Page 5 of Seduced by a Scoundrel (The Spinster Society #3)

O nly once her father felt thoroughly spoiled as well as exhausted by being the center of attention did Sybil excuse herself. She was itching to see if Priya had made any progress with the betting book. To see if her impulsive actions were worth the humiliation she had set herself up for.

Breakfast had not been reassuring on that end.

The Willoughby ball was one of the most anticipated events of the winter. Lord Willoughby could not compete with her mother, of course, who filled the garden with fire eaters, or Lady Cartwright, who had once suspended delicate nets of rose petals from the ceiling to release onto the dancers below during a waltz. But Lord Willoughby had a chef who inspired duels over a roasted duck recipe, as well as a wine cellar that princes wept over.

Everyone would be there. Invitations were fought over, stolen from the best of friends, bought with gifts that arrived well before the Season.

The gossips would swarm.

And Sybil was going to offer herself up as the main course.

She groaned under her breath and quickened her step. She had decided not to wait for the carriage. The air was crisp, and the faintest trace of hoarfrost glittered on windows and lampposts. She was impatient to be away, to be doing something .

Something that did not involve humiliating herself.

Walking all the way to Spinster House was not much, but it was a start. She caught the occasional glance thrown her way, but whether it was because of the growing rumors or because she was marching like a soldier to battle was unclear.

It felt familiar.

It felt very much like someone was following her.

She did not alter her pace or turn her head, though she dearly wanted to. She knew better than that. Just as she did not turn onto the street where Spinster House waited. Instead, she walked past it, chose the next turn, and went into Hyde Park. After the last few months, the Spinsters had set up new ways into the house.

Just in case.

She was not the first to be followed and was unlikely to be the last.

The back of her neck prickled. She wanted to spin on her heel and throw a punch. Alas, even a covert glance showed nothing out of the ordinary. She could be imagining it. Either way, if there was someone out there, he was not close enough for her to do any damage.

Which was no fun at all.

She turned onto a path grown over with yews and juniper, still green despite the weather. Sybil had a sneaking suspicion that Priya had planted the blackberry brambles herself to add cover all the year round. A few steps back and Sybil would be at the gate to the house’s back garden, also hung with holly to discourage approach.

Instead, she waited for a moment, and another, tucked safely in the copse, the edge of Hyde Park stretched out before her. Yellowed fields glittered under the weak sunshine with meandering paths where couples walked arm in arm, nannies pushed prams, children ran with their dogs. No one lurked with obvious menace. Nor even with stealthy menace, if she was truthful.

No one was following her. She was being a goose. Her brain was quite sure of that. The prickles at the back of her neck took a little longer to be convinced.

With a shake of her head, Sybil pushed through the greenery and used her key to unlock the secret garden gate. She passed the greenhouses, stuffed with orchids and lemon trees and more plants than she could ever hope to name. The back door was unlocked, though a footman appeared the moment she stepped inside. Sybil grinned at him. “At ease, soldier.”

Footman was a bit of a misnomer. For one thing, most footmen wore wigs or livery. They did not carry knives about their person. But at Spinster House, things were different.

Naturally.

The lady of the house knew more than a dozen plants to poison your tea. The ballroom was more of an obstacle course. The scullery maid had once stolen a pet bear she did not think was being treated well enough. And Pierce Gallagher, formerly of the Royal Navy and Priya’s paramour, had infiltrated the household staff with his own men to guard the house.

“Miss Taunton.” The footman nodded to her. “Lady Priya is in the family parlor.”

“She’s expecting me, is she?”

“Sybil, is that you?” Peony called down from the staircase landing. “Hurry up!”

Sybil tossed her cloak over a chair and went to join her friend.

“Why did you come in the back way?” Peony asked when Sybil joined her.

“Just keeping in practice,” Sybil said. If she admitted she thought she was being followed when she was not, someone would tell her to rest more, and then she would have to bite them. This was safer all around.

They went straight to the parlor reserved for the Spinsters. There were no stuffy rules of decorum here, often no shoes, sometimes only dressing gowns. There was tea, baskets of pastries, whisky on the sideboard. This was where they rested, where they planned and plotted.

