The Scandal of the Season

by Aydra Richards

  “I don’t care for any of that. It’s not my world,” Grey said, only half-attentive, divided between the staircase upon which he awaited Mouse’s entry and the clock, which had ticked through an entire hour since Lansdowne’s ball—thrown at Grey’s insistence—had begun.

  Though Mouse had yet declined to see him, somehow her brothers had impressed upon her the importance of apprehending their father once and for all, convinced her the risk to her life was great enough to merit working in tandem with Grey. She simply had not yet arrived, a fact which made Grey somewhat nervous, though he knew she was well-guarded.

  “You must learn to care,” Lansdowne said. “It is Serena’s world.”

  That, Grey thought, was a matter of opinion. She might have been born into it, but she had seemed to like it as little as he—nor had she made any great strides toward rejoining it these past few weeks. He suspected that her changed perspective had ruined it for her, stolen any joy she might have found in her previous life from her. Yet another sin she could lay at his feet.

  Alongside so many others.

  Grey spared a moment of his attention for Lansdowne. “Her world,” he said, “will be whatever she wishes it to be.” Because he would move heaven and earth to make it so, to create for her whatever world she wished—even if it happened to involve moving about in Ton society more frequently than he would have liked.

  Lansdowne made an uncomfortable sound in his throat, averting his eyes. “That’s exactly the sort of thing I meant,” he said. “Unseemly displays of emotion, and all that. Christ, and I used to think you such a cold bastard.”

  There was a time that he had been, a time he had been implacable, unmovable—but it felt like a lifetime ago, no more than a murky memory, far distant in his mind. Somehow Mouse had unearthed a heart from some hidden place within his chest, and no one had been more surprised by it than he. Too late to tuck it away again—now it burned and seethed with emotions long unacknowledged. Impossible, now, to wrestle them once more into submission.

  It felt like some sort of poetic justice, that he had faced all challengers and come away unscathed but for Mouse. That he had stood firm against renowned pugilists, against would-be assassins, against society’s censure—but a small, blond mite of a woman he’d named Mouse had destroyed his carefully-crafted and neatly-ordered world without landing a single blow. He had never had a chance, and he hadn’t even known it until it was too late for him.

  Lansdowne tensed beside him, going utterly rigid, and Grey’s gaze shot to the staircase.

  “She’s here?” he asked, scanning the crowd again.

  “No,” Lansdowne said, his voice a strained murmur. “No. Not Serena.” He shook himself, a self-deprecating smile touching his lips. “Portsmouth, our butler—he’s just signaled me. Father has taken the bait. I suppose there was a part of me that didn’t wish to believe it.”

  So Andover had behaved precisely as Grey had predicted. Unaware he’d lost the element of surprise, Andover had indeed been easily lured into the low-hanging fruit they’d laid out as temptation—a window left open in a strategic position within the house, one that would force Andover in a direction of their choosing.

  “Hugh and the constable?” Grey inquired.

  “In place,” Lansdowne said. “How can you be certain Father will do as expected?”

  “He’ll be seeking to avoid detection. He’ll not surrender the advantage he believes he has in stealth—servants placed in convenient positions throughout the house will force him to take a route of our choosing.” Shifting walls, forcing Andover to act according to Grey’s design—and the man wouldn’t even know it.

  “I hope to God you’re right,” Lansdowne said. And then, “Good lord. What the devil is she wearing? She’s done herself up like the bloody whore of Babylon.”

  Grey’s gaze flew to the staircase, to the lone figure gracefully descending. Mouse, with her hair artfully arranged, wild little curls tumbling about her face in wanton abandonment. Mouse, with a sedate glide that made it appear as if she were floating down the steps. Mouse, in a daring gown of scarlet silk shot through with delicate gold thread that caught the light and glinted, as if her gown were licked by flames.

  If she had wanted to cause a stir, she would have done it well enough without the scandalous gown—but her lips curved into a satisfied smile, and he knew that the whispers sweeping the crowd were exactly what she had contrived to accomplish.

