Virtuous Scoundrel (The Regency Romp Trilogy Book 2)

by Maggie Fenton

  “What are you talking about?” he demanded after a few beats of tense silence. He had a horrible feeling that this was not about the tulips or the duets after all, but rather something far worse.

  “Something Astrid told me yesterday. I didn’t believe it until I saw your face just then,” Katherine said.

  Damn Montford and his wagging tongue. He was going to kill his so-called friend.

  “Whatever you think you know . . .”

  “You’re a virgin,” she stated baldly, disgustedly even.

  Sebastian could not believe that this was actually his life. Perhaps he’d reinjured his head in Bond Street while shopping and this was all some horrible hallucination. God, at this point he prayed that it was.

  “I don’t understand you,” he said quietly. “First you repudiate me because you believe that I am a philandering rogue, now you do the same because of my alleged virtue?”

  “You don’t deny it?” she pressed.

  Now his bruised feelings were fast hardening into full-on fury. “Does it matter?”

  “It matters,” she said flatly, her tone brooking no argument.

  “Then, yes. Technically I am,” he ground out, refusing to feel humiliated.

  “Why would you let people think otherwise for so long?”

  “Because it’s better than the truth,” he practically shouted at her, the last reins on his emotions snapping. “That I am damaged. Abnormal. Broken.”

  “Yet yesterday morning . . .”

  In for a penny, in for a pound, he supposed. “You are the only woman I’ve ever wanted,” he said simply, honestly. “Enough to overcome my . . . aversion.”

  She turned back to him at last, frowning at him as if he were a puzzle to be solved. He hated that look. “I still don’t understand. You are not totally . . .”

  Oh God, how had it come to this? “Impotent? Like your late husband?” he retorted, because apparently he couldn’t resist being a little bit cruel in return.

  Neither could he help the little surge of spiteful satisfaction when she flinched.

  “No, not like your husband,” he said when she did not return fire. “But he is as much a cause of my shame as I was the cause of his.”

  Her eyes grew wide as his implication settled in. “You mean . . .”

  She would have him rip open his chest, then, and reveal the innermost workings of his soul, damn her eyes. He couldn’t help but oblige her at this point, even though he knew it would only drive her farther away.

  He sighed. “It was a duel. My first. I called him out. He accepted. I was all of seventeen and petrified. But with the help of a little liquid courage and a great deal of righteous indignation, I met him on the field of honor. My uncle promptly shot a hole in my left hand.” He turned down his lace cuff and held up the evidence. She averted her eyes, looking a little queasy. He didn’t blame her in the least. Just the thought of that cock-up of a day still made him sick.

  “I don’t remember much after that, as I was half-sprung and in considerable pain, but apparently I fell down on my pistol, and it discharged. The resulting injury to my uncle rendered him impotent.”

  He had left humiliation leagues behind him. The story of his pratfall was so ludicrous that he would have laughed had it happened to anyone else.

  She sat down again on the piano stool, as if it were all too much to take in while standing. It probably was. Lord knew it had taken more than a decade for him to come to terms with it.

  “And I was not sorry for it,” he said, before she began thinking he was some sort of hapless victim or remorseful sinner. He was neither. “I am still not sorry for it. The only thing I regret about that morning was that it was all the result of some half-foxed accident I cannot properly recall. For I want to remember. I want to remember the look on his face when the shot took away his manhood.”

  Katherine gazed at him, wide-eyed and speechless, as if she had never seen him before. As if he were someone to be feared. He felt like someone to be feared in that moment, such was his fury at her, at himself. The fragile, tentative hope, which he’d cultivated for the whole week despite the cautious warning in the back of his mind, was dead on the ground.

  But he was not done. She had demanded her pound of flesh, so he would give her all of it and then some, whether she deserved it or not. He’d nothing to lose now.

  “My mother died when I was eight—or so I was told,” he began. “It was . . . not easy. I was left alone under the care of an uncle who despised me. He hated that I, the son of a French opera singer, was his heir. It was an embarrassment to the family name.”

