Edmund took another swallow of his brandy. The lady’s friend, on the other hand, Miss Barrett, with her breathless sighs and moon-eyed looks had demonstrated a physical awareness of him that was more conducive with his plans of revenge. He smelled lust and the lady had desired him. He’d have staked all his possessions and all the debt owed him on that fact, and it was a pleasure he’d gladly act upon. There was something intriguing about the prospect of laying down the trusting innocent, parting her legs, and teaching her the pleasure one could find in darkness.
“My lord is there anything you desire?”
Edmund glanced up at the owner of that sultry whisper. He flicked a bored gaze over the blowzy blonde woman with rouged lips and a promise in her eyes. Life had taught him the perils of distraction. Margaret had been a distraction. She’d been the last. Wordlessly, he waved the barely-clad woman away. She departed on a flounce of crimson skirts.
Any other day, any other moment, he’d have gladly welcomed a diversion with one or two of the warm, willing women of Forbidden Pleasures. Not since his meeting with Phoebe, as the young lady had insisted he call her—a rather silly, ladylike name. More specifically, not since his encounter with Miss Honoria Fairfax. Following that meeting, he’d come to the rather surprising revelation it would be a good deal harder to slip into that lady’s good graces and lure her away from respectability. Such a woman would take care to avoid being alone in Edmund’s company, which, in turn, would make ruining the pinch-mouthed miss difficult. His mouth tightened. No, he’d not earn himself Miss Fairfax’s favors, but he could earn the favors of the more trusting, naïve Phoebe Barrett.
Edmund tapped his fingers along the edge of his tumbler. The lady’s friend was an altogether different matter. No, the prickly, pinch-mouthed Miss Fairfax would be the one he was saddled with. He gave a shudder at the prospect of shackling himself to that one; though revenge would certainly sweeten the otherwise unpalatable prospect of having her for his wife.
After he’d taken his leave of the ball last evening, he’d immediately realized he must alter his plans. Miss Honoria Fairfax could not be easily seduced away from respectability. No, the lady’s defenses could only be broken down if he ingratiated himself to Phoebe Barrett. Through her friend’s affiliation with Edmund, Miss Fairfax would slowly come to realize his trustworthiness. He’d crumple the walls of her reservations, and when she at last trusted—as they all inevitably did—he would trap her and, at that, have his revenge. His plans now all hinged upon another woman—Miss Phoebe Barrett.
He scanned the crowded, noisy club. His gaze alighted upon a familiar, bumbling form as he ambled past the other patrons. Lord Waters lurched his large frame through Forbidden Pleasures, carelessly shouldering younger dandies in his haste to get to his tables. The man’s lecherous gaze lingered upon the women scattered about the club, plying their trades. He paused and a brown-haired beauty sidled up to the fat viscount. Edmund studied the woman almost dispassionately. Never one to desire a brown-haired beauty, he’d long favored blonde creatures and the ladies with midnight black locks, as Margaret’s.
There had been something faintly interesting about Miss Phoebe Barrett’s tresses. What would those strands look like spread upon his satin sheets? He gave his head a brusque shake. Where in the hell had that bloody idea come from? He didn’t dally with innocents, but preferred his women as skilled and jaded as himself. A scantily clad woman leaned up and flicked her tongue over Waters’ ear. Edmund eyed Phoebe’s father disinterestedly. Give a lady some coin and it mattered not who she took to her bed. The Prince Regent, a pauper who’d found a purse or, in this case, the paunchy Viscount Waters.
Growing impatient while the man took his pleasures there, Edmund downed his brandy.
The viscount stiffened. His back straightened and like a buck caught in a hunter’s snare, he scanned the room. His beady eyes collided with Edmund’s and then he stumbled away from the brown-haired beauty. He walked with a far brisker pace than Edmund would’ve believed the man possible of, drawing to a stop at Edmund’s table. “R-rutland.” The lecherous beast directed that greeting to Edmund’s partially empty bottle.
With a deliberate glee for the man’s weakness, he picked up the bottle and poured another glass to the rim. “Sit,” he commanded.
Lord Waters hefted his corpulent frame into a seat.
“There is something more I require of you.”
