She had his attention, drat her. He spotted a mahogany bay horsehair on the cuff of his riding jacket and focused on plucking it away. “And the conditions?”
“There are essentially two. First, I may not sell the business for at least one year. During that time it is to be held in trust for me, and the profits available to me for my personal maintenance. That condition is problematic in itself.” She paused, peering at the tea again. This time she poured as she continued speaking, then doctored his tea according to his stated preferences. “If it becomes public knowledge I am living off the proceeds of a brothel, my future is ruined—though that matters little. My younger sister, however, is blameless, and deserves some happiness from this life. She cannot be tainted by this association.”
He accepted the tea and took a sip. This difficult, inconvenient woman had made him a perfect cup of tea. Against all probability, he found his goodwill modestly restored. “The second condition?”
The lady looked briefly away—toward the white roses on the piano—and he had the sense this mannerism was how she gathered her courage, though none of her trepidation was betrayed in her expression.
“I am to spend at least three months under the personal tutelage of the trustee, learning the skills necessary to manage what I am told is a high-class sporting house. I am to learn what the… employees know, how the business works, how to gamble, and how the courtesan’s trade is”—she searched for words with a delicately lifted eyebrow—“undertaken.”
Gareth stood as genuine surprise—a rare emotion for him and unwelcome—coursed over him.
“Did your cousin dislike you so intensely, to put this choice before you?” Her cousin’s generosity would be the ruination of her, whoever she was.
“She hardly knew me,” came the reply. “She had chosen or been forced into her profession when I was but a girl. The family no longer received her, nor did she appear to want their acknowledgment. She probably felt entitled to her anger, if in fact this bequest is a display of anger.”
Gareth lowered himself beside his guest on the settee. He did not ask permission, and she did not shift away.
“How could this not be a posthumous tantrum? You appear to be a decent woman, and your cousin has made sure if you accept this bequest then you won’t be, nor, by association, will your sister be. I call that mean-spirited, particularly when your alternatives are what? To go into service, where your safety is none too assured anyway? It’s a diabolical gift, this bequest.”
The lady regarded him steadily, measuring him with cool, feline eyes. “My cousin was Callista Hemmings.”
He leaned back against the settee, feeling a stab of loss. Callista had been the quintessential grande horizontale, and she’d treated him honorably. When all London had been fawning over the newly invested Marquess of Heathgate to his face and laughing at him or accusing him of murder behind his back, Callista had been honest. She’d taken him on as a project, educated him, refined him, shown him skills and weapons that had needed only the sharpening influence of time to see him into the peerage on his own terms.
She’d passed along tidbits about this peer, or that bit of business that had allowed him to make some brilliant investments. Then she’d dumped him flat, telling him she chose her clientele, and she was unchoosing him.
In hindsight, he’d seen the kindness in what she’d done. Untried as he was, he’d been in danger of losing his heart to her. She was shrewd enough to know that wouldn’t have been in her interests—or his. He was in her debt, and now she was gone. He’d felt the loss of her months ago, and felt it anew at the mention of her name.
“You knew her,” his visitor observed dryly.
“My dear lady, much of London’s titled male population knew her, and the remainder could only wish they had. Your cousin was… quite a woman. Quite a lady.”
“She was not a lady,” his guest countered, the first hint of heat in her words.
He let that observation hang in the air while he took another sip of wonderfully hot, sweet, strong tea. “You resent this choice.”
“I resent it, yes, even as I am grateful it gives me options. Penury would likely cost me my virtue at some point, in any case. I am resigned to traveling a safer road to ruin. Were my sister older, I could get her married posthaste then slide into obscurity, but she is seventeen, and that is…”
Her faltering resolve was interesting. “Seventeen is…?”
“Seventeen, in her case, is too young.”
Gareth’s guest busied herself sipping her tea, apparently oblivious to Gareth’s perusal. He sipped along with her, waiting to see where she was heading with her disclosures. At seventeen, without the first clue what present company was getting herself into, she would have married to protect her sibling, had it been an option for her. He had no doubt of that.