Scandal

by Carolyn Jewel

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Praise for the novels of

  CAROLYN JEWEL

  “The best jewel yet... Terrific.”—The Best Reviews

  “[A] dazzling series that just gets richer and more complex with each new chapter. Previously known for her historical novels, the gifted author has definitely found a new niche.”

  —Romantic Times (Top Pick, 4½ Stars)

  “A fast-paced, attention-grabbing, action-packed hell of a ride.”—Romance Reviews Today

  “Jewel keeps the plot fresh ... The perfect holiday treat.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “An intense, beautiful love story and a most rewarding read.”—Sherry Thomas, bestselling author of Delicious

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, andincidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  SCANDAL

  A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Sensation mass-market edition / February 2009

  Copyright © 2009 by Carolyn Jewel.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form

  without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in

  violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-69802-6

  BERKLEY®SENSATION

  Berkley Sensation Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® SENSATION and the “B” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To the usual suspects. Megan Frampton for reading drafts: Thank you, Megan! You rock. To my editor, Kate Seaver: It took me a while to get this right, but I managed it. Thank you for your patience and enthusiasm. To my agent, Kristin Nelson, who read one version (I forget which) and said, “Just start over.” OK, so I did, and I think it came out pretty good. And then there’s my son, Nathaniel, who really deserves pizza and burritos less often, but deadlines are deadlines, honey. To the Fudgester (aka Speed Brick), Jake, and Jasper: Yes, you can all fit on the chair with me, but then it’s hard to type. Comfy though! And thanks Mom and Dad, too. I love you both. I also owe thanks to the students in English 530, who read early chapters in the “starting over” version and to professors Sherril Jaffe and Noelle Oxenhandler for reading and responding to early versions. Such tact!

  Lastly, to all the readers who kept asking me when I was going to have another historical out: Here you go, and thank you for continuing to ask.

  One

  Havenwood, near Duke’s Head, England,

  NOVEMBER 2, 1814

  THE FIRST THING GWILYM, EARL OF BANALLT, NOTICED when he rounded the drive was Sophie perched on the ledge of a low fountain. Surely, he thought, some other explanation existed for the hard, slow thud of his heart against his ribs. After all, he hadn’t seen her in well over a year, and they had not parted on the best of terms. He ought to be over her by now. And yet the jolt of seeing her again shot straight through to his soul.

  He was dismayed beyond words.

  Beside him, Sophie’s brother continued riding toward the house, oblivious.

  She heard them coming; she left off trailing her fingers in the water and straightened, though not before he caught a glimpse of the pale nape of her neck. Just that flash of bare skin, and Banallt couldn’t breathe. Still seated on the fountain’s edge, she turned toward the drive and looked first at her brother and then, at last, at him. She did not smile. Nor, he thought, was she unaffected.

  Nothing at all had changed.

  “Sophie!” Mercer called to his sister. He urged his horse to the edge of the gravel drive. Banallt took a breath, prayed for his heart to stop banging its way out of his chest, and followed. He wasn’t afraid of her. Certainly he wasn’t. Why would he be? She was a woman and only a tolerably pretty one at that. He had years of experience dealing with women. “What luck we’ve found you outside,” Mercer said, leaning a forearm across his horse’s neck.

  Anxiety pressed in on Banallt, which annoyed him to no end. What he wanted from this moment was proof she hadn’t taken possession of his heart. That his memories of her, of the two of them, were distorted by past circumstance. They had met during a turbulent time in his life during which he had perhaps not always behaved as a gentleman ought. They had parted on a day that had forever scarred him. He wanted to see her as plain and uninteresting. He wanted to think that, after all, he’d been mistaken about her eyes. He wanted his fascination with her to have vanished.

  None of that had happened.

  Banallt still thought he’d do anything to take her to bed.

  Sophie lifted a hand to shade her eyes. “Hullo, John.”

  She was no beauty. Not at first glance. Not even at second glance. Bony cheeks only just balanced her pointed chin. Her nose was too long, with a small but noticeable curve below the bridge that did not straighten out near soon enough. Her mouth was not particularly full. Thick eyebrows darker than her dark hair arched over eyes that bl
azed with intelligence. The first time he saw her he’d thought it a pity a woman with eyes like hers wasn’t better looking. Not the only time he’d misjudged her; merely the first.

