The Scandal of the Season

by Annie Burrows

  ‘Not dancing tonight?’ He smiled. ‘I am glad to hear it. I am not fond of dancing, as a rule.’ He glanced at the empty chair by her side. ‘It will suit me far better to simply sit and talk. May I take this chair?’

  ‘You may,’ she replied coldly. ‘Preferably to the furthest corner of the room, where you may sit and talk to someone else.’

  He grinned at her. Grinned at her! If only she had a handy...parasol that she could whack him with. But parasols weren’t permitted in ballrooms. At least, nobody ever brought one, since there was no need for them. As a rule. Though perhaps debutantes should start carrying them everywhere, since it appeared there was no getting rid of some men without them.

  ‘I don’t want to talk to anyone else,’ he said, sitting down beside her and turning the whole of his upper body her way, making his interest in her plain for everyone to see. From across the room she saw Godmama’s face light with amusement. And Rosalind turned her head so sharply as she galloped down the room that she almost missed the outstretched hand of the partner waiting to claim her at the bottom of the set.

  ‘Besides, I do need to explain why I spoke the way I did, after you did me the honour of allowing me to take your virginity.’

  It was a good job Cassy did not have a drink in hand, because she would surely have spilled it. ‘You cannot say things like that! Not in such a public place, where anyone could hear.’

  ‘There are so many people here tonight that most of them are already having to shout to make themselves heard above the din. They aren’t going to be able to hear anything that I might say. Particularly not if I lean close and murmur it into your ear,’ he said, matching his movements to his words. ‘Would you prefer that?’

  Yes, oh, yes—having his mouth there, right by her ear, sending hot breath down her neck was...

  She grabbed her willpower in both hands and leaned away. ‘I would not,’ she said primly. ‘And if you don’t sit up straight, this instant, I shall get up and walk away.’

  ‘I shall only follow you,’ he said. But he did sit up and adopt a more respectable distance.

  ‘It all goes back to that business with Lieutenant Gilbey,’ he continued in a conversational tone.

  She had no idea where he intended to go with that statement, but at least it gave her the chance to get in a complaint. ‘Ah yes, the poor hapless boy you assumed I’d seduced,’ she said waspishly.

  ‘That was only after Issy, that is, my sister, had filled my head with all sorts of lies. At the time you and he tried to elope I could see nothing lover-like about either of you. You looked scared and so very young, and he was treating you like a problem he had to solve, a problem that had landed in his lap like an unexploded shell which he heartily wished he could toss away, but couldn’t.’

  Well, yes, which was because by the time they’d reached Portsmouth they’d both realised they’d made a mistake. Guy hadn’t taken into account just how much it would cost to transport a young lady right across the country, what with extra rooms in inns and the hiring of a chaise rather than just stabling his own riding horse. And she’d begun to see that she’d put her trust in an impetuous boy who had over-exaggerated his ability to take care of her.

  ‘Why did you, as a matter of interest, take it into your heads to run away together?’

  ‘I thought,’ she couldn’t resist saying, ‘you assumed I seduced him.’

  ‘I changed my mind.’

  ‘Only after you discovered I hadn’t!’

  ‘Then won’t you explain it now?’

  ‘You have no right to ask about it now,’ she snapped.

  ‘Perhaps not the right, no. But I want to understand. Please, help me to understand that part of your past. I opened my heart to you. I told you everything. And once you understood why I’d behaved the way I did, you were easily able to forgive me. Don’t you see how much difference it makes when you understand what makes people behave the way they do?’

  Yes, but the difference was she’d seen that all his anger and bluster were on the surface. That he wasn’t really that mean person who was trying to scare her by acting that way. That deep down he was a fine and noble man, even before he’d explained why he’d been acting the way he had. Whereas he’d never bothered to look any deeper into her.

  ‘The moment I learned that my sister had lied about your financial affairs,’ he pointed out, ‘I came straight round to beg your forgiveness.’

  Yes, but he’d believed that pack of lies to start with. He hadn’t ever had any faith in her. She’d been so foolish to think that the way he’d looked at her, the tone of his voice when he’d said he wanted her...well, that had just been a man telling a woman he was attracted to the way she looked. That was all. He hadn’t wanted her, the real her. He wanted the woman who went about in low-cut gowns shooting him come-hither looks. A woman who didn’t really exist.

  ‘And now I know that the other things people have assumed about you are lies, too. I want to know where those lies stemmed from...’

  ‘Oh, please,’ she said, finally losing her temper and thus her ability to maintain a stony silence. ‘You know exactly where they stemmed from. They stemmed from the assumption that a girl could not possibly run away with a boy without getting up to mischief along the way. Not even if they’d always been more like brother and sister.’

  ‘Was that how it was? Brother and sister? You grew up close to each other, I take it, if that is how it was.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake.’ She turned to him. ‘You aren’t going to stop pestering me until you get an answer, are you?’

  He shook his head and gave that wicked little grin again as though he was enjoying this. Enjoying baiting her.

  ‘I’m not going to stop pestering you,’ he said, lowering his voice to the merest murmur, ‘until you agree to marry me.’

