Ripe for Scandal (39 page)

Roland ran his hands down his chest as he took a deep breath, yanking them away as a pin dug painfully into his flesh. He
glanced down. A thin, brass dress pin held a slip of paper secured to his coat. Roland tore it free.

His own drunken handwriting crawled across the paper:

I, Roland Devere, bet Anthony Thane one guinea I can beat him into the bed of Lady Olivia Carlow.

His signature and Thane’s were scrawled below the statement. Roland crumpled the note in his fist. How many witnesses had
there been? Who’d been left by the time they’d degenerated into boasts and bets? Good Lord, if Lord Leonidas knew—and how
could he not—he was sunk. What the hell had they been thinking?

Lady Olivia shimmered insubstantially before his eyes: A heart-shaped face, brilliant blue eyes, a jumble of blonde curls.
She had been hotly pursued during her time on the marriage mart. An heiress and a beauty. She’d married well. Or so it had
seemed.

She’d been through a lot in the last year. He ought to know, having borne witness to all the most humiliating details of the
scandal that had ended her marriage. She didn’t need the gentlemen of the
ton
making sport of her, but it was inevitable that she would be pursued like a vixen by a pack of hounds now that she’d returned
to town.

Lady Olivia wasn’t quite a widow, nor was she ruined in the traditional sense of the word. Her situation was unique.

Numbness spread through Livy’s hands as she finished the letter that had arrived on the silver salver with the morning post.
The tingling spread up her arms and
coalesced into a blinding ball of fury inside her chest. She stared dumbly at the words, raking her eyes over the sentences
that sloped haphazardly across the page.

She’d known returning to town was a mistake. Had known it bone deep. But just when she’d convinced her father that it was
a terrible idea for her to accompany him back after the Easter recess, her grandmother had started in, siding with the earl—against
her—for the first time since her marriage had ended.

Her marriage. Livy’s stomach churned, and she tasted bile at the back of her throat. Her not-quite-marriage had been the great
scandal of the
ton
the previous year, eclipsing even the runaway marriage of her former not-quite brother-in-law.

Bigamy. It was still nearly impossible to grasp that the man she’d married, the man her father had chosen so carefully from
her legions of suitors, had already had a wife. Some low, Scottish cutler’s daughter, who was, even now, happily remarried
and living in Canada.

The crinkle of paper brought her head up from the insulting letter. Her father was staring at her over the sagging upper edge
of
The Morning Post
. Livy forced herself to pick up her teacup and take a drink. The tea was stone cold, and the sugar had congealed in the bottom,
but it served to settle her roiling stomach all the same.

“Bad news?” the earl asked, brows rising to touch his gaudy silk banyan cap.

Livy shook her head and refilled her cup. “No, just country gossip from Grandmamma,” she said, the lie coming easily to her
lips. Lying was a new skill, but it had become a necessary one. She couldn’t possibly have been
truthful about how she’d felt since her marriage had been invalidated. Not even with her father.

The earl smiled, his attention already slipping back to the news of the day. There were ink stains on his fingers. A sure
sign that he’d torn himself away from his desk to join her in the breakfast parlor.

He was a man of intellect. A man who waged war with verbs and won battles with synonyms. But it wasn’t magic. He wasn’t like
the bards of old, who could raise blisters with a word or lay waste to an army with a song. And today, she rather wished he
was. Surely Devere deserved some sort of reprimand?

Livy smoothed the letter on the table and read it over again, sucking the marrow out of every word. Devere’s penmanship was
atrocious, and there was a dark ring where a glass of wine had been set down on the sheet of foolscap, making the ink of several
words blur, but his offer—and the insult therein—was unmistakable.

Devere was offering himself as the sacrificial lamb for the pyre of her marriage. Every widow must start somewhere, and he
thought, perhaps, she would like to start with him. Arrogant bastard.

Livy toyed with a muffin, breaking off a piece and slathering it with ginger preserves. She chewed thoughtfully. This was
just the beginning. Just a warning shot across her bow. She was damaged goods, and men who’d once vied for her smiles would
be expecting something more—and offering a great deal less—this time around.

She swallowed and took another bite, letting the heat of the ginger linger on her tongue. Roland Devere was a pompous ass,
and he deserved to be punished. No, not just
punished. He deserved to be tortured over an extended period of time for his presumption, and he should serve a higher purpose
as penance.

Livy smiled and slipped the letter into her pocket. Not only should Devere do penance, he should serve as a warning to others,
and she knew exactly how to go about making him of use.