He had taken that choice away from Octavia. He had threatened her reputation such that she’d had no choice but to marry him to protect what mattered most to her. Not herself, but her family.
Selfish arsehole.
Jasper performed a final turn about the public rooms. He was growing weary. And though he preferred to oversee the hell with an iron rule, his wife was awaiting him. He ought to go to bed. Just a few more tasks to busy himself with before he retired.
He retreated into the private quarters, intent upon seeking out his office, thoughts still whirling and heavy. He settled in at his desk to consult some expenses Lily, who was a dab hand at arithmetic and tallied all their accounts, had left for him.
Somehow, in the course of spending a generous portion of his day with his wife and daughters, Jasper had made an astounding realization. A realization he was still unwilling to admit aloud, but one he could own to himself only now, when he sat alone in his office, nothing and no one to distract him. Nothing but the quiet of his own thoughts.
Once, his life had been nothing but The Sinner’s Palace and his determination to make his family’s gaming hell the best known, the most exclusive, and the most lucrative. Now, his life contained so much more. He had a family of his own. A wife who was gentle and giving and caring and beautiful, who had devoted herself to his children with the same single-minded persistence he had shown The Sinner’s Palace. Twin daughters who were so damn much like him he knew he ought to fret over their futures. Heaven help their husbands one day.
A knock sounded at his door then, disrupting his ruminations. Before he could bid the person enter, the door opened, and his brother Rafe sauntered over the threshold, curls looking as if a ladybird had recently run her fingers through them, his cravat comically askew, coat and trousers quite rumpled.
“I did not tell you to enter,” he pointed out, pinning Rafe with his sternest older-brother stare.
“I knocked,” Rafe drawled, unconcerned, as he tossed the portal closed with a loud report.
Jasper winced. “Need you be so bloody noisy? I’ve children and a wife abed upstairs.”
His brother’s brows shot up. “It’s a gaming hell, Jasper.”
Yes, it was. And for some reason, the reminder was rather like a splinter in one’s foot. Painful and in need of removal. He may have been born in the seediest stews of the East End, but Jasper was no fool. Octavia and the girls should not be living in the private chambers of a gaming hell. They ought to be in a fine home.
“It’s their ‘ome as well,” he said, only realizing he had lost his damned h too late. “For now.”
“For now?” Rafe threw himself into the chair opposite Jasper with an undeniable lack of grace. “You fleeing to the other half of London now? I never thought I’d see the day.”
He stiffened. “I’m not fleeing, and I never said I’d be going anywhere.”
His children and wife, however… They deserved far better than the life he could provide them here at The Sinner’s Palace. He thought then of Octavia’s outrage at Anne and Elizabeth learning how to curse from himself and his men and winced. He had not been prepared for the burden of being a father, it was true. But he wanted to learn. He wanted to be better. To give his daughters all the chances he had been denied and all the opportunities they deserved. To do far more than his bastard of a father had ever done for him.
“Jackey?” Rafe asked, apparently in search of a new vice now that he had just quit the other.
“I don’t have gin,” Jasper told him.
His brother blinked. “You always have gin.”
“Not any longer, I don’t.” Octavia had asked him what would happen if Anne and Elizabeth were to find their way into his stores.
The question had made him go cold. She didn’t know, of course, about his own rearing. But he’d been grateful he’d decided to sleep alone that night when the dream had returned, more forceful and painful than ever.
“Where are you keeping it?” Rafe asked. “This is about Lady Octavia, ain’t it?”
It was, and it wasn’t. Not even Rafe knew the complete story of what had happened when they had been young. Jasper had done everything in his power to protect the rest of his siblings from their father’s wrath.
“I don’t need it,” he said simply, and that was also true.
True, and he was proud of it. There had been a time when he had refused to touch a drop of the poison. But then, he had taken on the responsibility of all his siblings. It had not been easy, keeping them all fed and dry and safe. Father had left them the waterworks, but they’d needed to use all the revenue to build The Sinner’s Palace. With so much weight on his shoulders, Jasper had returned to that old familiar poison for comfort. Octavia and his daughters had shown him there was far more to life than drowning himself in drink.
“If you don’t need it, then may I humbly suggest you bequeath it to me?” Rafe asked, shaking Jasper from the heaviness of his memories and thoughts.
“You don’t look as if you need it either,” he said. “Where were you this evening? Madame Laurent’s?”
“The Garden of Flora.” Rafe grinned unrepentantly. “Christ, what a paradise.”
Jasper did not want to know. He was familiar with the name of one of London’s newer houses of the flesh, but he was not a patron. Nor would he ever be. Where once he would have been intrigued, would have even sought out the den of vice for some elusive pleasure like observation, the very notion of any other woman’s hands on his body made his cock shrivel.
There was only one woman he wanted, just as he had told Octavia.