Much Ado About April (The Rake Review, Season Two #4)

Chapter One

Where a rake stops pretending.

Percival Everard Trentham, Earl of Merevale, knew her by reputation.

Easily bored. Clever. Stunning. Bloodlines hauling her into society while she sought—with surgical precision—to heave herself out of it. Exactly the sort he made a point to avoid.

Ever sighed. Sadly, he and the girl shared more attributes than he liked.

He would have had to be blind not to notice her.

Isabella Anstruther-Colbrook unsettled a ballroom simply by standing at its modest fringes.

She asked controversial questions in putrid pink parlors no one wished to answer.

She’d once turned him down for a waltz when he hadn’t even truly wanted to dance, a courtesy extended to a young woman with an empty card, nothing more.

She was trouble, her beautiful face marked by an amused air, a trait common to those who refused to behave properly.

Women like her didn’t let a man lounge in the shadows.

And Ever had worked far too hard to do exactly that.

“Where is she?” he asked, bracing his hands on the mahogany beast of a desk that had been in his family for generations as he rose to his feet.

It appeared, despite the masquerade he was hosting downstairs, that this evening’s solitude was over.

Had he not recently entered into a covert—and, he hoped, successful—steam engine endeavor with her brother-in-law, Weston Whitaker, he would have let the Colbrook chit dig her own grave and lie in it.

Ruin herself in one fell swoop while he slept with the peace of babes.

As it was, he had his own susceptibilities: a sister he loved above all others, a stubborn miss who’d provided hours of daily torment before finding the man she would marry, giving Ever a clear understanding of how vulnerable one could be in this world without proper protection.

Even if that protection endured only long enough to see a young woman safely returned to her family’s palatial estate.

“I thought I should warn ye’, being connected to the brother and such, that she’s known to be a bit of a termagant,” Brick said, cracking his lumpy knuckles, his lisp leagues better now that they’d been practicing.

“Stumbled in with a crowd of weary elites, not enough in Mayfair to keep ’em occupied. You know the dizzy type.”

“I know the type,” Ever said quietly. He had run from them all his life.

“Course, course, you’re an earl, but low on the post, so to speak, what with them engineered scandals and boozy spectacles. Surprised the Colbrook gel would come this far afield. Took a scrap of pluck, I’ll say. Near to demi-monde, this crowd.”

“It’s that ridiculous Rake Review column, attracting moths to the brightest flame.

Though I’m happy for it since every piece of publicity is icing on the cake of this pretense, one I’ll gladly cast off when I retire.

Now, however, thanks to this intrusion, I’ll be forced to attend my own party.

” Ever snatched his mask off the sideboard as he passed it.

Black velvet, shaped close to his face. No adornment, no shimmer, just enough to blend in.

He wasn’t offended to be considered “low on the post” by a valet who was not a valet at all, but an enforcer attached to him for the duration of his tenure in the intelligence profession, which was another forty-three days.

And counting.

Looping the mask’s satin ties into a tight knot at the back of his head, Ever gave his hair a brisk burnish, leaving it as though he’d just tumbled from bed.

Dissoluteness was key to his presentation.

“Isn’t she marrying that fop of a marquess?

” Halting before Brick, he dipped his fingers into his sentry’s glass and flicked brandy across his own face and neck.

The scent of liquor went well with the package.

“Ireton, isn’t it? That chap sits a horse like a crone, threatening to tumble off at any moment. I can’t imagine anyone choosing him.”

Brick scowled and glanced into the glass his employer had dipped his fingers into. “How the bleeding hell should I know?” Then he grinned, revealing the crookedest set of teeth London had ever seen. “And why the bleeding hell do you?”

Ever paused in the doorway of his study, a frown tugging at his lips. Arranging his cravat until the ends dangled carelessly down his chest, he let the question flutter through his mind.

Why did he know anything about Isabella Anstruther-Colbrook?

He wasn’t sure, he only recognized that he did.

The man the ton called Tipsy Trentham, or on the particularly brutal occasions, Pickled Percival, ambled Isabella’s way, slipping between the islands of people who had spilled onto his veranda with a negligent grace she’d always found rather perplexing.

He rarely moved like someone tipsy or pickled, but rather like a panther on the hunt.

And his eyes were a sharp, clear green. Crystalline.

The color of calm seas that deepened upon submersion.

Nothing like her father’s dilated amber when he’d been at his worst.

It was as if no one else in the world but her noticed.

Which presented a riddle to a woman desperate for entertainment.

Ignoring Isabella as usual, the Earl of Merevale halted fifteen yards away to share a seeming witticism with a medieval knight Isabella believed was Baron Redcliffe; then paused to trifle with a nymph swathed in gauzy satin, silk tea roses trembling in her chignon as she laughed at something he said. Isabella had no notion who she was.

They presented a stunning portrait—tall, willowy, flirting fools touching just enough to make one wonder what the night might bring, their beauty burnished by a full moon in a rare cloudless sky.

A golden shimmer swam over them, teasing the ends of his cravat and the wispy hem of her gown.

Isabella had never been tall, nor anything close to willowy herself.

If she painted worth a damn, she’d give these two a go on canvas, though she doubted they were worth the effort.

Glancing away after suffering a moment’s irrational pique, Isabella lifted her champagne glass to her lips, searching the crowd for what she wouldn’t find—a spark of life to dull her helplessness, her powerlessness.

She’d done what she’d promised her sister, Penny, she would over a year ago and withdrawn from working with the Brazen Belle.

Two seasons—nearly eighteen months—of joyless performance as a compliant debutante.

