The Importance of Being Wanton by Christi Caldwell

Chapter 3

THE LONDONER

FRIENDSHIPS ABOUND

The Earl of Scarsdale has never met a person he couldn’t charm, and that includes the Viscount Featherstone.

M. FAIRPOINT

Charles had known since he was a boy that he’d no wish, interest, or even curiosity in the woman his parents had betrothed him to as a babe.

It hadn’t been until he was a grown man, watching her walk away, that he’d realized what a damned fool he’d been.

That did not mean, however, he’d given up all hope of wooing her back.

Charles let his cue fly, and cracked the balls upon the billiards table.

“Well done, Charles. Well done,” Emma’s father, the Viscount Featherstone, boomed, slapping him hard between the shoulder blades with an enormous hand that managed to shake even Charles. But then, the viscount was a mountain of a man . . . which made it rather fortuitous that he didn’t want to separate Charles from any of his limbs for the broken betrothal. “Better than your father, you are. Not that that is much of a recommendation, eh, Jared,” he jested, nudging the marquess beside him.

Both men jostled one another the way two jocular youths at Oxford might.

Charles’s younger brother, Derek, slid into position beside him, and made a show of studying the billiards table. “This is how you’ve been spending your time,” Derek said from the corner of his mouth. “Joining the older set for ribbing and billiards? You really are dicked in the nob since Emma Gately’s defection.”

Charles bristled. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that there is no way you’d be here if it didn’t in some way have something to do with your former betrothed.”

The father to the lady in question came close to consider the placement of his last shot before continuing on.

Former betrothed.

Charles picked up his glass and stared briefly into the contents.

In the first weeks following their Hyde Park meeting, he’d not been able to even think those words without needing the help of a bottle to drown them out. Given he was driven to merely sipping from a modest snifter felt an improvement, indeed.

He and Derek remained silent, with Charles not again speaking until the marquess had taken up a place closer to the viscount. “Is it really so hard to believe that my being here has nothing to do with Emma?”

“Yes,” his brother said bluntly. “In fact, I’d wager the only reason you’re here is because of Miss Gately.”

His brother was only partially right. Charles’s daily calls to Emma’s father had begun because of her, and might have everything to do with her. “It isn’t so bad as all that.” Far from it. “In fact, I’ve quite enjoyed myself,” he admitted as their father took his shot.

Craaack.

“You?” His brother laughed. “You’re enjoying . . .” He waved the tip of his stick at the two older men, who were pretend-jousting with the ends of their cue sticks as improvised rapiers. “Is it really so hard to believe that you, a connoisseur of fine spirits and finer women, have settled into domestic life, minus a . . . wife?” His brother snorted. “Yes, I do find that hard to believe.”

“Quit your dillydallying, Derek,” their father shouted. “You are holding up our game-play.”

“Yes, quit your dillydallying, little brother.” Charles ruffled the top of Derek’s black curls in the way he’d always hated.

Swatting at his hand, Derek moved into position.

“Such is the way of second-born sons, isn’t it, though?” Lord Rochester said commiseratively to the viscount, and both fathers went on to lament the inherent problems in heirs and spares.

“Oh, yes, jolly good fun, indeed,” Derek muttered, bending over the table and aligning his cue with his ball.

Charles laughed, tossing back another drink of his brandy while his brother took his shot—one that went predictably wide, as Derek was predictably bad at the game.

“Come, I know it is hard to fathom that I might enjoy being here, but I have moved on from pursuing Emma as determinedly as I have.” At least, enough that he no longer spoke of it daily. But he still wondered at what might be, and visited in the hopes that he could gather some way in which to earn the lady’s notice that was more . . . favorable than it had been before.

His brother gave him a look.

Charles’s neck went hot, but he’d be damned if he allowed any man, let alone his younger brother, to bring him to any more of a blush than that. “Very well,” Charles allowed. “My visits may have begun as one thing, but that isn’t the case anymore.”

“May?”His brother was unrelenting.

Adopting an air of complete disaffectedness, Charles swirled the contents of his drink. The problem with wearing one’s heart upon one’s sleeve, as Charles had for as long as he had, was that anything he said about his relationship with Emma Gately—or rather, lack thereof—was suspect, at best. “I am not as devastated as I was,” he said simply. At least, not to the point of making a public arse of himself. “In fact, I am grateful to Miss Gately for opening my eyes to some of the . . . simpler pleasures I’d previously been missing out on.”

“Such as playing billiards with our father and the viscount?”

“Such as playing billiards with our father and the viscount,” Charles said, drawing forth all the elder-brother patience he could.

