Dukes to the Left of Me, Princes to the Right

CHAPTER 9

It was a little-known fact about Nicholas that he always practiced archery when he was sexually frustrated. Of course, that meant he rarely did. He was usually a sexually sated male who preferred to spend his sporting hours boxing at Gentleman Jackson’s or fencing at Angelo’s.

But in his view nothing beat piercing sandbags with arrows when it came to releasing tension caused by a craving for a female. In fact, he was bound to get a lot of good archery practice in until he wedded and bedded Lady Poppy Smith-Barnes. Even the thought of her pert little chin or those endearingly bony elbows drove him mad with lust.

Which was why he was in Hyde Park much too early in the morning the day after his betrothal. He’d even managed to locate his brother at a dreary hotel in Cheapside and drag him along.

“I can’t believe it.” Frank was breathing down Nicholas’s neck (in quite the literal sense) when he bent down to pick up the arrow he’d dropped. “You missed the bull’s-eye by a good half inch.”

Nicholas ignored his unsporting behavior. “It’s been known to happen. Must you stand so close?”

“Must you be my brother?” Frank scowled, his bantam-rooster chest pushed up to Nicholas’s stomach.

Nicholas refrained from rolling his eyes. “You should take to the stage. Your gift for melodrama is wearing anywhere else.” He pulled back on the bow and focused on the sandbag target once more.

Frank scoffed. “I might have to. Especially since I’m down to my last farthing.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“Oh, yes, it is. You hold the purse strings.”

“And you’ve been given a generous allowance. But you gamble it all away.”

“That’s what a gentleman of leisure does. Stupid.”

Nicholas tossed the bow and arrow aside. Frank had always gotten away with calling him names at home. Mother had intervened every time, and after she’d died, his stepmother had actually encouraged Frank’s insults. But both of them were gone.

Nicholas grabbed his baby brother by the cravat and hauled him close to his face. “Grow up.”

“No.” Frank’s eyes narrowed. “Big dummy.”

Nicholas forced himself to remember that Frank was, quite simply, an ass. The last ass in the family had been Great-uncle Hesperus, who’d fathered six children among three housemaids.

Nicholas supposed the family was due another ass now. Which gave him the wherewithal to drop his brother to the ground without killing him. “And your speaking like a two-year-old is somehow going to convince me to give you additional funds?”

Frank stood up and wiped off his bottom. “It should. If you were a good brother.” He broke an arrow over his knee for emphasis.

Nicholas bit his cheek and picked up the bow again. “Listen. If you’d stop gambling, which you’re not terribly good at, you might notice you can do other things better.”

“Like what?”

Nicholas thought. “Like, um—”

He thought some more, poised the arrow, and then shot it directly into the bull’s-eye.

“See?” Frank let his hands drop to his thighs. “You do everything right. Which makes it so I can’t. So why should I try?”

Nicholas handed him the bow and arrow, stood behind him, and twisted him toward the target. “Because you were gifted with a brain, and a healthy body, and devoted parents who gave you many opportunities to prove your worth. Until Mother died, of course, and then Father became quite useless.”

Blast. He hadn’t meant to add that last bit.

There was a beat of silence.

Frank shot the arrow ten feet to the left of the target. “If you’d let me shoot barrels with a blunderbuss, I guarantee I’d do better than you.”

“We have no barrels—”

“I do. I’ve loads of them.”

“Nor blunderbusses.”

“You could get one.”

Nicholas clenched his jaw. “Well, it’s clear that today, we don’t have them. So let’s go again, and this time pretend the target is me.”

“I hate archery and you.”

“Very well, Frank.” Nicholas strove to keep his anger in check. “I won’t dwell on the fact that if you had any integrity whatsoever, you’d try to be a decent brother because that’s the right thing to do. But if you want your allowance to continue, you will stop stealing spoons from White’s or any other establishment and you will alert me if you get into any scrapes.”

“You always were a nosy bastard,” Frank said.

“Yes, I suppose I am. The Drummond name’s at stake.”

“I think you’re jealous. You want to know what I’m up to because my life’s much more exciting than yours. That’s it. You can’t let me have any fun because you’re the boring older brother.”

It was the same old story.

Nicholas gathered up his things. “I’ll see you around.” He began to walk away, then turned. “Are you staying at that hotel for long?”

Frank’s lower lip stuck out. “None of your bloody business. But you saw—my bed is no better than a pile of straw. And I’m down to two waistcoats.”

Nicholas felt a war being waged within him, but then he reached into his pocket. “Here.” He threw Frank a leather pouch filled with gold coins. “An advance on your next allowance.”

Frank sneered, but he grabbed the bag. “I’m not going to thank you, you old miser.”

“Then don’t.” Nicholas turned away and refused to look back.

“Hey.”

Very reluctantly, Nicholas stopped. Turned around.

“Is it true you’re marrying Lady Poppy Smith-Barnes?” Frank asked sullenly.

Nicholas hesitated but a moment. “Yes.”

“She’s a morsel I’d like to pluck.”

“No, you wouldn’t, Frank, because if you did I’d kill you. And I’ll maim you if you ever say something rude about her again.”

Frank narrowed his eyes, then he whipped around and took off at a run. He held the leather pouch up in the air and said, “The first thing I’m doing with this is bed a whore, and I’m going to imagine it’s Lady Poppy Smith-Barnes when I do.”

Nicholas stopped and inhaled a deep breath.

You will not kill your own brother. His parents’ words echoed in his head.

But when he walked back to the Albany, he was angry. Angry that he was saddled with an immature idiot as his brother. The only thing that kept him trying to help Frank was the memory of his father’s face whenever he’d talk about his big brother, Uncle Tradd.

His father James had needed his brother.

Near the end of his life, the duke had asked Nicholas to carry him that morning to the shore—which, of course, Nicholas had done.

“We try to deny it,” James told him while they watched the waves pound the sand, “but blood is thicker than any grievance or separation. No matter how irreversible—or in your case with Frank, how sensible—the parting, at the core of your being is a silent mourning. For me it has never gone away. Learn from my story, Nicholas, so that you may have a modicum of peace.”

And so Nicholas knew he couldn’t—and wouldn’t—abandon Frank the way Uncle Tradd had abandoned his own father.

Just in case Frank needed him.

But once a year Nicholas would sit him backward on a horse and make it go—Frank would never know the time or place, but God, it brought Nicholas such joy, such unbridled delight, to see his brother bobbing madly on that horse, yelling for help. Nicholas deserved that, didn’t he? After all, the other 364 days of the year, Frank brought him nothing but misery.

Oh, and he called him Frank the Farter every once in a while. But that’s because Frank called him Nick the Nutsack.

That’s what brothers did.

“I could do so much worse, Father,” Nicholas said to a passing cloud.

So much worse.

He was practically a saint.