Fawning over titles she hadn’t the slightest interest in and the pudding-heads attached for centuries to them.

Deadly dull conversations without a hint of controversy.

(Except that time in a baron’s shockingly pink parlor and the disagreement over women’s rights, when, wouldn’t you know it, the Earl of Merevale was in attendance, slumped sleepily in a dark corner but listening, damn him.)

This evening was, in fact, the first time in ages she’d roamed where she shouldn’t.

If not for her clandestine embroidery endeavor, enough to vex her family if they knew of it but not enough to ruin her, she would be lost.

It brought Isabella back to the desperate belief that this—parties, husband hunts, polite suffocation—was not all there was to life. She would have given up everything to have a purpose. A profession. A student. Shopkeeper. Modiste. Something.

When all that was ever suggested to her was wife.

She had just finished her champagne and was considering another when the hairs at her nape lifted. She tilted her head and, through the corner of her eye, watched Percival Trentham close in.

He lingered by the refreshment table his staff had thoughtfully placed on a level fragment of the lawn, selected a grape, popped it into his mouth, and chewed slowly.

Except for a nondescript mask a shade darker than his disheveled ebony strands, he’d not bothered to don a costume.

He was, as always, save for the dangling cravat, attired head to toe in black.

There would have been no hiding him in any case.

Few men in London possessed such height.

Nor was the stubborn cut of his jaw—usually tilted in censure when he fixed his gaze on her—a feature she’d ever miss.

She would never lie to anyone, including herself, and claim he wasn’t attractive. Perhaps too much so.

But what was another gorgeous wastrel in a sea of them?

She didn’t want her mother’s reality to become her own. A man who overindulged to this extent would never, ever be for her.

The moon sank notch by unhurried notch as Merevale nibbled and conversed playfully with a friar, two naval officers, and a huntsman. When the area cleared, leaving only the two of them, he turned to her with a suddenness that suggested he’d been waiting for solitude all along.

Selecting another grape, he chewed, glanced over his shoulder, then back.

“My carriage is in the alley on the south side of the residence. Take the pebbled garden path and it will lead you right there. My man, Brick, will assist you. Wait for me inside the vehicle, shades drawn. I’ll settle things here, then escort you home.

” His mulish jaw hardened, a muscle flexing beneath his ear.

“I’m assuming there isn’t a chaperone to include in this delightful invitation.

On that assumption, I’ve directed a maid to accompany us.

Should you be worried, which I’d be staggered if you were, we won’t be alone. ”

Her lips parted, and for the first time in her life, Isabella was speechless.

Had he ordered her to—

How dare he think he had the right to—

Words and fury tangled in her throat, and this is what came out: “Do you even know who I am?”

His lips flattened into an unappealing slant.

It was a crime the grimace didn’t do a thing to ruin his good looks.

“Allow me to be blunt. If you’d like, instead of helping you sneak into your residence through the domestics’ entrance, I can pound on the front door and include Weston in the discussion of where I found you.

I’m happy to go that route. Your brother-in-law and I are acquainted, unfortunately for you.

Perhaps your sister will be up and drawn into the conversation. More the merrier, am I right?”

Isabella brought her flute to her lips and polished off the contents, the taste turning flat as she realized her adventure was over. She was many things, but a girl who fought against overwhelming odds wasn’t one of them.

Dewy grass dampened her slippers as she headed in the direction Merevale had suggested. As she passed him, Isabella paused and thrust her flute at him. “Do you have the time?”

Without options, he grabbed her glass, then slipped his pocket watch from his waistcoat fob, bobbling both. “Ten of midnight,” he said, tilting the timepiece into the moonlight.

“You won’t be long then, will you, Merevale? I must get back.”

Won’t be long, he mouthed, a tiny pleat settling between his arched brows.

Though she knew she should, Isabella didn’t drop her gaze; she wasn’t going to accept anything more than a humiliating ride home from him. The night stilled as they drew invisible battle lines, the air around them swelling like an indrawn breath.

The imagined exhalation was an interesting moment.

In the calm, she noticed that although Merevale reeked of brandy, an underlying scent of sandalwood and starched linen clung to him.

A clean, steady fragrance, arresting, much like his emerald gaze, nothing tipsy or pickled about it.

This close, he was even taller than she’d imagined, intimidating—should she permit it, which she did not—his shoulders filling his superfine coat without an ounce of padding.

Long lashes and a plump bottom lip the shade of raspberries.

A fairly fresh scar running along that rock-hard jaw.

His fingers, slim and elegant, tensed twice around the cut crystal as a quick breath escaped him.

A few delicate, almost unnoticeable, streaks of gray at his temple.

Desire sparked inside her, perhaps for the first time, as she imagined those hands cupping her cheeks and lifting her lips to his. She pressed hers together to contain the memory of her previous kisses, three, to be exact, each one proving that men didn’t know what she wanted.

Because she’d never felt a warm glow with any of them.

Before or after contact.

Perhaps she should have accepted when he asked her to dance months ago. Other than believing Merevale too old for her, or that he’d asked on a lark, his smirk firmly in place, she couldn’t recall why she’d said no.

“Are you done?” he finally asked, without revealing whether he’d had to shake himself from his own reverie or simply grown bored to the point of exasperation.

“Quite,” she replied, and continued down the path, praying he couldn’t hear the hammering of her heart. Or see the trembling of her hands. Confusion she wasn’t accustomed to.

Oh, Isa, what have you done now, she thought, pressing her gloved palm to her breastbone. Her pulse vibrated beneath her fingertips.

She’d never gone toe-to-toe with anyone before. Not like this, without words as the weapon.

And, my, it was exhilarating.