The Scandal of the Season

by Aydra Richards

  “It,” Sarah said. “You know. Our project.”

  “Oh.” Serena said. “Oh. You did?” Her heart gave an odd thump in her chest, leaping into a mad rhythm.

  “Nipped in right after the laundry maids took out the old linens from his lordship’s room,” Sarah confirmed. “Said I was at loose ends and thought I’d make myself useful.”

  “Oh,” Serena said again, and her fingers knitted in her lap.

  Sarah gave an offended sniff. “I thought you’d be happy,” she said. “We worked so hard, after all.”

  And they had, it was true. She and Sarah both had labored for weeks over the project, working their fingers to the bone, and she’d vented a good bit of her frustration, her helplessness, on it.

  She might have promised to make Grey’s life miserable, since he’d ruined hers—but she had ceased feeling ruined some time ago, and though she had enjoyed the fruits of her many pranks, she was less certain how this one would be received, given his current volatile state.

  He’d spoken not a word to her in the carriage, nor when they’d arrived back at his home. Instead he’d shut himself up in his study and left her to her own devices—and she hadn’t realized just how much she had desired his company until it had been withdrawn.

  She wondered if he had been conflicted over his conduct. The strange possessiveness he had displayed at the gaming hell this evening had certainly surprised her. She had seen the rage simmering in his eyes and known it had been over her, and it had felt…lovely. Her feckless brothers, as much as she might care for them, hadn’t deemed the destruction of her reputation an offense worthy of violence, but Grey…Grey had struck a man—a duke—simply for daring to touch her gloved hand.

  She had no reputation to protect any longer, but still he had lashed out, and even if it had only been to protect his investment, the instrument of his revenge, she thought that surely he must…care for her. At least a little.

  But which version of him would she find, when he inevitably discovered her latest practical joke? Would she succeed, finally, in provoking his anger? Given his present mood, she did not know what to expect—what to hope for.

  Because she didn’t think she could take it if he’d reverted fully back into that cold, hard man he had once been. That man could wound with just a glance, cut her heart into pieces.

  Her heart? Her heart? No. Surely not.

  But that traitorous organ gave a fierce beat in her chest, as if to say, You fool, it’s far too late for you.

  She must have made some sort of sound, some mournful, pained little cry, because Sarah paused in her brush strokes and said, “I’m sorry. Have I pulled too hard?”

  “No.” The word came out a strange, hoarse croak. Serena dragged in a lungful of air, suffocating on her own panic. “You should go to bed, Sarah. Now.” She had no idea when Grey might return to his bed chamber, when he might discover what she and Sarah had done.

  “But your hair. Shouldn’t you like me to plait it for you first?”

  Serena could hear the frown in Sarah’s voice, and still she whispered, “No, thank you. I’ll leave it down tonight.” If Grey’s mood had failed to lift from its black bent, if tonight she provoked his honest ire instead of his humor, well….

  She did not want Sarah around to witness her humiliation. She did not want her heart shredded before a witness.

  “You know your hair tangles dreadfully if you leave it down,” Sarah said disapprovingly, though she crossed to the vanity and replaced the brush.

  “I’ll brush it myself in the morning. I promise.” Serena managed a weak smile as she reached for her dressing gown, which hung over a bedpost. “I think I simply need a bit of time to myself.”

  “All right, then,” Sarah sighed with a magnanimous nod, though Serena knew well enough that it was far past time that Sarah ought to have retired, and she was likely looking forward to finding her bed before the day would begin anew. “You do as you will.”

  “Thank you, Sarah,” Serena whispered, and the door swept closed behind Sarah with a click that sounded like the report of a rifle. She slipped on her dressing gown, feeling chilled to her bones. There was nothing for it but to await the inevitable, listening to the clock on the dresser tick off the minutes one after another, and swallowing down her dread until it was only an icy pit in her stomach.

  Even the heat of the fire failed to warm her.

