My Lady, My Lord (8 page)

C
ORINNA AWOKE
beneath a canopy swathed in dark fabric with the certainty that everything had changed. It had not, of course. Not for her present identity. The Earl of Chance would go along comfortably, living any way she saw fit. But Lady Corinna Mowbray’s life was ruined.

She felt the greatest pain for her father. When he learned of the scandal, he would not understand. He would still love her, but his faith in her would vanish.

She allowed the valet, Andrews, to dress her and she dragged herself to the dining room. The earl took breakfast desultorily, she had learned, coffee, toast, and the
Times
. Corinna missed her cup of chocolate and reading the post and art and political journals surrounded by soft pillows and satiny bed linens.

This morning, however, she found she was not alone. Gregory sat at the place at the long table nearest the sideboard, a heaping plate of eggs, muffins, and ham before him, and the
Observer
spread open.

“Morning, Ian,” he said with a nod. His eyes the color of indigo looked unusually serious. Gregory Chance was still young, not yet five and twenty, but intelligent and impressively intuitive. He might worship his older brother. Still, Corinna did not expect this interview would be particularly easy.

“You stayed over last night?” Corinna accepted a cup of coffee from the footman, then gestured for him to retire from the room.

“It was late. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course not.”

“Ian.” Gregory pushed back his chair. “I don’t mean to question you—”

“Then don’t.”

“Well, no. I’ve got to. Corinna has always been a good friend to me, like a sister. I don’t wish to see her unhappy.”

“I don’t know what that has to do with me, Greg,” she said in all sincerity. She and Ian had barely seen each other for years. They didn’t have anything to do with each other’s lives, not before they had encountered each other at the exhibition the other afternoon.

The exhibition.

Her mind whirled. Why hadn’t she thought of it before?

She stood, and Gregory followed to his feet.

“It certainly appeared as though it had something to do with you last night,” Ian’s brother said.

“Then it appeared wrongly. She merely wished my counsel on a delicate matter.”

“A delicate matter?” Gregory’s brows flew up. “
Your
counsel?”

“Astounding, isn’t it? But true.” She moved to the door. She must send a note to Ian immediately. Not a moment could be wasted.

“Then your conversation didn’t have anything to do with the reason she was walking home in the middle of the night alone?”

“Apparently not.” A bald-faced lie. But Gregory would never discover that.

“There must have been a man involved, that is to say, before the boung nipper.”

She paused as a footman opened the door. “Boung nipper?”

“She didn’t tell you?”

Corinna shook her head.

“Oh, well, she’s a brave one. Grace and I found her fisting it with a footpad. We made short work of him and the Watch carted him away. Still, he’d roughed her up a bit before we came along. Surprised she didn’t mention it to you.”

“Yes.” That explained the redness of Ian’s cheek. Dreadful. Horrifying if she’d been in her own body. But the idea racketing around her brain distracted her from events of the night before that had abruptly paled in comparison. Of course, if she recovered her own body now, she would be in the thick of the scandal Ian had created. But she would rather that than live like this for another minute.

“Did she tell you who it was?”

“Who what was?”

Gregory looked uncomfortable. “The delicate matter.”

She frowned. “Gregory, a gentleman does not reveal a lady’s confidences, not even to sympathetic parties.”

Gregory cleared his throat. “Of course not. It’s only that—”

“I’m afraid I don’t have any more time for this conversation. I have business to attend to.”

“Business? In such a hurry?”

The tightness of Gregory’s voice halted her progress again. His face had paled.

“Greg?”

“Sparks was about last night.”

Sparks. Sparks? She tilted her head in silent question. Gregory’s throat worked, but he did not continue.

“And?” she encouraged.

“He fleeced Thomas Patterson.”

“Patterson?” The Pattersons’ eldest son was still at university, if Corinna remembered correctly. The ball had been in honor of his sister’s debut. “At the ball?”

“After it. His father’s got him under house arrest for the last time he lost a bundle at faro, but Thomas said he wouldn’t even know he’d gone out, his parents were so fagged after the party. Came out with me.”

