Scandal Wears Satin Read Online Free PDF Page A

call their betters idiots . Not audibly, at any rate.
    But that was the trouble with Longmore. He got in the way of everything, especially clear thinking.
    She pushed away the first, emotional reaction and summoned her practical side, the one Cousin Emma had cultivated. A cousin by marriage, Emma was nothing like Sophy’s vagabond parents. Emma was not a charming wastrel like her in-laws. She was a hardheaded, practical Parisian.
    Practically speaking, this was a disaster.
    Lady Clara was Maison Noirot’s most important customer. She bought their most expensive creations and she bought lavishly, in spite of her mother’s hostility. It was Lord Warford’s man of business who paid the bills, and his orders were to pay promptly and in full, not to make fine distinctions among milliners.
    Lord Adderley was bankrupt, or very nearly so, thanks to the gaming tables.
    If Lady Clara had to misbehave with somebody, Adderley wasn’t Sophy’s first choice. Of the Upper Ten Thousand, he came in at nine thousand nine hundred fifty six.
    Had Longmore been more intelligent, less impetuous, and several degrees less arrogant, she would have counseled him not to go barging in and kill his sister’s lover. Since Lord Longmore qualified in none of those categories, she didn’t waste her breath pointing out that murder would only complicate the situation and leave Lady Clara’s reputation in ruins forever.
    He was furious, and he needed to hit somebody, and Adderley deserved to be hit. Sophy was tempted to hit him herself.
    This wasn’t the only reason she didn’t close her eyes or turn away.
    She’d seen Longmore fight before, and it was a sight to make a woman’s pulse race, if she wasn’t squeamish, which Sophy most certainly wasn’t.
    The blow should have dropped Lord Adderley, but he only staggered backward a few steps.
    Tougher than he looked, then. Yet all he did was hold his ground. He offered no sign of fighting back. She couldn’t decide whether he was following some obscure gentlemanly code or he held strong opinions about keeping the general shape of his pretty face as it was and all his teeth in his head.
    Longmore, meanwhile, was too het up to notice or care whether Lord Adderley meant to defend himself.
    Once more he advanced, fists upraised.
    “Don’t you dare, Harry!” Lady Clara cried. She pushed in front of her lover to shield him. “Don’t you touch him.”
    Then she burst into tears—and very good tears they were. Sophy herself couldn’t have done better, and she was an expert. Crooning over her injured lover—who was on his way to a magnificent black eye, if Sophy was any judge—tears streaming down her perfect face, her creamy, amply-displayed bosom heaving, Lady Clara played her part to perfection.
    Her ladyship would awaken, along with their baser urges, the sympathies of all the gentlemen present. The ladies, satisfied to have witnessed the downfall of London’s most beautiful woman, would allow themselves to feel sorry for her. “She might have had a duke,” they’d say. “And now she’ll have to settle for a penniless lord.”
    Fashionable London still wasn’t tired of repeating bits of Lady Clara’s speech rejecting the Duke of Clevedon. One of the favorite bits was the concluding remark: Why should I settle for you?
    For a moment, Lord Longmore looked as though he’d push his sister out of the way. Then he must have realized it was pointless. He rolled his eyes and sighed, and Sophy watched his big chest rise and fall.
    Then he threw up his hands and turned away.
    The crowd closed in, blocking Sophy’s view.
    No matter. Any minute now, the Marchioness of Warford would get wind of her daughter’s lapse from virtue, and Sophy owed it to the Spectacle to be there when it happened. And at some point, she’d need to look more closely into a disturbing rumor she’d heard in the ladies’ retiring room.
    It was going to be a long night.
    She turned away to look for a discreet route to the