Scandalous

by Karen Robards

  “Beth, it is time to be getting ready for dinner, you know. And you might want to take extra pains with your dress. We’ll be going to the opera afterward.” This was said with the air of one rattling a pie plate of corn before the nose of a balky horse.

  “The opera! Really?” Beth, never having attended before, was not an opera fan; she was, however, always glad for any excuse to sample the seemingly limitless delights of the metropolis. She glanced around at Gabby with delight. “How famous.”

  Wickham, on the other hand, frowned slightly at Gabby. “You will hardly go to the opera without an escort, or a chaperone. And I understand that Miss Twindlesham is very nearly unable to walk.”

  Gabby gave him a glinting smile that was not one whit removed, in spirit, from sticking out her tongue. To hear a scoundrel such as he preaching propriety was almost amusing. “Should it be necessary, I am old enough to chaperone my sisters, I assure you.”

  “Are you indeed? And how old is that, pray?”

  “Why, she is five and twenty. Do you not know our ages, Marcus?” Beth looked up from her cards, sounding scandalized.

  “My memory is most lamentable upon occasion,” Wickham apologized, recovering gracefully.

  “Gabby is five and twenty, Claire will be nineteen in June, and I am turned fifteen.”

  “I will strive to bear that in mind.” His gaze returned to Gabby. “Nevertheless, five and twenty or no, it will not serve. The three of you cannot go alone. It is no place for unaccompanied young ladies.”

  His tone implied a familiarity with the opera that Gabby could not suppose came from a love of music. As her father and his guests had brought a great many female companions to Hawthorne Hall over the years without being particularly reticent about their purpose or origins, Gabby was well aware that the opera was a chief place for gentlemen—or what passed for gentlemen—to pick up mistresses.

  Her lip curled at him. “It is fortunate, then, that our aunt goes with us, is it not? We may thus be sure of being spared the attentions of those who are less than gentlemanly.” She smiled at him. “If you’ll excuse me, I must go check on Twindle. Beth, Wickham is growing weary, I am sure, and would appreciate some time to rest. He is recovering from a serious injury, remember.”

  “I know, I know.”

  Waved blithely away by her sister, Gabby bestowed no more than another hard look on Wickham before leaving them to their game. The situation was growing unexpectedly complicated, she reflected with a frown. When she had made the decision to go along with this farce, she had not foreseen that her sisters, not knowing the truth, might actually treat the blackguard as though he were their true brother. Nor had she foreseen that Wickham might attempt to play that role. She foresaw all sorts of complications ahead, but could think of nothing to do about them.

  Except, of course, worry, which went without saying.

  She dropped by her own room, where she found Mary waiting for her. Changing her dress and generally tidying herself was quick work. Glancing at herself in the mirror afterward, she made a face. Her aunt thought she needed a new hairstyle, did she? Well, she probably did.

  Some half an hour later, having left Twindle amply supplied with sympathy and cold compresses, she returned to her own corridor to find the door to Wickham’s room ajar, just as she had left it. As it was nearly time for dinner now, she felt Beth truly deserved the scold she was about to deliver. Gabby tightened her lips, glanced into the room—and discovered Claire, pirouetting gaily in her rose silk gown for Wickham’s approval.

  The first thing Gabby noticed, upon once again rushing into his chamber in defense of a sister, was that the expression in Wickham’s eyes when he looked at Claire was very different from the one he wore when he looked at Beth. Watching him watch her beautiful sister, Gabby felt every protective hackle she possessed go on full alert.

  21

  The wolf might have been content to wear sheep’s clothing when he was with Beth, but now that Claire was within his orbit he was once again revealed for the beast he truly was, Gabby thought furiously.

  “Claire, dear, what are you doing in here?” With the best will in the world Gabby could not keep the sharpness from her voice.

  Wickham greeted her with a slow, devilish grin.

