The Last Hellion Read Online Free

opinion—dining room of the Ala-mode Beef House in Clare Court. The street, a narrow way off infamous Drury Lane, was hardly the most elegant in London, and the Alamode's culinary productions were scarcely calculated to appeal to discriminating palates. All of which suited the duke admirably, for he was no more elegant or discriminating than the average savage, and probably less so, from what Jaynes had read of the aboriginal races.
    Having made short work of a tall heap of beef, His Grace had settled—or sprawled, was more like it—back in his chair and was watching a waiter replenish his tankard of ale.
    The duke's chestnut hair, with which Jaynes had taken such pains only a short time earlier, had got raked into a tumbled disorder that declared it had never met comb or brush in its life. The neckcloth, once crisply starched and painstakingly knotted, with each crease formed at proper intervals and angles, had subsided into limp and rumpled disarray. As to the rest of His Grace's garments: In a nutshell, they looked as though he'd slept in them, which was how they usually looked, no matter what one did, and, Really, I wonder why I bother , Jaynes was thinking.

    Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
    What he was saying was, "The 'Rose of Thebes' is the name given to a great ruby, which the heroine found some chapters ago when she was trapped in the pharaoh's tomb with the snakes. It is an adventure story, you see, and all the rage since summer."
    The waiter having departed, the duke turned his bored green gaze upon the copy of the Argus . It lay as yet un-opened—and it was only through a phenomenal exercise of willpower that Jaynes had resisted opening it—upon the table.
    "That would explain why you hauled me from the house at dawn's crack," said His Grace. "And dragged me from one book shop to the next looking for it—and all of them thick with females. Mainly of the wrong sort," he added, grimacing.
    "I've never seen so many dowds in so many jabbering clumps as I have this morning."
    "It's half past two," Jaynes said. "You never saw the morning. As to the dawn, it was cracking when you finally staggered home. Moreover, I discerned several attractive young ladies among the crowds of what you so callously dismiss as
    'dowds.' But then, if their faces aren't thick with paint and their bosoms aren't bursting from then-bodices, they are invisible to you."
    "Pity they aren't inaudible as well," his employer muttered. "Twittering and simpering lot of nitwits. And meanwhile ready to claw one another's eyes out for
    —What is the curst thing?" He took up the magazine, glanced at the cover, and dropped it. "The Argus , indeed. 'The Watchdog of London,' it purports to be—as though the world is famished for more pontificating from Fleet Street."
    "The Argus's offices are in the Strand, not Fleet Street," said Jaynes. "And it is refreshingly free of pontificating. Ever since Miss Grenville joined the staff, the publication has become more like what its subtitle claims. The Argus of mythology, you may recollect—"

    Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
    "I'd rather not recall my days in the schoolroom." Ainswood reached for his tankard. "When it wasn't Latin, it was Greek. When it wasn't Greek, it was Latin.
    And when it wasn't either, it was flogging."
    "When it wasn't drinking, gaming, and whoring," Jaynes said under his breath.
    He ought to know, having entered Vere Mallory's service when the latter was sixteen, and the dukedom apparently safe, with several Mallory males standing between him and the title. But they were gone now. With the death of the last, a boy of nine, nearly a year and a half ago, Jaynes's employer had become the seventh Duke of Ainswood.
    Inheriting the title had not mended his character a whit. On the contrary, he had gone from bad to worse, thence to unspeakable.
    More audibly Jaynes said, "The Argus was reputed to possess a hundred eyes, you will recall. Its namesake's aim is to contribute to a