  She stood and walked to the edge of the lawn. Behind her, nearer the house, mist rose from emerald grass, and above the roof more fog curled around the chimneys to mingle with smoke. Havenwood was a very pretty property.

  “My lord.” Sophie curtseyed when she came to a halt. Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. Banallt saw the wariness in the blue green depths. She didn’t trust him, and she was still angry. Considering his reputation and their past interactions, a wise decision. She knew him too well. Better than anyone ever had.

  Banallt relaxed his hands on the reins. Really, he told himself, his situation was not dire at all. He preferred tall women, and Sophie was not tall. In coloring, his bias had always been for blondes, and she was a brunette whose fine-boned features added to one’s impression of her fragility. Delicate women did not interest him. She was in every way wrong for him. Havenwood might be a gentleman’s estate, but despite the wealth and property, despite the fact that Mercer had important connections, the truth remained that Mercer and his sister were only minor gentry. Sophie’s marriage had most definitely been a step down for her. His dismay eased. He would get through this ill-advised visit unscathed. He would tell her good morning, or afternoon, or whatever the hell time of day it was, express his surprise at seeing her, and be on his way, having just recalled an important engagement.

  “You haven’t changed,” he told her. Good. He sounded stiff and formal. It was not in his nature to abase himself to anyone. Not even to Sophie Evans. His Cleveland Bay stretched its nose in her direction, remembering carrots and sugar fed from her hand, no doubt.

  “You’ve met?” Mercer asked. His mount danced sideways, but he settled his gelding quickly. He was a competent horseman, John Mercer was. And far too alert now. Mercer was a dutiful brother looking out for his sister. Well. There was nothing for it. Banallt was here after all, and Mercer had reason to be suspicious.

  “Lord Banallt was a friend of Tommy’s,” Sophie replied when Banallt did not answer. She pressed her lips together in familiar disapproval. Sophie had seen him at his worst, which was quite bad indeed. Legendary, in fact. Heaven only knew what was going through her mind right now. Actually, he thought he knew. It was not much to his credit.

  “I didn’t realize,” Mercer said. Now he had the same wary eyes as his sister. The line between connections that were tolerable and connections that were not was sometimes all too fine. Mercer must have been wondering if that slender gap had been breached. A widowed nobleman with a long-standing reputation as a rake was one thing. A gentleman might overlook a scandal or two in the career of such a man. But a rake with a heretofore unknown acquaintance with one’s sister was altogether different. Particularly when said sister was already well connected with scandal.

  A look passed between Sophie and Mercer that made her mouth go thinner yet. If she was unhappy living with her brother, Banallt thought, this was something in his favor—if he went through with the madness that had begun flirting with him the moment he saw Sophie sitting at the fountain. That same compulsion had brought him here, all the way from Paris by way of London.

  “We met once,” she said. “Only once in eight years.”

  “Twice, wasn’t it?” Banallt said in a lazy voice. If she was lying to her brother, which she was, then he had hope that she would not dismiss him out of hand. In fact, he had visited Rider Hall exactly four times. Three times that her late husband had known about.

  “Was it?” she replied. Her voice could have frozen hell at noon twice over. He knew that voice well, and hearing it again made him want to smile. So many memories. She was the first woman ever to arouse his intellectual interest. Suffice it to say he typically admired women for other attributes than the quality of their minds. Perhaps his downfall had begun the moment he heard her speak with crisp indifference for his consequence. She spoke her mind. She wore her hair differently now, smoothed back from her forehead with fewer curls than he remembered. How like her to do so little to enhance her looks. “I don’t recall.”

  “Sophie,” her brother said with eyes that narrowed as he looked at her. But Mercer was no match for his sister’s chill. No one was. “I should think you’d want to mention that.”

  She rolled her eyes. “John, for goodness’ sake.” Her familiar no-nonsense tone fit perfectly with her features. Prim. Modest. Completely unremarkable. She was like a governess scolding some young charge.

  Banallt stared at her, more fascinated by her than he’d been by any other woman. His obsession with her bubbled up from wherever it was he’d tried to lock it away. He had been in the intimate company of women of undisputed beauty, but not one of them, not even the most exquisite, had made his stomach drop to the bottom of the earth as did one glimpse of Sophie.