  “Oh, Gabby, Beth has had the best notion. Instead of leaving Wickham to eat alone, we will dine with him, here in his room. She will be back as soon as she has changed her dress.”

  Gabby was taken aback. This was unexpected. And definitely not a good idea. The last thing she wanted was for her sisters, either of them, to spend more time with the conniving scoundrel than was absolutely necessary. And the danger to Claire might well be acute. From all available evidence, their false brother was not only an unrepentant criminal but a lecherous rake as well.

  Determinedly Gabby shook her head. “No,” she said in the brisk tone she used when she was exercising her authority as mistress of the house. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible. We will eat in the dining room as usual. Wickham will no doubt survive without our company.” Seeing Claire’s eyes widen in surprise, Gabby cast about in her mind for some sort of excuse to soften what, to her sister, must sound like an uncharacteristically autocratic decree. “He is, after all, not fully recovered, and I’m sure none of us wish to overtax his strength. Besides, it will make far too much work for the servants.”

  She added this last as if it were a clencher.

  Wickham smiled at her. “But I’ve already given permission,” he said, too gently. “And instructed Stivers to set up a table here in my room. You need not worry your head about me, you know. Enjoying my sisters’ company during a delightful meal en famille will no doubt prove therapeutic, rather than the reverse.”

  Gabby stared at him. He held her gaze with as much calm assurance as if he were indeed the earl. In that moment Gabby realized the enormity of what she had done. By recognizing this imposter as Wickham, she had granted him full authority over this house and everything in it. Over Hawthorne Hall. Over all of the Earl of Wickham’s holdings. Over her sisters, whose legal guardian he now was.

  Over herself.

  Gabby felt like screaming. She felt like tearing out her hair with both hands. She was well and truly caught in a trap of her own making. What, oh what, had she done?

  The knave could order things just as he chose, and there was not a thing, not one blessed thing, she could do to prevent him.

  Except tell the truth, and in doing so damn herself as well as him.

  In the event, except for two brief exchanges, it was, despite Gabby’s expectations to the contrary, a pleasant meal.

  The first exception came when Claire asked Wickham if his wound still pained him very much.

  He had, with Barnet’s aid, moved from the bed to one of the big wing chairs which had been pulled up to a small square table two footmen had carried in. Covered with a linen cloth, and set with china and crystal and silver that sparkled in the candlelight, it made a very charming venue for a meal. Claire, in exceptional looks as she always was when she found herself in company where she felt at ease, had roses in her cheeks to match the color of her gown as she blossomed under his easy charm. She sat at Wickham’s right hand, laughing often and appearing to hang on his every word; Beth, giggling and chatting and very young indeed in white muslin, sat on his left. Her eyes glowed with what appeared to be a severe case of hero worship every time she looked at him, which was, basically, all the time. Gabby, in soft gray-blue crepe, sat opposite her nemesis, feeling distinctly out of sorts as she watched his bewitching of her sisters with a jaundiced eye. To his credit, he was equally attentive to both, and if there was an extra degree of appreciation in his gaze when he looked at Claire, Gabby thought that it would pass unnoticed by any observer less keenly alert to trouble than herself. Of the sisters, she was the only one who merited a marked difference in treatment from him. He addressed few remarks to her during the meal, and, when he happened to glance her way, his gaze held what she finally
decided was a coolly assessing quality, rather than the laughing warmth he lavished on Claire and Beth. For her part, this suited her very well. It was, she thought, an acknowledgment on his part of their adversarial status. He might, with vile falsehood as a facilitator, win over the younger girls, but he would never make a conquest of her, and it was as well that he knew better than to try.