Derek dissolved into a paroxysm of laughter, doubling over from the force of it.

“So nice it is, seeing your boys getting along so well,” Emma’s father was saying to Charles’s.

“Oh, yes, getting along so well.” When the older gentlemen’s attention was firmly away, Charles turned up two middle fingers, and his brother howled all the more, the corner of his eyes leaking with tears of his amusement.

Muttering to himself, Charles silenced the remainder of the choice words he had for his brother and his explosion of levity. After all, it was hardly Derek’s fault. When Charles had been five and twenty, he’d been of a similarly like and erroneous opinion about such things.

Or in Charles’s case . . . wrong about far more. So much more. The crystal sheen of his snifter reflected back Charles’s dark expression. As always, she slipped in, as she’d been two months ago . . . rushing off, away from the Serpentine and completely away from Charles. Taking another long, deep swallow of his drink, he grimaced at the sting of the liquid sliding down his throat. He set down his snifter on the side of the billiards table. “Either way, my being here has nothing to do with Emma Gately. I’ve never even caught a glimpse of her here.” Not for lack of trying. Whenever he was ushered through the halls of the viscount’s household, Charles skimmed and searched. Alas, the lady was as elusive as the smile he’d rarely seen her wear.

Which, of course, only lent to this deeper hungering to see her. “And even if I did,” he went on for his benefit as much as his brother’s, “I wouldn’t be distracted from what brought me here.”

“Oh, yes. The good fun to be had with our fathers,” Derek said, his face a mask as, behind him, the two older men had shifted their attentions to light fisticuffs.

Resting a hip along the side of the table, Charles pointed his glass at his brother. “Precisely,” he said, taking another sip of his drink before setting down the snifter.

Derek glanced past him. “Do you know,” his brother murmured, “I do believe I was wrong. This does promise to be good fun, after all.” He nudged a similarly squared jaw toward the front of the room.

Charles followed that pointed gesture, and froze.

Emma stood there. Several inches shy of six feet, all willowy grace, she commanded even the enormous arched doorway.

The lady’s gaze, however, was not on him, but . . . Charles followed her stare, and with a silent curse, he shoved his snifter across the mahogany so that it came to a stop against his brother’s fingers, lest she see it and have confirmed everything she already believed about him.

“Very smooth of you, brother,” Derek said with a wide grin as Emma marched forward with determined strides.

“Emma!” the viscount called warmly.

“Papa,” she returned.

So that was why she’d come. Of course it was. She’d been clear she’d no wish to see him again, and—

His heart lifted a fraction as she continued forward in Charles’s direction, and he, always effortless on his feet where the ladies were concerned, remained against the billiards table, tongue-tied.

Emma reached them, her gaze lingering upon his abandoned snifter.

And for all their brotherly quarreling, Derek raised Charles’s glass as though it were his own and drank down the remaining brandy there. And then popped up.

Derek gave him a swift kick, prompting Charles to move.

He straightened, and flashed a half grin. “Miss—”

“Miss Gately.” His brother beat him to that greeting. Dropping a bow, Derek captured Emma’s fingers and drew them to his mouth for a kiss. A lingering kiss upon her knuckles.

A smile formed on Emma’s lips. “Lord Derek,” she greeted warmly—with a greater warmth than had ever been directed his way. Having spent the better part of his young—and adult—years as a rogue, there’d been all too many telltale signs that his brother was headed along that same scoundrel’s path. It was one thing, knowing that, and quite another altogether, witnessing one’s brother turn the Hayden charm upon one’s former betrothed.

Charles frowned.

His brother retained his hold upon her fingers, then . . .

Charles narrowed his eyes as Derek stroked his thumb along her wrist. “A pleasure as always,” Derek murmured.

Folding his arms at his chest, Charles stuck out a foot and tapped the tip of his boot pointedly.

All the while, his brother and Emma pointedly ignored him.

“Likewise, Lord Derek.” She inclined her head slightly, drawing Charles’s attention and appreciation to that gloriously elongated swan’s neck. “I trust you are enjoying my father’s brandy?”

Derek blinked. “Miss—?”

She nodded to the glasses flanking either side of him on the table. “To merit double glasses.”

Derek promptly released her fingers, a blush suffusing his cheeks, and Charles didn’t even attempt to repress a grin.

“Getting your brother to take the blame,” she chided, making for an all-too-brief triumph as she turned that displeasure back Charles’s way once more. “Tsk, tsk, Lord Scarsdale.”

“I didn’t get him to take the blame. I was merely setting aside my glass.”

He winked.

