Scoundrel (Lost Lords of Radcliffe Book 4) Read Online Free PDF Page B

them to their own devices?”
    “The servants are competent. I’m sure they’re fine.”
    “What an oaf you are. I’m glad your mother can’t see how you turned out.”
    “Don’t drag my poor mother into it. I’m certain if she’d lived, she’d have had a mellowing influence.”
    “I doubt it,” Ralston countered. “I’ve never met anyone more dissolute or corrupt than you.”
    “Spoken like the vicar’s son you’ve always been.”
    “I won’t apologize for my father being a minister of the Gospel.”
    “And you shouldn’t.”
    “My father aside, I’m an upstanding person. If my choice is between morality and vice, I choose morality.”
    “I have more fun than you.”
    “I’ll get into Heaven, and you won’t.”
    “Yes, but I won’t mind because I’ll be reveling in Hell, and all the loose, sinful girls will be reveling with me.”
    Ralston rolled his eyes, and Chase laughed, humored as he always was by Ralston and his prim views.
    Chase was a very elderly thirty-two and Ralston a decade younger. Ralston had been raised in a parsonage, the fifth of eight boys, so he’d never had any prospects, and there’d been no money available for him to wed or improve himself. It was the reason he’d been working as a clerk to the grain merchant, Mr. Fitzwilliam.
    His upbringing had been so far removed from Chase’s that, when they chatted about any topic, Chase felt Ralston was another species of human being entirely.
    He was like a happy puppy, like an eager little brother, who was constantly optimistic and enthusiastic. He hadn’t been slapped alongside the head over and over as Chase had been slapped. He hadn’t had to learn the hard lessons that Chase had had to learn.
    Even being attacked by pirates hadn’t clouded his sunny disposition. He was so bloody hopeful and positive. He was ceaselessly certain that something good was about to transpire, that better times were just around the corner, and Chase could never get him to admit that he existed in a fantasy world.
    In Chase’s opinion, the worst that could happen usually did.
    His father had been a French count, his mother the man’s favorite mistress. They might have married except that his father had already been married. His wife came from a typical aristocratic family, and they had several children together, but they’d hated each other and lived apart.
    When the Terror began in Paris, his father and mother had fled to England. Chase had been five, his sister Amelia a baby.
    Not long after that, his parents had had the audacity to die. He and Amelia had been separated and sent to boarding schools. They grew up as orphans and rarely saw each other.
    His French relatives had paid for his education, so in that regard he was fortunate. They could have simply tossed him into the streets to starve. But he’d never received a single farthing of support beyond his tuition. He’d never inherited a single item from his father’s vast estates, had never been given a penny to establish himself as an adult in London.
    He was a cad and a bounder, and he never pretended he wasn’t. He relentlessly scrimped and scrounged for funds, and he’d discovered every despicable trick in order to smooth his path to fiscal solvency. He gambled extensively—and cheated of course. He deceived and swindled and mooched and defrauded. He was particularly adept at flirting with older matrons, at convincing them to furnish him with money or shelter or any other boon he was seeking.
    He wasn’t proud of his conduct, but he’d never tried to behave any better. He had a knack for dishonesty and was a natural confidence artist.
    Poor Ralston, dear boy that he was, was aware that Chase had wicked impulses, but he didn’t know the half of it, and Chase wasn’t about to enlighten him. Their sojourn in the Mediterranean, where they’d clung to a floating log for days, had bonded them more closely than any two people could ever be.
    Ralston thought Chase was heroic and