Priya sat by the window, her dark, glossy hair pinned in a simple twist at her nape and the gold bangles she always wore gleaming at her wrists. A bronze statue of an elephant-headed man sat behind her with his jovial expression. Someone had left a plate of boiled sweets in front of him.

Matilda and Emmeline were curled close together on the settee. Matilda had long kicked off her shoes, which were always the very height of fashion and the very devil to wear. Peony sat on the floor like the hoyden she was, and Sybil would have joined her, but she had worn a proper gown in deference to her father’s birthday and it was too narrow at the hem. She ducked under a fern that had no business being as big as it was and sat in a gold velvet chair with a cushion shaped like a lemon instead. “Good morning, all.”

Priya glanced up from the betting book. “Do I need to tell you that you were too reckless and there might be consequences?”

Sybil snorted. “As I have to attend the Willoughby ball tonight in order to eat crow, no. No, you don’t.”

“Oh good, because I really, really wanted to get my hands on this book.”

They exchanged a grin.

“Have cake with that crow,” Priya added. “You deserve it.”

“You’re not going to tell me I should have been resting?”

“I dislike stating the obvious.”

“I’ve never been inside a gentlemen’s club,” Matilda said. “What was it like?”

“It smelled of port and pipe smoke and honestly was not worth the fuss.”

“I thought as much.”

“Lord Bentley is already in high dudgeon over the theft. He all but accused me over my father’s breakfast plate.”

“That’s remarkably rude,” Matilda said, blinking.

“He was rather overset,” Sybil said. “And I admit, perhaps, it was not my best move to be so obviously seen the same night the book mysteriously went missing.” She shrugged. “Too late now.”

“As your father is the soul of kindness, I hope your mother made him cry. Just a little.”

“She forced him to introduce himself and will no doubt continue to exact her revenge.” Sybil grinned. “The Courteous Cut. Death by a thousand social paper cuts.”

Sybil thought of Keir, of the way he had risen from his chair, all coiled violence. Not at all the stoic marquess who barely looked at her when there were others around. The man who exemplified duty and responsibility, nonchalant even at the point of a sword. He had become that sword between one blink and the next.

Cold, sharp. Menacing.

Delicious.

It surely said something distasteful about Sybil’s character that she thought so.

Ah well. She could add it to her already long list of flaws.

“Is Bentley in the book? Protecting himself, is he?” she asked.

“Yes, if I recall,” Priya said. “But nothing out of the ordinary that I could see. Just the usual peccadilloes. I expect his pride is stinging more than anything.”

“And why must you eat crow?” Emmeline asked over her cup of coffee. It was thick and strong, and no one else could even abide a single sip. She had been banned from making it for the rest of the household.

Sybil wrinkled her nose. “I may have announced to all and sundry that Lord Blackburn was courting me.”

“But he is courting Lady Violetta Pontefract,” Matilda said.

“Yes.” Not even Sybil’s closest friends knew what happened between her and Keir when they could not help themselves.

“Ah.”

“Exactly. And now I must undo it. Be a wallflower and dried-up, desperate spinster and all that.” She glanced at Priya. “Please tell me it was worth it?”

Priya smiled slowly “We will make sure of it.”

Amandine’s idea of a restrained birthday celebration involved a fountain of champagne pouring from the pitcher in the hand of a marble statue of a nymph. There were flowers, music, and circulating delicacies on gold platters. There was dancing, because Lady Wentworth could not abide an evening without dancing.

And, of course, there were fireworks to rival royal celebrations, from Versailles to St. James’s Palace.

Londoners gathered in the streets on the earl’s birthday because everyone knew the fireworks would be visible all the way to the river.

There was every luxury, every entertainment, every extravagance.

There were marquesses and dukes and a princess.

But no Keir.

By the time the fireworks were ready, Sybil had taken several turns around the house, and still no Keir. Sophie was in attendance with an elderly chaperone, despite the fact that she had not yet had her coming out. It was no great surprise Keir had not accompanied her—he only seldom crossed the threshold of the Taunton residence, especially if Sybil was at home. Anything to be sure no one linked their names together. He was careful, honest, rule-bound.

