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’andle the affair then ’e’d be. Besides, with all the viscount’s properties encumbered, there ain’t nothin’ I
could
suggest that would get the fellow out of ’is fix, short of—” He stopped speaking abruptly, his mouth open and his eyes staring out at nothing, as if a dazzling idea had struck him with a clunk.
    Cassie leaned forward eagerly. “Short of what, papa?”
    Mr. Chivers blinked, his eyes focusing slowly on his daughter’s face. Perhaps he
could
make a suggestion to Jennings about the viscount’s finances. It was an off chance, an endeavor with a very low probability of success, but it just might work. He’d never before known Cassie to show so great an interest in a young man. If his suggestion were taken, it could benefit not only his lordship but Cassie as well. It was certainly worth a whack. He would put out a feeler and see what he could see.
    “What
is
it, Papa?” Cassie asked, bursting with curiosity. “Why are you looking at me so strangely?”
    “It’s nothin’, my love, nothin’,” her father muttered, pulling his eyes from her and looking down at the dessert. “Eat yer blasted bla’mange.”

Chapter Five
    Sometimes it is hard to recognize the moment when one’s life falls to pieces. Robert Rossiter, Viscount Kittridge, however, could give you the date, hour and minute when it happened to him.
    His lordship was no fool. Although no one in his family—not his dithery mother, his young brother Gavin, nor his recently widowed sister, Lady Yarrow—had given him the slightest clue that anything was wrong with the family finances, it took no more than two days of civilian life for him to suspect that he was in trouble. But on the third day, an encounter with a wine merchant (who’d awaited him on the doorstep of the family town house in Portman Square and who’d asked point-blank for payment of a long-overdue bill for champagne) led him to seek out his father’s man of business without further delay.
    What he learned from Mr. Jennings sent him reeling. The news struck him like a blow to the stomach, knocking out his breath and causing him to fall back into the chair on the edge of which he’d been nervously perched. Mr. Jennings offered him a drink of brandy, which he downed without hesitation. “As bad as that?” he asked when he’d recovered his voice.
    Mr. Jennings nodded. “I’m afraid so, my lord. I had warned your father repeatedly, during the last five years of his life, that this day of reckoning would come and that it might be his son—you, my lord—who’d have to face the consequences of a situation not of your making. But the gambling fever had too tight a hold on him. He didn’t seem able to stop, even at the end when the pain of his illness was almost unendurable. Every day, rain or shine, in spite of his growing weakness, he had his man carry him to his club and seat him at the gaming table.” He shook his head in dismal recollection.
    Lord Kittridge shut his eyes. “That’s not the man I remember,” he muttered unhappily. “You’ve not painted a picture of a father of whom a son can feel proud.”
    “Nevertheless he loved you, my boy, as much as he could love anyone. I think one of the things that drove him on was the futile hope that he might make a killing and thus spare you some of this.”
    “Yes, the prayer of every man who ever rolled dice:
One killing, dear God, one killing, and I shall give up the game forever
.”
    Delbert Jennings sighed. “Too true, my lord, unfortunately too true. A terrible disease, gaming. Your father is not the first, nor will he be the last to succumb to it.” Sighing again, he gently pushed a folder across his desk toward the viscount. “I’ve worked out a plan of divestiture, which I’ve been waiting to go over with you—”
    Lord Kittridge held up a restraining hand. “Not now, Jennings. I don’t think I could make sense of anything right now. Let me go. I’ll come back tomorrow, I promise. Tomorrow.