Never Judge a Lady By Her Cover: Number 4 in series (The Rules of Scoundrels series) (6 page)

He watched her for a moment. “I think you are more of one than you would like to admit. Don’t you wish a breathless waltz under the stars with a suitor or two?”

“Breathless waltzes have only ever led girls into trouble.”

“You want a title.”

There, he was right. She let her silence be her agreement.

One corner of his mouth lifted. “Let’s dispense with the artifice. You’re not looking for just any unmarried gentleman. You have a mark. Or at least a list of requirements”

She cut him a look. “A list would be mercenary.”

“It would be intelligent.”

“Admitting it would be crass.”

“Admitting it would be honest.”

Why did he have to be so clever? So quick? So…
well matched.
No. She resisted the descriptor. He was a means to an end. Nothing more.

He broke the silence. “Obviously someone who needs money.”

“It’s the point of a dowry, correct?”

“And one who has a title.”

“And one who has a title,” she conceded.

“What else does Lady Georgiana Pearson wish?”

Someone decent.
 

He seemed to read her mind. “Someone who would be good to Caroline.”

“I thought we agreed that you would not speak her name?”

“She’s the bit that makes it difficult.”

Georgiana had pored over the files in her office at the Angel. She’d eliminated a dozen unmarried men. Whittled her options down to a single viable candidate – a man about whom she knew enough to know he would make a fine husband.

A man she could blackmail into marrying her if need be.

“There isn’t a list,” he said finally, watching her carefully. “You have him selected.”

He was very good at his job.
 

“I do,” she admitted.

She should end this conversation now. She’d been away from the ballroom long enough to be noticed, and there was no one else on the balcony but this man. If they were discovered…

Her heart pounded. If they were discovered, it would add to her reputation. The risk tempted, as was always the case with risk. She knew that well. But it was the first time in a very long time that the risk came with a handsome face.

The first time in ten years.

“Who?”

She did not answer.

“I’ll discover it soon enough.”

“Probably,” she said. “It is your profession, is it not?”

“So it is,” he said, and fell silent for a long moment before asking the question around which he’d been dancing. “There are other dowries, Lady Georgiana,” he said. “Why yours?”

She stilled. Answered, perhaps too truthfully. “There are none as large as mine. And none that come with such freedom.”

One golden brow rose. “Freedom?”

A thread of discomfort curled through her. “I do not have expectations for the marriage.”

“No dreams of a marriage of convenience turning into to a love match?”

She laughed. “None.”

“You’re awfully young to be so cynical.”

“I am six and twenty. And it’s not cynicism. It’s intelligence. Love is for poets and imbeciles. I am neither. The marriage comes with freedom. The purest, basest, best kind.”

“It comes with a daughter, as well.” The words weren’t meant to sting, but they did, and Georgiana stiffened. He had the grace to look apologetic. “I am sorry.”

She shook her head. “It is the truth, is it not? You know that better than anyone.”

The cartoon again.

“You should be pleased,” she offered. “My brother has been trying to bring me back to Society for years – if he’d only known that a ridiculous cartoon would be so motivating.”

He smiled, and there was a boyish charm in the expression. “You suggest I do not know my own strength.”

She matched his expression. “On the contrary, I think you know it all too well. It is only unfortunate that I do not have another newspaper on hand to reverse the spell your
Scandal Sheet
has cast.”

He met her gaze. “I have another.” Her heart began to race, and though she was desperate to speak, she kept silent, knowing that if she let him talk, she might get what it was she wanted.

And he might think it was his idea.

“I’ve four others, and I know what men search for.”

“Besides a massive dowry?”

“Besides that.” He stepped closer. “More than that.”

“I don’t have much else.” Not anything she could admit to, at least.

He lifted one hand, and her breath caught. He was going to touch her. He was going to touch her, and she was going to like it.

Except he didn’t. Instead, she felt a little tug at her coif, and his hand came away, a snowy white egret feather in his grasp. He ran it between his fingers. “I think you have more than you can imagine.”

Somehow, the cold March night became hot as the sun. “It sounds as though you are offering me an alliance.”

“Perhaps I am,” he said.

She narrowed her gaze. “Why?”

“Guilt, probably.”

She laughed. “I cannot imagine that is it.”

“Perhaps not.” He reached for her hand and she stretched her arm out to him as though she were a puppet on strings. As though she did not have control over herself. “Why worry about the reason?”

The feather painted its way over the soft skin above her glove and below her sleeve, at the inside her elbow. She caught her breath at the delicate, wonderful touch. Duncan West was a dangerous man.

She snatched her hand back. “Why trust you when you’ve just admitted you’re in this to sell newspapers?”

That handsome mouth curved in wicked temptation. “Wouldn’t you rather know precisely with whom you are dealing?”

She smiled at that. “Surely this is the best fortune a girl on a dark balcony has ever had.”

“Fortune has nothing to do with it.” He paused, then added, “There’s little love lost between me and Society.”

“They adore you,” she said.

“They adore the way I keep them entertained.”

There was a long moment as Georgiana considered his offer. “And me?”

That smile flashed again, sending a thread of excitement pooling in her stomach. “The entertainment in question.”

“And how do I benefit?”

“The husband you wish. The father you desire for your daughter.”

“You will tell them I am reformed.”

“I’ve seen no evidence that you are not.”

“You saw me goad a girl into insulting me. You saw me threaten her family. Force her friends to desert her.” She looked into the darkness. “I am not certain what I have is desirable.”

His lips curved in a knowing smile. “I saw you protect yourself. Your child. I saw a lioness.”