Lonely.

She knew it, even if he did not. She tasted it in every kiss, saw it in every glance.

She ought to be a great deal more furious about it, but mostly she was confused. He kept everyone at bay by choice. The day his mother died giving birth to Sophie was the day he had changed. He went from a lad who climbed trees with her to a young man who schooled his every expression and spoke very little. Even she had not been able to needle anything out of him, and she was very, very good at needling him.

But she was not Lady Sybil, merely Miss Taunton.

And he was the heir to a marquess, even if he had none of the usual lesser honorary titles because his father would not give them up.

But some things had not changed.

Sybil was not going to wait around for him. He needed to be dragged out of his cave once in a while.

And she needed him .

She did not want to need him, but she had learned long ago that that had very little bearing on the matter.

Sybil slipped from the crowded house, skirting the men congregating in the back garden, shouting to each other about gunpowder and distance. She knew every inch of pathway and the brittle lawn spiked with hoarfrost. The crack in the wall at the very back, behind the plum tree, had never been repaired. In fact, it had widened considerably during the years she and Keir used it as a thoroughfare.

She climbed through it, knowing to duck so that she did not bash her head on the oak tree on the other side. Montgomery House was dark save a candle burning in an upstairs window. The household staff were gathered in the mews between the houses, waiting for the fireworks. They did not see Sybil as she crossed the formal garden’s white gravel paths. She felt Keir standing at the glass door, watching her, before she even saw him. It was always like that. That had never changed, even when everything else had.

He stepped back when she opened the door, neither of them saying a word.

He held her gaze for a long, long moment.

Then he exhaled roughly and reached for her, hauling her up against him, his mouth closing over hers. She was already kissing him back. The hunger they hid from the world, even from each other, would not be ignored for long. It was madness.

And it was glorious.

The kiss was urgent, desperate. All consuming. Heat washed through her, expectant, eager. Impatient. He walked her backward through the parlor, still kissing her, still tasting her, right into a small music room no one ever used. He lifted her onto a table, stepping between her knees in a decisive move that made her moan. His hardness pressed against her, sending sparks into her belly.

There were still no words, none needed, none wanted. Only hands and teeth and mouth sucking at the tender skin behind her ear. He dragged his hands up her legs, widening her thighs, fingertips moving over her stockings to her bare skin, up, up, until he finally, finally reached her heated center, wet and swollen just at the thought of him.

He parted her lips, gliding thick fingers over her bud once, twice, and then plunging into her heat. She gasped, writhing against him. He always knew just how to touch her, just how to wring every ounce of pleasure from her body in the brief, furtive moments they allowed themselves. She rubbed her palm over the swell of his cock, gripping it through his breeches.

But he did not stop, not for a second, not even when he groaned into her neck. His fingers kept at their work, stroking her, curling inside to reach that sensitive spot that made her eyes close and her breath stutter. Again and again until her thighs quivered, until the pleasure coiled and tightened and then released, wave after wave of sensation.

She was still panting, her pulse racing as she helped free him from the confines of his breeches. He was hard and swollen for her, the tip of his cock glistening. She curled her hand around him, pumping as she drew him nearer, until she could drag it through her slick folds. His eyes darkened. She urged him closer, demanded it.

He slid through her wetness, the stretch of her body accommodating her stinging in a delicious way. His breath was harsh and rough in her ear. He splayed his big hand over her spine and took her weight while angling her so she could take more of him. Her head fell back, and she gasped at every thrust. She was so full, so anchored to him. She wanted more—she always wanted more.

He plunged deeper, slower, every stroke deliberate. Another climax began to build as she answered thrust for thrust, moan for moan. When it streaked up her thighs, she thought she was seeing exploding colors, but it was only the fireworks through the glass. They were bathed in flashing, jewel-toned lights as Keir gritted his teeth, refusing to alter his pace until she came again, and then he pulled free and released into the handkerchief he had clawed from his pocket.

They shuddered against each other, foreheads pressed close, eyes shut.

All without a single word passing between them.

As usual.