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Chapter 2
Likeabrother.
Jarvis exited Olivia’s house with hurried steps and tugged on his cravat. It seemed to be suffocating him. She bloody thought of him as her brother! She wanted him to help her catch another man and make him fall in love with her.
Jarvis almost growled aloud. He hadn’t known torture more acute than this.
He grimaced inwardly. He knew quite a lot about torture. He had several broken bones and many scars to prove it. Physical pain he could withstand. His left shoulder gave a dull ache at that moment as if reminding him of that fact. Emotional pain, however, was a different beast entirely. He had not experienced it ever since the death of his parents and avoided it at all costs.
He got into his carriage and thumped the roof with his walking stick. Then, he rotated his left shoulder slowly but carefully. He needed exercise. He needed to hit something. Do something to take his mind off Olive’s dreamy face when she talked about damned Bradshaw. When had she taken an interest in him?
True, Jarvis hadn’t paid much attention to Olivia for a while. Well, he’d been busy running around tracking bandits, outmaneuvering thief-takers, and looking for the thugs responsible for his friend’s disappearance. He hadn’t spent much time with his friends for a while, either. Had it really only taken several weeks for her to fall for Bradshaw?
Jarvis’s face heated in anger. He felt like steam would be coming out of his nostrils and ears if he didn’t calm down. Heneededto hit something.
That’s why when he arrived at his bachelor lodgings, the first thing he did was ask his valet, Elkins, to prepare his training attire.
“Are you certain you are well enough for this, my lord?” his loyal servant replied, eyeing his bad shoulder.
“Yes, I wouldn’t ask you if I wasn’t,” Jarvis snapped irritably.
Elkins lifted an eyebrow but proceeded to do as he was asked.
Jarvis was very rarely irritable. On the contrary, he was typically good-humored, even when he came home in the dead of night, bedraggled and bleeding, groaning from pain. That was a different kind of pain, however, as he had already established.
Jarvis tugged off his coat, carefully unbuttoned his waistcoat, took off his cravat, and started undoing his shirtsleeve buttons. Elkins put his clothing on the bed and came over to help his master out of his attire. After successfully undressing, Jarvis donned his exercise breeches and a tunic, put on his stockings and leather slippers, and headed out the door.
Elkins followed on his heels as they walked through the corridor toward the servants’ stairs. “Would you like your rapier, sword, or knives?”
“No, I shall be exercising without the weapons first.”
They were descending the stairs now.
“Are you certain this is the best course of action at the moment? With your injury—”
“My shoulder is all right. I’ve missed three weeks of exercising as it is.”
“Yes, my lord. But it wasn’t a mere dislocated shoulder. You were shot.”
“I know the nature of my injury, Elkins. I’m wearing it,” Jarvis said darkly.
He didn’t want to discuss this. He’d been reckless enough to be injured.
A few weeks ago, Jarvis’s friend Blake, the Earl of Payne, asked for his assistance in tracking the criminals who had captured and sold him to a slave ship. Payne had spent two years trying to get back home, and once he did, his mission became to find the people responsible.
That was quite a messy affair that led to Jarvis’s shoulder injury and the discovery that he was the one the criminals were originally after, not Payne.
Understandably, this left his friendship with the earl in tatters. He couldn’t blame Payne. He’d suffered for two years because of Jarvis, so it was unsurprising he wanted to avoid further association with him.
But the broken friendship aside, this new discovery that Jarvis had been found out as a Shadow and was wanted by criminals led to a new set of problems.
Elkins was the only person in Jarvis’s life who knew about the Shadows. As the late viscount’s valet and confidante, he knew all the family secrets. Elkins was the one to guide Jarvis on his path after his parents had died. He helped Jarvis with the training, patched up his wounds, and handled his correspondence with the Shadows.
Now that Jarvis knew for certain that there were more people who knew his true identity, he wasn’t about to sit at home and do nothing about it.
Of course, Erebus—the leader of the Shadows society—had ordered him not to leave the house until further notice. But Jarvis was never going to comply for too long.
Sitting at home with nothing to do wasn’t in Jarvis’s nature. He grew restless rather quickly, and if it wasn’t for his injured shoulder, he would have been out on the streets a lot sooner. As it was, he was tired from aimlessly lying around during the nights without his regular hunts to throw off steam.
