The Importance of Being Wanton by Christi Caldwell

Chapter 1

London, England

Mayfair

1829

THE LONDONER

SCANDAL!

The Earl of Scarsdale and Miss Gately have severed their long betrothal. It is rumored society’s most charming rogue and scoundrel broke it off, allowing the lady her dignity while maintaining his bachelor state!

M. FAIRPOINT

Charles Hayden, the Earl of Scarsdale, was under attack.

His household under siege.

Nor was it the first time the townhouse had been invaded.

But every time was terror-inducing.

And even more so when the assault upon his household came in the dead of night.

Heart pounding, Charles surged upright in his bed, and frantically blinking the sleep from his eyes, he looked around his darkened chambers. His gaze settled on the front of his rooms.

“I’m certain His Lordship . . .” His butler, Tomlinson, was giving it his usual great effort.

History, however, had proven there was only one inevitable outcome . . .

“Step aside, Tomlinson . . .”

. . . and that outcome never ended in Charles’s favor.

“I have a meeting with my son . . .”

A meeting.

Was it really fair to call whatever this forced entry was “a meeting”?

Lectures. Debates. Arguments, yes. He’d had all those with his father, ad nauseum.

But discussions? Nay, never that. Since he’d entered the world, he’d suffered through some order or another, coming from the man now marching toward him.

The footfalls and voices grew closer and the servant’s tone increasingly strident, elevated in what had come to be his way of preparing Charles as much as he could, for as much as he was able. “I trust His Lordship will be happy to meet you . . . when he has awakened for the morn—”

“This is a matter of urgency that will not wait.”

Not, a matter that could not wait.

But rather, a matter that will not wait.

It was a slight but telltale distinction, belonging to a marquess who was unaccustomed to taking anything but what he wanted and expected as his due.

Scrubbing a hand over his face, the stubble on his cheeks scratching his palm, Charles sighed and swung his naked legs over the side of the bed. Bloody hell. It was too early for this.

The door, however, had yet to be breach—

“Step aside,” his father bellowed.

The panel burst open with such force it slammed against the opposite wall. The marquess already had his cane up in anticipation, stopping the oak slab from connecting with his face when it bounced back toward him. “Charles,” he greeted, as if it were any other social call a father might pay his son and not a storming of said son’s household.

Wiping the sleep from his eyes, Charles donned a taunting grin. “Fath— Oh.” Bloody, bloody hell. His father had brought reinforcements—diminutive in size but dominating in spirit . . . and wearing skirts.

“Charles,” she said as she swept past her husband and laid siege to her son’s chambers.

Charles cursed and scrambled to get himself under the covers. “Mother?” he croaked. This was certainly a new and even more ruthless tactic. And that was precisely why his father was a formidable foe.

He peeked out from around the edge of the blankets.

The marchioness smiled at Charles’s butler. “Thank you for all your assistance, Tomlinson,” she said, drawing off her gloves one at a time and handing them over to the servant. “If you would be so good as to have these left with my cloak.”

Putty in her hands, Tomlinson went all soft-eyed. “Of course, my lady,” the young servant said, and after sketching a deep bow, he headed for the exit.

“Thankyou, Tomlinson.” Charles called out that sarcasm-laden response loudly for his traitorous butler. “That will be all.”

Tomlinson closed the door on the remainder of that droll reply.

The moment he’d gone, Charles’s mother stalked forward. “You’re drunk, aren’t you? You’re slurring your speech.”

“It was a deliberate exaggeration,” Charles said, and the closer his mother approached to him and his naked self, the deeper he inched under the blankets.

Alas, his mother ignored those assurances, looking to her husband. “He’s drunk, isn’t he?”

The marquess leaned over the head of his cane and shrugged. “He’s always drunk.”

“I am not drunk,” Charles called, climbing all the way under the blankets. Not this time anyway. “Though receiving a visit from both my mother and father in the middle of the night, I rather wish I was.”

“He’s making a jest, isn’t he, Aster? That was a jest, wasn’t it?”

“Indeed it was, dear.” She paused. “And a poor one at that, Charles,” she said, though it wasn’t clear whether the disapproval in her tone was a product of his supposed weak attempt at humor or the fact that he was also supposedly drunk.

There came the groan of a floorboard and the rustle of fabric.

His father instantly yanked the covers aside and tossed them to the floor.

Charles squeaked. What special hell was this? “Good God, man, have a care,” he sputtered, grabbing a pillow and holding it protectively to himself, all the while avoiding his mother’s gaze. He tipped his head pointedly in her direction.

“Why are you tilting your head like that?” his clueless-as-always father demanded. “Have you gone and injured your fool neck while you were drunk?”

“Oh, for the love of all that is holy, I’m not drunk, and I’m motioning to Mother.” Abandoning his efforts there, Charles looked once more to the only parent who did not require everything be spelled out in terms of emotions, sentiments, or intentions. “If you would, please, Mother?” Lying down as he was, with his parents both hovering around his bed, certainly robbed Charles of any real authority when he spoke.

