Chapter 2

One week later

Mr. Tristan Kingston did not expect to find a child pissing on his doorstep when he returned home after a sleepless night of work, his fingers stained with ink, and his neck cramped from bending over a desk. Stains and screaming muscles were better, in some ways, than a sleepless night aboard a rocking boat. And better, certainly, than the scent of piss in the warm air from a young boy with one hand propped against the brick of his townhouse.

"Button up and run, or I'll call the constable," Tristan growled.

The boy jumped, fumbled with his fall, then whipped around. "King!"

"Alex?" Tristan chewed a curse to mush and gave it to the world as a groan. His thirteen-year-old half brother's too-lean frame wobbled on his doorstep, his tired blue eyes blazing bright and one half of his dark hair sticking straight up. "Where have you been?" He pulled out his bruised silver pocket watch and cursed. The day had barely begun. "Are you coming or going? Where's your tutor?"

Alex opened his mouth to answer and swayed to the left. Then to the right. Then to the—

Tristan lurched forward with a grunt, catching Alex before he made friends with the hard ground beneath their feet.

"Thanks, King." A hiccup before he fell out of Tristan's hold and against the wall with a thud.

"Get inside." Tristan opened his door and dragged his half brother in, past the puddle on his doorstep. "You're going to clean that up."

"Why?" Alex stumbled over the threshold. "Everything in London smells like piss."

Tristan grunted. Not everything. The docks smelled like the tang of salt and the sour freshness of fish. And his offices on Fleet Street smelled like ink and paper and excitement. He dragged Alex to the sparsely furnished drawing room and lowered him onto a small couch.

And the boy promptly fell off it.

"Hell." Tristan squatted next to him where he sprawled on the floor.

"I'm fine here," Alex said. "Quite cozy."

With a sigh, Tristan sat beside him, leaning against the front of the couch, pulling his legs up before him, and resting his forearms on his knees. "Where have you been? You were supposed to be inside. Sleeping."

Alex pouted, brows drawn together, and his lips pushing out. "Bartie hosted a soiree. For young"—he hiccupped—"peers."

And that's exactly what Alex Kingston, Earl of Avelford was.

Tristan pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut tight. "You're too young for such events. Who is Bartie? How old is he? You're foxed. Hell. How did this happen?"

"Brandy. That's how it happened." A small, ill smile turned his lips up.

"No more brandy, Alex."

The smile disappeared. "It's what all the other fellows do. Drink and smoke cheroots and flirt with Layla. And since I am their p—" He hiccupped. "Their pee"—another hiccup—"peer, I must follow suit."

"Who's Layla?" Tristan almost yelled.

"Actress."

"You're too young for brandy, and you're much too young for actresses."

Alex's hands fluttered to his chest, and he sighed, a long sound with a toxic smell that curled the hairs in Tristan's nose. "I'm in love."

Tristan rolled his eyes. Why must the boy be so bloody enamored with the most fantastical of fairy-tale concepts? Love. Bah. "You're not in love, Alex. Need I remind you how old you are? Again?"

"Need I remind you"—Alex shoved a finger in Tristan's direction and missed by at least a hundred and eighty degrees—"I am an earl."

"Who won't have control of anything until he turns one and twenty. And you'll never get to that august age if you keep this up."

Alex pouted again—lips like a duck, brows like a V, and cheeks like an angry toddler. "You're no fun, King."

"Your shirt is on backwards," Tristan said. "And you've no cravat. Hell, you're barely dressed. This must stop."

"What must stop?" Alex scratched his head and yawned as his arm, too heavy to hold up apparently, flopped back to the floor.

"Self-destruction. You are ruining yourself, Alex. Your health, your reputation. You're shoving it all to the bottom of a bottle. No more. Something must change."

Too much had changed in the last year. Their father dead, the uncertainty of Tristan's guardianship, the watchful and disapproving eye of Alex's aunt, Lady Eldridge, returning home from school and leaving friends behind, taking on a man's title while still being a boy. The boy had been through too much. Or perhaps he was merely doing what boys did when they gained power—experimenting with what he could get away with.

