Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover (The Rules of Scoundrels 4)

Chase

March 1823

Leighton Castle

Basildon, Essex

“I love you.”

Three strange, small words that held so much power.

Not that Lady Georgiana Pearson – daughter of one duke and sister to another, child of honor and duty and pristine presentation, and perfectly bred female of the ton – had ever heard them.

Aristocrats did not love.

And if they did, they most certainly did not do something so base as to admit it.

So it was a shock, frankly, that the words spilled from her lips with such ease and comfort and truth. But Georgiana had never in her sixteen years believed anything so well, and she had never been so quickly rid of the shackles of expectation that came with her name and her past and her family. In truth, she embraced it – the risk and reward – thrilled to feel at long last. To live. To be.

Risk be damned; this was love.

And it had freed her.

Certainly, there would never be a moment as beautiful as this – in the arms of the man she loved, the one with whom she would spend a lifetime. Longer. The one with whom she would build a future, and hang her name and her family and her reputation.

Jonathan would protect her.

He’d said as much as he’d shielded her from the cold March wind and shepherded her here, into the stables of her family estate.

Jonathan would love her.

He’d whispered the words as his hands had unfastened and lifted, peeled and unwrapped, promising her everything as he touched and stroked.

And she’d whispered them back. Giving him everything.

Jonathan.

She sighed her pleasure to the rafters, nestling closer to him, cushioned by lean muscle and rough straw and covered in a warm horse blanket that should have scratched and bothered, but was somehow made soft, no doubt by the emotion it had just witnessed.

Love. The stuff of sonnets and madrigals and fairy tales and novels.

Love. The elusive emotion that made men weep and sing and ache with desire and passion.

Love. The life-altering feeling that made everything bright and warm and wonderful. The emotion all the world was desperate to discover.

And she’d found it. Here. In the frigid winter, in the embrace of this magnificent boy. No. Man. He was a man, just as she was a woman, made one today in his arms, against his body.

A horse in the stables below whinnied softly, pawing at the floor of its stall, huffing its desire for food or drink or affection.

Jonathan shifted beneath her, and she curled into him, pulling the blanket tighter around them. “Not yet.”

“I must. I am required.”

“I require you,” she said, putting on her best flirt.

His hand spread over her bare shoulder, warm and rough where she was smooth, sending a thrill of delight through her. How rare it was that someone touched her – first a duke’s daughter, then one’s sister. Pristine. Unmarked. Untouched.

Until now.

She grinned. Her mother would have a fit when she learned that her daughter had neither need nor intention of coming out. And her brother – the Duke of Disdain – the most impossible, entitled aristocrat London knew… he would not approve.

But Georgiana didn’t care. She was going to be Mrs. Jonathan Tavish. She wouldn’t even keep the “Lady” to which she was entitled. She didn’t want it. She only wanted him.

It did not matter that her brother would do his best to stop the match. There was no stopping it any longer.

That particular horse had left the proverbial barn.

But Georgiana remained in the hayloft.

She giggled at the thought, made giddy by love and risk – two sides of one very rewarding coin.

He was shifting beneath her, already sliding out from the warm cocoon of their bodies, letting the cold winter air in and turning her bare skin to gooseflesh. “You should dress,” he said, pulling on his trousers. “If anyone catches us —”

He didn’t have to finish; he’d been saying the same thing for weeks, since the first time they’d kiss

ed, and during all the stolen moments that had ensued. If anyone caught them, he’d be whipped, or worse.

And she’d be ruined.

But now, after today, after lying naked in this rough winter hay and letting him explore and touch and take with his work-hewn hands… she was ruined. And she didn’t care. It didn’t matter.

After this, they would run away – they would have to in order to marry. They’d go to Scotland. They’d start a new life. She had money.

It did not matter that he had nothing.

They had love, and it was enough.

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.

Similarly, she had little interest in fashion. Skirts were too often taken as a mark of feminine weakness, relegating ladies to doing little but smooth them and less refined females to doing little but lift them. When on the floor of her gaming hell, she hid in plain sight inside the brightly colored silks that costumed London’s most skilled prostitutes, but in all other places, she preferred the freedom of trousers.

And she had no interest in gentlemen, caring not a bit if they were handsome, clever, or titled as long as they had money to lose. For years, she had laughed at the eligible gentlemen who had been marked for marriage by the women of London, their names listed in the betting book at The Fallen Angel – their future wives speculated upon, their wedding dates predicted, their progeny forecasted. She’d watched London’s bachelors from the owners’ suite at her casino – each more rich, handsome, and well-bred than the last – as they were felled, shackled, and married.

And she’d thanked her maker that she hadn’t been forced into the silly charade, forced to care, forced to marry.

No, Georgiana ruined at the tender age of sixteen – now a decade-old warning for all jewels of the ton who had followed her – had learned her lesson about men early, and blessedly escaped any expectation of the parson’s noose.

Until now.

Fans fluttered to cover whispers, to hide smirks and snickers. Eyes grazed by, pretending not to see, even as they settled on her, damning her for her past. For her presence. No doubt, for her gall. For sullying their pristine world with her scandal.

Those eyes hunted her, and if they could, they would slay her.

They know why she was here. Despised her for it.

Christ. This was torture.

It had begun with the dress. The corset was slowly killing her. And the layers of underskirts were constricting her movement. If she was required to flee, she’d no doubt be tripped by them, land on her face, and be swallowed up by a cackling horde of lace-trimmed aristocratic ladies.

The image flashed, unexpected, and she nearly smiled. Nearly. The honest possibility of such an end kept the expression from making an appearance.

She’d never felt the urge to fidget so much in her entire life. But she would not give them the pleasure of playing prey. She had to keep her mind on the task at hand.

A husband.

Her target was Lord Fitzwilliam Langley – decent, titled, in need of funds, and in need of protection. A man with virtually no secrets save one – one that, if it were ever discovered, would not only ruin him, but send him to prison.

The perfect husband for a lady who required the trappings of marriage and not the marriage itself.

I

f only the damn man would turn up.

“A wise woman once told me that corners of rooms were for cowards.”

She resisted the urge to groan, refusing to turn toward the familiar voice of the Duke of Lamont. “I thought you did not care for Society.”

“Nonsense. I quite like Society, and even if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have missed Lady Georgiana’s first ball.” She scowled, and he added, “Careful, or the rest of London will question your decision to dismiss a duke.”

The duke, widely known as Temple, was her business partner, co-owner of The Fallen Angel, and immensely irritating when he wished to be. She finally turned to face him, pasting a bright smile on her face. “Are you here to gloat?”

“I believe you meant to finish that question with ‘Your Grace,’” he prompted.

She narrowed her gaze. “I assure you, I meant no such thing.”

“If you’re going to land yourself an aristocratic match, you had better practice your titular acumen.”

“I would rather practice my acumen in other areas.” Her cheeks were beginning to ache from the expression.

His dark brows rose. “For example?”

“Exacting revenge on supercilious aristocrats who take pleasure in my pain.”

He nodded, all seriousness. “Not a skill that is precisely feminine.”

“I’m out of practice with femininity.”