She did not miss the fact that he’d been a lion mere minutes earlier. “Every tale has two tellers.”

He opened his coat and inserted the feather in the inside pocket, before buttoning the coat once more. She could no longer see the plume, but she felt it there nonetheless, trapped against his warmth, against the place where his heart beat in strong, sure rhythm. Trapped against him.

He was a very dangerous man.

He grinned, all wolf, this powerful man who owned London’s most-read papers. The man who could raise or ruin with the ink of his printing press. The man she needed to believe her lies. To perpetuate them.

“There you are wrong,” he said, the words threading through her like sin. “Every tale worth telling has only one teller.”

“And who is that?”

“Me.”

Chapter 3

He should not have flirted with the girl.

West stood on the edge of the Worthington ballroom, watching Lady Georgiana dance across the room on the arm of the Marquess of Ralston. The man was rarely seen in the company of any but his wife, but there was no doubt that the Duke of Leighton had called in all of his chips – including his brother-in-law – that evening, in the hopes that the combined wealth and power of the Ralston and Leighton clans would blind Society into forgetting the lady’s past.

It wasn’t working.

She was all anyone in the room talked about, and it was neither her powerful champions nor her beauty that fueled the whispers.

And she was beautiful, all length and grace, smooth skin and silken hair, and a mouth – Christ. She had a mouth made for sin. It was no wonder she’d been ruined at such a young age. He imagined she’d had every boy for twenty miles salivating over her.

Idly, he wondered if she’d cared for the man who had taken advantage of her, and found he did not like the idea that she had. He had little patience for boys who could not keep their hands to themselves, and the idea of Lady Georgiana on the receiving end of those hands grated more than usual. Perhaps it was the child. No child deserved to be born into scandal.

He knew that better than most.

Or perhaps it was Georgiana, who looked every inch the perfect, pristine aristocrat, born and bred into this world that should be at her feet, and instead waited to eat her alive.

The orchestra stopped, and Georgiana had only a few brief seconds before she was in the arms of Viscount Langley – an excellent choice for husband.

West watched them with the eye of a newspaperman, considering their match from all angles. Langley was a big fish, no doubt – he’d recently assumed a venerable title that came complete with several massive estates, but he suffered from the great bane of the aristocratic existence – inheritances could be prohibitively expensive. Each of his properties had fallen into disrepair, and it was his responsibility to restore them.

A dowry the size of the one attached to Lady Georgiana would restore the earldom to its former glory, and leave him with enough money to double its size.

West did not know why the idea was so unsettling and unpleasant for him. She was neither the first nor would she be the last to buy a husband.

Nor to be sold to one.
 

For the price of a long-standing, irrelevant title. One valued only for its place in the hierarchy. Yes, it might buy her daughter silent judgment instead of vocal insult. And yes, it might buy that same young woman marriage to a respectable gentleman. Not titled, but respectable. Possibly landed.

But it would buy her mother nothing but snide barbs and hushed whispers. No additional respect, no additional care. Few of the aristocracy into which she was born would ever consider her worthy of their civility, let alone their forgiveness.

Hypocrisy was the bedrock of the peerage.

Georgiana knew it – he’d seen it in her gaze and heard it in her voice as she’d talked to him, far more fascinating than he would have ever imagined. She was willing to wager everything for her daughter, and there was tremendous nobility in that.

She was like no woman he’d ever known.

He wondered, vaguely, what it might be like to grow with the love of a parent willing to sacrifice all happiness for one’s sake. He’d had the love, but it had been fleeting.

And then he’d become the caretaker.
 

He resisted the memory and returned his attention to the dance.

Langley was a good choice. Handsome and intelligent and charming, and a skilled dancer, gliding the lady across the ballroom floor, underscoring her grace with his own. West watched her ivory skirts caress the viscount’s trouser leg as he turned her. Something about the way silk clung to wool briefly before giving in to gravity’s pull irritated him. Something about the way they moved, all grace and skill, grated.

He shouldn’t care. He was here for something else entirely.

So what had he been doing on a balcony making silly promises of social redemption to a girl he didn’t know?

Guilt
was a powerful motivator
.

The damn cartoon. He’d dragged her through the muck, as surely as her peers had done so a decade earlier. He’d been irate when it had run – hated the way it teased and mocked an unwed mother, a child who’d had no choice in the matter. He didn’t read
The Scandal Sheet
the way he read the rest of his papers, as he had little taste for gossip. He’d missed the cartoon, inserted at the last minute, before the pages went to print.

He’d sacked the editor in charge the moment he’d seen it. But it had been too late.

And he’d helped to further scandalize the girl.

She smiled up at Langley, and something tugged at West’s memory. He did not remember meeting the lady before, but he could not shake the idea that he had at some point. That they’d spoken. That she’d smiled at him in just the same way.

Lady Disrepute, they called her, in no small part because of him. It did not matter that she was everything they adored – young, aristocratic, and more beautiful than one woman should be.

Perhaps her beauty mattered most of all. Society hated the most beautiful among it nearly as much as it hated the least. It was beauty that made scandal so compelling – after all, if only Eve had not been so beautiful, perhaps the serpent would have left her alone.

But it was Eve who was vilified, never the serpent. Just as it was the lady who was ruined, never the man.

He wondered about the man in her case, again. Had she loved him?

The thought left a foul taste.

Yes, he would redeem the girl. He would make her the star of the season. It would be easy enough – Society adored its gossip pages, and easily believed the things it read in them. A few well-placed columns, and Lady Georgiana would marry her viscount and leave West’s conscience appeased and his focus on other, more important matters.