No Good Duke Goes Unpunished (The Rules of Scoundrels #3)(10)

She would be an excellent wife in that sense.

It was the rest about which she had questions. And she had fourteen days in which to discover the answers.

Was that too much to ask?

Apparently so. She cast a look at the now-closed door to Mr. Cross’s rooms, and felt a pang of something not altogether pleasant in her chest. Regret? Discontent? It did not matter. What mattered was, she had to reconsider her plan.

She sighed, and the noise swirled around her, drawing her attention to the enormous, empty room.

She had been so focused on finding her way to Mr. Cross’s private offices earlier that she hadn’t had an opportunity to explore the casino itself. Like most women in London, she’d heard the gossip about The Fallen Angel—that it was an impressive, scandalous place where ladies did not belong. That it was on the floor of the Angel and not that of Parliament where men forged the future of Britain. That it was the owners of the Angel who wielded London’s most insidious power.

Considering the quiet, cavernous room, Pippa conceded that it was certainly an impressive space . . . but the rest of the gossip seemed slightly exaggerated. There wasn’t much to say about this place except that it was . . .

Rather dark.

A small row of windows near the ceiling on one side of the room was the only source of light, allowing a few errant rays of sunshine in. Pippa followed one long shaft of light, peppered with slow, swirling particles of dust, to where it struck a heavy oak table several feet away, lighting thick green baize painted in white and yellow letters, numbers, and lines.

She approached, a strange grid of numbers and words printed down the long oval coming into view, and she could not resist reaching down to run her fingers across the fabric, along the markings—hieroglyphs to her—until she brushed up against a row of perfect white dice stacked against one wall of the table.

Lifting a pair, she examined the perfect dimples in them, testing the weight of the little ivory squares in her palm, wondering at the power they held. They seemed innocuous enough—barely worth considering—and yet, men lived and died by their toss. Long ago, her brother-in-law had lost everything on one wager. True, he’d earned it all back, but Pippa wondered at the temptation that made one do something so foolish.

No doubt, there was power in the little white cubes.

She rattled them in her palm, imagining a wager of her own—imagining what it would take to tempt her to game. Her research. An understanding of the secrets of marriage, of married life. Of motherhood. Clear expectations for that too-cloudy future.

Answers. Where she had none.

Information that would ease the tightness in her chest that cloyed every time she considered her marriage.

If she could wager for that . . . she would.

She rotated the dice in her hands, wondering at the wager that would bring revelation before she could establish her fate, however, a thunderous pounding at the door of the club gained her attention with its loud and unceasing racket. She set the dice on the edge of the hazard table and moved toward the noise before realizing that she had nothing to do with the door in question and should, therefore, not open it.

Bang.

Bang bang.

She cast a furtive look about the massive room. Surely someone heard the clatter. A maid, a kitchen girl, the bespectacled gentleman who had facilitated her own entrance?

Bang bang bang.

No one appeared to be in hearing distance.

Perhaps she should fetch Mr. Cross?

The thought gave her pause. Or, rather, the way the thought brought with it a vision of Mr. Cross’s disheveled ginger hair standing at haphazard angles before he ran his fingers through it and restored it to right gave her pause. The strange increase of her heartbeat at the thought gave her pause. She wrinkled her nose. She did not care for that increase. It was not altogether comfortable.

Bangbangbangbangbang.

The person at the door seemed to be losing patience. And redoubling commitment.

Clearly, his or her matter was urgent.

Pippa headed for the door, which was masked behind a set of heavy velvet curtains that hung from twenty feet up, solid mahogany standing barely open, shielding a small, dark entryway, quiet and unsettling—a River Styx between the club and the outside world.

She moved through the blackness to the exterior steel door, even larger than its interior partner, closed against the day beyond. In the dim light, she ran her hand along the seam where door met jamb, disliking the way the darkness suggested that someone could reach out and touch her without her ever even knowing he was there. She threw one bolt and another before turning the massive handle built into the door and pulling it open, closing her eyes instinctively against the grey March afternoon that seemed somehow like the brightest summer day after her time in the Angel.

“Well, I’ll tell you, I hadn’t expected such a pretty greeting.”

Pippa opened her eyes at the lecherous words, raising her hand to help her vision adjust to the light.

There were few things she could say with certainty about the man in front of her, classic black hat banded in scarlet silk and tilted to one side, silver-tipped walking stick in one hand, broad-shouldered, and handsomely dressed, but she knew this—he was no gentleman.

In fact, no man, gentle or otherwise, had ever smiled at her the way this man did—as though he were a fox, and she were a hen. As though she were a houseful of hens. As though, if she weren’t careful, he would eat her and wander off down St. James’s with a feather caught in his wide, smiling teeth.