After the Scandal Read Free Page A

Rosing might have picked anyone, anyone else in the ballroom, but she had been foolish—and maybe even, if she were honest with herself, desperate —enough to smile at him and consent to the dance. Even on the ballroom floor, Lord Peter Rosing must have been thinking and planning what he would do to her.
    “Were he not the son of a peer, Rosing would have twisted at Tyburn long before now.” Fenmore brought his dark gaze back to hers before he went on relentlessly, nearly spitting out the words, as if they left a bad taste in his mouth. “I do not know if it will comfort or disgust you to know that you are not the first young woman Lord Peter Rosing has raped, or attempted to rape. But I do mean you to be the last.”
    The calm surety with which he spoke sucked the last of the air from her lungs. “You mean to kill him.”
    Again that obsidian gaze came back to hers, so sharp it was nearly cutting. “I meant to cripple him. I mean that in the future, if he isn’t hanged, he should find it so difficult to walk that he will find it utterly impossible to shove young ladies up against brick walls.”
    The same feeling of powerless shame, of helpless, hopeless, choking despair, tightened around her chest.
    But she fought it back. It had not happened. Lord Peter Rosing had not raped her. But only because His Grace, the chilly Duke of Fenmore, had come in time.
    She meant to thank him again, not only for herself, but also for the greater population of London’s women, it seemed. But she could not. The words were stuck tight in her throat, trapped there by the casual violence of both men’s actions.
    Within her skull, her head began to ring like a church bell.
    “You are not yet recovered.”
    Again, she could not tell if the strange, dry ordinariness of his observation was an attempt at humor or censure. But pride was the last refuge of the weak. And Claire felt desperately weak.
    So she put up her chin. “Yes. Thank you, Your Grace. You do have a penchant for the obvious.”
    “And you have a penchant for the dangerous,” he shot back. Some of that vehemence had leapt back into his tone. “Planning to let a man like Rosing steal kisses.”
    That was condemnation in his low voice. Claire felt the thoughtlessness of her action burn a trail of heat down her face. She swallowed down the hot embers of her shame. “Yes. Stupid. But I think Lord Peter Rosing has cured me of stupidity.”
    “Good.” Fenmore took an audibly deep breath, as if he were as fraught as she. “Though I suppose you could not be expected to know what he is.”
    “No.” The admission gave her some small measure—a very small measure—of comfort. “Though if you did know what he is, why did you not tell anyone? Why is he still allowed to show his face in polite company? Why was he invited to your grandmother’s ball?”
    “A mistake.” The vehemence was back. “One for which I will never forgive myself. Nor ever make again. And he was not invited.” He spoke with such low, savage heat, she was taken aback. But his anger was all for himself.
    “It wasn’t your fault.” The words came out of their own volition—a forgiveness she could not grant to herself.
    “Wasn’t it?” He seemed unconvinced. “I should have anticipated that they would come, even uninvited.”
    It gave her another small measure of comfort to see him doubt himself. “They?”
    “Rosing and his father. Hadleigh.”
    “I don’t see how you could have anticipated that.” She was happy to find she could take a rather more normal breath. “My parents would never dream of going someplace they weren’t invited.”
    “Yes, parents. We ought to be getting you back to your mother, so she can take you home.”
    Yes. She wanted her mother. She wanted to be safe in her arms, and forget this had ever happened. But it had. “We’re not meant to go home. We’re meant to stay the night, as guests.” The worry and doubt and shame and anger wrapped itself ever tighter and