The Scandal of the Season

by Aydra Richards

  The Scandal of the Season

  Aydra Richards

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Epilogue

  Author’s Notes

  Dedication

  To the Great and Powerful Ras, Tyseco Brahe, and Thea. Thank you for always being so sweet and encouraging. I love you ladies!

  Prologue

  London, England

  March, 1828

  Grey had known when he had accepted the invitation to this ball that he would be something of a novelty. Half of the families present owed their fortunes to his financial acumen, and the other half—well, the other half were indebted for reasons far less savory. For Grey, the glitter and sparkle of the aristocracy had tarnished long ago. The gold veneer was nothing more than gilt, and he’d made something of a hobby of rubbing it away, revealing the ugliness that lay beneath.

  Perversely, he enjoyed the looks of shock and horror he collected as he strolled into the ballroom. Despite his title—Marquess of Granbury—he’d been skirting the fringes of Ton society for years. His welcome, such as it was, hinged upon his title rather than his actions. The aristocracy had a rather strange set of principles when it came right down to it—a man was simply of more worth to them when he had never sullied his hands with trade, when he had been born with blue blood running in his veins, a silver spoon in his mouth. They loathed him because their way of life was slowly dying, and his entrée into their midst represented the beginning of the end of their beautiful little world. He was an upstart, a pretender to their sacred ranks, a man who had been made noble rather than born.

  But more than that, they hated him because he had been successful, and in the years preceding his ascension to the nobility, he’d collected all of their secrets, their lies and their scandals, and, even more importantly, their debts. With little more than a look or a word, he could send the lot of them tumbling from their fragile pedestals. And when one sits at the pinnacle of society, there is so very far to fall. But they would continue issuing invitations to their insipid little gatherings and parties and musicales, because no one wished to risk overtly offending him—and so he accepted the ones he wished and rejected the ones he did not, and invaded their pretty little town homes and charming country estates, and took a wicked pleasure in knowing that no one wanted him there.

  The vast majority of them were inconsequential to Grey, though none were humble enough to realize it. He didn’t give a damn who’d lost a fortune at the gaming tables, who needed to marry well to put coin in coffers that had run empty years ago. He didn’t care which lords spent their wives’ dowries on prostitutes, who was showing signs of the pox, or whose bastard was being passed off as legitimate issue.

  For the last twenty years, he’d cared for just one thing. Vengeance.

  He had eaten, bled, and dreamed it since his childhood. He had lived for it, worked for it, burned for it. Soon it would be in the palm of his hand, and he would draw it out and savor it. He would dangle it before the man who had ruined his life and revel in the suffering he would cause.

  Because if there was one thing everyone knew, it was that no one crossed Grey St. Clair and came out unscathed. It was simply a fact of life.

  Tomorrow the Earl of Andover would learn it himself. It had taken a number of years to arrange circumstances to his liking, to manipulate them into his favor, but he had accomplished it nonetheless, strategically acquiring Andover’s debts, and the debts of the man’s sons. Like a thief in the night, he had commandeered the bulk of Andover’s assets. But even simple financial ruin was too tame—Andover would fall in every regard before Grey was through with him.

  He passed a trio of ladies on his right, who gave the impression that they had not seen him, though at least one of them was watching from her peripheral vision. Lady Pelton, the opium eater—an expensive habit she wished to hide from her husband. She gave a delicate shudder, a brief look of horror crossing her face.

  Grey was careful not to let his attention settle for too long on any one person. When he did give his attention, he wanted it marked, noted. And so he strode for the refreshment table and snatched up a glass of champagne and settled in to wait, a wolf in evening wear stalking the sheep; an invited—if unwanted—guest.

  Andover tended toward fashionable lateness at balls like this. He and his family imagined themselves of more consequence than they were—which was not saying very much, because in Grey’s opinion, every single one of the vacuous simpletons present made more of themselves than they truly were. They were merely the setting for Grey’s drama, little scurrying mice to be controlled and manipulated as best served his interests.

  It was almost fun, in a bizarre sort of way, to shift the walls of the maze and watch them scamper from one dead end to another. In a sense it was even cathartic—that the boy who had grown up with nothing now controlled so very much of their precious, scintillating, utterly disingenuous world. His to tear down and build up as he pleased.

  And none of them knowing that they hardly crossed his mind at all—it was Andover he had wanted; the last mouse to be snared in Grey’s trap. The one that would make everything worthwhile.

  Grey slipped his hand into his pocket and curled his fingers around the spoon resting there, the cold metal warming to his hand. They were a talisman of sorts, his spoons; in his younger days they had been base metals, tin and the like, whatever he could lay hands upon. He hadn’t been able to afford the silver, then, but it had been a goal to strive for, the representation of everything he hated. Something he could hold in his hand and bend into submission in place of the one he wanted to break.

