Ripe for Scandal (20 page)

G
areth waited for Beau to curtsey to Roland Devere as their set concluded before stepping in and claiming her. “Go and flirt
with someone else,” he said, waving his friend away.

Devere wrinkled his nose at him, bowed to Beau, and then wandered away to turn the pages at the pianoforte for the youngest
of the Ackeroyd girls. The stripling that he displaced glowered with displeasure before stalking off. Miss Alice, all of twelve,
glowed with pleasure.

“Do you know,” Beau said, smiling up at him, “I don’t think you’ve ever asked me to dance. Not once. We must have been at
dozens of balls together every year, and you never came near me.”

“I was purposefully avoiding you, brat,” Gareth responded with perfect truth.

“Really? I always thought you just didn’t like me.”

“Ha!” Gareth steered her in a circuitous path through their tiny throng of guests. “You never in your life thought for a moment
that any man alive didn’t like you.”

“Is that really what you think?” Her forehead wrinkled, and her eyes looked almost hurt. “Because I assure you, plenty of
gentlemen have disliked me over the years. And even more have disapproved of me.”

Another set began and the majority of their guests circled to the middle of the Great Hall. Even the vicar and the doctor
were dancing. Gareth stopped beside the roaring Yule log, under the giant ball of mistletoe.

“But did you ever think you couldn’t bring them to heel if you truly set your mind to it?” He’d seen her twisting men around
her little finger since she was a girl. It was an innate talent.

Her cheeks flushed pink under the layer of powder dusted across them. “I only ever tried it once,” she said.

“And?”

“And you raised one supercilious brow and stalked off without a word.”

“When was that, brat?” he said, though he already knew the answer. He could still see her outraged expression, could still
remember the gown she’d been wearing. Peach-and-green chine silk with matching feathers in her hair.

“At the hunt ball when I was sixteen.”

“And if you’d had your way and I’d run tame behind you, what would you have done with me?”

“Done with you?” She blinked as the impossibility of the scenario hit her. Grown men with no fortune of their own didn’t pay
court to underage heiresses.

Gareth chuckled. “You were best avoided entirely.” He reached up, plucked a berry from the mistletoe, and held it out to her.

“I suppose I was,” she said as though still thinking it
over. She took the berry from him and stared at it, turning it between her fingers. “Show me what you would have done if I
hadn’t been. If I’d been one of your string of married conquests, or that yellow-haired opera dancer.”

Gareth’s cock twitched rudely, immediately in favor of her suggestion. “We have guests.”

“They’ll keep,” Beau replied with a hint of a wicked smile curling up one side of her mouth. “The set has barely begun and
it will take half an hour or more. Are you really telling me you couldn’t have concluded an assignation in half that time?”

Gareth smiled back at his mad wife. “Meet me in the long gallery.”

“The gallery? Why not your room?”

“When debauching a lady at a ball, you don’t generally have access to a bedchamber. You have to make do with something public,
but unlikely to be in use.”

“Someone could see us.”

“The risk is part of why you do it.” Gareth bowed, plucked the berry from her fingers, took the chaste kiss to which it entitled
him, and walked off. He circled the room, smiling to himself when Beau slipped out. He stopped to talk to Mr. Howley, the
largest landowner in the neighborhood, for a moment. Howley was smiling indulgently as his son danced with one of the younger
Misses Ackeroyds.

“Miss Julia?” Gareth nodded toward the couple.

“Miss Hester,” Howley said with a grin. “Though it was a good guess. The Ackeroyd girls are all very similar, and Julia and
Hester are twins, just to add to the confusion.”

“Half the people I know can’t tell my brother Souttar and me apart, and he’s several years older and several
inches shorter. I feel for them. As boys we were always getting blamed for something the other did.”

Howley chuckled. “Young Thomas has no such luck. No one to blame but him when his mother’s Chinese vase was broken or a plate
of biscuits went missing.”

“That’s why every boy needs a dog,” Gareth replied before bowing slightly and slipping out of the room in pursuit of his wife.

He found her pacing the unlit, long gallery. She started like a frightened doe when he shut the door behind him. “Never sneaked
off to a dark corner for a kiss?” he said, burning to know the answer, jealous already of whoever it might have been.

He pushed her up against the wall, covering her mouth with his. She was pliant, nearly boneless in his arms.

“Never,” Beau replied, breaking off the kiss. Her eyes were wide, wild, the whites reflecting the moonlight spilling through
the tall windows.

“And here I thought you quite the hoyden.” Gareth opened the fall of his breeches, hauled her skirts up, and lifted her, so
she was splayed open, feet off the floor, legs around his hips.

“On the hunting field, yes.” She gasped and dropped her head back against the wall as he probed for entrance. “But aside from
my lamentable talent at being abducted—oh, God—I conducted myself with a great deal of decorum.”

He found the proper angle and thrust in. Her legs tightened around him. One shoe fell to the floor with a clatter. “Well thank
heaven that’s at an end,” he said. Gareth gripped her buttocks and ground into her, pushing them both toward climax as quickly
as he could. She stiffened
in his arms, gasps turning to mewls, and her body pulsed around his cock, triggering his own release.

He leaned hard against her, pinning her to the wall with his body, savoring the tiny contractions of her sheath. She let her
breath out in a long, satisfied sigh.

“Is that really what people do in dark corners?” she said.

Gareth laughed softly and kissed the pulse point just below her ear. “Some variation thereof, yes.”

“Is that what you did with Lady Cook?”

The question caught him off guard, punching the air out of his lungs. She sounded hurt by the very idea of it. He let her
slide to the floor.