  Her heart skipped. Several extremely inappropriate parts of her body thrummed, as if they were shouting yes. All the parts that no man but he had ever touched. Parts that wanted him to touch them again, damn them! Just when she thought she’d brought her reaction to him under control.

  ‘I am not going to marry a man just because he accidentally took my innocence and feels duty-bound to atone for the crime. But I would have married Lieutenant Gilbey,’ she told him, ‘gladly. He treated me like a princess.’ Which was because he suffered from the delusion that he was some sort of knight errant. As usual, when she reflected upon the fate of that young man, her spirits plunged.

  ‘But how happy would you have been, if you felt for him the way a sister feels for a brother?’ he mused. ‘What is more to the point, what on earth could have happened to make you feel that it would be better to run away with him than stay at home?’

  She flinched and turned her head away. She could tell him about her home life, she supposed. About the way her stepfather had bullied them into a state of perpetual anxiety. How he’d somehow driven wedges between them all so that nobody trusted anyone else. Until the only time she felt free was when she was out of doors, walking, walking, walking...

  Which was how she’d come across Guy that day. He’d been sitting under a tree, a little the worse for wear after a night of heavy drinking. He’d leapt to his feet when he saw her approach, trying to be the gentleman, and winced. She’d told him he’d better sit down before he fell down and had sat next to him.

  He’d put his arm round her, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. It had been so long since anyone had touched her to express affection that she’d leaned into him, buried her face in his chest and burst into tears...

  ‘I know that your family would not take you back afterwards,’ Colonel Fairfax was continuing. His voice turned remorseful. ‘I have learned a great deal about your stepfather in recent days, and, had I known then what I know now, I would never have suggested that you go back to people who would not shelter you. But at the time, I thought
you would be safer with them than sailing away with an army on campaign.’

  ‘Well,’ she said tartly, ‘safety isn’t everything. Or I wouldn’t have agreed to Guy’s mad scheme to run away with him. Only he...’

  ‘Yes? You can tell me.’

  She shook her head. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘I might.’

  She looked down at the fan she held in her lap.

  ‘Please. You will probably feel better for telling me. Especially if you haven’t been able to talk about it with anyone else.’

  She hadn’t. Her family hadn’t given her the chance to explain anything. Betty had been with her and so had simply understood how it was. Only her aunts had asked a few pertinent questions and that only when she’d first landed on their doorstep. They’d told her to let it be a lesson to her on the nature of men and encouraged her to put it all behind her. Since it had been by no means certain they’d let her stay, she’d done all she could not to annoy them by complaining about how she felt.

  ‘I certainly feel better for talking to you,’ he said, ‘the other day.’

  She flushed.

  ‘In fact,’ he said, leaning back in his chair and surveying the ballroom rapidly, before leaning back in, ‘I would go as far as to say it was a very healing experience. Before that, as you know, I was buttoned up. Afraid of what would emerge if I let anything loose. But since then I have felt...’ He shook his head and gave a soft laugh. ‘Everything. It started with anger. The anger I felt every time I saw you, if you hadn’t already guessed. And then yearning, then contrition, and grief, and...’ he lowered his voice so that it rumbled down her spine ‘...ecstasy.’

  ‘Don’t refer to...that,’ she bit out, her eyes darting frantically round the ballroom. It was making her heart beat and her blood pound, and her body remember the glide of his fingers, the rough texture of his legs, the heat and pressure of his mouth...

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why...because...’ She was so...aroused that she was certain it must show. ‘People will know what we are talking about.’

  ‘No, they won’t. They will just think I am making you blush by declaring my ardent love for you. They will simply think I am pressing my suit a little too warmly.’

  She was blushing? She was. She raised her fan and began plying it vigorously, which made him chuckle.

  ‘I wish you would go away,’ she said angrily.

  ‘No, you don’t. You still want me. Even though I blundered badly. Once you have forgiven me, I will ask you to marry me again.’

  ‘What makes you think I will ever forgive you?’

  ‘You are not a vindictive woman.’

  ‘I...how do you know that?’

  His eyes slid across the room to where Lady Henley was sitting next to Godmama. ‘You could have made things extremely difficult for the baggage who started spreading gossip about you,’ he observed, just as Miss Henley went skipping past down the set in which she was currently dancing.

  ‘She only told the truth. I...’

  ‘Nor will you utter one word of condemnation against the man who led you astray and effectively abandoned you the moment I exerted the smallest amount of pressure. Nor even against the family who drove you away in the first place and who wouldn’t take you back when you most needed them.’

  Finally, he was showing signs of understanding what she was really like. It made her look up into his face.

  ‘Do you know,’ he said with a rueful smile, ‘what I like about you the most?’

  She shook her head. She hadn’t thought he liked anything about her except the way she looked. Oh, please God he wasn’t going to start wittering on about her limpid eyes, or her glorious hair, or some such twaddle. She’d thought he was different.

  ‘I like the way you stand up to me. You have never backed down, not even when I was at my worst.’

  Well, that was certainly different. Only, he was wrong about her. She was timid and deferential, and...