  On the steps leading down into the ballroom, the majordomo at last announced Andover and his family, but Grey only half-listened as the neck of the spoon began to soften beneath the pressure of his fingers. Edward Tyndall, Earl of. William Tyndall, the heir. Hugh Tyndall, the spare. And at last, Lady Serena Tyndall.

  Her. His key. The last piece Grey needed to crush Andover.

  The fragile neck of the spoon surrendered and bent, submitting—just as everything else in Grey’s sphere submitted—to his manipulations.

  Just as Andover would submit. Just as she would submit. Because there was nothing in the world that Andover possessed that Grey wouldn’t destroy just for the pure pleasure of it.

  He lifted his head and watched her as she descended the stairs—her, Serena Tyndall. He’d known she existed, of course, this woman who was the daughte
r of his enemy. It was his business to know such things and to make use of them. But he had not attended an event at which she had been present before tonight, because there had been no purpose in it.

  She was pretty, he supposed, in a bland, pink-and-cream sort of way. Her mouth was just a bit too wide, her figure too delicate, her hair too pale. Alongside her brothers—both tall and dark-haired—she looked like a ghost. Too pale, too washed-out—like a fading memory, a changeling child who did not quite belong.

  She would never be a diamond of the first water—she would not have been even had Grey not already made his plans for her. He placed her solidly average; neither a darling of the Ton, nor completely overlooked. She’d sit out as many sets as she danced, like as not. Not that Grey would request one of her; he did not dance.

  She spoke when spoken to, and, like a little doll, returned to her place when not called from it. Soft and fine, like the rest of her kind. A cosseted little lady, trotted out to make for a good show, and sheltered against the cruel realities of the world. Protected from people like him.

  She bent. Like the spoon in his pocket, she bent to the strictures placed upon her. She would bend at Grey’s command, and it would hurt Andover in worse places than his pocketbook. It would kill the man’s pride, savage his honor, and heap shame upon his entire family. For a man like the earl, that was a humiliation beyond anything else. Social position meant far more than money.

  Grey watched his prey openly, taking her measure and collecting information to file away within his mind as he did with everything. She had a small circle of friends—other ladies of similar rank and social standing—but she was quiet even amongst them. She listened more than she talked, smiling a placid, serene smile that looked as if she’d practiced it before a mirror. She held a glass of lemonade that she did not drink, and her gaze wandered when the conversation flowing from her little coterie had drifted away from her.

  For a brief moment, it landed on him, and he fancied she’d given a little start of surprise to find someone staring back at her. Just as swiftly, her eyes dropped back to the glass in her hand—bending even now.

  It should have pleased him. Instead, he found himself faintly irritated. Whatever shreds of personality Andover had imparted to his sons—which had been so delightfully advantageous in luring them into ruin—had been utterly missed in the daughter. She was a spiritless creature, but he supposed it wasn’t entirely fair to hold it against her. That insipidness was bred into ladies, encouraged from infancy. Spirit was for horses, not women.

  She would probably have married well enough, if not for Grey’s plans for her. She’d had a few offers already, none of which her father had entertained, because he was at the end of his financial tether, and any negotiations would naturally break down upon the discovery that the earl could not provide his daughter a decent dowry.

  Or any dowry, really.

  But she was ruined now. She’d been ruined practically from the cradle—it was just that no one aside from Grey had known it. Any chance she had ever had of an advantageous marriage would shortly go up in smoke.

  Were he a man capable of pity, he might have spared a sliver of it for her. To the best of his knowledge, her only crime had been being born to the Earl of Andover.

  Unfortunately for the eminently pitiable Lady Serena, that was more than enough.

  Chapter One

  Grey offered his card to the butler guarding the door of the Andover townhouse in Grosvenor Square and waited for the man to look it over and admit him.

  He would be admitted, of course. Though there was always that pretense of civility, of treading the line between courtesy and expectation, Grey doubted there was a man in London who would cross him.

  The butler cleared his throat and stepped back. “I shall inquire if his lordship is receiving.”

  “You may inform his lordship that I expect him to present himself immediately,” Grey said, moving past the man and into the foyer.

  With a noncommittal sound, barely a squeak of acknowledgement, the butler backed away. Grey doubted he would pass the message along exactly as it had been delivered, but surely the man could manage a relatively inoffensive alternative.

  It had been two decades since last he had set foot within this place, and not much had changed. The walls had seemed higher, then, the halls longer. Perhaps it had simply had a larger impression on a lad of ten that it possibly could upon a man of thirty, who now had a good number of finer houses at his disposal.

  It called forth buried memories from their neat little cabinets in his mind, memories he had long since locked away. His father’s hand, gently ruffling his hair. His mother’s voice, chiding him for dragging his feet, lest he scuff the immaculate floors.