  Shortly before three, when she huddled beneath her blankets, when the fire had burned to mere embers, she heard footsteps in the hall, heard the latch of Grey’s door lift. Her breath snarled in her throat; her fingernails dug divots into her palms. For a few minutes there was nothing, nothing at all—no sound, not the slightest inclination that he had done anything more than simply go to sleep.

  She very nearly relaxed, almost breathed a sigh of relief and settled in to sleep, content to let the matter rest until the morning, when she’d had the opportunity to distance herself from her tangled emotions. When perhaps Grey’s own mood would be less volatile.

  And then a single shout split the silence hanging over the house.

  Grey bellowed, “Serena!”

  ∞∞∞

  Grey had spent hours this evening locked within his study with a decanter of brandy, scratching out a number of letters to every club manager he could name to see Hugh Tyndall barred from their premises under threat of incurring Grey’s wrath. Both the brandy and the letters had been undertaken as a distraction to cleanse his mind of the myriad things that swirled within it, gumming up the gears and cogs.

  Things like the visceral fury that had coursed through his veins when Mouse had been manhandled this evening. The instinctive urge to protect her that had risen in him when it had become apparent that she had no one else who would. The fact that despite everything he had stolen from her, still she had judged him kind.

  Kind. She didn’t know she was worth so much more than simple kindness. She didn’t know that her good opinion had dredged up a wealth of emotions with which he had long since thought he had parted company. He had spent so many years immersing himself in cold, hard logic, in the analytical guise of a consummate businessman, pursuing his goals with a single-minded determination. As if he had been built of steel instead of flesh and bone. But she had taken a wrench to his inner workings, peeled back his metal plating, and revealed what lay beneath.

  He could not say which of them had been more surprised by it. Except that she was still the mouse whose patterns he could not predict, and he did not know her mind—whatever she had done to him, the end result had been a loss of himself, of his calculated cunning. He was less than he had been, removed of the level-headed rationality that he had cultivated his life through. It was mystifying, mind-boggling—somehow, Mouse had made a man out of a machine.

  Upon his return to his room in the early hours of the morning, Grey extinguished the lamp before he turned down his counterpane and noticed nothing amiss until he turned his head upon his pillow, and coarse thread interrupted the smoothness of the pillowcase beneath his cheek. Baffled, he lit the lamp once again and felt his brows wing toward his hairline in shock and surprise.

  Smothering the urge to laugh uproariously, he instead bellowed Mouse’s name as he shrugged into his robe. One hand clenched around the pillow, Grey stormed across the hall, threw open Mouse’s door, stalked inside, and slammed the door behind him as he crossed the floor to the foot of Mouse’s bed.

  “What the devil is this?” he inquired, holding the pillow aloft.

  In the faltering glow of dying embers which silhouetted him, he doubted it would be possible for her to make out much of anything—but he was willing to wager she knew exactly what he referenced.

  She huddled in the shadows of her bed, draped in the velvet counterpane. The fading light caught in her loosed hair, played in the hollows of her cheeks as she sucked in a breath, and revealed a glimmer of something in her grey eyes that looked remarkably like fear.

  Fear? She had never truly feared hi
m before—not even when she ought to have done. He had seen apprehensive Mouse, brave Mouse, contrary Mouse, rebellious Mouse…but fearful Mouse was not a version of her he had expected.

  Not of him. Never of him.

  “Mouse?” he prompted, and she curled in on herself, her fingers tangling in the counterpane, drawing it tighter around her.

  “I—it was a stupid prank,” she said, her voice rasping through the space between them. “I apologize. It won’t happen again.”

  Grey felt a frown settle over his face, scrunching his brows together. As far as her pranks went, it was elaborately constructed and meticulously planned—and perhaps a lesser man, a more genteel man, would have been appalled. But nothing she’d ever done had been anything above even mildly annoying, though this particular prank had clearly consumed a great deal of her time and attention.