Young ladies were schooled early on in all the reasons to avoid a rogue, rake, or scoundrel. Along with those lessons came the markers of what posed the most danger to a lady’s sensibilities and senses: The crooked grin. The kiss. The whisper of poetry. A forbidden caress.

Those lists had been proven remarkably incomplete and erroneous.

For it was . . . the wink.

That subtle glide of lashes sweeping down, but not before those depths of irises glimmered with wickedness, a transitory glimpse of a whole host of sentiments: mirth, interest. Desire.

Her lungs struggled to force out the air stuck there.

Desire?

Emma silently scoffed. Impossible.

Furthermore, it was not as though she’d known any of those others firsthand . . . not from this or any other gentleman.

Which perfectly recalled her to the very reason she’d stormed here in the first place.

“Your shot, Charles,” Lord Derek called over.

“Might I speak with you, Lord Scarsdale?” she said tightly.

“He would be glad to, Emma,” the marquess called out on behalf of his eldest son.

“But it is his shot, Fath—”

The marquess fixed a glare on the younger gentleman, effectively silencing him. “I said, he is free to speak to Miss Gately, Derek.” He pointed the end of his stick in Charles’s direction. “He’s free to speak with you, Emma.”

Color filled Charles’s cheeks, and he glanced in the direction of his always-meddling sire. “I can handle my own affairs where Miss Gately is concerned, Father,” he said tightly.

The marquess snorted. “If that were the case, you wouldn’t find yourself in the position you have, then, would you, my boy?”

Emma’s father and his closest friend in the world dissolved into laughter, and she gritted her teeth. As if any of this were amusing, in any way.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, earning a look from her father and Charles . . . which she ignored.

Charles held his cue aloft. “Playing billiards.”

“Playing billiards?”

He nodded. “With the boys?”

“The boys?” she echoed. Her voice climbed a fraction. “The boyyys? They are ancient men.”

“I heard that, Emie,” her father chastised.

Lord Derek added his indignation to the mix. “And we aren’t all ancient. Why, I’m younger than Ch— Owww.” A startled shout escaped the younger man when his father tapped him hard on the back with his billiards stick.

“Have a care, boy.”

Cursing softly, she gripped Charles by the arm and steered him several paces away from the boys now playing.

Except . . . she had made the mistake of touching him. Her fingers curled reflexively upon the soft wool fabric, that softness at odds with the sinewy muscle under her palm. All the moisture leached from her mouth, leaving even her throat dry. Bloody hell, what was wrong with her? “They are not boys, Lord Scarsdale.” She swiftly released him, and stole a glance up to ascertain whether he’d caught that moment of insanity. He continued to eye her from under a hood of golden lashes. “Boys are those scoundrels you keep company with. Speaking of, are they otherwise engaged that you aren’t with your own sort?”

He applied chalk to the end of his cue. “I’ll have you know, one of my ‘sort,’ as you refer to them, is, in fact, married. And happily so.”

“Yes,” she said softly. They had wed several weeks earlier. Her heart cinched. Where there should be only happiness for her friend Lady Sylvia, the cofounder of the Mismatch Society and a former widow who’d found love, there was also a pain she refused to let herself feel . . . for that which Emma had so desperately wanted. No more. Never again. “I am well aware.” She steeled her jaw. “That doesn’t change . . . who you are, however, Charles.”

His brows snapped together, and his perfectly formed mouth tensed in the first-that-she-could-ever-recall hint of failure in his always-charming attitude.

Coward that she was, as tension ran through him and a palpable dark energy thrummed in the air around them, she wanted to call back her words.

“Oh?” Abandoning his relaxed pose, he moved closer, shrinking the space between them and making her feel instantly small in his tall, commanding presence. “And tell me, Emma, since you know so very much. Who am I?” A slight edge of steel coated that murmur, danger whispering up from both his words and a tone too deep to be considered a baritone.

She swallowed, her body pulsing, not at all born of fear, but coming, instead, from her heightened awareness of him.

“Hmm?”Charles leaned close, his mouth a fraction of a breath from hers, and it was the second time in her life that she’d been so near to this man. A kiss whispered in the air. A desire that defied logic and knew not of the distant activity unfolding in this room. Just like at the shore of the Serpentine more than two months ago, all she knew was a hungering for whatever promise he dangled with his nearness. “I would love to . . .” He shifted his mouth so it lingered closer to the shell of her ear; the sough of his breath tickled that sensitive flesh, and brought her eyes briefly shut.

I would love to . . . ?

What? Whaaat? Her lashes fluttered open, needing the remainder of that answer from him.

