Page 21 of Lady Petra and the Wolf

“This is as good a time as any to cut my losses. As you so unflatteringly put it, I have been gambling my wife’s dowry away.” St. George fell into step with Wolf, who continued his earlier aimless ambling down St. James.

“You know,” St. George began more quietly, once they were further down St. James, “yours was not the only name connected to Lady Petra in the betting book.”

“Yes, yes, Longley was also in there.” Wolf did not wish to hear about the fated union of his oldest friend and his…pretend betrothed. Perhaps his actual betrothed.

“Not just Longley,” St. George bit out. “Dunsmore, Toppling, Purvine. I can’t recall the rest.

Wolf halted abruptly at the juncture of St. James and Bennet, his thoughts momentarily snagged upon the names. Dunsmore, Toppling, and Purvine spanned almost three decades in age. But they were all Whigs who belonged to Brooks’ and they were all bloody bastards at that.

Wolf absorbed that information, then glanced over to find St. George studying him.

“When you wed your wife, her dowry saved your barony, yes?”

St. George’s eyebrows shot up, obviously caught off guard by Wolf’s question.

“And then some,” the other man admitted glumly as they crossed the street. “Since we married, Mariah has taken to reviving the town, not just the estate.”

Wolf speared St. George with a glance, and the man almost blushed behind his beard. “I suspect that my complaints likely smack of nothing so much as sour grapes.” St George leapt to the side to avoid a puddle from a shower that morning while Wolf walked right through it, uncaring. “I suppose it is not her I object to so much as the circumstances of our marriage. I was never meant to be St. George. I did not have a father who prepared me my entire life to be a peer of the realm,” he added with a pointed nod at Wolf. “I’d spent my life preparing to be James Reed, a gentleman traveler, and then Lionel died and left me with more debts than I could have ever expected to pay off in one lifetime.”

“I thought Lionel was a war hero? I thought he lived?”

“No, that is my younger brother, Harrison.” The glum quality returned to St. George’s voice as Wolf recalled that he had indeed met the younger Reed brother. “He did survive. I had not heard from him for several years. He has been traveling, the lucky bastard, while I was saddled with a failing estate and a responsibility I never prepared for. I just had a letter from him, which was why I—” St. George gestured back in the direction of Brooks’, but then, appearing to think better of it, shook his head and turned forward again.

Wolf narrowed his eyes at the man next to him who was admiring a pack of bays pulling a carriage on the street before them. Wolf highly doubted that Harrison Reed would consider himself a lucky bastard. The one time Wolf had seen him since the war, he discovered that the man had lost his eye. But it would be ungentlemanly to comment on such a thing, so Wolf returned to what he truly wished to hear. “So, you needed your wife rather badly, it sounds.”

St. George exhaled through his nose. “When you put it like that, yes, I did.”

Wolf took a moment to consider the wording of his question before he spoke. “To what lengths would you have gone to ensure that you would wed?”

“My wife wed me willingly, her father was over the moon to be tied to the—”

“Humor me. Imagine if she had not been willing.”

St. George set his walking stick down hard, then glanced at the bottom of the stick. It had caught on what appeared to be a flier with the words “Irish Problem” in large lettering, likely spread from the nearby Piccadilly. “Huxworth would attend such a demonstration,” St. George muttered under his breath and Wolf found he could not disagree.

“If my wife was not willing to wed me…well, first I might have tried to find another heiress,” St. George said as the paper caught on the wind, a remnant from the rain earlier in the day.

Wolf tracked the paper as it flew on the wind, back toward Piccadilly. “In this hypothetical, imagine that there is no other heiress. There is only one woman you wish to wed. But perhaps she is not ready to wed yet. Perhaps her heart was otherwise engaged.”

“You think Mariah’s heart is otherwise engaged?” St. George thundered with rather too much venom for a man estranged from his wife.

“This is a hypothetical, remember?”

“Of course,” St. George muttered, his color returning to its usual aristocratic pallor. “I suppose, if Mariah had been unwilling to marry me when we first met, I would have endeavored to change her mind.”

Wolf held back a curse. This was not producing the clarity he wished. “Yes, yes, but imagine there was a time constraint, like an hourglass running down. Imagine if you did nothing, you could lose her to—”

“Dunsmore. Or Purvine, perhaps?” St. George’s eyes sparked knowingly and he accented the “Pure” in Purvine in such a way that raised the hairs on the back of Wolf’s neck. He could not leave Petra to such jackals. His father had raised him to be a man of action, to take what he wanted when he came to a decision.

Wolf offered no retort as St. George turned his attention back to the path ahead, a glimmer of triumph manifesting in the distinctly smug smile that now played across his features. “I suppose that if I needed to convince Mariah to marry me post haste, if there was a pressing reason, then yes, I would have gone to great lengths to secure her hand.”

Although Wolf had already come to a decision, that was the conclusion he needed to hear. He was filled with such a sense of rightness that he did not notice the commotion before them.

“I say,” St. George began as a group of young men shoved at a woman alone before them.

“I bet she’s got a pack of brats at home, those papists breed like rabbits,” one of them jeered.

Wolf caught the petite figure amidst the crowd, a woman in a gray cloak, and without thought, he rushed ahead.