Never having had that sort of power, Tristan couldn't say. He sighed. "Get up, then."

Alex's eyes popped open. So did his mouth. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm sending the servants away for the day. You're to do the cleaning. Starting with the front door."

"I'm an earl!" Petulance in the corners of his words. Fear, too. Uncertainty. When the boy said, "I'm an earl" he didn't really mean it. Didn't feel it.

"You are an earl, Alex, but you are not a man."

"I'm thirteen!"

Tristan grunted, rolled his eyes.

"You drink," his brother said.

"Not to excess."

"You have a mistress."

"Not since Father's death."

Alex groaned. "You should be the earl, not me. It should have been you."

Born to an Italian widow, Tristan was the Earl of Avelford's oldest son. Illegitimate. Born to the earl's wife, Alex was the earl's heir. They were worlds apart but raised under the same roof as brothers by a father who didn't much care for either of them so long as he had enough wine and whisky and women.

"It's what everyone wanted anyway," Alex muttered.

"I never wanted it." He wanted only what he had earned through his own hard work. Success through his own sweat. And he wanted Alex safe and happy. He'd conquered the former, but the latter seemed out of reach. "Your mother certainly never wanted it. If you can't control yourself for my sake, or for yourself, think of your mother." Lady Avelford, Katherine, she'd insisted Tristan call her, had held her son to high standards, and she would be horrified to see what he'd come to. Horrified with Tristan for allowing it. She was not a woman any man liked to disappoint. Stern yet kind, confident and competent. And entirely ignored by her husband. She'd held Tristan to high standards, too, treated him as her own when he'd arrived an orphan on her doorstep. The only woman he'd ever thought of as mother. And her son, his only remaining family, a sot at age thirteen.

Unsupportable.

Tristan strode for the door. "Get up. Get properly dressed. Have some food to sustain you. Then clean your piss off my front step."

"Wait. King?"

The waver in Alex's voice put a waver in Tristan's heart and halted his steps. "Yes?"

"I'm sorry."

He swallowed the lump in his throat and glanced at his brother. "I know. Now do better. Eat a hearty breakfast. Once you're done cleaning the door, have a bath and get some sleep."

"No cleaning?"

Tristan sighed. "Save that for tomorrow."

Then he left, shutting the door softly behind him. He checked his pocket watch. The chain, several years newer than the timepiece, gleamed brighter. The seventh chain he'd had on the thing in fifteen years. They kept snapping. But the watch, a gift from his stepmother, worked as well as ever. He didn't need the watch, though, to tell him the time this morning. His own sagging limbs and muddled brain told him exactly what hour of the clock he stood at—the hour for sleep.

But he'd have to put it off for now. Fear churned in his gut, as if he'd just witnessed a man falling overboard into a storm-tossed sea, and he could see no way to pull him out.

But there might yet be a way to pull Alex out of the darkness he'd flirted with for the last three months. And if there was, Tristan would find it. He'd do anything to save the brother who called him King, the boy who'd never once judged him for his birth. Some would consider not the boy, but the title worth saving, the lands and all those Alex would be responsible for one day.

They saw the wrong thing. Only Alex mattered.

Tristan set off down the street toward answers. He knew just the man to help. A duke too young to have the care of eight children would know exactly what to do about a boy too young to be an earl.

The heat already rose around him as he clipped through the short walk from Wimpole Street toward Grosvenor Square, sweat beading on his brow when the butler ushered him into his friend's large study.

The Duke of Clearford did not look up from his desk where he seemed lost in a large, open ledger, one finger running down the page from top to bottom. "Just a moment, Kingston." He frowned at the ledger once more, then snapped it shut, and leaned back in his chair. "What brings you here so unexpectedly?"

"Young people."

Clearford sighed and sank lower into his shirt points and cravat. "I know about that sort of difficulty. Quite well."

