The Scandal of the Season

by Aydra Richards

  Good. That was good. Every moment she was considering ways to make him miserable was a moment she was not spending in self-pity. It had been so easy to ruin the pampered girl he had thought her to be—the spoiled, selfish lady like those to which he had become accustomed. Any sort of regret would serve no purpose; it was far too late to return her to the bosom of society from which he had snatched her. Now there was nothing for it but to see her through to the other side and hope that the thing that he’d asked of her would not break her.

  He didn’t want her to break.

  He didn’t even want her to bend.

  The thought surprised him, because there was no reason for it. Bending people to his will was simply what he did. It was his raison d'être. There was a sport in it, a game in watching circumstances play out as he’d laid them, bringing all things beneath his control. It was the satisfaction in knowing he would hold a winning hand, even before the cards had been dealt. It was the delicious pleasure in drawing out the suffering of men who owned too much and dealt dishonorably with others. He took delight in handing their own methods back to them, in using their own tactics against them, in bringing them to their knees.

  He did not want Mouse on her knees.

  All right, so that was a lie. But he didn’t want her groveling for her life, her livelihood, her fortune, her future. He wanted her fire and her fury in the smaller context of his bedchamber, something involving smooth, crisp sheets and a hopelessly tangled counterpane. He wanted her alabaster skin ablaze with a glow that had nothing to do with humiliation and everything to do with passion.

  And if she ever discovered it, what a hell of a weapon she would have in her hands. She could cut cleaner with that than she ever could with that table knife she’d stashed away somewhere.

  “You are an ass.” Her voice sliced across his reverie, splitting straight through his fantasy with the precision of a scalpel. She flounced off in a bristling display of indignation, her footsteps thudding upon the stairs as she retreated.

  Very good, Mouse, he thought. Don’t forget

  ∞∞∞

  Serena tried not to succumb to defeat as she slammed her bedchamber door as she flounced within. There was something so cathartic about a perfectly-slammed door, she realized slowly. A sort of echoing, reverberating sound that tore the rage from the heart and set it free to careen down corridors and hallways, scratching at the walls and windowpanes. She listened to the reverberation of all of her unleashed fury resound through the house with something like reverence.

  Before now, she had never slammed a door in her life. It was not something a lady ever did. It was not something a lady even thought of doing, even when anger was burning an ugly hole in the pit of her stomach. A lady bit the inside of her cheek, or else her tongue—or both—and carried on unaffected by such unseemly emotions.

  She might still bear lady as a courtesy title, but she would never again be one. And suddenly, there was a queer, nearly frightening sense of freedom in it, an independence she could almost taste upon her tongue. She could slam every door in the house every day of the week if she pleased, and twice on Sundays. She could drink spirits and laugh too loudly. Go out unchaperoned, or wear her hair down and loose. She would never again have to sit and listen to a lecture from her father, or bear the weight of his disapproval, or the pain of his indifference.

  Because he would never again acknowledge her existence.

  And no one else would, either.

  She glanced at the precious antique escritoire sitting against the wall. It had been delivered only this morning, a pretty and frivolous bit of furniture in which a lady would store her writing implements and stationery, and at which she would scribble off bits of correspondence. Notes to friends and family, invitations and letters.

  She could write, of course. No one could stop her from writing. But no one would answer. Her letters would fly out into the ether, unheeded. Like a missive from a ghost. Quite suddenly she hated the escritoire, hated the intricate pens and nibs she’d purchased, hated the fine stationery and bottles of ink. They were but remnants of a past life, and to cling to them was to deny her new reality, to wallow in the depths of despair.

  “Serena,” Sarah said, emerging from the bathroom with an armload of linens for laundering, blowing away a lock of dark hair that had escaped its neat bun. “Is something amiss?” She tilted her head. “Your hair is coming down from its pins. Shall I redress it for you?”

  Serena shook her head wildly, and felt another few sleek coils of hair fall free. “No, Sarah. Take it down. Take it all down, please.” She hesitated, chewing her lower lip. “Have you got a hammer?”