“Please, what?” she drawled, and from the corner of his eye, he caught the way she folded her arms at her chest and stuck out a foot, indicating in every way that she had no intention of taking herself off that easy. Or letting him off that easy, either.

She’d really make him spell it out? “Would you please excuse us? Given my current”—heat exploded in his cheeks, and he glanced pointedly at the feather pillow across his person—“circumstances?”

“Naked,” she said bluntly. “Those are your circumstances, and secondly, that man, as you referred to him, is, in fact, your father, and I am your mother. And I assure you, I’ve seen everything there is to see where a man is concerned. Including your once very small bits, and—”

Grabbing for another pillow, Charles promptly dragged it over his head, muffling the remainder of those words. Alas, it was too late. The words his mother had uttered couldn’t be unheard. They would dwell forever in his ears, as rotten as poison. “Very well. Would you both allow me a moment to dress myself? Then I promise we can speak about”—refusing to relinquish his hold on his pillows, he settled for shifting his head back and forth between them—“whatever this is?”

His father’s eyebrows dipped. “Whatever . . . this is?”

Alas, Charles had said the wrong thing. Because he was apparently supposed to know just whatever calamity had resulted in his parents barging into his chambers at this ungodly hour.

With a sound of disgust, the marquess slashed a hand through the air and stalked off, as if he’d quit his son completely. But then he began to pace. “Tell him, Aster.” And Charles rather wished the pair of them had quit him.

Alas . . .

His mother drew in a deep, heavy breath, then pressed her fingertips to her lips, shaking her head, not getting the words out. And for the first time since they’d stormed his household, he registered the drawn lines at the corners of the marchioness’s eyes. Creases that revealed her worry. His mother, who wasn’t given to histrionics and who didn’t bluster and overreact.

Panic grew in his chest. Grabbing the blanket, he drew it over his legs. “Mother?” he asked, sitting upright, as there came the first real stirrings of dread. “What is it?”

Whatever it was that had brought them here was surely—

“Your brother has not seen Morgan or Pierce this week.” That announcement exploded from her lips, and her shoulders sagged.

Emma’s brothers? That was what this was about? Charles puzzled his brow.

Because of . . . that? He stared at them. This was why they’d roused him from his rest and visited this misery upon him? He waited for her to add something more than that. “Annd?” he asked when it became apparent she had no intention of doing so and he couldn’t even begin to fathom why he was at the heart of this latest disappointment.

“And they are best friends.” His mother released a sigh. “Surely that must matter to you. Why, imagine if you weren’t speaking with St. John or Landon. Hmm?”

“If I weren’t speaking to St. John or Landon, then you have my express permission to never do something as bothersome as darken Derek’s door in the dead of night.”

His father sputtered. “Why— Why . . .”

His mother held a hand aloft, quelling the tirade her husband couldn’t get out. “And furthermore, what is this nonsense about the dead of night? Hmm? Charles Christopher Ashton Hayden, it is seven o’clock.”

“Seven o’clock is an unholy hour for a soul to be up,” Charles insisted.

“Especially when one was getting oneself completely foxed the night before, eh, boy?” his father said, looking him up and down disapprovingly.

Fortunately, he’d grown well accustomed to his father’s disappointment. And yet . . . his father had welcomed that deficit in Charles’s character when it served him. When it had served the family. Now, he’d expect Charles to simply . . . cease being what he and the world expected him to be. Nay, what his father had once needed him to be. “This is the problem right here,” his father said, shaking a finger Charles’s way.

Charles slumped on the mattress and covered his eyes with a hand. It was coming. In fairness, however, the marquess had waited a good deal longer for the customary lecture than he usually did during their visits.

“He’s a rogue.”

“I thought you appreciated my being a rogue?” Charles drawled.

Color suffused his father’s cheeks at the reminder Charles leveled there, the one neither of them spoke about anymore because of the hint of risk that could come should anyone, absolutely anyone, overhear and learn . . .

The marquess quickly found himself. “When you were a lad of twenty-three. I didn’t expect the charade to become real and for it to drag on for years and years beyond that. Now that you’ve lost Emma, you must take on a more proper role to make a good match. Why, you’re past an age when most gentlemen wed.”

Ah, so that’s what this was about. Making himself respectable now, so he could find a wife.

“It no longer suits you for me to be a scoundrel, so I am to shift course to ‘proper gent’?”

“Charles,” his mother said admonishingly.

Yes, it was an unfair blow to level, given Charles had willingly taken on that persona for the end it had served. “Either way,” he said, frustration creeping into his tone, “I’m not a scoundrel. I don’t drink and wager . . . nearly as much as I once did,” he added in fairness.

“My, how . . . honorable.” His mother gave him a sad look that was somehow worse than the marquess’s blatant condemnation.

