Page 80 of Seduced By a Scoundrel

“Thank you, Chevril. Send her in.” Keir glanced at Sophie pointedly. “Be nice.”

Mrs. Gorse was a stout woman wearing a very lacy bonnet and a soft, nervous smile. Keir knew at a single glance that she would be no match for his little sister. Especially when Sophie stood and curtsied perfectly with a smile so sweet it rivaled a Gunter’s fruit ice. He groaned. “Good luck, Mrs. Gorse.”

Mrs. Gorse began to look alarmed. Smart woman.

He paused as something occurred to him. “Wait, Sophie, where did you sneak off to?”

“I wasn’t sneaking off. I saw a friend flirting with someone unworthy of her.”

He frowned. “And how did you know he was unworthy?”

Sophie lifted her chin in that stubborn way of hers that sent a frisson of fear through him. “Mrs. Gorse, shall we start with a promenade?”

“Sophie!”

Returning the betting book to Fortingham’s was, frankly, anticlimactic.

Sneaking a look at the books of the other clubs on St. James was much more fun.

As Lord Singleton, Sybil had been relegated to gaming hells and once, memorably, a brothel. She did not have access to the gentlemen’s cubs.

Until now.

St. James was a riot of sounds and colors, from the passing carriages and snorting horses, to the music and laughter pouring from bay windows lit with hundreds of oil lamps. Sybil loved it.

She loved sabotaging it even more.

They stepped into the first club, and she tilted her head down slightly, making sure the brim of her hat shadowed her face. Keir was dressed in a greatcoat and Hessian boots, the cravat around his throat white as the snow around them. “Lord Blackburn,” he said in that marquess’s tone of his, so commanding and cold. With every expectation of being obeyed, as always.

But when he turned his head, he winked at her.

And she came very close to melting into a puddle right then and there, damn the man.

This was the Keir she remembered. Her Keir.

The one she could not keep, she reminded herself. Despite what he believed.

His eyes narrowed as if he could read her thoughts.

“And a guest, Lord Singleton,” he added. The butler bowed and moved aside with the alacrity only reserved for marquesses and dukes. Perhaps she ought to have made Singleton the son of a duke no one had ever heard of. Then she would outrank Keir. The fun she could have with that.

The club was loud and smoky and smelled of several different types of colognes. The linens Sybil had wrapped tightly around her torso to contain her bosom pinched.

She loved every second of it.

“Come on, you absolute madwoman,” Keir said as she grinned at him.

They took a turn throughout the rooms so as not to arouse suspicion by heading straight to the betting book. Sybil accepted a small glass of port from a passing footman, plucked an apple from the sideboard. Nodded to several men she did not recognize but who congratulated her on beating Chiswick in the horse race.

“Bad luck for him,” someone chuckled. “His bride never showed to the church that day either.”

“Can you blame her?”

Several hands of cards were being played, and there were two billiards tables gathering dripping candle wax from above and coins from lost games. In the time it took to cross the ground floor, Sybil saw three family fortunes lost and one duel narrowly avoided. They made it back to the table that displayed the betting book.

It was chained to the table.

A thin chain, but a chain, nonetheless.