Gentleman Wolf (Capital Wolves duet Book 1) Read online

  Lindsay caught the dealer’s eye. “Is there someone who can fetch us some wine?”

  The dealer sent him an apologetic look. “I regret I cannot leave the table, Monsieur, but someone should be along directly to serve you.” He began dealing the next hand.

  Standing, Lindsay laid a hand on Aubrière’s shoulder and, leaning down, murmured, “I need to relieve myself. I’ll find someone to fetch our wine while I’m at it.”

  “Good man,” Aubrière mumbled absently, distracted by his cards.

  Lindsay crossed the gaming room at an unhurried pace. His clothes were too fine for this place and he did not miss the glances—both suspicious and interested—that his appearance attracted. He had begun this evening at the Opera and had dressed accordingly in pale blue brocade and silver lace with his hair powdered and his face rouged. In this second-rate pleasure palace, he stood out like a peacock among pigeons. Or perhaps, he thought—eyeing an ugly fellow with an alarming scar bisecting the left side of his face—vultures.

  It was all Aubrière’s fault they were here. He’d insisted in front of his wife that he adored the Opera, prompting Lindsay to invite him to see Iphigénie en Tauride. But after barely half an hour of the performance, the man had begun begging Lindsay to accompany him to the Perle Noir. Admittedly, Lindsay had not entirely believed that his claimed passion for music was genuine. Nevertheless, he’d thought Aubrière might at least sit through most of the performance before suggesting alternative entertainment. And he certainly hadn’t been expecting to have to take a carriage trip across the river to this place with its shabby furnishings and well-used whores.

  Halfway across the room, and without the slightest hitch in his stride, Lindsay adjusted his coat, to better display to the patrons currently eyeing him the small sword that lay aside his hip. Not that he actually needed a weapon to deal with any trouble that came his way, but it was a convenient way of making his point, and he had the satisfaction of noting a number of heads turning back to their cards in response... though not the scarred gentleman’s, admittedly.

  The gaming room gave onto a narrow, poorly lit corridor, at the end of which stood a row of piss pots. Lindsay headed for them, and quickly relieved himself, careful to avoid splashing his new pale blue damask shoes. He would not have worn them had he known he would end up in the Perle Noir, and now he was annoyed at himself for not considering that possibility. He really ought to have anticipated this from an oaf like Aubrière.

  Ah well, never mind. His manservant, Wynne, was quite the magician when it came to getting even the stubbornest stains out of the most delicate fabrics. As for Aubrière, tonight would certainly be long and excessively dull, but by the end of it, Lindsay would have secured the valuable monopoly that Philippe Colbert wanted for his paper mill and that Marguerite had promised to him. Precisely why she had promised such a boon, Lindsay didn’t know, only that she had, and so it fell to him to make it so. That was his role. To implement Marguerite’s decisions.

  Which, in this case, meant keeping the odious Aubrière happy.

  As Lindsay fastened his breeches, he heard the approach of soft footfalls behind him, and a new scent bloomed in the cold air, sour and sharp. Turning around, Lindsay was unsurprised to find himself facing the scarred fellow who had been watching him in the gaming room. The man stood quite close, little more than an arm’s length away, effectively blocking the corridor.

  “Good evening,” Lindsay said pleasantly. “May I help you?”

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” the scarred man snarled. “You’re not welcome here.”

  Lindsay raised a brow. “Are you the proprietor of this establishment?”

  He got a glare for that. “The fuck I am.”

  “Then I’m afraid it’s not for you to decide whether or not I’m welcome,” Lindsay replied, smiling ruefully.

  Undaunted, the man stepped closer. “I don’t like your face,” he bit out. He flexed his hands from fists to open and back to fists, making his knuckles crack ominously.

  “No?” Lindsay asked, eyes wide. “Don’t you find me pretty?” He made a moue of his painted lips and gave the thug a lascivious wink.

  “You’re a fucking molly,” the man hissed. “I knew it as soon as I saw you. Well, when I’m done with you, your face won’t be so pretty.”