Tristan sat in the chair on the other side of the desk from Clearford. "Which is why I'm here. Tell me, what does a man do when he finds his younger brother pissing on his doorstep?"

The duke's eyes widened. "Plant him a facer." A suggestion made as his thumb rubbed the edge of a dark wooden box on the corner of his desk. A box Tristan knew contained a set of shiny knives. Knife throwing was an unusual hobby for a duke, but one Clearford claimed calmed him. "Foxed and thirteen years old."

Clearford hissed. "We're not speaking hypothetically then?"

"We're speaking of my brother, and if he continues down this path, he's ruined. No one will have him for a son-in-law if he's drink-drowned and pox-riddled before he's twenty." Practical points that didn't cover the heart-shaped reasons he wouldn't say out loud. Alex—his only family. Alex—his whole damn heart.

"I see your problem. On the other hand, I distinctly remember not being too much older than him during our first bout with a bottle."

Tristan remembered, too. They'd been young little devils who'd snuck away from Eton for a few hours of distraction, found a bottle of something with a hellish burn, and drank it all. "That was different. We drank for fun. Not to forget. I must help him. No one was as shocked as I that the old man named me guardian in his will, but he did, and I refuse to botch the job." At the very least, he would be a better guardian than the earl had been a father. Tristan had already ended relations with his mistress, and he only met the fellows for drinks once a week. He still worked, hard enough to break bone and hours enough to drown in. But he had to—to show Alex what real men did and to ensure his hand-built empire didn't flounder.

Alex's accusations rang still in Tristan's ears—you drink, you have a mistress. He stood and walked to the window, watched the passersby for several long, silent moments. "Perhaps I am not the best man to mold Alex. I'm not perfect. I'm not a peer."

"And?"

Tristan swung around with a raised brow. "Says the duke."

Clearford shrugged.

"I'm a bastard."

Clearford stroked his jaw. "True. But you're also the owner of several newspapers, and you've traveled more places than most, brought home tales my sisters read with anticipation. You've made your own fortune and your own name."

Tristan grunted. He'd not done enough. Never enough. When your own birth dug a hole for you, climbing high was harder. He'd barely just pulled himself from the hole. He had more climbing, more building to do.

"My point is," Clearford continued, "that you are, or can be, precisely the man your brother needs as an excellent role model in his life. You just need to be more aggressive about it. Like me."

"Like you?"

Clearford stuck a finger into the ledger. "I've told my sisters in no uncertain terms that they must wed. The marriageable ones, of course."

Tristan swung his attention to the large, ornate fireplace at the side of the room. Above it hung a painting as wide as the mantel, which seemed bigger than some families' dining tables. The painting cluttered with people lounging against one another in a plain drawing room. A man and a woman, a younger man, and eight girls and women of varying ages. The duke's sisters, from golden-blonde angels to chits with raven-wing hair. Their larger-than-life faces seemed to laugh down at Tristan.

"How did they respond?" Tristan asked.

"Not at all well. Much grumbling. It's as if they don't want to be happy."

"Or don't want to marry."

"It should be the same thing for women. It will be the same thing with this." He stabbed his finger into the ledger again.

"Your account books?"

"My guide. To courtship."

"Hell, Clearford, I thought you were jesting when you were rambling on about that at Freddy's last week." The duke had spent the entire two hours they'd slumped on wooden benches in the coffeeshop going on about his great project.

"Not a jest. Brilliance. After years of watching an army of suitors fail to win my sisters, I have discovered the key to a successful courtship. If those nodcock suitors would listen to me, they'd be wed in no time at all, and I'd have fewer sisters to marry off." Clearford scratched his jaw and studied Tristan. "You know, marriage might be the answer for you, too."

"I don't see how."

"It would provide stability for your brother. His parents are dead, his guardian is always working. He needs someone at home to keep an eye on him, to provide a… maternal influence."

"No. I know what you're hinting at with your maternal influence and, just so I am quite clear, no."