  “Sebastian, what does this . . .” she began, stirring with restless dismay, looking anything but cold now.

  “You wanted me to tell you the truth,” he interjected. “You’ve wanted to know for years why I hated my uncle so much. So I am telling you the truth. My tale of woe,” he finished bitterly. “Don’t worry. It is a short tale.

  “I was seventeen and at Cambridge when I went down to London with Marlowe for our first proper holiday. We gambled. We raced. We drank. The usual entertainments for young gentlemen. Then, one night, after several bottles, we had finally worked up enough courage to sample the wares on offer at Covent Garden. Do you understand what I’m saying, Katherine?”

  Her cheeks were flaming, but she was glaring at him with some of her usual hauteur. “Don’t patronize me.”

  “Fine. We went to a brothel, which is as much a rite of passage for all young gentlemen of our class as visiting the races,” he said bluntly, his own face heating. God, this part was so nauseating. He’d wanted so much to fit in with the rest of his mates at that time, to prove his manhood to Marlowe and the others, even though the thought of lying with a prostitute had not excited him in the least, despite being seventeen. Even though it had taken an entire bottle of cheap gin for him to work up the nerve to so much as cross the threshold of the brothel. “We were adolescent lads, green as grass, and very eager to get a bit tarnished. And so we were.”

  She made a small noise of protest.

  “It is not what you are thinking,” he said with a wry, humorless twist of his lips. “I never got far enough to lose my waistcoat, much less my breeches. For which I am forever grateful. It was only after a few . . .” He paused here and swallowed down the bile. “A few caresses from the lady that she stopped. Pulled away and said my name. My real name. Not the one I had used at the door. So I finally had a good look at her. And I knew immediately who she was. She was older, of course, and worn by her . . . profession. But it was like gazing into a mirror. I had always looked just like her.”

  “Oh God, Sebastian!” Katherine cried, hand over her mouth, eyes watery, as the truth dawned on her.

  He could not bear her look of pity. He closed his eyes and turned away, swallowing his bile. “It was my mother. Suffice to say the incident was rather . . . damaging to my appetites. I discovered that my uncle was the architect of her misery. He had never liked her. So when he thought me old enough, he cast her out without a farthing, and threatened to cast me out too, have me disinherited or some such nonsense, if she didn’t go without a fight and never return. She resorted to her final profession out of desperation, and died shortly after our . . . reunion of a disease of the trade, despite my best efforts. A miserable tale, and an all too common one in this country. But for me, my uncle’s callous actions were unforgiveable. So I called him out. You know the rest.”

  “That is a horrible, horrible story,” she finally said hollowly.

  “It is. Horrible and sordid, and I never wanted anyone to know the truth. So I welcomed the rumors and cultivated my reputation and tried to feel normal. Even though I wasn’t. Even though I could never touch a woman without . . .” He swallowed, refused to continue that line of thought. “But then, there you were at that bloody musicale. Playing that damned Opus 53, so perfect and pure and
glorious, and I wanted you. And I still want you, to be worthy of you.”

  She looked stricken, her cheeks and lips bloodless by the time he’d arrived, breathless, at the end of pouring out his heart one final time.

  “I’m not . . . I can’t, Sebastian,” she finally said, her voice quavering and low. “I can’t return your feelings in good conscience.”

  “What does that even mean?” he demanded.

  She shook her head firmly. “I can’t let you continue to . . . pursue this,” she said, gesturing to his discarded tokens of affection.

  “But yesterday . . .”

  She averted her eyes, her expression still consumed by that pale, stricken thing that he could not hope to comprehend.

  “A momentary lapse in good sense, a passing folly of the flesh, no more.”

  She may as well have gutted him by saber, her disgust for their actions clear enough in her tone. But she must have known, from his confessions, that he did not—nay, could not—deal in mere follies of the flesh. Which meant she was talking about herself and herself alone, telling him in no uncertain terms that it had meant nothing to her.

