The aristocracy was not to be envied. It was to be pitied. Without love, why live?
She sighed, watching Jonathan for a long moment, marveling at the grace with which he pulled on his shirt and tucked it into his breeches, the way he tugged on his boots as though he’d done it a thousand times in this low-ceilinged space. He wrapped his cravat about his neck and shrugged on his jacket, then his winter coat, the movements smooth and economical.
When he was done, he turned for the ladder that led to the stables below, all long bones and lean muscle.
She clutched the blanket to her, feeling cold with the loss of him.
“Jonathan,” she called softly, not wanting anyone to hear her.
He looked to her, and she saw something in his blue gaze—something she did not immediately identify. “What is it?”
She smiled, suddenly shy. Impossibly so, considering what they had just done. What he had just seen. “I love you,” she said again, marveling at the way the words slid over her lips, the way the sound wrapped her in truth and beauty and everything good.
He hesitated at the top of the ladder, hanging back, so effortlessly that he seemed to float in the air. He did not speak for a long moment—long enough for her to feel the March cold deep in her bones. Long enough for a thread of unease to curl quietly through her.
Finally, he smiled his bold, brazen smile, the one that had called to her from the beginning. Every day for a year. For longer. Until this afternoon, when he’d tempted her finally, finally up to the hayloft, kissed away her hesitation, and made his lovely promises, and taken all she’d had to offer.
But it hadn’t been taking.
She’d given it. Freely.
After all, she loved him. And he loved her.
He’d said so, maybe not with words, but with touch.
Hadn’t he?
Doubt curled through her, an unfamiliar emotion. Something that Lady Georgiana Pearson—daughter to a duke, sister to one—had never felt before.
Say it, she willed. Tell me.
After an interminable moment, he spoke. “You’re a sweet girl.”
And he dropped out of sight.
Chapter 1
Ten Years Later
Worthington House
London
When she looked back on the events of her twenty-seventh year of life, Georgiana Pearson would point to the cartoon as the thing that started it all.
The damn cartoon.
Had it been placed in The Scandal Sheet a year earlier, or five years earlier, or a half dozen years later, she might not have cared. But it had run in London’s most famous gossip rag on March the fifteenth.
Beware the Ides, indeed.
Of course, the cartoon was the result of another date entirely. Two months to the day earlier—January the fifteenth. The day that Georgiana, utterly ruined, unwed mother, walking scandal, and sister to the Duke of Leighton, had decided to take matters in hand and return to Society.
And so she stood here, in the corner of the Worthington ballroom, on the cusp of her reentry into Society, keenly aware of the eyes of all London upon her.
Judging her.
It was not the first ball she’d attended since she was ruined, but it was the first at which she was noticed—the first at which she was not masked, either with fabric or paint. The first at which she was Georgiana Pearson, born a diamond of the first water, devolved into a scandal.
The first at which she was present for her public shaming.
To be clear, Georgiana did not mind her ruination. Indeed, she was a proponent of the state for any number of reasons, not the least of which was this: Once ruined, a lady was no longer expected to stand on ceremony.
Lady Georgiana Pearson—who barely claimed the honorific and barely deserved the descriptor—was thrilled with her ruination, and had been for years. It had, after all, made her rich and powerful, the owner of The Fallen Angel, London’s most scandalous and most popular gaming hell, and the most feared person in Britain . . . the mysterious “gentleman” known only as Chase.
It was of little consequence that she was, in fact, female.
So, yes, Georgiana believed that the heavens had smiled upon her that day a decade prior when her fate had been forged. Her exile from Society, for better or worse, meant a dearth of invitations to balls, teas, picnics, and assorted events, which, in turn, eliminated the necessity for battalions of chaperones, inane conversation over tepid lemonade, and pretending to show interest in the holy trinity of aristocratic female conversation—mindless gossip, modern fashion, and marriageable gentlemen.
She had little interest in gossip, as it was rarely the truth and never the whole truth. She preferred secrets, offered by powerful men who had scandal to trade.