  Lindsay leaned forward and whispered, “I don’t mean to be rude but has anyone ever told you what an unutterable bore you are?”

  With a snarl of fury, the man shot out a hand, grasping Lindsay by his linen neckcloth and pulling him so close Lindsay could smell the brandy and garlic on his breath.

  Lindsay chuckled. “Such a flirt!” he teased. “Do I get a kiss?”

  “A fucking kiss?” The man drew back his arm, his hand tightening into a fist an instant before he let it fly towards Lindsay’s face.

  The punch didn’t land.

  Lindsay’s hand snapped up, intercepting the blow, his fingers closing round the scarred man’s meaty paw.

  The man’s eyes went wide, then white, and he gave a stifled scream that seemed to die in his throat. The bones in his hand cracked audibly as Lindsay slowly, mercilessly, tightened his grip, until, with a strangled cry of agony, he dropped to his knees on the piss-wet floor.

  “Now,” Lindsay said softly, as he watched the man writhing at his feet, gasping noiselessly now, the whites of his eyes flashing in the gloom. “Let’s have a little talk about good manners, shall we?”

  WHEN LINDSAY RETURNED to the gaming room some time later—having prevailed upon the Madame who ran the house to have his unconscious would-be-attacker removed—it was to discover that Aubrière had already left. According to the dealer with the fine arse, Aubrière had overheard some fellows joking about the fact that Lindsay was about to be accosted at the piss pots, and instead of going to his aid, had decided that discretion was the better part of valour. In short, Aubrière had made off in his carriage and abandoned Lindsay to his fate.

  The toad.

  It really was turning out to be a most unsuccessful evening. All that effort to avoid getting piss on his shoes only to end up with blood spatters instead, and now Aubrière gone and the carriage with him.

  Gritting his teeth, Lindsay set off for home on foot, displaying his sword and exuding wolfish aggression to dissuade any cutpurses from approaching him. By the time he finally came upon a fiacre, he was thoroughly bad-tempered and his shoes were quite ruined, saturated with filth from the street.

  The fiacre delivered him back to the house he shared with Marguerite and Francis, off the Place Louis XV. He paid the driver and turned to mount the steps to find the front door was already open. Blaireau, Marguerite’s devoted majordome, stood in the doorway, the candle he held illuminating his stooped frame. These last few years, Blaireau had noticeably aged. His shock of hair, so recently a distinguished iron grey, was now pure white and his broad shoulders had rounded, bowing his back. Standing on the street, looking up at his old friend, Lindsay was struck by a familiar melancholy pang. Wolves grew attached to the humans they allowed into their lives, grieving them sorely when they passed. Lindsay had known Blaireau since he was a filthy street child, brought home by Marguerite after he tried to steal her bracelet. Now Blaireau was an old man, but in some way, he would always be that child to Lindsay.

  Lindsay mounted the steps. “I’m back,” he said, smiling, when he reached the top.

  The majordome smiled, his expression fond. At some point, perhaps twenty, or even thirty years ago, he had begun to adopt a fatherly manner towards Lindsay, inverting their old relationship and saddening Lindsay in some way that was difficult to put into words.

  “A bit earlier than expected,” Blaireau observed, standing aside.

  “My evening did not turn out quite as planned,” Lindsay admitted as he entered the house. He paused next to the old man for a moment, setting his hand on his shoulder and squeezing it lightly. “Is Madame in her study?”

  “Yes,” Blaireau said. “Go o
n up. I’ll bring you some wine.”

  “Thank you,” Lindsay replied. “I need it after the night I’ve had.”

  Behind him, Blaireau chuckled.

  He took the stairs to Marguerite’s study two at a time, gave the door a token rap and strolled in.

  Marguerite glanced up from her ledger. She was sitting at her desk in her nightgown and a loose blue wrapper, mahogany hair tumbling about her shoulders, sloe eyes gleaming in the candlelight. “Back already?” she asked, one eyebrow raised.

  Lindsay crossed the room and bent over her, nuzzling affectionately into the side of her neck and inhaling her familiar violet scent. Letting her serene presence soothe his prickled edges.

