The Wicked Duke Takes a Wife

Chapter Thirty-seven

The Duke of Glenmorgan got arrested on the night before his wedding.

He’d considered refusing when two of his Boscastle cousins, Lords Drake and Devon, appeared on his doorstep that evening and innocently announced that, as he would be taking a wife tomorrow, they would escort him for a last night on the Town.

He shrugged. Why not? Harriet, Aunt Primrose, and Edlyn had been whisked off in an impressive coach-and-six by a bewigged driver and a haughty assembly of footmen, who closed the carriage door before Harriet could blow her betrothed a kiss. The ladies would spend the night at Lady Sedgecroft’s Park Lane mansion, discussing… he didn’t know. The mysteries of the marriage bed? That Primrose should have an opinion on such matters chilled his blood. As long as it did not involve raising an Egyptian pharaoh from the dressing closet, he assumed he would be able to deal with it.

“Are we taking my carriage or yours?” he asked as he walked out the front door, where the two blue-eyed brothers awaited him.

“Neither,” Drake said, staring up at the cloudy sky. “We’re walking.”

Shoulder to shoulder, the Boscastle men owned the streets. Only a fool would cross a member of the legendary brood and hope to escape unscathed as well as with all his teeth intact.

Still, more fools come out at night than do stars, and it was only a matter of time before the boys ended up at a low-stakes silver hell, where Lord Devon not only lost his proverbial shirt but sheepishly realized he didn’t have a sixpence on his person to pay up.

The other player, who was not only missing a few teeth but had obviously never heard of the Boscastle family, reached across the table to grab Devon by the lapels of his double-breasted gray frock coat.

Devon’s hand shot up and caught the man’s wrist in a paralyzing hold. “Ask him to pay,” he said, grinning in Griffin’s direction. “He’s a duke.”

The man spat a stream of spittle on the table, shaking his wrist as it was released. “Dook, my arse.”

The clink of glasses, the rattle of dice, and uninhibited conversation ceased. Lord Drake Boscastle looked up from his hand of cards with a half smile. The guard who stood at the iron-grilled door turned in expectation.

Griffin bestirred himself from his private musings of bedding Harriet and glanced around the smoke-filled den. For a moment he wondered if some bawdy toast was about to be made in his dishonor. But suddenly the player who’d beaten Devon lifted a stool over his head.

“Be ye deaf, boy?” he shouted at Griffin. “I said, ‘Dook, my arse.’”

Griffin smiled, rolling up his sleeves. “I could do that.”

And so he did, with Drake and Devon at his back joking that this hell was nothing compared to what they would go through when they returned in a disheveled state to their wives.

Griffin tore off his coat, flung it into a leering face, and threw a punch at another. “If this is your idea of a bachelor party,” he said with a laugh, “I bloody well hope I wake up tomorrow for my own wedding.”

Drake upended a table as the last of three entry doors splintered open and the guard yelled, “Raid!” The den swarmed with bludgeon-armed Bow men who had only yesterday been on Griffin’s side. Gamblers scrambled for secret passageways, their cards and dice boxes swooped up before Griffin could even find his coat.

“All right.” A club prodded his ribs. “Party’s up. There’s a penalty for illegal gambling, as if you didn’t know.”

“Oh, for the love of God. I’m the Duke of Glenmorgan.”

The constable shifted his gaze to the two other men leaning idly against the wall. “Right. And those would be your duchess and her hairdresser, I suppose?”

Who would have dreamed that the wicked Duke of Glenmorgan would learn everything he needed to know about love in a gaol cell, from one of London’s premier rakes? A helpless audience, he slumped on the hard wooden bench he shared with Devon’s lanky frame, while Drake paced and waxed philosophical in the dark. Griffin felt his skull throb with what might evolve into the worst hangover of his life. At least he would meet Harriet on the morrow with all his teeth.

“I will give you only one piece of advice,” Drake said, pausing as if he were about to reveal the mystical powers of the Holy Grail. “It is something that Grayson, our Marquess of Scoundrels, once confessed to me during a family crisis.”

Devon thumped his head against the wall. “Here we go.”

Griffin shoved his foot into Devon’s back. The gaol had not been built that could house three Boscastle men at the same time.

“‘Love is horrible, Drake,’” Drake quoted. “‘Horrible,’ he said. ‘Don’t let it happen to you.’ And then, in the next breath, I vow, when I had just escaped into the hall, he said, ‘I was wrong. Don’t listen to me. Love is a wonderful thing.’”

“Indeed, it is,” said the mordant voice of Sir Daniel Mallory, to the accompanying rattle of keys in the prison door. “And let it not be said that those of us who sacrifice our lives in the name of justice would ever dare obstruct its path.”