Charles’s lips curled in a taunting, knowing, confident grin, a smile that could be born only of a rogue’s knowledge of the subtleties of a woman’s quickened breath and rapidly beating heart. “Hear whatever opinions you’ve drawn about me, Emma,” he teased.

He may as well have dunked her in water to douse her desire.

Bloody hell.“No, you wouldn’t,” she said flatly. “Your ego couldn’t stand it.” When would she cease being captivated by him?

“I have an ego, do I?”

He did, but one deserved because of his Adonis-like looks and his effortless charm. And she’d sooner slice out her tongue than feed into his deserved esteem.

“The truth is, Emma, you know nothing of me.”

The casual way with which he said it struck her square in the chest. Charles couldn’t have hurt her more had he taken the end of the cue stick he’d applied chalk to and jammed it through her chest.

I know nothing about you because you never let me. Because you never wanted to learn anything about me,she screamed silently.

Emma gave a flounce of her head, hating the absolute absence of curls that would have added a flair of emphasis. Alas, she’d never been in possession of the luxuriant tresses of the women he preferred. “I’ve known you the whole of my life, Lord Scarsdale.” She infused her response with an impressive modicum of boredom, given he’d leveled a truth that had always caused the greatest of aches. “I know a good deal more about you than you credit.” The most distant memories she carried of him included someone who had been friendly enough to her . . . until the day of the mock wedding ceremony their families had held . . . when she had learned precisely how he felt about her.

His grin widened, and lifting his hands, he waggled four fingers of each. “All right. Out with it. Let’s hear it.”

The doors opened, and her brothers spilled into the room, studiously avoiding looking at Emma as they made a path to their best friend, Charles’s brother, Derek.

The moment Pierce and Morgan had moved past them, taking a wide berth, she proceeded to oblige him. “You don’t take anything seriously, Charles. Everything and everyone is a joke to you. You’re notoriously late.” From their betrothal on to every ball at which she’d ever been in attendance with him. “Should I keep going?”

The ghost of a smile grazed the corners of his lips. “Can you?”

He was amused? The lout. “You hunt!”

“And you . . . have a problem with hunting?”

She despised it. “It’s cruel,” she said flatly.

“It is the English way.”

Emma’s lips pulled. “Yes, domination is the English way, isn’t it?” she muttered. God spare her from men who conquered. “People don’t go about chasing you—” She stopped herself from completing the remainder of that wholly untrue thought.

He leaned in. “What was that, sweet?”

Sweet.And while the Lord was at it, let him save her from pretty words her former betrothed used on every woman.

“You drink too much,” she said bluntly, getting to the heart of the list she’d composed prior to sending ’round the note to break off their betrothal. “You’re a womanizer.” She’d been but a girl when she discovered he’d gotten a child on a woman who was decidedly not her, and the adoration she’d secretly carried for the free spirit that he’d been had died a swift death. “You wager too much.”

His golden lashes swept down, forming a hood that shielded the thoughts within. “And you pay too much attention to the scandal sheets, so I should say we’re both in possession of our own character deficits, Emma-love.”

Emma-love.

There’d once been a time she’d longed to hear such an endearment from this man’s lips, one that was intimate, reserved just for her. And she didn’t want the sound of her name tangled with that affectionate utterance to have any effect, and certainly not the damned “flutters,” as she’d come to name the dratted sentiments. “And you’re casual with your words of affection,” she said softly, tiredly. “I’m not your love, Charles.” He’d seen to that long ago.

Charles winced.

But neither did he make any protestations of the contrary.

Of course, what had she expected? The entire reason he’d fought to keep her was because of his wounded ego and his family’s insistence, and a rejection he was so unaccustomed to that he didn’t know what to do with how Emma had ended it.

Emma drew a deep breath. “I’m not even sure you are capable of the emotion,” she said, for herself as much as for him.

He narrowed his eyes. “That is a bold presumption, Emma-love.”

This time she didn’t give rise to that deliberate endearment, one meant only to goad. “Is it? From a man who’ll sire a child and not give his mother the benefit of—”

He surged forward, and Emma gasped, stumbling over herself in retreat, until her back collided with the wall.

“Do not mention Seamus,” he seethed. “And do not mention things you know nothing about.” Volatile emotion blazed from his eyes, burning her with anger . . . on behalf of his son. “Have I made myself clear?”

Laughter went up between their families at play; how could the world be so oblivious to the volatility of her and Charles’s exchange that bordered on fire?

She gave a juddering nod. “My a-apologies. I didn’t—”

“Know that I wouldn’t want his name dragged about?” He cut her off.

