Page 125 of Rules for a Bastard Lord
“Not the one! Not the smallest stone on the right!” That last word ended on a wail.
The stone she’d constantly fondled. Yes, he’d guessed that one had been real. Meanwhile, he was all too conscious of the time ticking away. He needed to get the drink to Jeremy. “Well, now we’ve visited. Nice to see you again, but I must run. Good-bye.”
“No!” Dicky pushed to his feet, daring to come forward, though his nose wrinkled at the smell. “Look at her, Bram. She’s miserable. I could have done it, you know. I could have lived there with the livestock and the humiliation, but Clary is more refined than that. She can’t do it. We need to find another solution.”
Another solution. As if answers fell like rain from the sky. After all the things he’d already done for them! “You cheated Lord Sturman. He doesn’t forgive that easily.”
“But the money’s all gone!” wailed Dicky, which set Clarissa into another round of loud tears. “Just a few weeks, and it’s all gone!”
As if that would make Sturman go easier on them. Bloody hell. Nothing short of a miracle would make that man forgive Dicky. A miracle…
No.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
The more he denied the thought, the more it pressed into his brain. He was never going to be rid of these two if he didn’t solve their problem. If he didn’t somehow get them back intocharity with Sturman, and then, the rest of theton.These two were society’s creatures, and they would plague Bram until they returned to an environment where they belonged.
But the potions were his way of making good with Jeremy. They were his way of creating something positive out of this whole fiasco.
But there was Clarissa sobbing in his parlor and Dicky looking miserable. And now his landlady was up, shuffling into the room with her eyes narrowed and her nose wrinkled.
“What’s to do, ’ere?” she asked. “And what is that awful smell?”
Bram gave up.
There was only one solution that would get Dicky and Clarissa out of his life. One solution that gave them—and him—a way out.
He apologized to his landlady and told Dicky and Clarissa not to move until after he’d cleaned up. And once the smell was mostly gone, he did what he always did. The hard thing. The action that the spoiled brats of society would never consider.
He took himself, Dicky and Clarissa, and the potion to see Lord Sturman.
Chapter Twenty-Five
If the world makes you hard, you will see, feel, and be hard. How then will you ever knowsoftness?
“What happened?” Bluebellasked two nights later. He was stretched out on her bed, idly stroking her body. He didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to bring the outside world into his experience of her silky skin, the spiced scent of her arousal, or the languid way she coiled against him.
He would take her a second time tonight, he realized, and he didn’t feel guilty about that. He was too pleased with her and the knowledge that Clarissa and Dicky were out of his life for good.
“Bram,” she said as she tugged on his ear. “Tell me.”
“I had them tell their tale,” he said. “Sturman isn’t a bad man, and Dicky knows how to spin a tale of remorse.”
“Did they look pitiful?”
“It rained on the way there, so the damned papier–mâché pig was a sodden, sticky mess.”
“Were the pound notes inside?”
“All three of them. Sturman let them keep it because he didn’t want to touch ’em.”
“The notes or Lord Linsel and his wife?”
“Either.”
She chuckled, and he paused to watch the way her breasts bobbed with the movement. “But what happened?”
“Sturman agreed to forgive them the swindle.”
