Confessions of a Royal Bridegroom(3)

“Ah, well,” she said, not sounding all that disappointed. “I thought not. Truly, Griffin, you are turning into a monk. We haven’t seen you next door in three nights. I do hope you don’t intend to take yourself off to some dreary mountaintop in Scotland, or hole up in a ridiculous hermitage on one of your uncles’ estates.” She let her gaze drift down over his body. “That would be such a waste.”


He grinned at her. “Now you’re simply flattering me, and you know I’m immune to that sort of thing.”

She was about to retort when a quick knock on the door cut her off. Before Griffin could call out permission to enter, Tom Deacon opened the door and barreled into the room.

Griffin raised his eyebrows in a pointed question. His business manager might be several inches taller and outweigh him by three stone, but Tom knew better than to charge into his office without permission. Combined with the scowl on the man’s blunt features, it suggested that something had disturbed his normally unflappable right hand.

Tom came to a halt in front of the desk, practically stepping on Griffin’s toes. The space was small enough that Madeline had to sit down in order to avoid getting squashed between the two men.

Griffin’s office, once the room from which he’d managed the gaming hell that had graced this part of Jermyn Street, wasn’t large. He’d closed The Cormorant only a few months ago, converting the building back to its original use as a private dwelling, but he’d seen no point in moving his office to a more spacious room upstairs. From here, Griffin could still monitor the comings and goings in his household and the brothel next door, connected by a small, conveniently placed passageway right outside his office door. Tom’s bulky form and his obvious agitation filled the room, making the walls seem to close in.

Sighing, Griffin moved around to the other side of his desk and waited. Tom was a man of few words to begin with, and it rarely served to push him. But after several seconds of watching Tom’s jaw tick under the impact of some obviously perturbing stimulus, Griffin finally lost his patience.

“Are we going to stand here like a pair of chawbacons, or are you going to tell me why you’re so disturbed?” Griffin asked with some asperity.

Tom’s jaw worked again, as if chewing over a gristly piece of mutton, but he finally spit words out. “It’s a baby. A baby in the entrance hall.”

Griffin’s mind blanked for a second. “A baby?” he repeated, sounding rather like a chawbacon after all. “In my house?”

Some of the girls did occasionally succumb to that particular hazard of the profession, but Griffin always set them up off the premises. Babies weren’t exactly good for this sort of business.

Tom unleashed a grim smile. “Aye. And, apparently, it’s yours.”





Griffin strode toward the front of the house.

“If there’s one thing you can be sure of,” he snapped over his shoulder at Tom, “it’s that this baby is not mine. I’ve been very careful with that sort of thing, I assure you.” Given his lamentable parentage he’d be damned if he spread his seed around with such careless abandon.

“I’m just telling you what the boy who brought him said,” Tom retorted. “I’m not sayin’ it’s true, am I?”

“I should bloody well hope not,” Griffin muttered. Even so, he couldn’t help counting in his head, thinking of whose bed he’d been warming about nine months ago. A few moments of rapid reflection confirmed what he’d thought. He’d been sleeping with only Madeline back then, and he sure as hell had not gotten her with child.