  She had used this ball for a dual purpose, Grey realized, and he was hardly the only one arrested by the very sight of her. Not content merely to rout her father, she was sending a message to the rest of the nobility. Her head high, her shoulders set proudly, she swanned through the crowd with the utmost grace and serenity, unperturbed by the stares she collected or the murmurs that followed in her wake. If she had held even a sliver of apprehension, not a hint of it showed on her face.

  A flower that had come into full bloom—more beautiful and exotic than anyone could have dreamed. She was marvelous. Grey lurched forward a step reflexively and then paused as he realized that he had been caught staring. More than a few sets of eyes had turned toward him, gauging his reaction, and it was a struggle to retain a mask of impassivity. This time he did not have the comfort of a spoon in his pocket to bend to his will, and the feel of one in his hand had long since ceased to be of any comfort to him.

  But he did have something.

  He slipped his hand into his pocket and curled his fingers around the strand of pearls resting there. Mouse’s mother’s pearls—he had carried them with him more often than not since she had gone. He could have returned them before now, through her brothers, but selfishly he had wanted to give them to her himself.

  Mouse wended her way across the ballroom toward Lansdowne, stopping a few times to briefly greet a few people who cast themselves into her path—several gentlemen, a lady whom Grey did not recognize but whom Mouse greeted with restrained aloofness. Grey knew she could not have failed to notice that he stood beside Lansdowne, but her gaze had not touched him directly. He was certain he would have felt it, like a stroke, a caress.

  Perhaps like a blow.

  Instead she made her way to Lansdowne’s side—the one opposite Grey—and acknowledged only her brother, as if Grey did not exist.

  “William,” she said, and her warm voice trickled over Grey like honey. “Any news?”

  “As planned so far,” Lansdowne returned. “Which you would know had you arrived on time.” His voice was faintly chiding.

  Mouse gave a wry smile. “I arrived earlier,” she said, “but I was told Father was skulking about the grounds and I was to wait in the carriage until he had gone inside. Besides,” she said, with a small, silvery peal of laughter, “You cannot expect me not to wish to make an entrance.”

  “Whyever not?” Lansdowne groused. “You never did before.”

  With a careless shrug, she said, “No one would have paid me any attention before.” She turned, and Grey could see her only in profile now, tucked away at Lansdowne’s opposite side. In a voice tinged with wicked delight, she said, “I received three propositions just crossing the ballroom.”

  Something coldly furious leapt to life in Grey’s chest—an amalgamation of wrath and jealousy. “Names,” he snarled, scanning the crowd for the likely offenders.

  Still she did not acknowledge him. Instead she addressed her response to Lansdowne. “Of course, I let it be known that I am not in a position that would require I take a protector.” Her voice thrummed with satisfaction. “Do you know, I think they were disappointed. Can you imagine?”

  Grey fisted his hand around the pearls in his pocket and struggled to stamp out his irritation. Of course she was entertained by this notion—men whom had never looked twice at her before now saw her in an entirely new light. It did not particularly matter to her whether or not they looked upon her with honorable intent; she was content enough simply for once to be seen.

  But she didn’t want them, any of them
. Mouse was not so fickle as that, her heart so easily swayed. She had wanted him, and—

  And he had refused her. Cast a list of other eligible men at her and told her to pick from it, and that glorious glow had died in her eyes in the space of a heartbeat. A doused spark not easily reignited.

  Christ. Grey fought against the urge to press his hand to his chest in an effort to ease the ache in his heart.

  “Well,” Mouse said briskly. “Champagne first, I think—and then dancing. I can’t imagine I shall lack for partners now. Do summon me when I am due to play my part.” Her gay laugh set Grey’s teeth on edge, and then she was sweeping away in a swirl of scarlet, and he yet held a fistful of pearls in his hand undelivered, stewing in the certainty that her lack of acknowledgement had been noted.

