Loretta Chase – Scandal Wears Satin (страница 1)
‘I married Marcelline knowing she’d never give up her work,’ Clevedon was saying. ‘If she did, she’d be like everyone else. She wouldn’t be the woman I fell in love with.’
‘Love,’ Longmore said. ‘Bad idea.’
Clevedon smiled. ‘One day Love will come along and knock you on your arse,’ he said. ‘And I’ll laugh myself sick, watching.’
‘Love will have its work cut out for it,’ Longmore said. ‘I’m not like you. I’m not
‘Very possibly,’ Clevedon said. ‘Which will make it all the more amusing.’
LORETTA CHASE has worked in academe, retail and the visual arts, as well as on the streets—as a meter maid (aka traffic warden)—and in video, as a scriptwriter. She might have developed an excitingly chequered career had her spouse not nagged her into writing fiction. Her bestselling historical romances, set in the Regency and Romantic eras of the early nineteenth century, have won a number of awards, including the Romance Writers of America’s RITA®.
Website: www.LorettaChase.com.
Scandal Wears Satin
Loretta Chase
This book was made possible by the support of: my insightful and inspiring editor, May Chen; my indefatigable agent, Nancy Yost; my witty and fashion-wise friend and blogging partner, Isabella Bradford, aka Susan Holloway Scott; my patient French adviser, Valerie Kerxhalli; my loyal, funny and crazy sisters, Cynthia, Vivian and Kathy; and, most especially, my brainy and brave husband, Walter, a hero every single day.
Table of Contents
Observe his fierce, fighting-cock air; his coal-black gipsy curls; his aristocratic (not to call it arrogant) expression of countenance—never laid aside, whether he is smiling on a fair dame or frowning on a fawning dun.
“Sketches from Real Life,” 1835
The trollops knew how to throw a party.
On Wednesday nights, after dancing or playing cards with Society’s crème de la crème at Almack’s, London’s wilder set continued more eagerly to a very different assembly at the house of Carlotta O’Neill. On offer was a roulette table, along with other games of chance, as well as spicier games with the demireps who played ladies-in-waiting to London’s current queen of courtesans.
Harry Fairfax, Earl of Longmore, was on the scene, naturally.
Carlotta’s wasn’t the sort of place his father, the Marquess of Warford, would wish his twenty-seven-year-old son and heir to frequent, but heeding his parents’ wishes, Longmore had decided a long time ago, was the fast and easy route to murderous boredom.
He was nothing like his parents, on any count. He’d inherited not only his great-uncle Lord Nicholas Fairfax’s piratical looks—black hair, black eyes, and a tall, muscular physique usually associated with buccaneers—but Great-Uncle Nicholas’s talent for Doing What He Was Not Supposed To.
And so Lord Longmore was at Carlotta’s.
And she was draped over him, wafting waves of scent. And talking, unfortunately.
“But you’re intimately acquainted with them,” she was saying. “You must tell us what the new Duchess of Clevedon is really like.”
“Brunette,” he said, watching the roulette wheel spin. “Pretty. Says she’s English but acts French.”
“My dear, we could have found that out from the
Longmore wondered where she was this night. He hadn’t spotted her at Almack’s. Milliners—especially slightly French ones—had as much chance of receiving vouchers to Almack’s as he had of turning invisible at will. But Sophia Noirot had her own mode of invisibility, and she was perfectly capable of inserting her elegantly curved body anywhere she pleased, in the guise of a temporary servant. That was how she dug up so much dirt for Foxe’s scandal sheet.
The roulette wheel stopped spinning, one of the fellows at the table swore, and the wench acting as croupier raked a pile of counters in Longmore’s direction.
He scooped them up and handed them to Carlotta.
“Your winnings?” she said. “Do you want me to keep them safe for you?”
He laughed. “Yes, m’dear, keep them safe. Buy yourself a bauble or some such.”
Her well-groomed eyebrows went up.
Until a moment ago, when visions of Sophy Noirot sashayed into his mind, he’d assumed what Carlotta had assumed: that he’d soon disappear with her into her bedroom. She was supposed to be in Lord Gorrell’s keeping, but he, while rich enough, wasn’t quite lively enough to keep Carlotta fully amused.
Dependent on an allowance and gambling winnings, Longmore probably wasn’t rich enough. But while he didn’t doubt he possessed the necessary stamina and inventiveness to hold her interest, it occurred to him now that she wasn’t likely to hold his for more than five minutes. Even by his careless standards, that hardly justified a large financial investment and the subsequent tedium of listening to his father rant about overspent allowances.
In other words, Longmore was tired of her already.
Not too long after abandoning his winnings, he took his leave, along with two of his friends and two of Carlotta’s maids of honor. They found a hackney and after a short discussion, set out for a gaming hell with a very bad reputation, in the neighborhood of St. James’s. There, Longmore could count on a brawl.