CHAPTER 1
Deliciously and deliberately free.
“Back straight.”
Lady Gwendoline Reeves let the syllables ring in her ears as she drifted through the blaze of the Millingtons’ masquerade ball, her silk skirts whispering over marble like a rumor in flight.
Her stepfather, Howard Tull, had assumed the role of Viscount Fenwick without a moment’s delay following the wedding to her widowed mother, Cordelia. As quickly as he had donned the pomp and airs of his new title, the cordialities fell, seemingly too much of a burden to bear.
“… should have had her hair styled differently. Too obvious…”
Gwen rolled her eyes as her stepfather continued to hurl insults from behind her.
For all his awareness of the nasty rumors about me, he is forever the one to belabor the point.
“Howard, dear, let’s not perpetuate rumors. We’re here to enjoy the evening without the judgment of the ton following us. It’s the first ball of the new Season, after all. Perhaps it’s all been forgotten?”
“Like a mask could hide our shame,” Howard scoffed, but adjusted his mask and tendrils of loose hair to ensure that both were fully camouflaging his reputably large forehead. His cold satisfaction, though, remained remarkable in his manure-colored eyes.
Gwen’s fingers curled around her fan as a pair of ladies passed by.
“Is that…?”
“Shh! The Viscount!”
Shame. Ruin.
What tidy words to cover a hundred breathless inventions: trysts in borrowed carriages, assignations sketched in ink and innuendo, gentlemen she had never met arranged like chess pieces around her name.
Scandal.
The corner of her mouth quirked beneath her black-lace half mask.
“If you insist on being gawked at, you may at least give them something worthy. Shoulders back, Gwendoline.”
Gwen obeyed the command out of habit, though her spine was already straight. “It’s a masquerade ball.”
“Sweet lady,” a fox-masked gentleman said with a bow, “would you grant me this dance?”
“She is engaged for the next set,” her stepfather cut in, smiling without showing his teeth.
The gentleman retreated and then passed the message along to the other suitors in the room.
“Howard…” her mother trailed off.
Any public contestation of his decision was unacceptable. Lady Fenwick knew it. Gwen knew it.
Hell, the entire ton knew it.
Gwen attempted to distract her stepfather from recognizing her mother’s slip by whipping around. “To whom am I engaged, My Lord?”
“To silence,” he murmured. His gloved hand pinched the soft flesh above her elbowhard, disguised as a guiding gesture. “You will not make a spectacle. You will not chatter with people beneath you.”
Her eyes flicked to the corner where her friends, Eleanor and Arabella Barker, stood.
Eleanor was wearing a sober dove-grey domino, while Arabella was in a pink silk dress, looking like a rebellious confection. Both were staring at her with matching concern.
“And,” Howard hissed, “you will not cling to the daughters of a lowly baron as if they were a raft and you were drowning. Do you understand, girl?”
