Deb Marlowe - Regency Rebels - Scandalous Lord, Rebellious Miss / An Improper Aristocrat

She should be flush with success, awash in triumph, but she had found that she couldn’t truly enjoy any of it. Instead she was only filled with a ceaseless, restless anxiety.

It was all Charles’s fault, damn his eyes. She had neither seen, nor heard from, him in the fortnight since that unexpected, heart-pounding, earth-shattering kiss. And unsettling though his continued absence may be, worse was her inability to reconcile her unruly feelings.

Once she had recovered from the pure, physical shock of their embrace, she had been furious. How dare he resurrect a moment of their past, seduce her with the beauty and intimacy of it, then use it to push her away!

A little more thought, however, had reinforced the notion that his kiss had been an act of self-defence. She had touched him. Her patient chiselling had succeeded at last, and she had found a tiny breach in the stone rampart around him. She had reached the man inside and it had frightened him. Typically, like a scared little boy, he had pushed back, trying to scare her off in the same manner.

Perversely, his tactic had had the opposite effect on Sophie.

And perhaps that was characteristic of their relationship as well, she thought with a smile. But she could not help the feeling of intense relief that had swept over her with the realisation that there was indeed a mystery to be solved here. It wasn’t a natural tendency for prudery and sanctimony that had changed Charles. Something had happened to induce this drastic alteration in personality and demeanor, to cause him to retreat behind that bulwark of prickly pride. Something to do with his dead elder brother.

What could it have possibly been? As far as she knew, Charles and Phillip had had the normally contentious relationship of brothers a few years apart in age. They had been especially close as young boys, tumbling through the home woods, racing their ponies, and perpetrating endless pranks. Even later, when separated by school and their father’s increasing demands on Phillip’s time, they had maintained the rough-and-tumble, slightly competitive regard of adolescents.

Had something happened to change that? Sophie did not know, but she was going to find out. It was a relief to have the task before her. It gave her hope, at least, that if Charles faced whatever it was he was hiding from, he might have a chance to be happy.

That, at the last, must be her goal. With everything in her, she longed to see her tousle-haired, smiling Charles again, even if it meant he found his happiness without her.

Such a thought, of course, led right back to that burning kiss. Good heavens, but every girl dreamed of such a kiss, when not only lips and bodies mingled, but souls brushed each other as well. Heat, desperation, spiralling desire—it all came rushing back. A small, triumphant smile escaped her as she touched her lips. Let him kiss Miss Ashford and see if he felt like that.

She drew away from the window. He could not escape her tonight. Lady Dayle was throwing a dinner party and expected him. It was time she prepared herself for the confrontation ahead. A silk gown would be her armour tonight, her weapons nothing more than determination and a smile. But perhaps she would carry along her chisel as well.

‘That’s all I know, I swear on my mother’s grave!’

Charles tightened his grip, choking off the remainder of the man’s lies, along with most of his breath. ‘Your mother is alive and well and living in Kensington,’ he said in disgust. ‘How do you think I tracked you down?’

Like her son, the mother of the editor of the Augur liked money. Charles wasn’t complaining, however. Greed was far easier to get past than radical fervour—which still blocked any progress with the Oracle’s editor.

‘That’s all you can give me?’ Charles released the man, allowing him to slump back against the wall. ‘A small, dark, wiry man. No name? No idea for whom he worked?’

‘No, no,’ Mr Mills said, rubbing his throat. ‘He came around at night, left me a fat file of papers—all dealing with you.’

‘And a fat purse, I’ll wager.’ Charles snorted. ‘Do you still have the file?’

‘Aye.’ The man turned sullen now. ‘I left it at my mother’s place.’

No wonder the old woman had looked at him so strangely. ‘What, exactly, was in this file?’ Charles asked.

Now the little editor was eyeing him up and down. ‘A right long reckoning of your career as a hellraiser, my lord.’ He chuckled. ‘And may I salute your creative thinking too! We never got to print half the juiciest stuff.’

‘You’re sure this small, dark man never mentioned where he got this file?’

‘No, it was always “my employer” wants this, “my employer” wants that. But whoever it is—it seems they have been watching you a long time.’

Charles had come here expecting to solve this mystery; instead it was only growing deeper. Frustrated, he sat abruptly down upon a nearby chair. His opponent watched him warily as he drew a purse from his pocket. He tossed it on to the scarred desk the man was obviously using as a temporary office. ‘That’s a sign of good faith. I believe you have told me everything you can, and I believe that if you remember anything else, you will contact me right away.’

The scoundrel snatched it up. ‘I swear, that’s all of it.’

Charles drew out another, fatter purse. ‘This I will give you if you agree to print another story about me. A remorseful story. A favourable story.’

The man weighed the first purse in one hand while eyeing the other. ‘No insult intended, but your randy youth is the most interesting thing you’ve got. What else is there to draw the readers in?’

‘The truth. An apology for the damage you’ve done me. I don’t know, something about the good I’ve accomplished in Parliament, the charities I support, something. Do your own research this time, man. Write a real story.’

He nodded agreement and reached for the second purse.

Charles tucked it back into his coat. ‘You will receive it on the day the story is printed.’ He stood. ‘I want that file delivered to me tomorrow.’

Without waiting for a response he turned and strode out. Once outside the man’s dingy little hideaway, Charles vaulted back into his curricle, took the reins from his groom and set his bays off sharply. He had several hours before he had to be back home in time for his mother’s blasted dinner party. The idea had him groaning out loud. A house full of people. It was the last thing he wanted when this whole mess had him feeling so desperate.

Despite his best efforts with the ton , despite his obvious perusal of the available debs, despite his intensifying courtship of Miss Ashford, the tide of public opinion was turning against him again.

He wasn’t a madman. Someone, for some unknown reason, was orchestrating this siege against him, but this time the tactics had changed. Nothing new was in the papers. Instead, the attacks came in the form of vague rumour and untraceable innuendo. He was living a masquerade, people whispered. He hadn’t reformed, he’d just taken his illicit activities underground. He was lulling Parliament, pulling the wool over society’s eyes. He was a secret radical, a closet Catholic, a Whig sympathiser, a bacchanal, or an opium addict, depending on whom you spoke with, and whose friend of a friend they knew.

Charles would have laughed if he hadn’t known that the truth about himself was far worse than anything society could come up with. And he would have realised the serious nature of the situation, nipped it in the bud earlier, if he hadn’t been obsessed with Sophie.

A discreet cough from his groom recalled his attention to the road. Just in time too. He pulled his pair up as traffic slowed at the crossing of the Westminster Bridge. He was doing it again. Obsessing. And on the road, no less.