  Sarah blinked, bewildered. “I suppose,” she said, “there’s likely to be one somewhere in the house. But what should you need it for?”

  “Just a bit of…redecorating,” Serena said. “Nothing you ought to concern yourself with.”

  ∞∞∞

  Grey had thought Mouse would have long since retired by the time he returned to his residence. It had, after all, gone nearly two in the morning. With her social calendar now a good deal freer than once it had been, it had been a reasonable assumption that Mouse would find her way to bed at a decent hour.

  Instead, music crashed into his ears the moment he threw open the carriage door in front of his townhouse. It was a frantic melody—Mozart, he thought, played at a significantly more spritely speed than it ought to be. There was a madness in it; bass tones pounded out furiously as higher notes trickled, ephemeral, through the air and were soundly suffocated in the rest of the din.

  Mouse could turn a waltz into a funeral dirge, twist a light-hearted melody into something grim and dire and devastating. He imagined it a portent of doom, as if the very flames of hell were already licking at his feet.

  His neighbors, he suspected, would be somewhat less than pleased with the racket his temporary guest was making. But they would also hold their tongues if they knew what was good for them.

  He had hardly reached the door before a woman came barreling out of it, flying straight past the nonplussed butler, Simpson. The lady’s maid he’d engaged for Mouse, Sarah. She clutched her wrapper tightly closed, attempting an awkward curtsey before she flew into a disjointed, rambling speech.

  “The whole house thinks she’s gone daft, my lord!” she said, gesticulating wildly with her free hand. “She’s been at it for hours.” She winced as the music hurtled into a crescendo, violently pummeling back the stillness of night. She gave a little shiver, as if the dour music had unsettled her. “She won’t go to bed, won’t let the maids clean.”

  There was something perplexing in the way she’d stressed the words. “Has she made a wreck of the house, then?” It had always been a possibility, but he had thought such tantrums to be a touch too juvenile for Mouse. Of course he could well afford to replace whatever she’d ruined, and he supposed it would be beneath him to begrudge her a bit of well-earned wanton destruction.

  “Not…as such, my lord,” Sarah said weakly, knitting her fingers. “The, er…the mess is mostly confined to the foyer. Mostly.”

  Mostly? He glanced up at Simpson, but the man avoided his gaze.

  “And there might be a bit in the drawing room,” Sarah said. “I’d advise you to take care where you step.” She cringed anew as a fresh melody began, harsh strikes of the keys producing warbling, plaintive notes. “I tried to sneak the liquor away from her, my lord, I truly did.”

  Against his better judgment, a laugh slipped free of his throat. “So she’s gotten into my spirits, has she?”

  “She seems to favor the brandy, my lord.” Sarah ducked her head as if ashamed.

  She would. “I’ll handle Mouse,” he said. “Tell the staff—whoever is still awake—to find their beds.” Another pound of the keys rattled across the cobblestone street and into the night, a banshee shrieking her ire.

  Sarah took an awkward step backward, her expression suggesting that even if she were to take herself off to bed, it was doub
tful whether or not she would be able to sleep through the din. She and Simpson both tiptoed through the darkened foyer as if catching Mouse’s notice might also invite her wrath. The music continued on unabated, however, and they reached the landing on the stairs and disappeared into the bowels of the house.

  The foyer was dark, but the glow of a lamp in the drawing room pushed back the gloom and sent shadows skittering along the wainscoting. Something hard crunched beneath the sole of Grey’s boot, and he paused to examine it—a bit of wood, rough and splintered. An edge of it was smooth and polished, so it had clearly come from larger bit of furniture that had since met an untimely demise. A rather grisly one, judging by the bits of it scattered about. A chunk here and there—shattered legs and the occasional drawer handle—but by and large it was only bones of what it once had been, reduced down to its smallest components.

