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She could almost picture Nicholas flying off the handle if she told him she had not only kissed his best friend, but that Ronan had all but offered her an affair.
         But , perhaps she could take advantage of the situation in some other way. For instance, by finding out more about the man whose kiss had shocked and titillated her in ways that still made her shiver when she recalled them.
         “You and Mr. Riley have been friends for as long as I have ever known you,” Lucinda said and prayed she did not sound overly interested.
         Nicholas nodded. “Indeed. He is a good friend, the best I have had in my life.” He looked at her with a frown. “Aside from my brother, of course.”
         Lucinda smiled in an attempt to show him that his statement had not hurt her. And was surprised that it did not. Her grief had once made it almost impossible for her to be in the same room as Nicholas, with his face just like Anthony’s. Even when that terrible time had passed, she still flinched whenever someone mentioned her late husband, for good or for ill. But now even that pain was beginning to fade. She wasn’t sure whether to rejoice that grief no longer overwhelmed her, or to miss that intense pain that signaled how close to Anthony she still felt.
         “Rage even helped me,” Jane said with a sad smile. “And I will appreciate that for all my life.”
         “What kind of a man is he?” Lucinda asked, drawn again to thoughts of Ronan.
         Nicholas took a bite of his sandwich and as he chewed, he seemed to contemplate the question. “A complicated one, that is for certain. He was born into poverty in Ireland, but after his mother died he was moved to London and taken in by servants of the Duke of Nordcross.”
         “Relatives?” Lucinda asked, setting her plate aside. Her hunger was for information, not food.
         Nicholas shrugged. “I don’t think so. He didn’t talk about that time much and I’ve never pried.”
         “Whoever they were, they must have had a good relationship with the Duke,” Jane added. “Because for a while Rage was educated in the same schoolroom as the Duke’s own children. He wasn’t sent to Eaton with them, of course, but he was put into another school, Greenlake. That is how he became so well-spoken and educated, at least in worldly matters, though he has never been comfortable with social ones.”
         Lucinda blinked. It was odd, she had never really thought of how an underground boxer with a rough past seemed so well-versed and intelligent. That was just Ronan, a man who was part of a world she didn’t understand in the least. But in truth, he was an odd dichotomy of both wild and tamed.
         “If he was so well educated, how in the world did he end up fighting in the underground?” she asked. “Was it a situation like your own, Nicholas? A decision to break with the world he knew?”
         Nicholas shook his head. “No. I think he never was comfortable in that world of the higher class. He certainly isn’t now. He ran away from his school when he was fifteen and took to the streets for a while. Luckily he’d had to fight his way out of trouble both in the nursery at the Duke’s home and later in his school, so when Easton Hathaway saw him beating the piss out of a boy twice his size, he saw a world of potential. He took Rage in and trained him to fight.”
         “Easton Hathaway,” Lucinda said. “A man from the underground?”
         Nicholas nodded and she was surprised at how much softer his expression became. There was true affection there. Something that made him look all the more like his brother, who had never had the hard quality that Nicholas did.
         “Yes. Hathaway arranged the fights and trained the fighters. He was the reason Rage survived and how the two of us met. Hathaway died a few years ago, but his wife Ruby still runs his pub down by the docks in London. They were hard