He took a rattling breath. “With Lady Cook, and others.” Many, many others. He’d lost count. It wasn’t important. They weren’t
important.

Beau’s chin wobbled. “I think she loved you.”

Gareth would have laughed at the preposterousness of that statement if he couldn’t see that Beau utterly believed it to be
true, or at least feared that it was.

“Lady Cook loved the idea of rubbing me in her husband’s face. Nothing more.”

“And you liked it too,” Beau said with a hint of resentment.

Gareth tipped her head up with his knuckle under her chin. “Yes, brat. I liked it too. But Lady Cook isn’t in love with me,
and I certainly wasn’t in love with her.”

“No?” Beau stared up at him, a tiny frown line between her brows. “You’re sure about that?”

“I’m sure, Beau,” Gareth said before kissing her again, hard, fast, and hungry.

“Where did the two of you disappear to last night?” Devere said as he piled a rasher of bacon on top of the steak and kidney
pie and eggs that he’d already loaded his plate down with.

Gareth gave him a repressive stare, but Devere merely smiled, showing his teeth in a wolfish grin, and sat down. No one else
was up and about yet, but it still didn’t make for polite conversation for the breakfast room.

“No one else noticed,” Devere said before taking a large bite. He chewed happily, a smile still lurking in his eyes. He swallowed
and reached for the cup of coffee that Gareth had poured for him. “But I’ve had years of experience watching you cut your
fillies from the herd.”

“Have you?” Beau said from the doorway, voice heavy with interest and amusement.

Devere choked and snatched up his napkin. He wiped coffee from his chin and went off in a fit of coughing.

“Imbecile.” Gareth shook his head and refilled Devere’s cup.

Beau smiled at him before filling a plate for herself and sitting down beside Devere. “So, what’s my husband’s usual method?”

“Beau,” Gareth said, hinting her away from the topic. Beau blinked innocently at him as she heaped marmalade atop a wedge
of toast. He’d as good as told her he loved her last night, and the same pleased half-smile was still lurking at the corner
of her mouth.

Devere grinned, and Gareth prayed for patience. “Well, he’s always liked the assignation. Do you remember the time I walked
in on you and Lady Ligonier in the bathhouse at Dyrham?”

Gareth glared at him. He most certainly did. Very awkward it had been, too. And far too recent for comfort, seeing as it had
been at a party only a few months ago.

Devere shrugged, eyes full of devilment. “Or the time the innkeeper caught you and his daughter in the taproom at The White
Horse? I thought you were a dead man for sure.” He leaned closer to Beau. “Man was screaming his head off and waving a cleaver
around like a sword. Sandison’s lucky he’s not a capon.”

“I was sixteen!”

“And already a bad piece of work,” Devere said, nodding as though he were pronouncing a home truth.

Beau burst into laughter. “He’s learned a little something since then,” she said.

“I would hope so,” Devere said.

Gareth ground his teeth. “Come on, you,” he said to Devere, rising from the table. “Come and meet Frederick.”

“Frederick?” Devere looked baffled.

“New pet. I can’t even begin to explain. You just have to see him for yourself.”

Devere swallowed the last of his eggs and followed him out. Beau’s laughter chased them down the corridor and into the hall.

“You don’t have to encourage her, you know,” Gareth said as he led his last remaining friend across the lawn to the home farm.

“Not sure I can help myself,” Devere said. “She always was a delightful little beast of a girl. Who knew marriage to one of
us could improve upon that trait.”

Gareth tamped down the urge to laugh. Devere didn’t need any encouragement, and it shouldn’t have been funny.

They reached the sty, and Frederick came bolting out, jumping up against the fence in a frenzy of excitement. Gareth obligingly
scratched behind his ear.

“What the devil is that thing?” Devere said, staring at the little piglet with horrified fascination.

“The brat’s idea of a joke, I think,” Gareth replied. “I’m a gentleman farmer now, and Lord North here is my prize pig.”

“Kind of runty for a prize pig, isn’t he?”

“He’ll grow.”

“Kind of…” Devere waved his hands about as though shaping a pig in the air. “Spotty too.”

“I’m assured that he’s supposed to look like an obese carriage dog. It proves he’s the most English of pigs or something.”

A low wuffle from beside the sty drew their attention. “Well, there’s your answer,” Devere said, gesturing to the giant black-and-white
dog. “Its mother is a Newfoundland.”

Frederick abandoned them to run to the fence nearest the dog. The dog licked the pig’s nose through the slats. Gareth shook
his head. “Beau’s been trying to lure that dog to her for weeks.”

“Taking after her sister-in-law, is she?”

“What?” Gareth said. “Oh, yes. Giant strays. You have to admit, Pen is hard to resist. And this beast here, should he ever
allow himself to be captured and tamed, would make an impressive conquest.” Gareth snapped his fingers, and the dog cocked
its head and backed away, never taking its eyes off them. “But not today, and alas, not for me. I suppose that’s for the best.
Beau would never forgive me if I took her dog.”

“Laid claim to it, has she?” Devere leaned on the fence, calling the piglet back over with dangling fingers.

“Along with everything else,” Gareth said with a chuckle. “Beau does tend to suck everything into orbit around her.”

Devere turned his head and slanted his gaze so their eyes met. “Any regrets?”

“About Beau? Good Lord, no.”

“About Vaughn?”

Gareth nodded. “I keep hoping he’ll come around. He can’t stay mad forever, can he?”

“We are talking about Leonidas Vaughn,” Devere said with a sad shake of his head. “He’s got a talent for holding a grudge.”

CHAPTER 27