  “What does it matter,” Sophie asked her brother, “if I met Lord Banallt before you did or, for that matter, whether we met one time or three?” She threw a hand in the air, and Banallt felt smugly certain she recalled exactly how many times they’d met. “Or even a dozen?”

  “Mercer,” Banallt said. He shifted on his saddle. “I’d no idea your sister was Mrs. Thomas Evans.” The lie rolled from his tongue like warm butter.

  The thing was, Mercer was right to be suspicious. Banallt and Sophie were both lying, for one thing. For another, any woman who confessed to knowing him stood a good chance of having been to bed with him. John Mercer was not fool enough to think his sister would be excluded from the likelihood. Well. And so. The truth was he wished Mercer’s suspicions were well-founded.

  “That much I understand, my lord.” Mercer smiled. “It’s my sister’s silence I wonder at. You’re all anyone has talked about since first we heard of your arrival at Castle Darmead. For pity’s sake, she practically lived at Darmead when we were children. Your hair would curl, my lord, if you’d heard even half the stories she told about you and your ancestors.”

  Sophie shrugged as if the talk—more like gossip—was a matter of no importance. Her attention was on her brother, which gave Banallt an unrestricted view of her inelegant nose and the slant of her sharp cheekbone. Today’s cold and foggy weather suited her; the gray brought out the bronze in her dark hair and gave the faintest pink to her cheeks. Had he not come to Havenwood to discover whether the unthinkable had, indeed, befallen him? He was far more than bewitched. Damn the world to hell and back for it, too.

  “Sophie,” Mercer said. “Let’s serve tea in the conservatory, shall we?”

  “As you like, John.” She spoke coolly, and Banallt didn’t know if she did so to allay her brother’s suspicions, unfounded though they were as to any past sexual connection, or whether because she was bitterly displeased that Banallt had come to Havenwood. God knows she was justified in thinking him here for no good purpose.

  Banallt urged his horse up the drive ahead of Mercer so as not to reveal his uneasy state of mind. Whatever else he did, he owed her an apology. Would she forgive him? And if she did not? He might well regret his decision to come here. He’d made a mistake. They’d never have met, not in a thousand years, if she hadn’t been married to that bounder Tommy Evans. Met they had, and Christ, he’d fallen hard. Precisely, he thought, because she was so unexpectedly the opposite of everything. The opposite of his expectations, the opposite of his desires, the opposite of any woman ever to flit into his imagination.

  She was still dainty. Still slender. Still with eyes that made a man think of nothing but looking into them a moment longer. Still wary and reserved. He knew her as he had never come to know any other woman. He knew she longed for love and that her life up to now had not been one to make her think she would ever have it. He still wanted to take her into his arms and swear she would never want for anything again. None of which he had ever done, despite the fact that he never had considered a woman’s marital status an impediment to an affair. Nor
his own, either. Her opinion on the matter was quite the opposite.

  Rather than catching up to Banallt, Mercer stayed behind to say something further to his sister. Banallt heard the tension in their voices but not the words themselves. He gave his Cleveland Bay the signal to stop when he heard Mercer riding after him. Damn. A man of his experience of life was too old for butterflies. The question now was whether Mercer had been tasked with sending him on his way. He mastered himself, and the control felt comfortable, like a favorite coat. From the corner of his eye, he saw Sophie cross the lawn, heading toward the house.

  “Sophie never mentioned she knew you,” Mercer said when he’d caught up.

  Banallt gave Mercer an icy stare. “Should she have?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Like any good rake, Tommy Evans kept his mistress in London and his wife in the country.” He tried to recall whether Sophie had ever talked about her family and concluded he’d known only that she had an elder brother who lived at Havenwood. “London was where he preferred to be. In those days, so did I.”

  Mercer said nothing, and Banallt didn’t know what to make of the man’s silence. How unfortunate that Mercer was easily as intelligent as his sister.

  “I was in Kent twice, as I recall. Perhaps three times. I met your sister then, when Evans brought me to Rider Hall to hunt.” They had not, to his memory, done much hunting, unless one counted choosing a whore at the local bawdy house as hunting. More like shooting fish in a barrel.

  “I see.”

  Banallt sighed. Mercer most assuredly did not see. “Forgive me if I am blunt. But Evans was more interested in whoring and gaming than in his domestic bliss. As was I. In those days,” Banallt said.