  “You don’t seem very glad to see me,” he mumbled into her hair.

  Marguerite gave a soft laugh, reaching back to lightly stroke his cheek. “I am glad—I’ve got something I want to talk to you about as it happens—but I’m also wondering why you’re back so early. What happened with Aubrière?”

  Lindsay straightened and sighed. “It was a bloody disaster.”

  He expected her to begin an interrogation right then but Marguerite didn’t even blink. “Go and warm yourself by the fire while I finish this,” she said, waving him off. “Then you can tell me all about it.”

  Lindsay obediently settled into his favourite sofa by the fire while Marguerite turned her attention back to the ledger, dipping her quill in the ink pot.

  He watched her work and it was oddly soothing, listening to the scratch of her nib on the paper and her mutterings as she calculated columns of figures. As always, the calm, subtle power she exuded settled him, and by the time Blaireau arrived with the wine he was feeling less frayed about the edges.

  “Aren’t you joining us?” Lindsay asked the majordome, noting there were only two glasses on the tray.

  “Not tonight,” Blaireau replied, filling both glasses from the decanter. “Madame’s got something to talk to you about.”

  “So she says,” Lindsay agreed accepting one of the glasses, “but so far she’s been too busy with her totting-up to tell me.”

  “I’m nearly finished,” Marguerite said without looking up. “You have the patience of an infant.”

  Blaireau set Marguerite’s wine at her elbow, then tucked his tray under his arm, saying, “I’ll leave you two to your squabbling.” He had that fond, fatherly note in his voice that made Lindsay happy and sad at the same time, his heart twisting in his chest with pained affection.

  Lindsay watched the old man slowly leave the room, then sat for a while longer, sipping his wine and contemplating his ruined shoes as Marguerite completed her task. Finally, she set down her quill and leaned back in her chair, lifting her wineglass.

  “So, tell me how it went with Aubrière.”

  “Badly,” he said, making a face, and proceeded to tell her of the evening’s events.

  He expected her to be exasperated by his lack of progress, but when he’d finished his tale—and she’d stopped laughing—she only said, “Ah well. We’ve waited this long, another week or two will make no difference now.”

  Lindsay stared at her in disbelief. “I beg your pardon?” he said. “Did you not, only yesterday, tell me that I’d taken far too long over this already?”

  Marguerite shrugged in that negligent Gallic way Lindsay secretly admired, making her wrapper slide off one shoulder to reveal a slice of perfect, creamy skin.

  “Priorities change. Something more important has arisen that I need you to deal with for me. Francis can handle Aubrière.”

  Lindsay gave a choked laugh. “Did you hear any of what I just said? Can you imagine Francis entertaining Aubrière at the Perle Noir?”

  Marguerite gave him a quelling look. “Francis will deal with him as Francis does. His methods are different from yours.”

  “Francis disapproves of bribery,” Lindsay reminded her baldly. “That’s why you leave that stuff to me. He’ll insist on going through the official channels and you’ll end up paying out a damned sight more than you wanted to.”

  “Such is life,” she said with another of those shrugs. “It can’t be helped.”

  Lindsay’s eyebrows rose. If there was one thing he knew about his Marguerite, it was that she did not like to part with gold. Something was going on—this was entirely too placid a reaction.

  Carefully he said, watching her, “What’s this important thing you need me to deal with, Mim?”

  She glared at him. “Don’t call me that ridiculous name. It’s bad enough that Francis uses it.”

  “Fine. I’ll stop calling you Mim if you tell me what this is about.”

  She hesitated for a moment then said simply, “I want you to go to Scotland.”

  Lindsay stilled. The thought of his birthplace had his stomach hollowing out and his mouth drying up, pictures of Duncan MacCormaic’s Keep and of Duncan himself flooding Lindsay’s mind. Duncan’s cruel smile and those lazily beckoning fingers.

  “Come, cur...”

  “MacCormaic is still in Spain,” Marguerite said, correctly guessing his thoughts. “But we believe he’s on his way to Paris. If that’s right, he will likely arrive by the end of the month.” Her gaze was unwavering. “I want you well out of the way before then. You will be safer in Scotland for now and I have business for you there, in Edinburgh.”