Emma bit the inside of her cheek, ashamed and appalled . . . with herself, for having inadvertently done just as he’d said and raised his child as a cornerstone of her upset with Charles. “You are correct,” she said softly. “I should not have mentioned him in such a way.” She grimaced. “In any way, that is. It wasn’t my intention to disparage the boy.” But rather, to what? Highlight that Charles had failed him? And yet all these years, she’d believed Charles . . . indifferent to the boy. Only to find Charles was anything but. It was the first hint of a real layer of a person—a man who was protective of his son. And it was also the first she’d come to see that, as he’d said, there was perhaps more to Charles than she’d believed.

Charles nodded tightly in a silent acknowledgment of that apology. She drew in a deep breath, and forced herself to focus on the whole reason for seeking him out this day. “I want this to stop,” she said quietly. It had gone on enough. “It is hardly fair for me to . . .” Have to see him daily. And be reminded of how little he’d wanted her before. And all the unlikely reasons he supposedly wanted her for his wife now. “Have you subvert my wishes by being friendly with my father and mother.”

He frowned. “I’ve always been—”

“Stop,” she hissed. “Just stop. They will not cease in their efforts until you cease in yours.” And until they did, she would be forced to live in a perpetual hell where the only thing her parents spoke to her about or saw her value in was a potential marriage to this man before her.

Charles trailed a gaze over her face, one that had such shades of tenderness her heart quickened, the organ’s unlikely reaction to the very favor she put to him now. Nay, not a favor. Demand. One that if he cared in any way, he’d honor.

Then, ever so slowly, with a languidness to his movements, Charles brought up his shoulders in a slow shrug.

She gasped. The gall of him. Emma lowered her voice when she spoke. “I am asking you to cease with all these friendly visits to my father.” Because it was . . . impossible having him here daily.

He applied more chalk to that damned stick, which couldn’t possibly require another bit of dust as long as it should ever be used. “Very well, Emma,” he said quietly, and her eyebrows went flying up at the unexpectedness of that capitulation.

“Thank you . . . Charles.” As he’d made a concession, she could certainly do so with something as simple as using his name.

He paired his rogue’s grin with a wink.

And her heart did its characteristic leap in her breast. “If you’ll excuse me. I have matters to see to.”

Charles angled the cue stick, cutting off her escape. “I take it the important business you see to is, in fact, your club.” And then it was as though she’d imagined that unexpected show of real emotion from him, as Charles dropped a shoulder casually against the wall, curving his body in a way that framed her perfectly and managed the impossible . . . to make Emma, taller than most men, feel dainty beside him.

She gritted her teeth. He’d choose this instant, of course, to keep her at his side.

“Do you need one of us to beat him, Emma?” Morgan called over, far more loyal than either of their parents combined.

“As if you could beat Scarsdale.” Pierce snorted, and the twins promptly forgot about coming to her defense, should she need it, and instead sparred over the matter of Scarsdale’s prowess.

Emma briefly closed her eyes. This, again, from her brothers? Their great fascination with duels and dueling. “Men,” she muttered. Not that she’d require either of their help anyway. They’d all proven remarkably useless where she was concerned.

Charles leaned in. “What was that?”

She squared her shoulders and got back to the prime focus of her annoyance. “I’ll have you know, we are a society.” She’d opened her mouth to launch into a lecture when she registered the glimmer in his chocolate-brown eyes. She firmed her lips. “I see.” She’d often read that he was one of the teasing sorts. But never had he engaged her so. She’d wanted him to. “You are making light.”

An eyebrow went arcing up. “You’re in the habit of recognizing jests now?”

Yes, because he’d taken her as one incapable of having fun or even a spirit. “It is rather hard not to when I have the biggest one before me.”

He blinked slowly, and then those long golden lashes ceased moving altogether. Good, let him stew upon that.

“Furthermore,” she went on when all their family members present were otherwise diverted. “You should have a care, throwing around willy-nilly jests about my ability to laugh or smile, Lord Scarsdale.” Emma took a step toward him. “You never took time to learn anything about me. As such, allow me to advise you . . . I’ve always been capable of doing so, and were I you, I wouldn’t go throwing about my lack of amusement in your presence, given you never provided me with a reason to laugh or smile. Therefore”—she stuck a finger in his chest—“I would also say it is a greater reflection of you, and a deficit on your character, more than mine.”

With that, she yanked her skirts away and stalked off.

“What in hell have you done now, my boy?” The marquess’s booming disapproval for his son followed Emma all the way out into the corridors.

And with her second victory in the matter of Charles Hayden that day, Emma smiled.