  Except, her eyes widened as the truth hit her, except with him. It was true. She’d never once attempted to placate him. Not even when he’d been at his most beastly.

  Why was that?

  He laughed. ‘I am a soldier. I am used to fighting. And I am looking forward to our courtship, even if it is a long and stormy one. It will bring some spice to my life, which has been such a desert waste, for so long.’

  ‘It must have been if you can talk about wearing me down with your proposals of marriage as something to look forward to,’ she said, then found that she had to make use of her fan again to cool her suddenly burning cheeks.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Cassy didn’t doubt he meant what he said. He’d made up his mind that it was his duty to marry her and he never shirked his duty.

  And so she wasn’t surprised when he came to call the next day, bearing a posy of red roses. Even though, strictly speaking, he need only have brought them if he’d danced with her.

  It was a strange experience, having him sit next to her in a drawing room, attempting to utter pleasantries. He didn’t seem to know where to begin. It didn’t help that Godmama’s other visitors were clearly drawing their own conclusions about his presence and kept darting him arch glances, which made him shift in his seat and clench his jaw.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Cassy with mock sympathy. ‘I can see you are finding it terribly hard to think up something pretty to say. How much easier it is for you to hurl insults my way.’

  ‘It’s true,’ he said tersely, surprising her. She’d thought he might at least have put up some show of gallantry, in the name of his current cause. ‘I have never been much of a one for flirting. So I have not the experience with flattery that this situation clearly calls for.’ He glowered round at Godmama’s cronies, who nearly all nudged each other and tittered.

  ‘How any man ever manages to conduct a courtship in such conditions has me baffled.’

  ‘Yet last night you were so sure of yourself. Are you ready to throw in the towel already?’

  He turned his glare in her direction. ‘I shall never give up. You are mine,’ he said, getting to his feet and marching to the door.

  Leaving her all churned up inside. On the one hand she rather liked hearing that he found it hard to conduct the sort of banal conversation most men seemed to think suitable for a lady’s ears. And she had really enjoyed watching him squirm under the scrutiny of some of society’s most formidable matrons, but his parting shot had been so arrogant, it almost erased what pleasure she’d derived from the rest. How dare he declare she was his? Just because she’d yielded to the clamour of her body and her mistaken belief that he loved her? Or at least valued her?

  That meant nothing.

  As soon as the last of that day’s crop of visitors left, she pulled all the petals off the posy he’d given her, before tossing them, and the remaining stalks, into the waste bin under her dressing table.

  * * *

  She was not his, she had muttered under her breath over and over again as she’d prepared for the ball they were all to attend that night.

  She danced with him, when he asked, naturally, since if she refused him she would have to refuse all other offers. And she went into supper with him, but only because he thrust all other potential partners out of the way with such determination he didn’t leave her any choice.

  ‘I have to say,’ she informed him, as he began to lead her to the queue that was lining up by the buffet table, ‘that I do not care for your tactics. You are not,’ she said, lifting her chin in an attempt to look down her nose at him, ‘behaving like a gentleman.’

  ‘I have never behaved like a gentleman where you are concerned,’ he shot back. ‘And that didn’t stop you from letting me into your bed.’

  ‘How dare you bring that up here?’ she hissed between her teeth, glancing wildly at the crowd jostling their way th
rough the door to the refreshment room. ‘Anyone might hear.’

  He shrugged. ‘Well, as you said, I am no gentleman, am I?’ He gave her a half-smile. ‘I am a soldier. Used to employing ruthless tactics to obtain my objective. To getting what I want. And,’ he said, leaning down to murmur into her ear, ‘I want you, Cassy.’

  The words slid down her spine, turning her knees, and several points in between, almost liquid. She snatched a glass of champagne from the buffet and took a most unladylike gulp, feeling a sudden welling of understanding for her godmother’s weakness for Captain Bucknell. When a man made your body feel like this, with just a few words, it was incredibly hard to resist him. The only part of her that wasn’t straining to meld with Colonel Fairfax, right now, was her pride. If pride could be considered part of her body.

  Actually, she worked out as she slammed the empty glass back down on the buffet, pride did not reside in the body, but in the mind, which was why it wasn’t lying down and rolling over. Pride was, on the contrary, reminding her that this man had humiliated her. She’d often looked back on her younger self with disdain for allowing Guy to make a fool of her, but she was beginning to think she hadn’t learned her lesson. She was just as susceptible now. Because, the last time Colonel Fairfax had said those very words about wanting her, or needing her...well, it made no difference, really...the point was that instead of taking them at face value, she’d bound them up with her own hopes and interpreted them as meaning something far different from what he’d intended.

  And after she’d yielded to the urgings of her body, assuming that it was fine because they were in love, and would be getting married, he’d turned round and lectured her for...lack of morals!

  That timely reminder of how he’d turned his reluctant proposal of marriage into an insult gave her the strength she needed to get through the rest of the evening, but she tossed and turned in her bed all night.

  * * *

  She rose the next day bleary-eyed, knowing he would be calling with another posy of flowers later on. When he set his mind on doing something, nothing would dissuade him, no matter how little encouragement she gave him. He’d told her so.