“Lottie—”
“No,” she snapped, advancing a pace. “Do notLottieme, Ben.Youmay drink your way through half the cellar, stagger home at dawn, gamble away your allowance, and no one so much as lifts an eyebrow! This would not even be a discussion if I were a man!”
He groaned and pressed a hand to his forehead. “Heavens, must we have this argument now?”
“Yes, we must,” she snapped. “Tell me, Ben. How many women have you lain with? Or do you not keep such tallies?”
Benedict winced. “None whose reputations I endangered, if that is your point.”
“Oh, I see,” she said with biting sweetness. “So long as they are notladies, they do not signify.”
“Even a gentleman must conduct himself with discretion.”
“Discretion! You disappear for nights at a time and return smelling of brandy, tobacco, sweat, and God knows what else… andIam the one paraded about as an object lesson?”
“Youarethe object lesson, Charlotte!” he snapped. “Good God! Whether you like it or not, that is the world we inhabit. You cannot run away with men just because—”
“I did not run away! I was—”
“You were angry,” he cut in. “You were bored. You were flattered! You wished to prove that no one could command you, and so you placed yourself in the power of a man who would have been delighted to prove the opposite!”
That struck. Lottie stood very still.
Then she lifted her chin, and said with terrifying composure, “I shall go and bathe. I shall have a quiet day of crochet, watercolours, and such other improving feminine occupations as may render me fit for public display. And then I shall don the vile green silk and smile sweetly at Lord Marston tonight until my jaw locks, precisely as Mama ordered.”
She turned and ascended the stairs.
As she reached the landing, she caught Mari’s wide-eyed stare over the top of her book, and heard Benedict mutter low and bitter behind her, “I need another drink.”
Chapter 14
Beneath the glittering chandeliers of Lady Culpepper’s townhouse, thetonpreened and paraded in all its usual finery, like peacocks in an aviary.
Charlotte Tolliver stood at the edge of the ballroom, swathed in the infamous green silk, which pinched and itched and made her look seasick.
She was furious. Not wounded or ashamed or chastened, but furious. How dare her family fling Marchmont’s name at her like mud?
She smiled anyway, sweetly and perfectly, as if she had not been shrieked at that morning by a mother on the verge of theatrical collapse or snarled at by a brother reeking of brandy and hypocrisy. And as if she had not been reminded, once again, of her great scandal, and of how fortunate she was to still have a place in drawing rooms such as this one.
Lord Marston, that damp towel, stood ten feet away, speaking of his new monocle with animation. His stubby, pale hands, folded over his waistcoat, made her shiver in disgust.
They were nothing like Jasper Deverell’s hands.
It was just as well that she had the most inappropriate memory to distract her from the many unwelcome feelings of that evening—namely, the memory of Deverell’s most masculine fingers between her thighs, curling inside her until her toes curled in her boots.
Heat swept through her so swiftly that she nearly laughed. It was gloriously absurd—that she stood arranged for public redemption in the ugliest gown ever to disgrace a ballroom, while her body remembered, in exquisite detail, what it felt like to be neither managed nor corrected nor fooled, but desired.
Lottie snapped open her fan.
Propriety could go hang. She was tired of standing always at the edge of scandal, shivering in the draught, while everyone congratulated themselves on having dragged her back from the threshold. If she was already to be treated as half-ruined, she ought to make a whole business of it. Why not finish the job? A well-timed ruin might be more tolerable than this endless, suffocating restraint.
Across the room, beneath the glow of a dozen candelabra, Jasper Deverell stood conversing with Miss Artemisia Pomeroy.
Miss Pomeroy, now well into her third Season and wearing the fixed expression of a woman who had planned on a dukedom and found herself instead making small talk to lesser gentlemen, was nodding with pointed attentiveness. Her gown—pale rose satin with far too many bows—clung to her in all the places Society approved, none of which interested Lottie in the least.
Jasper, for his part, looked—as he so often did—exceedingly handsome and exceedingly bored.
Their eyes met across the space, and he did not smile, but neither did Lottie. She wanted to smile, of course, and to raise one brow just so, in the manner that would make him abandon his conversation mid-sentence and provoke from him someimpetuous remark that would draw the attention of every old lady within earshot—but instead, she watched him, waiting for him to make the first move.
