Free Enslaved by Hope Tarr Page B

drunker than they let on, Gavin asked, “What is so funny?”
    Swiping the back of his busted hand over watery eyes, Harry shook his head. “Rourke just bought the place a few minutes ago, lock, stock, and barrel.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    “I had rather have a fool to make me merry
than experience to make me sad …”
—W ILLIAM S HAKESPEARE , Rosalind,
As You Like It
    T wo days later, Gavin sat with Rourke and Hadrian in what until a few days before had served as his study, his formerly feral cat, Mia, stretched out on the arm of his chair. Reaching over to stroke her soft black and white fur, he kept one eye on the wall clock as he listened to his two friends recount the full story of how Rourke had come to be in possession of The Palace.
    After leaving Daisy’s dressing room door, a furious Sid had stomped to the front of the house, intent on having his bullies drag Gavin’s two troublemaking friends out into the alley for a proper beating. Rourke’s offer to purchase The Palace outright had forestalled the violence. At first, Sid assumed the Scot was either drunk or bluffing or a bit of both, but when Rourke produced a money clip of 100-pound notes to stand as his surety, along with his business card and signed marker for the balance, which would arrive by bank draft at the week’s end, Sid changed his tune. Instead of ordering up a beating, he ordered the contents of the bar be brought out to seal the deal.
    “If I can buy a castle in the Highlands, then why not buy a palace in London to go with it?” Rourke asked with a grin. It was an open joke among them that the Scot accumulated property as other men accumulated lint and pocket change.
    At present, Gavin’s flat was all the property he cared to manage. With the help of his two friends, he’d spent the previous day converting his study into a miniature theatrical school. He’d even gone so far as to box up all but the most necessary of his legal texts and law school tomes to make room on the bookshelves for the dramaturgical library he hastily amassed—comedies and dramas by European masters Shakespeare and Ibsen, Wilde and Pinero, Chekhov and Zola. No Gilbert and Sullivan, though. Musical theater struck him as scarcely a step above the vulgar dance hall burlesques he’d suffered through the other night. Daisy was quite simply too fine to be locked into performing that sort of rubbish, he saw that clearly. Her rehabilitation from dance hall chanteuse to serious actress hinged on making quite certain she saw it, too.
    Sipping a glass of whiskey, Rourke shook his auburn head. “Delilah du Lac and our wee Daisy one and the same woman—I can scarcely credit it.”
    Gavin pulled on his cuffs and stared ahead to the study door. Daisy was due any time and the prospect of seeing her again had him feeling absurdly nervous. She’d solidly refused to let him have any hand in helping her move, swearing she had but little with her. He couldn’t say she’d been rude, not exactly, but she had been firm, making it clear she meant to settle her affairs with her promoter without his help. It occurred to him to wonder if such a strident display of independence might be masking some secret something or rather
someone,
she might be hiding from him, but for the time being he resolved to set aside that maddening thought. Even if it were the case and another man was involved, he had no claim upon her—at least not any he might yet enforce.
    “Delilah du Lac was a dance hall persona only, a fiction,” Gavin replied more strongly than he intended. “Now that Daisy will be pursuing a theatrical career, she’ll either use her given name or we’ll come up with a more suitable stage name.”
    Hadrian and Rourke exchanged looks. Without speaking, Hadrian walked over to the sideboard, unstoppered the crystal whiskey decanter, and poured three fingers’ worth of the amber-colored alcohol into a glass. Turning about, he offered the drink to Gavin. “Fancy a spot of whiskey to take