Clearford stood and strode with confident steps toward the painting of his sisters. "Tell me you've not thought of marriage. You just bought a home and land north of London. A man like you doesn't buy a country estate if he's not thinking even a little bit about taking a wife."

He couldn't deny it. A home had always been a dream. When he'd bought the house, he'd thought of some lady, gentle and bright but faceless at his side. But she'd dissipated. Nothing more than the idea of home—a dream, a lovely fairy tale he'd likely never achieve. The one thing beyond his reach he wanted more than anything else.

His fingers wrapped around the edge of the windowsill, the hard wood biting into his calloused fingers.

"Marriage is the answer, Kingston." Excitement buzzed in Clearford's voice.

And suspicion buzzed in Tristan. "Why do you care?"

"Eight sisters. Five of marriageable age. None married. And an eligible bachelor standing before me."

Tristan laughed. "Now you jest. You can't seriously be proposing that a bastard marry one of your sisters." He would not shy from the reality of who he was. He would not let others deny it, either. No bits of him could be erased. "Look at me. I just came here from working all night at the paper. I've lost my gloves. I've not bathed. Every inch of me is crumpled. I'm not a polished, aristocratic suitor. I have no social connections. I do not attend balls. What family I have other than my brother won't even acknowledge me."

"Eight sisters, man. Do you think little things like illegitimacy and wrinkled clothes will keep me from marrying one of them off to an otherwise upstanding man? Hardly. Do you think I sneer at a lack of social connections?" He snorted. "What need do have you of them when I have so many? I know you, Tristan. I've bloodied fellows' noses for you, and you've done the same for me. If it were up to me, I'd call one of my sisters in this very moment and proclaim her yours. But it's not up to me."

"It's up to …" Tristan held his palms open and up on his thighs, waiting.

Clearford closed his eyes. "Them. It's up to them, my friend." His eyes opened with an almost audible pop. "I promised my mother I'd let them choose their own matches, and—" He swept back toward Tristan, grasping the back of a chair and dragging it with him. He stopped close and straddled it, sitting with the quickness of a cat pouncing upon its prey. "A deathbed promise is not to be ignored. They've met the eligible peers, and they've rejected the eligible peers. It's time to try another sort of gentleman entirely."

"But why in hell would they choose me?" He'd always thought to take a wife from the merchant class, a woman with a father who valued the successes of his career and the contents of his pockets over the uncontrollable circumstances of his birth.

"Because of that." Clearford pointed toward the ledger—no, the guide—on his desk.

Tristan shook his head. "No. It wouldn't work."

"How do you know? Have you tried this strategy yet?"

"Hell. I'm an experiment, aren't I? You want to see if your methods will work for the most hopeless of suitors."

"If you don't like it, if you don't want my help, you may leave. I'll see you at Freddy's on Friday? I hear there's a new coffee. I'm anxious to try it." Clearford turned his back.

Tristan locked a curse behind clenched teeth. He'd do anything to help Alex, try any goddamn scheme. Even if…

"You're using me," Tristan said. "You see a desperate man before you and call him a means to your own ends."

"I won't deny it."

"Will you marry to show your own sisters the way, then?"

"I intend to, yes. Marriage is on my to-do list."

"Romantic."

"Romance has little to do with it, Kingston. Courtship is a system, and if properly implemented, it results in the maximum happiness of both parties."

Was Clearford right? Likely. Everyone he'd ever known who'd married or procreated for passionate purposes, including love, had botched it in the end, populated the world with more misery and hardship than love and happiness. As much as he'd like love to be more than a fairy tale…

It wasn't.

"Very well," Tristan said. "I'll play your little courtship game."

Clearford rested his arms along the back of the chair. "Excellent. Though it's not a game. It's a system. Based on countless hours of observation. Now, let us begin. First"—Clearford waved an arm to the portrait above them—"which one?"

His friend seemed to be asking him to pick a sister. Seemed wrong. Tristan shook the feeling away and studied the faces of the five eldest. He knew exactly which one. "Lady Andromeda." She had kind eyes, and though the painting showed brown hair and green eyes, it lied. The truth of her was much more shiftable. Her hair changed with the light, and her eyes bounced from green to blue with the gown she wore. A bit like the sea, she was, like the London news, too—one never knew what would come next.