  Of the late countess, her face already marked with death by the wasting disease that had taken her in only a few months, bending to show him the precious bundle cradled in her arms. Her name is Serena, she’d whispered to him.

  It hadn’t suited the puling infant then, but it seemed she’d grown into the appellation.

  A sound from the top of the stairs pulled him from his reverie. Andover stood there, his face shrouded in a petulance that did not suit a man of some fifty years.

  “Granbury,” he said, and the title was as a curse. “For all that you’re new to our ranks, you still ought to have the good sense not to call before noon.”

  “I find that I like rules best when I choose not to apply them to myself,” Grey responded. The first words he’d spoken to Andover in twenty years, and they felt good—a reminder that Andover was not in control here. Not even within his own house could he count himself safe.

  A cloud of apprehension settled over Andover’s face, and he tweaked at his cufflinks, displaying his nervousness. Men of power and position were rarely challenged on it, even by their own set. To have a pretender to the aristocracy do so had to be galling in the extreme. But Grey relished little more in life than putting sanctimonious noblemen in their places—and that place was generally directly beneath his boot.

  He wondered absently whether or not Andover had recognized him. Of course, Andover knew of him. They’d even seen each other once or twice in the past few years, though this was the first time Grey had approached the man in person. But it seemed as though Andover did not truly know him. He frowned as if he couldn’t quite place him, and Grey thought he preferred it. This way, he would get to savor Andover’s surprise, his shock. His pointless, impotent fury. The game was already won, and Andover was still ignorant of it.

  “The library, then,” Andover said, and gestured down the hall. Grey remembered exactly where the library was; he had spent a good amount of time within its walls while his father and Andover had taken spirits in Andover’s study. From a slow scan of the walls, Grey could see that little had changed here as well. The library wasn’t as well-stocked as it once had been. Perhaps half of the books were missing, and Grey assumed that any of the rarer volumes had been sold off for a bit of ready cash, of which Andover was in constant need these days.

  Andover took a seat in one of the large wingback chairs set out. “Make your demands and then leave my house,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “Your house?” Grey inquired, insinuation coloring his voice.

  Andover’s face flushed a ruddy hue, his lips tightening into a disgusted line beneath his thin mustache. “You know damn well what I meant.”

  “Hm,” Grey said, though they both knew it wasn’t Andover’s house. Not anymore. Not with the mountain of debts that he and his scapegrace sons had incurred, and certainly not with the house standing as collateral against them. “If I were you, Andover, I would be exceedingly careful in how you decide to treat me. I am not, after all, known to be of a forgiving nature.”

  A muscle in Andover’s jaw ticked reflexively. He reached for a glass decanter set upon a table beside his chair and slung a measure of amber liquid into a glass, but his hand trembled in the doing, and a splatter of liquor pooled across the surface o
f the table.

  Weakness. For all their bluster about respect and honor and nobility, noblemen were so easily controlled with the judicious application of fear. And there was little that Grey liked better than to ferret out their pressure points and lay his fingers upon them. He’d ruined more than a few men, of course, but for most it was the threat that was important. The threat was as good as the deed, and just enough to keep his victims in line.

  Andover tossed back his liquor and snarled, “What do you want?”

  A satisfying silence filled the room, and Grey enjoyed it in much the same way that he would have enjoyed a fine wine. There were undercurrents of fear, delicious backnotes of anger, and a distinct, lingering sense of helplessness.

  Though he had not been offered a drink—in an incredible and deliberate breech of etiquette—Grey snagged the decanter anyway and poured his own glass. Just as he’d suspected, the whiskey was fine indeed. For a man who had put off paying his tailor’s bill for some months now, somehow he seemed to find the money to keep himself in the best spirits.

  “Do you know why, Andover, I purchased a marquessate for myself?” Grey asked, sipping his drink. It wasn’t strictly true, but the difference was negligible in the eyes of the Ton. In exchange for the dispensation of a title, he had agreed to pay off King George’s mounting debts himself. For a Parliament at their wits’ end with their monarch’s excessive spending which seemed never to end, it had been worth the minor concession of an Irish peerage, which would not entitle him to a seat in the House of Lords.

  “An Irish peerage,” Andover spat. “There’s no power in that. One might as well be common.” He sneered his disdain. “I rarely concern myself with the foibles of commoners—most especially those who would pretend above their station.”

  Grey chuckled. “What a pity. Perhaps if you had, you might have seen me coming.” He drained his glass and set it aside. “I wanted a marquessate so that you would know I would always be above you. You specifically, Andover. I am above you in every conceivable way that one man can be above another. I outrank you. I control everything you own. If I told you to dance a jig right here on the floor of your very own library, you would do it—because all the cards are mine, and if I called in your markers, your family would be ruined. One breath, one word from me, and your house of cards collapses.”