  He couldn’t even tell if she were lying or not, had at some point in the proceedings stopped even hoping that was a possibility.

  How could he have been so mistaken?

  Mongrel, nestled quite comfortably against Seamus, stared at him sympathetically. He refused to be jealous of the pug’s blossoming romance, but it was hard going at the moment.

  “I think it is time you returned to your own lodgings, Sebastian, as it seems you are recovered enough for Bond Street shopping,” she continued coolly, hours or minutes later. He could not be sure how long he’d stood there in tortured silence.

  Her eyes flitted to him, then quickly away, as if she couldn’t stand to look at him any longer. As if he was not bleeding out all over the floor between them from the wound to his heart. He could only imagine what his expression was. He had ceased to even try to mask his feelings.

  “I will, of course, keep what you have told me today in confidence.”

  And there it was. A confirmation that everything he’d told her was indeed something to be ashamed of. Just as he’d always suspected. But it still bloody hurt.

  And he wanted to hurt her, for he was as furious at her as he was injured. Though he was beginning to wonder if hurting her was even possible. Perhaps Lady Ice was an appropriate sobriquet for her after all.

  “What?” he murmured, deliberately obtuse. “That my mother died a poxy whore? That I am a bloody thirty-three-year-old virgin because of it? Or that I am in love with you?”

  She winced at this last bit, but the jab was no more than a hollow victory after everything that had passed between them.

  “All of it,” she finally said. And then, as if to rub salt into the wounds she had inflicted, she picked up the bouquet and extended the tulips in his direction without meeting his eyes. “Please, take these back and we’ll forget this ever happened.”

  He choked out a strangled laugh. She’d concede nothing to him, then. He wondered why he was so surprised. “Keep them, my lady,” he bit out. “You own every other part of me anyway. Why not another?”

  He turned on his heel and left before he could see her reaction to this parting shot, mostly because he feared that there wouldn’t be one.

  Chapter Twelve

  In Which the Duchess of Montford Meddles

  THE LITTLE SEASON was at its pinnacle when the Marchioness of Manwaring, one of society’s brightest lights, at last emerged from half mourning to attend the Montford winter ball with a most unusual and unexpected escort—an escort that immediately set the gossip mill churning anew. None had expected this development, in light of recent alleged events at the marchioness’s Bruton Street residence.

  Though usually irreproachable, the marchioness had not escaped the gossip hounds during her mourning year. Her controversial new charity project with the city’s burgeoning population of Incognitas, her mounting collection of exotic pets, as well as the purchase of a townhome not associated with her late husband’s estate—gasp—had indeed raised a few eyebrows. But her decision to take in her estranged nephew after his infamous assault had blown the eyebrows clear off many a matron’s face, so briskly did they fan themselves as they shared this latest on-dit.

  It was the scandal of the year . . . so far.

  The marchioness’s involvement in the whole Blanchard Affair was the subject of much speculation, as well as whether or not she would actually attend the ball at all, what with her alleged houseguest still recuperating. It made the frenzy to secure an invitation even more vicious than usual.

  It was already the most coveted invitation of the year, even if it was during the leaner winter months, and it had become even more fashionable an event after the duke had acquired his unconventional wife.

  When the duke had brought his new bride home a few years ago, a bride who was decidedly not Lady Araminta Carlisle, London society had been turned upside down. A Yorkshire country bluestocking (dear Lord), she’d come with a retinue of equally peculiar relatives: two sisters in short skirts whose antics rivaled that of the Viscount Marlowe’s twins, and the half-senile, foul-mouthed Aunt Anabel, with her antique wig collection and a propensity for napping in her soup.

  There was rumored to be another one of their clan, a beauty recently married to Sir Wesley Benwick, a famously nitwitted Yorkshire baronet who speculated his fortune on various scientific schemes that never came up to scratch (steam power indeed). To make matters worse, the new duchess was rumored to have been—perhaps still was—in trade. Brewing ale.

