After the Scandal Read Online Free PDF Page B

the quieter seclusion of the trailing boughs of a tall willow tree that marked the boundary of the Old Deer Park, where the river turned toward the vast Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.
    Which meant that they had already come much farther than he had planned. Which also meant that the tide had begun its ebb, flowing downstream toward the city of London. But the woods were soft and quiet and peaceful. And she was not ready to go back.
    So he plied them along the south bank where an industrious river vole was dragging a green reed into his hole beneath the willow’s roots. The trees overhead were full of drowsy insect sounds. “What do you hear?”
    In the cathedral-like quiet of the willow trees’ sanctuary, the river quieted until to a low gurgle.
    “The water,” she said. “The river, with the water lapping against the bank. And the night wind, rustling low through the trees.”
    “Yes. Very good. All information you can use.”
    “But it sounds the same as when I went out with Rosing. Were the bush crickets supposed to warn me as I went down the lawn? Did I fail to heed their warning?”
    “No.” He could hear her self-remonstrance and frustration, and understand how little it seemed to make sense to her. “But there were other clues in Rosing’s behavior. In his look.”
    She had opened her eyes and was staring at him now, her eyes wide and velvet dark with something stronger than frustration. “I should have read his intent in his look?”
    “Yes.” There was no kinder way to say it.
    He half-expected her to dissolve into sloppy tears—innumerable women had at his blunt assertions. But even that might be for the good. Many women seemed to believe quite strongly in the efficacy of what they called a good cry.
    But she surprised him with her depth of character. “You mean I should have given him greater scrutiny of my own before I accepted his—or rather his father’s—invitation to dance, and especially to walk in the garden. I should not have trusted that just because he’s the Marquess of Hadleigh’s heir he wouldn’t be a bloody bounder.”
    He would have smiled at her cursing if he hadn’t been so instantly furious. At Rosing. And at himself. “Yes. Exactly.”
    Because the truth was that every man was a bounder—himself included. And refined, polite young women were easy targets. It was all the confining codes of ladylike behavior—of always having to be civil and passively polite—that got immaculate, refined young women into such monstrous trouble.
    This was one of the twisted coils of his obsession with her—the innocence he adored in her was what had made her unsafe.
    Perhaps she was thinking the same, for she pleated her forehead into an angelic frown. “I should have paid attention to his hands. They were clenched into fists, I think, opening and closing in … anticipation before he took my arm. I thought perhaps he was nervous around me. Men often are.”
    That fucking, fucking bastard. Tanner should have killed him when he had the chance. Planning, all the time he had this exquisite young woman in his arms on the dance floor, to defile her. “Excellent observation.”
    “And now that I think on it, his breathing was strange. Exercised. I think I thought him out of breath from the dance. But I wasn’t out of breath—it was an easy country dance. And you’re not breathing hard, even though you are exercising. You’re breathing evenly, in and out, even as you do all the work to ply the oars.”
    Tanner tried to muffle the deep sound of satisfaction her observation startled out of him. She wasn’t meant to notice him—no one ever noticed him. He was the one who was meant to notice others. He was the one who was meant to pass unseen. She had certainly never seen him before. If her eyes had ever alit upon him, it was only in mistake, for she would look past him, or turn away, or step so that some piece of architecture, or the voluminous plumage of a matron’s turban blocked her