Charles felt his cheeks heat with a blush. “I’m merely saying when compared with other gentlemen, my actions are not outrageously wicked.”

“Not outrageously wicked,” his father muttered to himself. “Is it a wonder she ended it?”

Charles winced.

Clapping once, his mother held up her hands between them. “Gentlemen, that is enough. We have not come to discuss the state of your betrothal.”

His broken betrothal.

“You haven’t?” he asked incredulously.

“No,” his parents responded at the same time, suspiciously in lockstep.

“Well, that, then, is certainly unexpected,” Charles muttered under his breath.

“We are here because Lord and Lady Featherstone have failed to invite us to a dinner party, Charles,” she continued over him.

“And?” he prodded when it became apparent neither intended to say more. That this was it. The offense.

Both of his parents looked pointedly at him.

“And you know we’ve never not invited one another to one’s events. They are our best friends.”

“Or they were”—his father glared Charles’s way—“before you went and made a blunder of that.”

“Surely you aren’t . . . suggesting I’m at fault?” he choked out.

The marquess and marchioness struck a like pose, folding their arms and sticking out an opposite foot and eyeing Charles from under arched eyebrows, their silence serving as his answer.

So they were suggesting he was to blame. “Well, that is as unfounded as it is preposterous.” He gritted his teeth. “Whatever upset you might have with me, I am not the one who broke it off with Miss Gately.” They could be upset with him for overindulging and wagering and for the company he kept, but this? “Take your upset to the Gately household, and perhaps you’ll get yourself somewhere.”

His mother looked at Charles for a long moment before speaking. “Jared?”

The marquess promptly headed for the door and let himself out.

“You really should teach me the skill of dispatching Father,” Charles said when he and his mother were alone. “It would prove ever most useful.”

Her expression was unwavering, revealing none of her usual warmth. “As much as I always enjoy your levity and jests, this is not one of those moments.”

Bloody hell. He’d never been able to close his damned mouth. It was the curse of his existence.

Amongst a lengthy list of many.

Coming over, she seated herself on the edge of his bed. “I’m not happy about . . . a lot of this.”

He tensed his mouth.

“And wipe that petulant look from your face,” she chastised. “This instant. I’m not here to lecture you upon your drinking and womanizing.” His ears went hot. “Or wagering. Though I’d be well within my motherly rights, were I to do so.”

Charles sighed. “Very well. What is it?”

“I want the situation with the Gatelys resolved.”

He swallowed back a curse. “I cannot marry someone who doesn’t wish to marry me, Mother.” That rejection, Emma’s rejection, chafed still. Because he’d not appreciated what he might have had . . . until he’d lost it.

His mother angled herself on the bed so she was facing him more directly. “I’m not asking you to marry Emma. Not any longer. That proverbial swan has soared.”

“More swan analogies?”

“Always swan analogies,” she corrected.

Well, they made even less sense now than when he’d been a boy of sixteen about to make the matrimonial march to his child bride.

“You owed the viscount a discussion”—she raised her voice slightly, edging him out of a place to speak when he attempted to do so—“indicating that you cared about the arrangement and that you have regrets for how it turned out.” Her lips pulled in a grimace. “Or rather, how it did not turn out. That you recognize your fault, and that you value our family’s relationship with his.” She hesitated. “That is, if you indeed feel those things?”

“Of course I do.” He may have always resented being betrothed as a boy to Featherstone’s young daughter, but Charles had also always seen the older gentleman as a second father of sorts.

Her shoulders sagged slightly. “That is reassuring, as I did not believe I had raised a son who was indifferent to such bonds.”

“However,” Charles went on, “neither do I believe it will serve any good for me to speak to h—”

“It will.”

Charles ran his hands over his face. She’d have him pay a visit to the viscount and take complete ownership of his and Emma’s failed betrothal? So much for the lady’s assumptions that none would hold Charles at fault. “I thought a mother’s loyalty was to her son.”

“It was. That was before you went and broke me and Alice Featherstone apart. If you learn nothing in your life, Charles, know this: women shall not tolerate any man who comes between them.”

“And I take it that rule also applies to one’s own child?” he asked dryly.

“Is one’s own child a man?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Then yes. I would say, especially one’s son.” With that, she stood. “Fix it, Charles,” she said. “Fix your reputation. Restore your image. Make yourself the respectable man I know you can be.” She started for the door. “Just fix it,” she repeated, not even glancing back. She swept out and closed the door firmly behind her.

Fix it.

As in make peace enough between his and Emma’s families so that their parents and brothers could all resume their friendships, and he could set to work reforming himself and improving his reputation.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be so very difficult, after all. With that in mind, Charles dashed off a quick note, then rang for his footman.

The young servant arrived almost instantly. “My lord?”

“See that this is delivered posthaste to the viscount,” he asked, folding the note and handing it over to Wickham’s care.

Then heading back to his bed, Charles burrowed into his mattress.

It was done.