They'd spoken twice, and each time, she'd made him smile when he'd had no intention of doing so. She'd made him want to pull a chair closer to her and just… be there. In the same space. He'd not pulled out his watch even once. He'd had the same fairy feeling he'd had when he'd bought his country house—that time could slow, and that he welcomed it.

"Yes, Lady Andromeda," he said.

The duke's brow furrowed. "No. Not her."

"You told me to choose," Tristan growled. "I chose."

"Yes, but you mustn't choose wrong. That's the first mistake the suitors made. None of them knew quite which of my sisters to choose. I'm not sure they cared. But if you wish to succeed, you must know what you need and choose the woman who can provide that."

Tristan scratched the back of his neck. "Makes sense."

"Of course it does. Now, what do you need?"

"A woman who can marry me soon. Within the month. She needs to be"—he rolled his hand in the air—"motherly. For Alex. I suppose she should be a proper sort of lady who knows how to behave in any given situation. A woman who wants a family." He flashed a glance at the painting again. Lady Andromeda didn't smile, but her eyes danced. How had the painter done that? "Why is Lady Andromeda the wrong choice, by the way?"

"She's promised to another. Or she will be."

"I thought you said none of your sisters are engaged."

"I said none was married. Annie's been engaged for years. I'm not convinced it's going to happen. It's all quite mysterious, and if he doesn't show his face soon, I'll have to refuse his suit. I've only allowed it because Annie seems so set on having him."

"You've never met him?"

"A failing, I know. The man lives in Cornwall. Writes to her faithfully, as she does to him. But I'll not approve an actual marriage until I meet the man first. But until I figure out what's going on, consider her engaged. You need a lady like Charlotte. She's a bit on the shelf, I admit, at six and twenty. But she's lovely. And so proper not a hair on her head ever risks stepping out of line. Her gown is never wrinkled. Her face never creased in a frown. She's solid and dependable as they come, and as the oldest of eight girls, she has experience keeping children in line."

"A paragon."

"Just what you need to help a young lordling shape up. And my guide will help you court her."

Tristan studied the painting. Lady Charlotte was indeed lovely—smooth blonde curls, clear blue eyes, a fine figure—and if she proved everything Clearford said, well, she'd be perfect.

"When do we start? I don't have time to waste."

"That's the spirit. Lesson number one—never woo the wrong lady. We've already mastered that."

"And lesson number two?"

"Meet your future wife with a smile. It's horrifying how many fools show up with flowers held under gloomy faces." The duke frowned. "But at least their hair is neat. Bloody hell, man." He waved his fingers at Tristan's head. "Do something with that mess or Lottie will say no quicker than a young buck running from a matchmaking mama."

"Or a matchmaking duke," Tristan grumbled. "I'm to meet with her now?"

Clearford gave a sharp laugh. "I've got five marriageable sisters." Apparently, he needed only that explanation, for he disappeared into the hallway, ordering Tristan to stay put.

Tristan found the mirror in the corner of the room and tamed his locks as much as they conceded to taming. Meet Lady Charlotte with a smile. He could do that. He found the book on Clearford's desk. A well-worn spine and the cover splattered with dots of ink. He opened it to the first page. A list, nothing more, and it read:

Lesson One:

Be direct. No kissing.

Movement in the doorway.

Tristan slammed the book closed.

Clearford grinned from the doorway. "Lottie's on her way. I'll make myself scarce."

"You appear elated."

"I am delighted to help a friend, is all."

"You're delighted to soon be free of one sister."

The duke's grin widened, and he disappeared down the hall once more.

Tristan took a heavy breath. What had the guide said? Be direct. No kissing. He could do that. He did not want romance, after all. He wanted a lady to tame Alex's wild grief, a wife to add a bit of respectable domesticity to his life. He needed an exchange. Nothing more.