  Despite her professed abhorrence of embroidery, still she’d devoted what must have been many long hours of her time to embroidering every filthy word, every foul epithet and insult she knew—and, judging by the spelling, some she had only recently learned—upon his sheets and pillow cases. In beautiful, elegant script, with deep crimson thread.

  “It won’t happen again,” she repeated, her voice quavering. “No more pranks, Grey. I promise.”

  Damn it, he didn’t want that promise from her—there had been so little amusement in his life that he had cherished Mouse’s humble efforts at pricking his temper. She’d adopted a maddening little smirk of triumph whenever she’d thought she’d succeeded in her efforts, followed by a pout of disappointment when he’d failed to lose his temper—so why did she fear it now, when she never had before?

  Or perhaps it wasn’t his temper she feared at all. It was hours past midnight, and he had invaded her bed chamber—in his robe, no less. It was not lost on him that the queer ritual that had developed between them—repaying kisses for her petty jabs—was at an entirely different level here in the darkness of her room.

  And if he were honest with himself, that thought had crossed his mind when he’d discovered his altered pillowcases. That it might as well have been an invitation.

  But that fear scored into her face….

  Grey hated that he had put it there.

  “Are you…are you very angry with me?” she whispered, her fingernails scratching at the velvet counterpane draped around her.

  “What?” For a simple jest? “Of course not.”

  She visibly relaxed, her shoulders slumping from their tight, defensive position. Some of the tension left her face; her eyes—once wide and alert—fluttered closed on a sigh of relief. “I thought for certain—”

  “I’ve not lost my temper with you over something so insignificant before,” he reminded her, and settled at the edge of the bed, cradling the pillow on his lap.

  One of her hands drifted down to pluck at the folds of the counterpane, and the loosened edge slid free from around her, revealing a swath of her shoulder covered only in the thin linen of her nightgown. “But you were so angry,” she said softly. “At the gaming hell. In the carriage.”

  “Not at you, Mouse,” he said, although that hadn’t strictly been true. He’d been furious when she’d stowed away in the carriage, and furious all over again when she’d been accosted. But even then he hadn’t been angry with her—he’d been fearful for her. And he wondered if that made even the slightest bit of difference…if her father had taken his own anger out on Mouse, even if she had not given him cause. If she had learned to expect that foul moods meant foul words slung in her direction. Or even worse than simple foul words.

  He held the pillow up, letting the dying light of the fire play over the lettering embroidered along the edges. “This must have taken a great deal of work,” he said.

  She gave a shallow shrug. “I was....”

  “Angry?” he suggested.

  She nibbled her lower lip for a few seconds, considering. “More like hopeless,” she said at last. She dipped her head and a lock of hair trickled over her shoulder. “That,” she said, with a flippant gesture at the pillowcase, “was the very worst thing I could think of to do. I had to ask Sarah how to spell some of those words.”

  Of course she would have to ask—most of them were unprintable. “Sarah’s spelling leaves something to be desired,” he said. But the thought of Mouse holed up in her room, bent over a white pillowcase she’d filched from some cabinet somewhere, studiously stitching indecent words provoked a laugh. Some women embroidered flowers, or birds, or biblical quotes.

  Mouse embroidered filth.

  He chuckled again, and Mouse dropped the remainder of her tension, reassured. “Most of them I don’t know,” she confessed. “I hear my brothers say them from time to time, but nobody tells ladies what they mean.”

  “Ah,” he said, and he searched the edge in the fading light, and pointed out a few words. “These ones,” he said. “Crude euphemisms for, er—male parts.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “No,” she said, horror edging into her voice.

  “And these,” he said, pointing out a few more. “Female parts.”

  “Oh, dear.” She dropped her face into her hands, and he suspected she had begun blushing.

  “And this one—the act of intercourse.”

  She peeked through her fingers. “That’s vile.”

  He shrugged. “I thought you deserved to know what, exactly, you’d been working at.”

  “Give me that.” She snatched for the pillow in his hand, which he held out of reach. “I’m going to burn it.”

