Sins and Scandals Collection: Whisper of Scandal / One Wicked Sin / Mistress by Midnight / Notorious / Desired / Forbidden

He shifted in the armchair, studying her thoughtfully.

“What do you really do when you are pretending to attend your bluestocking soirees?” he asked. “And when you are not stalking me?”

She considered him for a moment. Her eyes were a smoky-violet in the shadowed room. “I lead a blameless life, your grace,” she said. “I really do attend bluestocking soirees. I read and I study. I go to Professor Brande’s lectures at the Royal Institution and to poetry readings and concerts.” She took another sip of champagne. She sounded cool and amused.

Garrick smiled slowly. “You also work for Tom Bradshaw,” he said.

Merryn jumped. A drop of champagne fell on the rose gown, staining the material to a deeper pink. They had been fencing before, testing each other’s defenses. Now the nature of their exchange had altered. Garrick sensed this was really important to her.

“How did you know that?” She spoke abruptly. Garrick was interested that she did not try to deny it, even for a second.

He shrugged. “I have been asking questions about you, of course.” He tilted his head and studied her, watching her closely. “You know how the system operates, Lady Merryn. I pay someone to find out about you.”

He saw her fingers tighten on the stem of the champagne glass. “You paid someone to do your dirty work for you,” she said. Scorn tipped her words. “Yes, that fits.”

“It’s quicker,” Garrick said. “Bradshaw is corrupt,” he added. “But surely you know that?”

Her gaze flashed to his face. “He is not!” She sounded outraged at the slur. “Tom works for justice! He helps people—” She broke off, as though she realized too late that she had revealed too much.

“No,” Garrick said gently. “That is why you work for Bradshaw.” He paused. He could see it all, her blind quest for justice and the determination that drove her. She felt a burning need to set right perceived wrongs and he would wager his entire fortune that it had been initiated by her brother’s death at his hands.

“It is, isn’t it?” he persisted. “You do it because you believe in justice and fighting for what is right, and to help the underdog?”

“I do it for the money,” Merryn said defiantly. She tilted her chin up, her look defying him to contradict her. He had trespassed, Garrick thought. Merryn Fenner’s world had hitherto been a secret from all those she knew, even those closest to her. He had not only blown that wide apart, he had seen straight through her motives to the painful truth below. For a moment she looked small and defenseless and Garrick felt the most enormous compassion for her. He was a cad to do this to her, to force her to confront those truths, to strip away her defenses, and his only justification was that there were those even more defenseless who needed his protection. Twelve years before he had sworn to defend them. He had never imagined that the price would be so high.

“My reasons are not what matter here,” Merryn said, after a moment, rallying. Garrick could see that her eyes were suspiciously bright but she faced him down. She was not, he thought, a woman who would resort to tears or to the vapors to get her own way. “What matters,” she said, “is that you have chosen to challenge what I am doing. And you are doing this because …”

“Because you threatened me,” Garrick said. “When someone indicates that they would like to see me ruined it concentrates my mind.”

“Has that happened to you often?” Merryn inquired politely.

Garrick laughed. “More than once.”

She flicked him a look. “I might have imagined so. A pity no one has as yet followed up on their threat.”

“There’s always a first time,” Garrick said. The last time a man had threatened to take his life it had been in the Peninsular and it had ended very badly for his assailant. No need to tell Merryn that, though. She would probably pick up that cause as well and declare open season on him.

“You have been gathering evidence,” he said. “That newspaper entry you found at the Octagon Library—”

He saw her eyes flash. “The one you stole from me? That was underhanded.”

Garrick laughed. “I did not hear you protesting at the time.”

The color fluctuated deliciously in her face. She looked infuriated, pink, cross, unwillingly aroused. “I should have guessed you would stoop as low as kissing me to achieve your aim,” she said.

“It was no hardship,” Garrick agreed.

She glared. “You are a rake.”

“I was a rake,” Garrick corrected.

“You are confusing your tenses.” Merryn looked down her nose at him. “I do not believe that a man ever stops being a libertine.”

Looking at her, with her shining fair hair as rich as silk and her cheeks stung pink with righteous anger and her bow of a mouth pursed with disapproval Garrick was tempted to prove that she was exactly right by grabbing her and kissing her to within an inch of her life.

“Forgive me,” he said, “but you base your remarks on … what, precisely?”

She turned away. “Literature,” she said. “Observation.”

“Let me know if you would prefer to replace that with experience,” Garrick said, and received another glare for his pains.

“We drift from the subject,” Merryn said tightly.

“We do indeed.” Garrick shifted. “From the piece of paper that I extracted from your pocket I surmise that you have found other items, little details that you think contradict the official record of your brother’s death—”

She reacted to that, as he had known she would. “I don’t think they contradict it,” she said hotly. “They do contradict it.”

“Guest lists can be notoriously unreliable,” Garrick said. “Names confused, numbers miscounted—”

“Like the number of shots heard?” Merryn said sweetly. “The number of bullets in a body?”

Hell. She had discovered a great deal. Garrick felt the sweat break out over his body. A few more steps, a little more digging, and Lady Merryn Fenner would be perilously close to the truth. She would learn what an out-and-out rogue her brother had truly been, she would learn the appalling things Stephen Fenner had done, she would be heartbroken.

Not that he was blameless. Garrick rubbed his forehead. He should have dealt with matters differently, he should have kept his head, instead of sacrificing everything—life, honor, the future—in that one desperate moment that he had killed his friend. Yes, Stephen Fenner had been a scoundrel but a day did not go past when Garrick did not regret his death.

Merryn was watching him. She had, not surprisingly, misread his expression. Garrick knew that he had looked guilty as all hell because in many ways, in the matter of Stephen’s death, he was.

“Can I appeal to you to let matters rest?” he asked. “I can look after myself but if you pursue this matter there are others who might be hurt—” He broke off, seeing again in her eyes that vivid flash of pain he had witnessed when they had spoken at the Octagon Library.

“Others often are,” she said in a hard voice, and Garrick knew she was speaking of herself, of the thirteen-year-old girl who had had home and family and fortune ripped away from her.

“If you refuse to stop I will expose your work for Tom Bradshaw,” Garrick said. “Taken together with the information that you habitually visit the bedrooms of noblemen, I think you will find that scandal more difficult to quell than a simple slur on your reputation.”

There was a frozen silence. Merryn sat quite still, almost as though she had not heard him.

“You’re trying to blackmail me,” she said. “How immoral of you.”

“I would do nothing so vulgar as stoop to blackmail,” Garrick said, and saw her smile as she recognized her words to him at the library two days before. “I am merely pointing out to you the dangers of your situation.”

“I am obliged to you,” Merryn said ironically. She sighed. “The same argument applies as before, however. The worst you can do is ruin my reputation—” there was the shimmer of triumph in her eyes “—and that only matters if I care about it.” She rubbed her fingers thoughtfully over the rim of her empty glass. “It would be a nuisance,” she conceded, “to be the subject of scandal and gossip, but I am sure I would survive it.”

“You would not survive with any of the things that you value left to you,” Garrick said, and saw her gaze jerk up to his.

“What do you mean?” she demanded.

Garrick shrugged. “The other reason I think you work for Bradshaw is that you are bored,” he said. “You are clever, and society has no use for clever women.”

She was betrayed into a rueful smile. “Other than to laugh at them,” she said dryly. “Or to make them conform.”