  It seemed mere moments before she was sailing across the floor, bright as a beacon, in the arms of a viscount whom Grey knew to be in search of a new mistress.

  “My God, man,” Lansdowne said between clenched teeth. “You ought to have asked her yourself.”

  “I don’t dance,” Grey said in a low voice, feeling, for once, woefully inadequate. There had never been a reason to learn in his younger days when he had devoted every hour to business, to raking in money hand over fist. He had never truly had occasion to regret his lack of natural affinity for music, for the way some people—like Mouse—could seamlessly move to it. He might be able to memorize the steps, the patterns, but that did not mean he could force his body through the paces of them with that same grace she had.

  She belonged in this place in a way that he never could. And he could only watch as gentleman after gentleman made themselves known to her and took the place that ought to have been his…had he only claimed it when she had offered it to him.

  ∞∞∞

  It felt like years had passed since Serena had last seen the house she had lived within all her life. To call it a home would have been something of a misnomer, for it had never been that—it had simply been the place she had lived. Home had been what she had found, however briefly, within Grey’s household. It was the pianoforte in the drawing room, and the decanters of liquor on the sideboard that never seemed to deplete themselves. It was the ink-stained rug he had never bothered to replace.

  It was nightly meals taken together, and that opulent bathing room, and a set of silk bed linens embroidered with horrible words that she had never managed to recover, for all that she was certain she had searched the whole of the house. It was the comfortable window seat in library, and the dressing room filled with gowns in every hue save for yellow, and the long walk to the garden in the early morning to let Cassandra out.

  It was Grey’s arm thrown over her waist, and the soft hum of his breath in her ear in the depths of the night. The prickle of his stubble at the nape of her neck. The peculiar grit of his voice upon waking. All things she missed beyond reason, beyond comprehension.

  For weeks she had wondered how a man she had known so briefly could have insinuated himself so incontrovertibly into her life that to be separated from him had felt like half of herself had been torn away. Eventually she had come to the conclusion that before Grey, she had never truly lived. She had never had much of an opportunity to do so, beyond the carefully constructed borders of her tiny world.

  And now, as the music wound down at last and the set concluded, and the gentleman with whom she had been dancing—the Earl of Pennington, who looked at her with undisguised interest—at last drew away, she marveled at the fact that she did not miss this at all. How could a creature, any creature, having known freedom, willingly choose captivity?

  Pennington bent low over her hand, reluctant to release it. “Would you honor me with another dance later in the evening? A waltz, perhaps? I believe I have one free.”

  “Another time, perhaps,” Serena demurred as she caught sight of William, who gave her a short nod, his face almost dour in its severity. The time had come, she supposed, and she wished she felt anything other than apathy—whatever familial affection she might have held for her father had died long ago.

  But as she headed for the door to the terrace, she realized that despite the fact that her father had ostensibly come here to kill her this very evening, she felt no fear. Not because the situation did not merit it, but because she knew that Grey would never have allowed any harm to come to her. Still she trusted him—if not with her heart, then with her life—implicitly.

  The things he had given her she valued beyond measure. The world was so much more than the stifling confines of a ballroom, the collection of pretty gowns and hats and shoes, the pretense of a civility in public that few displayed in private. It was more than chaperones and closely-guarded reputations, more than tea cakes and afternoon calls.

  She fended off three more invitations to dance, snatched up a glass of champagne that she did not particularly even want—her third, because who was there now to gainsay her—and slipped out onto the terrace.

  Once she had been warned away from such places, had been advised that reputations were ruined on terraces, but just now it was only a relief that she could go anywhere, in any fashion, free to do as she wished without the looming threat of social ruin hanging above her head.

  Really, there was a quite a lot to be said for ruin, in her opinion.