  “Oh, I think not. These I intend to keep.”

  “But you can’t!” she cried in dismay. “They’re dreadful!”

  They were that—but they were also a symbol of Mouse’s dedication, her determination. Her clever, devious mind, with all of its strange delights. Her unpredictability, her perseverance, her unconventional wit. Everything he’d grown to admire about her. Unexpected Mouse, learning who she was, becoming who she wished to be, stretching her wings beyond the limits of her gilded cage.

  “I’m keeping them,” he asserted again, and as she lunged for the pillow once again, he slid the fingers of his free hand into her loosed hair, cupped the back of her neck and admitted, “I’m rather fond of your pranks, Mouse.”

  “Oh?” It was a breathless little sound, and she stilled, the hand that had been reaching for the pillow falling into her lap.

  His thumb found the sensitive skin behind her ear and stroked lightly. “Mm,” he said. “Do your worst. Provided you’re willing to suffer the consequences.”

  Her gaze dropped to his lips. And he was lost.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Serena knew at once that this was different. This time he was not laughing—no exasperated grin lurked at the corners of his mouth, no humor softened the sharp edges of his face. There was nothing playful or anything even remotely jovial about him in this moment.

  Suffer the consequences, he’d said. And when his lips brushed the curve of her cheek, she did suffer. It was a perplexing sort of agony that settled low in her belly—the ache of desire. It was not a comfortable sensation, and she shifted a little in an effort to relieve it, but moving only seemed to exacerbate the problem.

  His palm, which had been a brand on her nape, slid down her back to steady her, but the heat of it scorched her skin even through her nightgown and rushed through her veins like fire. This time she wore no stays, no layers of fabric to dampen the sensation—just the thin linen of her nightgown, and it was an insufficient barrier against the heat of his hand.

  She felt herself listing toward him, and couldn’t determine whether it was due to the pressure of his arm over her back or her own desire to be closer. And then her hand landed on his chest, over the soft fabric of his robe, and she knew—that was her reaching for him like a flower for sunlight. His heart pounded beneath her palm, and his lips grazed hers, and she leaned into his kiss with a sense of desperation, as if nothing in her life had ever meant so much.

/>   Certainly nothing else in her life had ever felt quite so important, so monumental. She suspected that, in the absence of the rigid structure of propriety and societal expectations that had dominated her life until a very short while ago, she had become…a bit wicked. Perhaps more than just a bit—because as she slipped her palm into the shadowed gap between the two sides of his robe and touched the bare skin of his chest for the first time, she tilted her head to find a better angle.

  He responded with a sound that was midway between a groan and a growl, like a feral animal, and it sent a shiver careening down her spine. His fingers blazed up her back once again and tightened on her nape as if to hold her in place for the onslaught he unleashed, and when his lips opened on hers and his tongue swept into her mouth, she trembled and braced herself, flattening her palm on his chest.

  His skin was so warm beneath her fingers, so different from her own, lightly sprinkled with crisp whorls of hair that tickled her fingertips. It was such a peculiar sensation that she brought up her other hand, which had lain in her lap, and nudged the edges of the robe from his shoulders to touch him with both hands, sweeping her palms across hard bands of muscle that flexed and tightened to her touch.

  With a groan, he broke away from her and his lips seared a trail from her cheek to her ear. His other hand covered one of hers—the one that had begun to drift down his abdomen and lower, because she had wanted to discover if he wore anything at all beneath his robe. If the compelling firmness of his muscles beneath his skin continued all over. If the sparse dark hair that dusted his chest was present in other places.

  “You should hate me.” His voice was a rasp against her ear. “By all rights, you ought to despise me.”

  “Hm,” she murmured in agreement, enjoying the warmth of his hand covering hers, the bristle of his stubble against her cheek. “I think that’s my decision to make.” She wiggled her fingers beneath the clasp of his. “Is Grey your given name or your surname?”