  There was a puddle of…something that clung to the marble tile like liquid night, and in the flickering lamplight he recognized the tracks that led away from it and into the drawing room. Footprints. Perfect impressions, including the outlines of five toes each, meandering across his previously pristine floors. Into the drawing room, where they had no doubt stained his priceless Aubusson rug. Ink, he thought. It had to be ink. And she’d waltzed right through it in bare feet.

  She couldn’t hear him over the racket she was producing, and so she did not look up as he entered the room. The melody had changed again, but once more she’d taken liberties with the song and transformed what was meant to be a minuet into a doleful elegy. Her fingers flew over the keys with a precision that surprised him, given that Sarah had suggested her state of inebriation should preclude it.

  Six decanters of spirits were arrayed upon the top of the pianoforte like dismal little soldiers, the liquid inside them bouncing to the resonance of the music. Mouse slammed the keys in a vibrant, tempestuous motion that sent the decanters sliding and her fair hair flying riotously about her. Either it had come loose or she’d taken it down, but by the wealth of wild strands cascading around her, he suspected it had been down for hours.

  Her song had not come to a natural conclusion; she’d simply banged out a final chord and let the music descend into silence as she reached for a decanter, hooked her fingers round its neck, and took a swig directly from the bottle. But she caught sight of him as she replaced it, gave a startled screech, flailed in horror, and sailed backward straight off the bench, her skirts flying around her.

  The soles of her bare feet were black in the lamplight, stained with ink. Naturally.

  Grey smothered a snicker as he claimed a seat on a low sofa.

  Buried beneath the fabric of her skirts, she muttered a good number of things that sounded suspiciously like foul words of the sort ladies weren’t supposed to know. She engaged in a vicious war to right herself, battling layers of petticoats and silky skirts that resisted her efforts to shove them back down. Amidst the scuffle, his eyes caught a fleeting glimpse of one smooth thigh, and his ears caught another grumbled profanity.

  “Language,” he chided, settling in for what would certainly be an entertaining evening. “Where did you even learn such words?”

  “Brothers.” The word emerged on guttural growl, and she succeeded in shoving down her skirts, but gave up the rest of the fight, sinking back to the carpet, her head resting mere inches away from one inky footprint.

  She made an interesting picture stretched out on the floor, her skirts and hair in disarray. It was the sort of scene he’d expect to be painted in oils and hung upon the walls of a sordid gaming hell or perhaps a brothel—or it would have been had she not groaned and clapped her hand to her mouth. The footprints on the rug were bad enough, but he had no idea precisely how much brandy she’d imbibed and there was always the possibility that it would disagree with her violently, and the inevitable result of that was not something he relished soiling his carpets. He sought a distraction.

  “Busy day, Mouse?”

  She tipped her head back, her throat working as she swallowed hard. “Oh,” she said airily, flopping her free hand about, as if to convey some vague meaning, “You know.”

  He did not, in fact, know. What little he had gleaned from the servants had hardly been encouraging or elucidating. “Would you care to enlighten me on what, exactly, has made such a mess of my foyer? There’s bits of wood strewn everywhere.”

  “Oh,” she said dismissively. “That. It was my escritoire.” Her voice was delightfully warm and a bit slurred, and it poured over his ears like honey.

  “Your what?”

  “Escritoire. My writing desk. Or it was my writing desk, before I tipped it off the landing.” Her shoulders shifted in an inelegant shrug.

  “What possessed you to do such a thing?” he asked.

  Now she sighed, shoulders slumping—at least as much as they could slump. “I realized I wouldn’t need one.”

  Oh—because she had no one with whom to correspond. Was that guilt that made him slouch in his seat? Surely not.

  “Besides,” she said, and her hand twirled in the air as a shred of a smile tugged at her lips. “It made such a lovely crash.”

  So had she. A little fallen angel who had crash-landed in his drawing room, and she was more than lovely. She was magnificent. “Surely the writing desk wasn’t so fragile as to break into so many pieces from a simple fall,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “That was mostly me. I asked for a hammer, but, regrettably, Sarah could not locate one. However, Simpson did manage to find me a hatchet.”