  The horror.

  No one could at first figure out what had possessed the austere Duke of Montford, of all people, to marry such a woman. She had no fortune, no conventional beauty, and very little breeding to recommend her. And her looks were most odd. Her eyes were, admittedly, an unfortunate accident of nature, and so was her hair, but most agreed that her rather vulgar freckling could have been prevented by a regular adherence to decorum. Hats weren’t just for show, after all.

  The duchess’s manners were equally appalling. She spoke whatever she was thinking without apology. She had the nerve to give her true opinions on everything from the current trend toward puffed sleeves—which she thought atrocious—to the latest fracas in the East Indies or some other far-flung backwater of the world, which she thought equally atrocious. No true lady disliked the latest fashions from the Continent or talked about world affairs over a cup of tea as if she were a man.

  Most infamously, she’d given the cut direct to a royal duke at the first ball she’d attended as the new duchess. The old blighter had thought it the most exciting thing to happen to him in polite society in years.

  Not that he spent much time in polite society.

  His Royal Highness, it was duly noted, began accepting invitations to gatherings he knew the duchess would attend, and rumor had it he’d thrown over a certain Mrs. Hodge, lately of a discreet(ish) address in Soho, and was currently shopping around for a newer model. In red.

  But it was a universal truth acknowledged by even the most censorious voices in the ton that the Duchess of Montford had eyes for no one but her husband. Their mutual faithfulness was rather refreshing among a class rife with infidelity, if nothing else.

  With friends like Katherine, Marchioness of Manwaring, and Elaine, Countess of Brinderley, firmly behind her, however, the duchess quickly had the London ton eating out of the palm of her hand. Though the stodgy matrons seemed terminally unable to stop disapproving of her behind their fluttering fans, the gentlemen loved her, the old biddies adored her, and the younger generation wished to be her. Many debutantes began adopting the duchess’s forthright opinions and loose, unkempt hairstyle that was being dubbed Brise-jet à la Astrid, or the Honeywell Swirl, in the hopes of snaring a mate as prized as Montford.

&
nbsp; The duchess, loved or hated, had at least added an element of excitement to an otherwise lackluster past few years in society. Since the war had ended, good entertainment had been hard to come by. But, alas, with the Duke of Montford officially off the block, and the infamous new Marquess of Manwaring (cleared in the court of public opinion after the birth of Mrs. Firth’s red-headed child) in convalescence, eligible gentlemen were even lower on the ground than usual, especially during the Little Season. The most interesting (i.e., rich) marital prospect at large was Sir Thaddeus Davies, a Scot with a squint and a family seat near the Outer Hebrides.

  None of the ladies of London, aside from the bare handful with sense, could locate the Outer Hebrides on a map.

  The widowed Viscount Marlowe, usually thought an appalling prospect, was beginning to look very well indeed to the most desperate of matchmaking mothers. He didn’t seem to own a decent pair of English boots, but he had a title and was heir to an earldom, even if his father despised him. Many dowered ladies and their anxious mothers began to hope he would ruin himself at the gaming tables so completely he would decide it was time to marry another fortune.

  At least he, unlike most of his ilk, put in an appearance at the odd function or two at the behest of his sister, but no one expected him to escort the Marchioness of Manwaring to the Montford ball and to, by all appearances, positively dote on her as the night progressed.

  Katherine herself could hardly fathom the bizarre turn of events. Marlowe had presented himself at her door the evening of the ball looking agonizingly uncomfortable in his new tails and breeches, whiskers shaved and hair pomaded, bound and determined to escort her despite how much he clearly loathed the prospect.

  Even if she and Marlowe had become cautious friends over the years and had grown even closer during Sebastian’s convalescence, she had never expected this courtesy. She was immediately suspicious and could only assume the Countess of Brinderley, who had been most insistent on Katherine’s reentry into society for months, had put her brother up to it.