Page 63 of Lady Scandal

“As you were?”

She shook her head. “My first husband wasn’t a scoundrel. Roger was an addict, and he was weak, perhaps, but he wasn’t a scoundrel. And besides, I may have been as young as your sister back then and equally sheltered from life’s harsh realities but—” She broke off, giving him a grin. “I was never sweet.”

He laughed. “I can well believe that. But what makes you say it?”

“At Cassandra’s age, I was regarded as something of a hellion.”

“Really?” he said dryly. “Imagine that. What did you do?”

“Well, for one thing, I was an accomplished poet.”

“Writing poetry makes one a hellion?”

“Well, my poems did. At finishing school, I composed a long and lurid ode to the gardener’s handsome young assistant, particularly the way his trousers hugged his shapely, muscular legs.”

“Indeed?” He was tempted to glance down and imagine how trousers would look on a certain pair of wholly feminine legs, but he refrained.

“But I think,” she went on, “it was my limerick about the headmistress’s lack of internal organs that did it for me in the end.”

He frowned in puzzlement. “Lack of internal organs?”

“My headmistress was born in Park Lane,” she recited. “She has no heart and no brain—”

His shout of laughter interrupted this impudent epistle. “I begin to see how you acquired your reputation. What happened?”

“My parents, God rest their souls, were advised to come and collect me forthwith. That was my first finishing school.”

“I take it there was more than one?”

“I was expelled from three.”

“Three? Good God.”

“I did manage to graduate from the fourth one. Either way, I may regret these confidences, for after hearing them, you’re probably not too keen on the idea of me befriending your sister.”

She was right about his lack of enthusiasm, but not for the reasons she was assuming. “Why were you at finishing school at all? I mean, Cassie was in finishing school only because our mother had died and I had another year to serve in the army. Reserves, of course, but I was still stationed in Africa, so boarding school was the best thing for her. But aren’t girls of your class usually schooled at home by a governess?”

“Usually, but having been through a slew of nannies and governesses, my parents thought perhaps finishing school would be a better choice for me. Obviously, they were wrong.”

“Your poor parents.”

“Just so. That’s why they allowed me to marry so young. I was wildly in love with Roger. He was a poet, too, you see. We were mad about each other, and my parents thought a husband would straighten me out.”

“Given what you’ve told me about your first husband, and what I know of you, that plan doesn’t seem to have succeeded.”

“Not a jot. Roger was far too weak to control me.”

“And your second husband?”

“Armand?” She shook her head. “Heavens no. He was a French count, insanely attractive, and a stone-broke fortune hunter. He was also reckless, dangerous, and completely without regard for consequences. He drove motorcars, sailed yachts, and chased women. When he chased me, I fell for him like a ninepin. I’d never met anyone like that, you see, and he harkened to my own adventurous side. We ran off together a month after we met, got married in Gibraltar, and spent the next three years living off my money in the south ofFrance—gambling at Nice, sailing the Mediterranean, and driving his favorite motorcars along the Côte d’Azur.”

“You didn’t mind him living off your money?”

She shook her head, giving him a rueful smile. “I probably should have, but the truth is, I loved every minute of it. Until…”

“Until?” he prompted when she fell silent.

“Until he died in a car crash.”