  “You hacked it apart yourself?” He would have paid good money to see that.

  “It was cathartic,” she said, half insistent, half petulant. “Do you know, I have never had spirits before.”

  “Christ,” he heard himself say. “How much have you had?”

  Another disinterested shrug; she waved an indifferent hand toward the decanters on the pianoforte. “Those ones on the left I did not like,” she said. “But that one, there—that one was pleasant enough.”

  She’d just discounted a fortune in fine whiskeys, scotches, and gins, but the most worrying aspect was that she’d at least tried all of them. And there was a noticeable depletion in the brandy. Which meant that Mouse was likely three sheets to the wind.

  “I’m afraid you’re in for an unpleasant morning, Mouse. Too much brandy tends to do that to a person.” He reached out to snag the decanter of whiskey and plucked out the stopper to take a healthy swallow.

  “Oh? As opposed to the pleasant morning that I would undoubtedly have had otherwise?” She splayed out her hands above her head, stretching sinuously. Her back arched, muscles trembling and taut, and Grey found his gaze unerringly drawn to the thrust of her breasts against the violet fabric of her bodice.

  He should have let her have her insipid white garments. Perhaps he’d encourage her to send Sarah to commission some new gowns—the sort a woman of her station was meant to wear. At least then she would once again be Mouse as he had expected her to be and not…whatever she was now. Vixen seemed fitting, but then so did siren, and that made her dangerous. At this moment, she was precisely the sort of woman who could lure an unwary man to his doom.

  She relaxed once again with a sigh, her body going limp and pliant, and she turned her face into the cup of her hand. Her eyes fluttered closed.

  He didn’t want her to nod off to sleep. He wanted to explore this strange new facet of her, to shove her into the light of the lamp and watch her sparkle—a gem cultivated exclusively for him. He feigned a cough, startling her out of her twilight state, and said, “If you had wanted to drink, Mouse, you could have simply called for wine. I keep a well-stocked cellar.”

  “I regret nothing. And had I wanted wine,” she said, smothering a yawn in her palm, “I would have done so. Ladies don’t drink spirits, you know. Or wear their hair down. Or go barefoot.” She lifted her foot and wiggled her toes for effect.

  So it had been a day of firsts for her, then. Little Mouse
had decided to exercise her new relative freedom and run just a bit wild. He supposed it was fairly tame, all things considered. But then she was just stretching her wings, testing them from outside her gilded cage for the first time. Who could say what she would become, given time and space to be as she would?

  “I don’t know what I like,” she murmured into her hand, settling on the carpet like a child snuggling into bed. “It’s never mattered before whether or not I liked something. Ladies simply do as they are told. It never occurred to me that I might like something other than watery lemonade or flat champagne. But I have discovered that I do like brandy, and that…seems somehow important.” She subsided once more, her lashes fanning her cheeks.

  Rule two, Grey thought. Let Mouse discover what she likes and see that she gets it. He owed her that much at least. It was at most a minor concession.

  “You’ll find interests,” he said. “Hobbies outside of those typically expected of a lady. I daresay some of them will even be rewarding, and…Mouse?”

  A soft snore met his inquiry. She twitched in her sleep, one leg creeping up over the other.

  “Hell,” he grunted, setting aside the decanter of whiskey. He knew he ought to leave her as she was. She’d learn an unpleasant lesson about spirits in general and brandy in particular. But she was likely to learn that anyway, and perhaps it would better serve the both of them better for her to be comfortable while she did it.

  Better for his carpet, anyway. Possibly less so for her lady’s maid, who would doubtless have to deal with her come morning.

  He shoved himself off of the sofa and dropped to a knee beside her. “I have a feeling, Mouse, that you’re going to cause me no end of trouble.”

  She reacted not at all to that, but a lock of her hair slipped over her shoulder, and it looked smooth as silk. He would likely never get a better chance than this—as if on instinct, his fingers curled around that lock, and it was soft and cool and fine. His fingers ached to bury themselves in the full weight of that loose mass of silky waves.