“Well, it wasn’t Lady Christine Dingley.” Johnathan was certain of that much, at least. His lady had the softest skin he’d ever touched, the most delectable curves he’d ever caressed, and the most intoxicating scent he’d ever had the pleasure of inhaling.
Cross frowned. “You really don’t remember anything about her?”
Johnathan remembered a thousand things about her—the silk of her skin under his fingertips, the seductive caress of her silky hair against his lips, the curve of her waist giving way to the gentle swell of her hips, but short of kissing, stroking and caressing every young lady in London, he didn’t see how he could…
“Her scent.” Johnathan sat bolt upright in his chair, his gaze meeting Cross’s. “She smells like roses.”
“Roses! Half the young ladies in London smell of roses.”
“No, not like this. Her scent was…” Johnathan tried to think of a way to describe it, his hands fisting at his sides in frustration as words failed him. Her scent was as elusive as the lady herself. “Different. Not like any other scent I’ve ever experienced.”
She was different.
Johnathan flushed, thinking Cross might laugh, but he said only, “There’s one person in London who can tell us something definitive about the young ladies at the ball last night. I suggest we pay a call on Lady Fosberry.”
A lady could do a great deal of damage with a dibbler.
Emmeline grasped the rough wooden handle with both hands and slammed the spiked end into the ground. The blow vibrated up her arms with satisfying force, but instead of a neat hole ready for planting, she found a torn bit of lavender root at her feet.
Oh, dear. She hadn’t meant to do that.
Perhaps it was time she set the dibbler aside.
She leaned the heavy tool against the back of the walled garden where she’d found it, and plopped down beside it, her back against the stone. The trouble with this garden was there wasn’t a thing to do in it. Not a single patch of clover to attack, or diseased cane to prune, or soil to improve. It was as flawlessly maintained as the rest of Lady Fosberry’s home.
It was disconcerting, all this relentless perfection.
Emmeline let her shoulders relax against the sun-warmed stone at her back and pulled her straw gardening hat low over her brow to shade her face. For a few blessed moments she thought she might drift off to sleep, but before long her mind was racing with the same thought that had kept her awake most of the night.
Lord Melrose’s kiss.
Each memory chased the next through her mind, like a dog chasing its tail. She’d asked herself dozens of times what she could have been thinking, letting Lord Melrose kiss her, but only one answer made sense.
She hadn’t been thinking at all, which was not a thing she ever did.
If she had been thinking, the violet ribbon with her father’s scent would still be in her possession. She’d searched in every place she could reasonably expect to find it—the gardens, the library, her bedchamber—but it had vanished.
She dropped her head onto her bent knees with a groan. Oh, wagers were wretched, despicable, horrible things! Even now she could hardly believe she was in London, but the Countess of Fosberry could coax the devil himself into waging a soul he didn’t possess.
Her kiss with Lord Melrose had begun innocently enough—that is, as innocently as any secret, passionate kiss ever did. It was a case of mistaken identity, nothing more, but if the ton discovered one of the infamous Templeton sisters had been kissing the peerless Lord Melrose in Lady Fosberry’s library, the avalanche of gossip would shake the foundations of London itself.
Emmeline’s expectations for the season had hovered somewhere between mild unpleasantness to catastrophic disaster, and the ton had detected a whiff of blood in the air the instant Juliet entered the ballroom last night. The gossip had started not even fifteen minutes after she descended the staircase, the whispers as thick and dense as the London fog, with the ton behaving as they always did when a potential scandal was brewing.
Like rabid hounds with an injured fox between their teeth.
God knew there wasn’t a family in England more scandalous than the Templetons, and there was poor Juliet in the midst of it, toying with the ton’s patience by playing at being a respectable young lady.
Lady Fosberry might scold all she liked about people being unpredictable, but these were all the same people Emmeline remembered from her own nightmarish season, all of them saying the same things about the Templetons in the same tones of thinly veiled delight, as if their mother’s disgrace had only just happened.
There was nothing unpredictable about the ton. At best, they had a lengthy memory for scandal. At worst, they were cruel. One needn’t look any further than her own family for proof of that.
The one pleasure she’d taken in the ball had been the few moments she’d hidden in a curtained alcove on the second floor and peeked down at Juliet as she floated through the cotillion like a graceful bird soaring through the air, her cheeks pink and her borrowed violet skirts whirling around her ankles.
Warmth had flooded Emmeline’s chest at the sight of her sister’s smiling face. Juliet had been born for this chance, born to grace a ballroom. The ugly gossip, the stares and whispers—none of it seemed to touch her.
But now another disastrous scandal was bearing down on them, hurtling directly toward them like a runaway carriage, all because Emmeline hadn’t put a stop to Lord Melrose’s advances as soon as he’d accosted her in the library.
She kicked at a rock next to her toe and sent it skittering over the dirt.
