane.

“Oh, he didn’t come out tonight. His gout, you know.”

Percy hadn’t, but no surprise there. “And Tuppy?” Lord Harold Ponsonby.

“Tupping a wench upstairs, what else?”

Right. “And Bumpy?” Lord Basil Arbuthnot.

Runt jutted his chin toward a point behind them. “Passed out in a chair.”

Percy glanced back and spotted the unconscious man, a thread of drool hanging from his open mouth.

And that was the old Eton tribe accounted for.

To survive Eton, a boy needed a tribe, and they’d formed one based on their shared status as younger sons, spares to the heirs. With no expectations placed upon them, they’d been free to be useless to a one, and they’d run with it, Percy included. In fact, as the younger son of a powerful duke,