“I’m bollocks at lying.”
“Fortunately, I’m excellent at training.” Without warning, Bruiser leapt on Rafe’s back. “Yah.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Rafe spun in a circle, swatting at his trainer as if he were some kind of gnat. Only more irritating.
“Easy, stallion.” Bruiser locked his ankles onto Rafe’s hips in piggyback fashion. “Just run like this, will you? I’m spent, and you need more exertion.”
Rafe huffed a sigh and started running again. Bruiser was right; he’d tire much faster this way. And if he had any hope of making it through one more night in Twill Castle, he needed to run himself into a stupor.
“Now listen sharp,” his trainer said, clinging tight to Rafe’s neck as they pounded down the length of the northern wall. “The key to a good lie is embroidery.”
“I missed that day at finishing school.”
Bruiser dug a heel into his ribs. “Not the needle-and-thread kind. The verbal sort. Embellishments. Particulars. They’re what make a lie believable. As they say, the devil is in the details.”
Rafe snorted.
“If you want to convince her that Piers is in love, you’re going to have tell a good story. One with a time and a place, and plenty of specifics. Now, tell me all about the time you bedded that Parisian opera dancer.”
“I never bedded any Parisian opera dancer.”
“Exactly my point, you dolt. Make it up.”
Rafe tried. He honestly tried. In his imagination, he conjured the fantasy of a dark, mysterious woman, beckoning him toward a bed with beaded scarlet hangings. But his mind kept working a strange alchemy, turning the woman’s ebony hair to gold. Her dark, smoky eyes lightened to a familiar, lovely blue. And as for the bed . . . well, the only bed he could picture was a four-post affair with emerald velvet, and row after perfect row of pillows.
Even in his imagination, he just didn’t have it in him to bed another woman. Not today.
Probably not for a long, long while.
“This is stupid,” he said. “I’m telling you, I can’t lie.”
“You can. You just need practice. And you’re about to get an excellent chance,” Bruiser muttered. “Right about . . .”
“Oh, gracious!” someone close—and female—shrieked.
“Now,” Bruiser finished.
Rafe pulled up short, chest heaving. Clio’s lady’s maid—Anna, was it?—stood before them in the center of the path. No doubt wondering why the hell a sweaty, breathless man was running around the castle wall while carrying another grown man on his back.
Her hands fluttered. “I’m so sorry to have interrupted your . . . this.”
“There’s a reasonable explanation, never fear,” Bruiser said. “Lord Rafe had to carry me. I have a condition.”
You most certainly do, Rafe thought.
“A condition?” Her eyebrows crinkled together, and Rafe could all but see little cogs turning behind them. “Is it . . .” She lowered her voice. “Is it serious?”
“Sadly, yes. Possibly fatal.”
She covered her gasp with both hands. Because, apparently, one hand wouldn’t have been dramatic enough. “No. But surely something can be done. What is it?”
“I don’t know. I was unconscious when the doctor saw me. Lord Rafe can explain it better.” Bruiser nudged him in the ribs. “Go on, then. Tell her the whole story of my malady. In detail. With all the particulars. What did that German doctor call it?”
Rafe gave her a single, unembroidered word. “Syphilis.”
The lady’s maid turned a pale shade of green. She began backing away in small steps. “I just came to say Miss Whitmore is looking for you, my lord.”
With that, she dropped a frantic curtsy and fled.
The moment she was out of sight, Bruiser tweaked his ear. “You bloody jackass.”
“What are you complaining about? I lied. She believed me.”
“I’ll get you for this.” He began kicking at Rafe’s ribs.
Rafe turned his back to the wall and crushed the man against it.
“My pocket,” Bruiser squeaked. “Mind the quizzing glass.”
“Fuck the quizzing glass.” Rafe let him fall to the ground in a heap. “And to hell with embroidery. I don’t need to lie to Clio. She has enough honest reasons to marry Piers. He’s a bloody marquess with pots of money, and he’s a decent, honorable man. She can’t possibly do better.”
And Rafe was determined that she would have the best.
“What about you?” Bruiser asked.
“What about me?”
Bruiser hauled himself off the ground, clapped the dust from his trousers, and put his hands on Rafe’s shoulders. “Your future is on the line here. I can go out and find another fighter, but you are all you’ve got. And you’ve fought enough bouts that you know by now, if you’re to have any chance at besting Dubose, you have to want it. You have to want it more than you want anything in this world.”
Rafe closed his eyes and saw himself on the ground after fighting Dubose. Eyes stinging, head thick. His vision blurred by sweat and blood. The crowd around him chanting and calling as the umpire counted away the last moments of his reign as champion.
Prizefighting had been his life, his salvation. He’d worked too hard, for too long to let that be the way he exited the sport.
“I want to win,” he said. “I need to win.”