Scandal of the Year Read Online Free PDF Page B

with a bow. “Waiting for a game?”
    “I am.” The other man lifted his glass, took a hefty swallow, and grimaced. “Thank God there’s cards. It’s the only way to get through one of these beastly things.”
    “Beastly things?” Aidan smiled. “You mean a public ball?”
    “I mean any ball at all. I believe if I have to attend another one of these affairs, I’ll go mad. And it’s only May.”
    He took another drink and scowled. “It’s a hellish business, Trathen, being in charge of a debutante.”
    This reference to the other man’s American ward gave Aidan pause. He’d seen the girl out driving with her mother and Scarborough in Hyde Park a few days earlier, and Miss Annabel Wheaton, if he recalled correctly, was a pretty woman, demure and sweet-looking, with chestnut-brown hair. He wondered what color her eyes might be, but then Julia’s words about his preference for dark eyes came back to him, and he gave an exasperated sigh.
    Damn that woman and her knowledge of his tastes. Shoving her out of his mind, he glanced over the various tables. “Are you looking to put together a whist game?”
    “I’d prefer auction bridge, if I can find a partner with even a decent understanding of the strategy.”
    “Ouch,” Aidan murmured dryly. “That hurts, Scarborough.”
    “Sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” the other man assured him, laughing as he touched his free hand to his forehead. “I wasn’t impugning your knowledge of cards. On the contrary, you are one of the few men in London who comprehends the concept of bidding hands and leading the proper cards.”
    “Then would you be interested in partnering with me for a few hands?”
    “I’d adore it, but you know how I run, old chap. Deep stakes. Very reckless, I know, but there it is.”
    Aidan shrugged, not minding a high-stakes game at this particular moment. “I can afford it, and besides, twenty-five percent of the winnings are donated to the London hospitals.”
    “Still, extravagant gambling isn’t your cup of tea, really, is it?”
    “Perhaps you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
    One of Scarborough’s devilish black brows lifted in surprise. “Fair enough,” he murmured, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s do a good turn for the hospitals by fleecing some of these idiotic young dandies out of their quarterly allowance, shall we?”
    *  *  *
    Cards provided Aidan with plenty of distraction for the remainder of the evening, but in the days that followed the May Day Ball, Lady Yardley proved harder to dismiss from his mind.
    Upon waking, the sight of his bed linens evoked the image of her naked in bed beside him at her cottage. The sight of a motorcar in the street as he traveled back and forth to his offices in the Strand made him think of her Mercedes and the wild way she drove it. Any white dress recalled to his mind the way she’d looked coming out of the water that afternoon at Gwithian Cove, her wet muslin frock clinging to her body like a second skin. He’d worked so hard to put the events of that day behind him, yet now, after one encounter with her, it seemed as if his efforts all had been for naught.
    Aidan looked away from the work on his desk to stare out the window of his office, seeing past the wet spring day, past that day in the divorce court, past the hot August afternoon at her cottage, all the way back to the beginning, to the summer he was seventeen and the footbridge in Dorset where he’d first met her.
    In fact, he could bring to mind every time he’d seen her over the years. The ball at St. Ives where he’d danced with her cousin because she was married. The house party at Lord Marlowe’s villa where she’d played bawdy ragtime on the piano and he’d tried to keep his wits about him. The day before their picnic when she’d waved at him across the High Street in St. Ives and he’d crossed the street to speak to her even though he’d sensed he was making a huge