  During the course of the meal, she was, therefore, an oasis of silence in a storm of gaiety. She spoke when spoken to, smiled at her sisters when they glanced her way, ate her meal, and listened with growing irritation as the lying wretch responded with imperturbable good humor as the younger girls peppered him with questions about his life in Ceylon. She refused to notice how handsome he looked when he laughed, or how well the maroon dressing gown became his dark coloring, or how broad his shoulders were as they seemed to fill nearly all the space from one wing of his chair to the other. But something in her silent gaze must have penetrated his genial facade, and finally nettled him, because his glances at her became more frequent as the meal wound down, and less friendly. When Claire asked about his wound he leaned back in his chair, twirled his wine glass between his fingers, and responded in a way clearly intended, to Gabby’s ears at least, to pay her back for not fawning over him as her sisters did.

  “To tell the truth,” he said with a gleaming smile for Claire and nary a glance for Gabby. “I find I’m more troubled by a bite on my shoulder. From some creature that had the temerity to crawl in bed with me, no doubt.”

  Gabby stiffened as the meaning of that home thrust burst upon her. It was all she could do not to react in any other way. Her eyes met his for a pregnant instant as the events that had led up to that bite replayed themselves in her mind. You cad! You bounder! You churl! she raged at him inwardly, as their gazes held. Then, to her horror, and despite exercising every bit of willpower she possessed to prevent it from happening, she felt hot color begin to creep over her face as the memory became too vivid to be borne. To cover her confusion, she picked up her glass and took a sip. The wine was sweet, fruity, and utterly tasteless in her mouth.

  His eyes gleamed at her. A faint, satisfied smile curved his lips. Gabby, seething, blushing, and helpless to do anything about either, realized to her fury that she was being purposefully baited.

  “A bedbug, do you mean?” Beth asked in all innocence. She glanced at Gabby, who prayed that the red glow of the fire was sufficient to mask her heightened color from unsuspecting eyes. “Never say that we have them here.”

  “A bedbug. Yes.” Wickham still smiled only faintly, but his eyes laughed at Gabby as they met her furious, mortified gaze. To add insult to injury, he ruefully rubbed the place on his shoulder where she had bitten him. “That is certainly what it must have been. A particularly vicious one, too. Rapacious creatures, bedbugs.”

  “Mrs. Bucknell must be instructed to air the sheets,” Claire said with horror, also glancing at Gabby.

  Gabby kept a firm rein on her temper. To openly lose it would be to reveal far too much. “Wickham is mistaken, I am sure. Mrs. Bucknell would certainly be most upset to have her housekeeping called into question. I think we can safely discount the possibility of bedbugs in any establishment she presides over.” Her gaze met Wickham’s. “Possibly you are confusing a bite for something else. Another one of your self-inflicted wounds, perhaps.”

  “Perhaps,” he conceded, grinning wickedly at her. It was not his intention, Gabby realized with mixed fury and relief, to reveal her disgrace to her sisters. Instead he wanted to keep the knowledge of the shameful things he had done—and the even more shameful way she had responded—between the two of them. So he could continue to torment her in private, Gabby reflected grimly, like a small boy prodding a bug with a pin.

  Under her direction, the conversation was directed into more innocuous channels. Claire was perfectly willing to talk of fashions, the flattering number of invitations that had already been received, and the interesting intelligence that Cousin Thomas’s daughter Desdemona was also to make her come-out this year. Beth, for her part, had found the park where she had taken her abortive walk with Twindle to be delightful, and recommended that her sisters explore it without delay.

  “The fashionable hour to be seen there is between five and six,” Wickham said. Gabby, who had indulged in a malicious hope that he would be heartily bored by the sisters’ talk of matters that were popularly supposed to be of interest only to females, got the first inkling that she was about to suffer retribution when he glanced at her with a smirk and then, quite deliberately, switched his gaze to Claire. “When I am able to do so, which I devoutly hope will be in the next few days, I’ll take you driving in the park. I took delivery of a new curricle on the day of my accident, and have not yet had a chance to try it out.”

  “That would be delightful,” Claire said with a sparkling smile, while Gabby did her best to conceal her dismay; then Claire glanced at her younger sister. “Beth may come with us, and show us the lookout point she and Twindle were trying to climb up to when Twindle twisted her ankle.”

