Read Online This Rake of Mine by Elizabeth Boyle - Free Book Online Page B

challenge for some remark or comment or insult he'd made during the course of the last few days.
    Rap! Rap! Rap!
continued the insistent caller, pounding on the door as if they were trying to escape the gates of hell.
    Gads, at this rate they'd break the demmed thing in, and he could no more afford the door than he could the rent on this rat-infested disgrace of a flat.
    "What do you want?" he growled, still lying atop his bed and unwilling to test his legs while the room spun at such an unholy rate.
    "Get up, you no-account rascal, or I shall give this address to your brother."
    The voice belonged to only one person, but it was enough to rouse Jack so abruptly that he nearly emptied his accounts into the bucket beside the bed.
    Dear Lord, not Aunt Josephine!
    Struggling up from his bed, he made his way to the door. Since he hadn't bothered to remove his clothes when he'd toppled into bed, he was, for all intents and purposes, still decent.
    If you could use that word to describe Jack.
    Ruinous Jack. Drunken nit. That wastrel Tremont.
    He opened the door and, without even waiting for an invitation, she barged in.
    He must have gone pale, for the indomitable old girl nudged the bucket over toward him and turned her back on him while he threw up.
    When he'd finished, she tossed a towel at him. "Some greeting this," she said, taking the one good chair in the room and sitting.
    "Aunt Josephine, what are you—"
    "Silence, you fool," she said, cutting him off.
    Jack clamped his lips shut. From anyone else, he might have ignored such an order, dared to defy them, but this was Lady Josephine Tremont, and he doubted even the king would naysay her.
    "You are a disgrace," she declared.
    Leave it to his great-aunt to get right to the point.
    "Yes, but a happy one," he muttered.
    She snorted and looked about the room with a measure of disgust. "Seems I've arrived in time. You appear to be alive."
    "Much to Parkerton's dismay."
    This time she laughed. Though it was more of a cackle. "Your brother is a stiff-rumped fool. 'T'would give him apoplexy to see you thusly."
    "Not such a bad idea," he conceded, shoving aside the bucket and propping himself up against the edge of his bed.
    To be honest, he didn't think he could stand, for the room was still spinning like the very devil. "Aunt Josephine, what do you want?"
    "It is about time you took your place in the family."
    "Parkerton will never stand for it," he told her.
    "Still holding that Mabberly chit's ruination over you, is he?"
    Jack shrugged. All Society held him responsible for Miss Miranda Mabberly's disgrace and the calamity that had followed. They hadn't cared much for the
cit'
s daughter beforehand, even when she'd become engaged to the Earl of Oxley. But all it had taken had been one mistaken kiss on Jack's part to propel Miss Mabberly into a state of disgrace and make himself a pariah.
    "Yes, well, all that nonsense is in the past," his aunt was saying. "Time you take your rightful place."
    "I don't think the
ton
will be all that welcoming." After the debacle with Miss Mabberly, Jack's brother, the Duke of Parkerton, had cut him off without a farthing. He'd then managed to insult and offend every single one of his friends, until even his best friend, Alexander Denford, Baron Sedgwick, had given him the cut direct. Not that Jack hadn't deserved it. He'd made a complete cake of everything, and now here was Aunt Josephine droning on and on about duty and "being a Tremont."
    "You've got the wrong man," he muttered, wondering if this bad dream was ever going to end.
    "Wrong man? Rubbish. I'll make a man of you, a Tremont of you, if it is the last thing I do."
    Those words echoed in his head as he once again passed back into a dark, dreamless sleep. One that offered no happy dreams and little respite.
    Until some hours later, when he was roused again.
    Once again, insistent pounding interrupted his sleep.
    "Demmit," he muttered, as he struggled up off the floor. What did his aunt want