The other man planted his elbows on the table and the furniture shifted with the abrupt movement, rattling the bottle. He shot a hand out, righting it before it tipped. “I couldn’t get the shawl,” he said on a wheedling tone.
He flicked a piece of imaginary lint from his sleeve. “As such, you’ve only increased your debt to be paid back with interest.”
The viscount swiped a hand through his sparse hair. “And you’ll forgive my debts if I help you with the ugly miss?”
Edmund yawned. “A fat, foul bastard such as yourself has little right to cast aspersions upon the lady’s attributes.” His was spoken as a matter of fact. Crassness had ceased to bother him since he’d become the jaded boy of seven who’d been forced to witness his mother and her lover—a man who also happened to be her brother-in-law. Red suffused the viscount’s fleshy cheeks. It mattered not that the lady in question would one day be his wife. “I need to know the lady’s whereabouts.”
Lord Waters shifted his enormous belly. “I imagine the Fairfax girl is at some ball or another.”
He leaned across the table. “Not this moment, you fat fool.”
The man whitened, but then a knowing glint reflected in his eyes. “Eh, you want to court the gel?” He reached for the bottle. “My daughter would make you a lovely wife.” An image as Phoebe had been last evening, the moon’s light bathing her face in a soft glow, came to mind. Her full lips parted with an unwitting invite in her eyes.
The viscount noted that imperceptible pause. “Pretty girl, my Phoebe is.” He scratched his paunch. “My younger daughter is even prettier. You’re welcome to either of them. Prettier than the Fairfax chit. That one’s mother was a whore. My wife knew her proper place, gave me a son and allows me to carry on as I will. My girls will do the same.”
Edmund drew his bottle back, unfazed by the man’s blunt cruelness in talking of his family. Then, when one’s father forced you to watch your mother being tupped by her brother-in-law, everything else ceased to shock. “It matters not if she’s a whore,” he drawled. He expected when they were wed, the lady would have any string of lovers in her bed. That was the way of their world of false propriety.
Waters frowned at Edmund’s lack of interest in Miss Fairfax’s gentility. “You’re certain you don’t want my Phoebe?” His breath came in little wheezes from the exertion of speaking. “You wed the Fairfax girl and she’ll only give you a bastard. Everyone knows…” Edmund fixed a glare on the man that left those words unfinished. Yes, all of Society knew the scandal that had whirred about of the lady’s family. Honoria Fairfax’s mother had been rumored to spread her thighs for footmen and dukes and everyone in between. Perhaps with their like pasts, they’d suit after all. He didn’t have an interest in innocence. It was the one thing he did not know how to handle, but for the corrupting of it. “I’ve no interest in your daughter,” he said flatly, which wasn’t altogether true. He had very specific interests in the lady, that all connected to the pound of flesh he’d exact.
A beleaguered sigh escaped the viscount. “Can’t you just court the Fairfax chit as any other of the gents?”
No, his connection to Miss Fairfax’s aunt made that an impossibility. He leveled the man with an icy stare that silenced any further recommendations or presumptions.
“Er…right.” He eyed Edmund’s brandy once more and smacked his lips.
“How often does your daughter see Miss Fairfax?” he asked in hushed undertones lest any passerby foolish enough to come close might hear.
“Not altogether certain,” he mumbled.
“Ho
w long has she known her?”
The man scratched his creased brow. “I don’t quite know—”
“How do the young ladies spend their time together?” This would prove useful and spare him the tedium of having to find anything out about the rambling miss with her delectable derriere.
Lord Waters sat back in his chair and folded his hands over his paunch. “Do you know, I’ve no idea how those three occupy themselves?”
“Then start. I want to know where your daughter goes, and with whom, and what her interests are.”
“Her interests?” Edmund fixed a dark glower that had the man nodding. “Er, right…I’ll find out her interests.”
The nearly destitute man failed to realize his inattentiveness would mean the ultimate ruin of his already doomed daughter. Those unattended young ladies invariably found themselves with their ivory skirts tossed up and a rutting lord between their legs. The image merely drew up the memory of Miss Barrett bent over the rail, a piece of her gown caught in Lord Delenworth’s spear. An unwitting smile played about his lips.
