A Gentleman’s Position(56)
He set his shoulders. “I need your assistance quite desperately. I would not have called on you otherwise. You have every reason not to work for me, and this is not how I wanted to meet you again or what I should have wished to discuss. I should have far preferred to come to you for your sake alone, certainly not to make demands, but there is too much at stake. I must put Ash’s and Mason’s lives before my—our—affairs, and I hope to God you will find yourself able to do the same.”
David still wasn’t moving, his silence unnerving. Richard sighed. “I am well aware I have no right to expect your help, but you cannot solve all of my problems for years and then expect me not to run to you in a crisis.”
“I was run to you,” David pointed out. “I don’t work for you, your lordship, and you are asking a very great deal of me, and we did not part on good terms. You told Mr. Norreys to offer me anything.”
“I did.”
“Anything,” David repeated. “What does that mean? Money from your overflowing coffers? Yet another position in your household? To have my way in your bed?” His voice had plenty of feeling in it now, the imperturbable mask cracking at last. “What are you proposing to pay me with this time?”
“Hell and the devil. I did not mean—”
“And yet, you did,” David said. “Again. I will not be bought, I will not be bribed, and I will not return to serve where my service is despised.”
“I did not offer to buy you. I offered to pay you. What in hell’s name should I have done? I could hardly ask your help as a friend given the way we parted, still less as a lover. You are insulted that I offered a price, but would you have been less so if I had assumed your time was at my command? For God’s sake, I didn’t know if you would even listen to my message. Of course I threw all my worldly goods at your feet. I hoped that might convey how much I need you!”
“You need me to work for you,” David said with cold precision. “As you have said, we would both do well to remember our places. I am very aware of mine, your lordship.”
He was not a forgiving man. And Richard knew damned well he had an apology to make. “I have said a number of damn fool things recently. That was one, if not the worst. But as to despising your service—David, I swear to you on my father’s name, it is not true. I did not ever consider your work in that light.”
“Really.”
“In truth? I barely considered it at all.” That got David looking at him, a startled glance. “I took everything you did for me for granted, as my due. All the comforts and the little perfections and the way you made the whole world work for me, and I don’t think I ever quite noticed. You are so good at going unnoticed, you see. And of course our places are different. I am a lord, I should not care to be a servant, and I will not pretend otherwise. I expect I should be an execrable servant, whereas if you were a lord, you would probably be prime minister already. And whatever your station, you would never be fool enough to insult your best and most loyal friend by letting him believe you did not value his work. By not valuing it. I’m sorry, David.”
David was watching him. His face was still and drawn tight with tension.
“I would like to beg your forgiveness,” Richard went on. “I should like to persuade you that I have thought about your words and come to understand them. I should very much like to talk about things again and this time listen to what you tell me. But I don’t think I can afford to do that now, because my friends and I are in bad trouble, worse than any I have known, and the foundations are crumbling under our feet. Will you help, David? Tell me your terms, whatever they may be. Tell me what I must do to have you back at my side, because I have never needed you here more.”
David did not move. “What, precisely, do you want me to do?”
“Make this go away. I assume Julius explained the situation? Retrieve the damned letter, and lift the threat from Ash and Mason.”
“But that won’t be enough,” David said. “Even if you get the letter back, Lord Maltravers will still know. He can still make accusations against Lord Gabriel, and if that spreads, and people start to look…”
That, somehow, had not quite dawned on Richard before. He had been focused on the letter, not the knowledge it held, but of course, David was right. “God rot it. Oh, hell and the devil. We must at the least get the accursed letter back to remove the threat from Mason and Harry, but—my poor Ash. Is there nothing to be done?”
“Oh, of course,” David said with unconscious assurance that took Richard’s breath. “But it would mean pulling Lord Maltravers’s fangs altogether and Mr. Skelton’s with them. That is a large task.”