  In the cool of the evening, a starry sky draped itself overhead without a single cloud to mar it, nor to shadow the crescent of the moon lodged therein. The fresh scent of roses permeated the air, and it was a relief to breathe in only a single scent instead of the cloying mesh of a hundred different perfumes worn within the ballroom. Perhaps from time to time she would make an appearance at a ball, if either of her brothers required a hostess, but she could not say she was willing to rejoin the Season in earnest. It all seemed so much a phenomenal waste of time, of energy.

  The mad urge to remove her slippers and walk through the dewy grass assailed her, and she wished for a moment that she did not have this dark task to attend to, this scheme laid out by Grey to ensnare her father in a net from which there could be no escape. Waltzing in the garden seemed infinitely preferable to waltzing in the crowded ballroom, and it seemed a perfect night for it.

  A night for freedom and magic.

  A night for—

  She paused, one hand curled into the skirt of her gown to save the hem from the wet grass, staggering to a less-than-elegant stop, swallowing a gasp as the champagne glass slid from her hand and dropped onto the grass.

  Apparently a night for discovering one’s former lover lurking in the garden.

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Grey looked…dreadful. She hadn’t noticed before—or, rather, she had made an effort not to notice. In the ballroom, she could not have managed polite greetings, the civilized pretense of their relationship being less than it had been to save her life. She had only let her gaze sweep over him for fear that she would not otherwise be able to tear it away.

  But now, with the moonlight drenching his face and absent the prying eyes of the Ton, she truly saw him at last and was taken aback. Oh, his clothes were proper and correct, faultless in every respect. His face was cleanly shaven, his dark hair combed neatly. But there was a sort of devastation in his eyes, a strain in his face, a tension in his shoulders.

  Her breath stuttered in her chest. That wretched part of her that felt as if it had been torn asunder when he had cast her out cried out to be reunited with its missing piece.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. She turned to glance behind her—they were still within sight of the ballroom. When she cleared the hedges, it would be the signal for their trap to proceed as planned. Grey had chosen his moment perfectly; a moment of stasis, but well past the point of no return. “I was to walk alone!”

  He said, “I know. I couldn’t let you go unguarded.”

  Somehow she had believed herself exempt from his manipulations, and yet she had fallen into his trap the same as anyone else.

  Grey’s shoulders rose and fell i
n a sheepish shrug. “You could hardly expect me to let such an opportunity pass me by when you will not see me. Or answer my letters.” An unpracticed smile hitched up the corner of his mouth, suggesting he had not intended censure. One of his hands slipped into his pocket, clenching into a fist. “Mouse, please,” he said. “I simply couldn’t—” He broke off abruptly, a muscle ticking in his jaw.

  Couldn’t what? But she would not pose the question. She was stronger than that. If he had something to say, he could say it—but she would not press him for words he seemed loath to speak.

  He heaved a sigh, casting his gaze heavenward. “I couldn’t watch you dance with other men,” he said at last. “Men who were your social equals. Men who might deserve you.”

  Incredulous, she said, “You’re a marquess. You’re the equal—or superior—of nearly everyone in the ballroom.”

  “And in two hundred years, my title might be worth something to them,” he said. “But I’ve possessed it for only a handful of years and I come from common stock. No one has forgotten it. No one will ever forget it, Mouse.” It had the tenor of a warning, as if he wished her to tuck that statement into her brain and carry it with her always.

  He swallowed hard, like a man facing down his greatest fear. “I have something to give you,” he said. “I would have sent it to you, but I couldn’t take the risk that you would decline it.”

  Did he think she could be appeased with gifts, distracted with a shiny bauble? Her shoulder stiffened, her back straightened. “No,” she said. “Thank you. I have everything I need.”

  Grey caught her hand as she turned to proceed along the garden path on her own, appearing at her side so suddenly that it dizzied her, like he had dashed across the grass to reach her before she could leave him. His fingers curled around her gloved hand, his thumb sweeping over the back of it. “Please, Mouse,” he repeated. “It’s not truly a gift; it already belongs to you.” His fingers climbed her wrist, settled over her pulse. “A simple walk, Mouse, just as planned. I ask only a few moments of your time.”