“Am I to understand that he lost a great deal of money?” Her blood hummed with impatience. She wanted to be gone, but Gregory’s face seemed unusually drawn.

“Yes.”

“But that isn’t all, is it?”

Gregory shook his head.

“Why don’t you simply tell me and have it done with?”

“I played.”

“With Thomas Patterson?” she ventured.

“With Sparks.” He said the words like a death sentence. This man Sparks must be one of the Earl of Chance’s less respectable acquaintances, which was saying a lot, she supposed.

“Did you also lose money?”

“Well, it’s somewhat worse than that, Ian.”

What could be worse? She lifted her brows.

“You see, Patterson was losing at blue-ribbon speed, so I stepped in and tried to help. I’d run through my quarterly, so I offered Sparks a vowel for another four thousand—”

Four thousand pounds?

“—but he didn’t want it.”

She struggled to keep her jaw closed. Four thousand pounds, and that
after
he had already lost everything in his pockets to this man Sparks.

No. Not four thousand. Sparks hadn’t wanted the money. He wanted something else. Foreboding crept up her long spine. She didn’t know why she should care a fig. Whatever it was, it was Ian’s problem, not really hers, especially if her suspicions about the exhibition proved accurate.

“What did he want, Gregory?”

“Bucephalus.”

A horse, of course. And from the look on Gregory’s face, it wasn’t his own animal. It must be Ian’s. But Ian had plenty of horses. Probably as many horses as mistresses.

Her shoulders relaxed, but she kept her tone firm. “Did you lose him?”

Ashen now, Gregory nodded.

She showed him a stern face, then turned toward the door.

“You’re not furious?”

“I will consider the matter and speak with you about it later.” More pressing matters beckoned. She did not bother with a note but walked straight to her house. It wasn’t yet ten. The street was quiet with morning traffic. But he probably wouldn’t even be awake yet.

He was already gone. Corinna’s butler, a perpetually disapproving man she had been meaning to ask her father to replace, tipped his nose into the air.

“She has stepped out, my lord.”

“To where?”

“St. James’s Street.” He named the fashionable address like it was a disease.

Corinna couldn’t imagine what business Ian thought she had in that male preserve, especially in the wake of her scandal the previous night. He couldn’t very well go to one of his clubs, after all.

Nausea tickled her throat, chased by suspicion. Last night he had offered to defend her reputation publicly. He hated her, but he told her she should defend herself from the rumors.
As him
.

If he were still that determined to repair her reputation, he might try to do something as idiotic as confronting a gentleman in a gentlemen’s club, as a woman. He was, after all, Ian Chance.

She flew back to his house and called for his horse.

~o0o~

She found her carriage parked at the end of St. James’s Street. Heart lodged in her throat, she dismounted, looped her horse’s reins about a post, and—hoping against hope to find him within—opened the carriage door. Her own hazel gaze met her.

“Oh, thank God,” she breathed.

“I have never had a woman greet me in precisely that manner, but after your dismissal last night, it will do.”

“I am not a woman at present.” She glanced about. The street was still relatively empty. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Defending our honor,” he said tightly.

“You cannot do this, Ian.”

“I can do anything I wish, madam, except, it seems, walk about in my own body.”

“That is what I have come to tell you. I think I know how it happened.”

He lifted his brows and crossed his arms over her charcoal gray pelisse.

“Do tell.” He sounded entirely disinterested.

“It would help if you showed a little enthusiasm.”

“I beg your pardon. I must have left my enthusiasm in the marquess’s parlor.”

“Well, if so it’s your own fault. Anyway, leave that. I believe I have discovered a solution to our problem.”

He unfolded his arms and turned fully to her, a peculiar expression on his face. “What is it?”

“When we saw each other at the exhibition, we quarreled—”

“We always quarrel,” he growled.

“But the switch happened the next morning, or sometime during the night.”

“That being significant in what manner?”

“Don’t be an imbecile. Something about the exhibition must have changed us.”

He stiffened. “Continue, madam. Enlighten my perpetual ignorance.”

“Well if you weren’t so off-putting, I would—”

His attention shifted out the window and his eyes narrowed. He reached for the door latch.