“Er, have I said something amusing?” Lord Waters asked, puffing out his chest with pride.
His smile died. “No,” he seethed. The man deflated. It would take a good deal more than this bumbling fool to elicit any amusement on his part. Delighting in tormenting the viscount, Edmund picked up his brandy and downed another glass. He welcomed the fiery trail it blazed down his throat. Edmund shoved back his chair and stood.
“You’re leaving? May I finish your b—?”
He ignored the other man and started through the club, winding his way past drunken fops, who nearly fell over themselves in their haste to be free of the Marquess of Rutland. Except one.
A tall figure stepped into his path. Edmund flicked a cold gaze over the blond-haired gentleman with bloodshot eyes. The man had been drinking. “What do you want?” he asked on a silken whisper that would have sent most any other man fleeing. This one remained.
“You do not even know who I am?”
Oh, he knew the man. The Viscount Brewer. Up to his neck in debt, with creditors knocking, and a miserably unhappy wife. The occasionally visible bruise worn by the viscountess in Polite Society indicated just why the lady was so unhappy. That discontent had driven her to seek a place in Edmund’s bed several weeks past. “Do you expect I should know you?” And he’d been happy to oblige the woman.
The viscount snapped his eyebrows together in a furious line. His cheeks turned a mottled red.
Edmund peeled his lip back in a sneer. “Say what it is you’d say or step out of my way.”
Lord Brewer’s momentary courage seemed to flag, for he fell silent, and with a sound of impatience, Edmund stepped around him. “My wife.” The other man called after him.
Edmund turned around with a deliberate nonchalance. He dusted a fleck of imaginary lint from his sleeve. “What of your wife?” He’d had the young viscountess in his bed for that one exchange, but took an abiding pleasure in taunting her sniveling coward of a husband. “I’ve had so many men’s wives in my bed, surely you don’t expect me to remember yours?”
The man opened and closed his mouth several times, and when he still said nothing, Edmund continued on, and dismissed the drunken bastard from his thoughts. Instead, as he reached the entrance and accepted his cloak from a servant, he returned his attentions to the delectable Miss Barrett. Prior to their exchange on the terrace, she’d merely represented the key to his plan in lowering Miss Honoria Fairfax’s defenses. He shrugged into his cloak and then the majordomo pulled the door open. He stepped outside and a cool blast of wind slapped his face. I suspected the wind might have carried it off when I was looking at the grounds below…
The whispery soft quality of Miss Phoebe Barrett’s voice slipped into his mind. Now she occupied his thoughts for entirely different reasons. Her sultry tones were best reserved for wicked games upon satin bedsheets and a familiar stirring of lust struck him. Edmund strode down the handful of steps to his waiting carriage.
The liveried driver yanked the door open.
“Home,” he commanded in clipped tones. He climbed inside and sat upon the crimson squabs. The door closed with a firm click behind him and then the carriage dipped with the young driver scrambling atop his box. A moment later, the black lacquer conveyance rocked into motion. He peeled back the edge of the curtain and peered out at the passing unfashionable, seedy streets. He’d long preferred the sordid London hells to the respectable, polite White’s and Brooke’s. The world of dark and deception was, at least, sincere in what it represented unlike the façade of polite, wedded lords and ladies who’d simultaneously gasp with outrage at the fabric of a person’s garments while taking their pleasure with another.
He considered his meeting with Lord Waters. The greed and desperation gleaming in the man’s eyes indicated he’d do anything and everything Edmund required of him. Though this particular meeting had proven useless, avarice was a powerful motivator. What the old, fat letch didn’t know of Miss Fairfax, he soon would.
From the crystal windowpane, his evilly grinning visage stared back at him. An unsought-after creature such as Phoebe Barrett would welcome any hint of attention bestowed upon her. No, it would take no effort at all for a scoundrel like Edmund to slip through her defenses so he might, in turn, ruin her friend.
The carriage continued to rattle down the cobbled roads. His smile dissolved into a scowl. However, the lady he intended to bind himself to had proven herself suitably guarded and cynical. Such a woman was the perfect match for an emotionless bastard like him. How ironical to find he preferred the idea of bedding that prattling lady with her well-rounded buttocks presented on Lord Delenworth’s balustrade, all the more.