  Lindsay swallowed, hard. “He’s coming after me again then.”

  Marguerite sighed. “Yes.” She paused then added gently, “He will probably never stop trying to get you back—you really must accustom yourself to that.”

  She was right, but it had been more than a decade since Lindsay had last had to run from Duncan, and somehow he could not stop the persistent seeds of hope from germinating each time he had some reprieve.

  “Why won’t he just give up?” he said despairingly.

  “Because he can’t replace you,” Marguerite replied flatly. “He cannot summon the Urge.”

  The Urge. What a word for that murderous, base instinct.

  It was only when a wolf delivering a death bite was consumed by the Urge that a human could be changed to a wolf.

  Some said the Urge was a compulsion, an irresistible force that possessed the wolf entirely so that they weren’t in their right mind when they gave the transformative bite. Others insisted it was no more than a fierce temptation—something that could be resisted, albeit with great difficulty. Very few wolves knew the truth of the matter—to experience the Urge was rare. Other than Duncan, the only wolf Lindsay knew who had been possessed by it was Francis.

  After all, it was Francis who had transformed Duncan MacCormaic.

  Francis insisted that the Urge that had consumed him had been provoked not by his reaction to Duncan but by his devotion to Marguerite. At the time, she’d been distraught over the recent disappearance of her beloved maker and foster-mother, Alys. Duncan had claimed he could find Alys—a claim that had turned out to be a lie—and had demanded to be transformed before he would help her. Desperate, Marguerite had agreed but had been unable to summon the Urge herself. Francis said it was her distress that had sparked the Urge in him.

  Lindsay’s transformation had been similar in that he had not been the inspiration for the Urge that had possessed Duncan. It had been Lindsay’s misfortune to resemble Francis—Duncan’s maker and the one man that Duncan longed to control, but never could.

  Back then, Lindsay had been a soldier in the Covenanter army. When he’d been captured by Duncan’s men, he’d thought he was being taken to a Royalist stronghold to be interrogated. Although he’d been as afraid as any man reasonably would be in such circumstances, he’d nevertheless had hopes of his eventual release.

  That hope had quickly died when he’d met the leader of his captors.

  The Keep they’d taken him to had been dark and gloomy and remote. Mercer, the leader of the group that had captured him had dragged him into a great echoing hall by his manacled wrists.

  At first, Lindsay had thought the hall
was empty. Then he’d caught a flicker of movement from one shadowy corner—two rising figures. A pair of mastiffs, one on either side of a high-backed chair of carved black wood. Upon that chair had sat Duncan MacCormaic, his handsome profile caressed by the glow of the great fire. The mastiffs had begun to growl, low in their throats, but when Duncan had glanced at them, they’d fallen to their bellies, their growls transforming to submissive whines.

  “What have you brought me, Mercer?” Duncan had said as Mercer had dragged a stumbling, exhausted Lindsay towards him. A small, cruel smile had played about Duncan’s mouth, a smile that froze when Mercer grabbed a fistful of Lindsay’s hair and dragged back his head to allow Duncan to see him properly.

  He’d risen from his chair then, moving silently towards them, light and graceful on his feet for such a big man. Reaching out, he’d stroked Lindsay’s cheek with impossible tenderness.

  “My God, he’s the Eunuch’s very image,” he’d whispered, almost reverently. Then, looking at Mercer, he’d grinned wildly. “I shall greatly enjoy playing with this one, Mercer. You have done very well.”

  The Eunuch. Duncan’s name for Francis, the one man who could bend Duncan to his will. The man he desired above all others but who recoiled from his very touch. Who would always reject Duncan... but could not bring himself to harm him.

  That first night, Duncan had visited all his frustrated desire for Francis upon Lindsay’s body, acting out his fantasies of what he wanted to do to his maker. The fact that Lindsay had cursed and fought him, far longer than he should have done, had only made it sweeter for Duncan. So sweet that Duncan had become consumed by the Urge, drunk on the heady prospect of acting out those fantasies again. And again, and again.