“Ian.
Ian
, where are you going?”

His gaze swung to her. “This morning your father returned home from a ride in the park with the interesting information brought to him by a friend that your name has appeared in the betting book at White’s.”

“The betting book?” Her fingers flew to her mouth. Somehow, with the hope of a solution to their problem in hand, she had managed to convince herself that her reputation might not be ruined. Probably only a few people had seen Ian and the marquess leave the ball together. And Lord Grace and Gregory certainly would not tell anyone of what passed afterward.

That left Abernathy.

“What did you do to him?”

He lifted a brow. “I might have accidentally broken the lock on his parlor window.”

“Ian, tell me.”

“Nothing, Corinna. I did nothing more than tease him. But a man’s pride is a fragile thing.” He looked at her quite directly. “I believe he wishes you to suffer for rejecting him.”

“I did not reject him. I did not entice him in the first place.”

“And that is what I will now ensure becomes public knowledge.” He opened the door and climbed out.

Corinna stared in horror as her body moved away along the sidewalk toward the modest entrance to White’s Club.

A few yards from the door, Ian and the marquess came face to face. Abernathy smiled, a knowing twist of his lips. Corinna couldn’t imagine what about him enthralled women so. Ian’s hands fisted, and the marquess laughed. Ian stood with his back to her, and Corinna could not see her face, but her raised voice drifted down the street. Ian must be almost shouting.

She looked up to the bow window above the door. None of the dandy set were perched in it gathering gossip from their perusal of the street. Thank God for that, at least. It was early yet on a Sunday, the thoroughfare still thin of pedestrians and traffic.

Ian struck the marquess’ shoulder with his fist. Abernathy grabbed his wrist and laughed harder.

Corinna leapt out of the carriage and took off at a sprint, her heart pounding. In a haze she saw Ian punch the marquess’s arm again and the roué thrust him away.

Corinna’s big fist connected with bone and flesh with a horrendously painful but nevertheless satisfying thwack. The marquess tumbled onto his backside on the pavement.

“
That
is for treating a lady with lack of respect.” She glowered down at him, cradling her tortured hand in her other palm and struggling not to wince. “Now, beg her pardon, then go inside and strike what you have written from the book.”

Astonishment covered Lord Abernathy’s reddened face. Beside her, Ian seemed to be bouncing upon the balls of his feet.

“Do it!” she insisted.

The marquess climbed to his feet, touched a ginger hand to his jaw, and scowled. “My pardon, my lady,” he muttered then his resentful glare sluiced to Corinna. “I should call you out for this, Chance.”

“But you won’t,” Ian said, satisfaction ringing through her voice. Corinna glanced at him and gestured toward her carriage. The less time her body stood on the street with two gentlemen of questionable reputation with no maid in sight, the better. Ian grinned, then turned on his slippered heels and retreated to the carriage.

Corinna followed the marquess into the club. Elegant, wainscoted chambers furnished with comfortable chairs and impressive oils and etchings looked quite like the appointments of the other gentlemen’s club, Brooks’s, where she had passed that wretched evening with Ian’s friends. Lord Abernathy went directly to a table near the back of the main chamber. The interested attention of a number of patrons—mostly older gentlemen at this hour—followed them. The marquess took up a pen, bent over the open page, and wrote in long, slashing strokes.

Corinna peered over his shoulder.

Five hundred guineas from Baron R.S. to Marquess C.A. that Lady C.M. lost her innocence to Marquess C.A. after the Patterson ball, 3rd November 1822.

Beneath, it read,
Retracted and withdrawn. C.F., M. Abernathy
.

The marquess turned to her. “Will that do?”

She nodded.

Abernathy’s brow bent. “What is it to you, Chance? Everyone knows you can’t abide the chit.”

“She is not a chit. I may not be fond of her, but she is a lady and deserves respect.” She turned, and made her way out of the club, hand aching and stomach peculiarly hollow despite the victory. She withdrew her horse’s reins from the post and walked it to the open door of the carriage. Ian sat within.

“You did well,” he said with a slight curve of his lips, glancing at her limp hand.