His carriage rocked to a slow stop before his fashionable Mayfair townhouse. He didn’t await his coachman’s assistance, instead he shoved the door open and jumped out. With purposeful steps, he strode down the pavement and up the stairs of the white townhouse. His butler, an older man with white hair, pulled the door open.
“Lord Rutland,” he greeted. Despite his stooped and aged form, he sketched a flawless bow.
He frowned. “Wallace,” he said tersely. “I told you, you needn’t bow,” he snapped as the old servant closed the door behind him.
A twinkle lit the man’s rheumy blue eyes. “It is good for my constitution.”
Edmund snorted and shrugged out of his cloak. Wallace held his hand out. He eyed the gnarled fingers and thick, dark green veins jutting at the top of the man’s hand. The loyal servant should have retired twenty years ago. Sheer pride and no small amount of obstinance kept him at his post. Edmund had offered him a sizeable pension at some point ten years ago, and continued to present the offer, but the man refused. Edmund suspected the old, withered figure would die at the damned doorway.
Wallace followed his gaze and cleared his throat. “It’s merely the cool weather,” he confided.
Edmund released his cloak into those ancient hands. Tightening his jaw, he said nothing. It was age and rheumatism. He’d not debate the merits on the man keeping his position at this late hour. He started up the winding, white marble staircase.
“I understand you’ve begun attending respectable events, my lord?”
Alas, old, bold, and mouthy Wallace had little point in allowing Edmund his much-welcomed, solitary presence. “You learned long ago I don’t answer questions,” he said with far more patience than the man deserved. Edmund didn’t answer to anyone. Cheeky servants. Cloying mistresses. Eager young ladies with a taste for darkness. Powerful peers. He owed nothing to anyone.
Edmund reached the top landing and turned down the corridor, making his way to his office, the vexing Wallace forgotten. He stopped beside his sanctuary and pressed the door handle, stepping inside the ominous room. He closed the door behind him and locked it, welcoming the hum of quiet and the eerie shadows that danced off the plaster walls. This room, once belonging to his father, held many dark memories. He�
�d learned long ago to embrace those memories. They’d shaped him into the man he’d become, driven all weakness from him, and transformed him into the cold, powerful nobleman who roused terror in the hearts of most. How many years had he spent despising his parents for the pain of his past? Yet, his selfish parents had shaped him. Strengthened him in a way that he could not be hurt. That was the greatest gift they could have ever given, not that useless sentiment people called love.
He strode over to his desk and settled into the familiar folds of his winged back chair—his only addition to the office. This was his. The single piece of dark leather furniture represented his conquering of the old, long-dead marquess’ hold—upon this room, and more, his hold upon Edmund. With deliberate movements, he pulled open the top drawer and removed his leather folio. He flipped open the book and shuffled through pages.
Lord Exeter. Weakness Faro and French mistresses. Debt one thousand pounds.
He flipped to the next.
Lord Donaldson. Weakness diddling his servants. Whist. Debt country cottage in Devonshire.
He skimmed the following names and then stuck his finger in the book to halt the pages turning.
Miss Honoria Fairfax?
He picked up a pen and dipped it into the crystal inkwell and added one more name.
Miss Phoebe Barrett.
Edmund proceeded to mark notes upon the pages of his leather folio and then sat back in his seat. The lady’s weakness was her friends, and that weakness would guide him to Miss Fairfax, the woman he’d ruin and wed. Last night, he’d seen Miss Phoebe Barrett as a vexing interference in his plans for another woman. After he’d taken his leave of her, however, he’d realized the serendipitous meeting with the too-trusting miss. With her regard for Honoria Fairfax, Phoebe would ultimately aid him in his quest for revenge.
His attention should be devoted to the woman he’d make his marchioness, and yet… He drummed his fingertips on the arms of his chair, studying the most recent addition to his folio. Phoebe remained firmly entrenched in his thoughts, for reasons that did not have anything to do with revenge. No, it had to do with her lithe frame and well-rounded buttocks.
The Heart of a Scoundrel Page 5