  “Well, actually I was climbing up to it,” Beth said apologetically. “Twindle was trying to prevent me. She said I should fall.”

  “And so fell instead, thus proving indeed that good deeds are invariably punished,” murmured Wickham, his expression bland in the face of Claire’s transparent assumption that Beth was as welcome a participant in his proposed expedition as she was herself. Gabby sent him a gloating glance in which the word checkmate was fairly shouted, and, pushing back her chair, got to her feet.

  “Our cozy family dinner has been most delightful, but you must excuse us now, Wickham,” Gabby said with assumed affability, and glanced at her sisters. “Lady Salcombe—Aunt Augusta—is to call for us at nine, remember. I will meet you both downstairs in three quarters of an hour.”

  As Beth got tangled up in a heartfelt apology to Wickham for proposing to leave him to his own devices for the rest of the evening, Gabby crossed the room. She was nearly at the door when Wickham called after her.

  “Gabriella.”

  She turned, looking at him with raised brows.

  “Have you hurt your leg? I notice you are limping.”

  The question hit Gabby with all the force of a blow. Just why it should bother her so much that he should notice and comment on the hesitation in her carefully calibrated gait, she didn’t know, nor even want to try to analyze. But it did bother her; she couldn’t help it, although she knew that caring because she was not perfect was as useless as wishing she could fly. Try though she might to move normally, there was always going to be a halt to her step, and that was just a fact of her life.

  Still, with Wickham’s questioning gaze upon her, she could not help hearing her father’s voice echoing from the misty past: Poor pathetic creature, what good are you to anyone now? ’Twould have been better for us all had I just had you drowned at birth.

  Even after all this time, after her father had been dead and in the ground for the past eighteen months, those words still had the power to hurt. As did Wickham’s gaze on her, probing the cause of her less than graceful gait, recognizing and making a point of her defect.

  But just as she had refused to slink away from her father’s scorn, so she now refused to allow Wickham to see how his question had caused her to shrivel up inside.

  Her chin came up a notch, and she looked him in the eye. “I have been limping most of my life. I broke my leg when I was twelve, and it never healed properly.”

  “Did you not know that Gabby was lame, Marcus?” Beth asked, amazed. Knowing that Beth accepted her limp as a part of her, and intended the statement to be no more hurtful than an assertion that Gabby had gray eyes, Gabby nevertheless winced inwardly at having her affliction so crudely named. Beth, in addition to all her many wonderful traits, had ever been one to call a spade a spade. Which had both its good points and its bad.

  “Gabby is not lame,” Claire said fiercely, glaring at her younger sister. “She ha
s a weak leg. If you are lame, you need a cane to get around, or a Bath chair, or—or someone to be forever assisting you.” Her gaze shifted to Wickham. “Gabby may limp sometimes, but she is perfectly mobile, I assure you.”

  Gabby glanced at her next sister and smiled, her eyes full of warm affection. In that instant, instead of the ravishingly beautiful young woman Claire was now, she saw the tangle-haired moppet her sister had been at five years old. Claire had been the first one to reach her after the accident, the one to crouch beside her and hold her hand while one of the housemaids ran for help. Gabby had always known, although she never really liked to think about it, that her accident had had a profound effect on Claire.

  “Don’t be such a mutton head, Claire. I wasn’t insulting Gabby. She’s my sister as much as yours.”

  “You’re a great looby if you think it doesn’t hurt her to be called lame.” Claire got to her feet abruptly, her chair making a scraping sound as it slid over the floor.

  Beth stood, too. “Well, you . . .”

  “That’s enough.” Wickham interrupted the rapidly escalating conflict with as much authority as if he did it all the time. His gaze met Gabby’s. She could detect no pity for her there, and its absence made her breathe a little—just a little—easier.

  He continued: “The world is full of coincidences, it seems. I, too, have a damaged leg. It was broken in three places when a horse fell on it. It took forever to heal, and still pains me when it rains.”