The Importance of Being Wanton - Christi Caldwell Page 0,46
for everything achieved. Forbidden Pleasures at ten o’clock.
Be there.
L
With a laugh and wry headshake, he folded the note and set it down on the corner of his desk. “Please, send ’round my regrets to Lord Landon. I won’t be joining him this evening.”
Wickham, who’d hand delivered the missive and was already buried deep in Charles’s armoire, filling his arms with garments for the evening’s entertainment, glanced over his shoulder. “What?” Surprise lit the young man’s voice.
“I will not be joining him,” Charles reiterated, rubbing at the back of his neck, those muscles aching from the amount of time he’d spent with his head down, taking notes for his new endeavor. “If you would send on my regrets?” he repeated.
“Of course.” The young man returned the garments he’d selected to their proper places and brought the gold-painted panels of the armoire shut. “As you wish, my lord.”
Setting aside his notebook, Charles removed a sheet of paper, and dipping his pen into the inkpot, he dashed off a quick declination. After he sprinkled puce powder to dry the ink, then folded it, he handed it over.
Standing at his shoulder, Wickham continued to stare wide-eyed at the proffered response to Landon . . . as if he’d never before beheld a rejection of this sort.
In fairness, the young man hadn’t. As such, that shock was certainly merited. It was the first time in the whole of Charles’s adult existence that he’d declined to join his friend at their scandalous clubs.
Nay, the more wicked the venture, the more likely it was Charles would be there.
“It’s all right,” Charles said dryly. “It’s not going to bite your fingers.”
His cheeks flushing red, Wickham took the note and, with a bow, rushed off.
After he’d gone, Charles returned his attention to the place it had been for the better part of the evening: his work.
He dragged forth an old university notebook he’d repurposed, three-quarters of those pages dedicated to notes he’d made in his youth, the last quarter filled with hastily written potential agendas and topics.
Charles turned the page, updating the most recent changes to the attendance sheet.
From him, Landon, St. John, and Anwen Kearsley, the eldest of St. John’s brood of sisters, the organization had grown.
Sometime later, his old university notebook nearly full, Charles stole a glance at the clock. Twenty minutes past one o’clock. It was a new, unfamiliar way to find himself . . . particularly at this hour. For more years than he could remember, his time had been spent out, living his most improper life.
His gaze snagged on his visage reflected back from the enormous gilded mirror hanging on the opposite wall, and he stared contemplatively at himself. Emma hadn’t been incorrect in the charges she’d leveled his way—that was, with the exception of the one sin she and all society believed Charles guilty of. Over the years, he had drunk too much. And sat across from dealers at gaming tables, placing wagers.
Oh, with time’s passage, he’d tempered those wicked pursuits. They’d lost their appeal. But the image, however, remained.
Just as the perception of him as a libertine had, too.
Nor was it Emma’s fault for holding those ill opinions. Charles had stepped in and passed off Camille’s illegitimate son as his own, and in so saving his sister, he’d also shaped a narrative in which he was a reckless rake who’d not taken proper precautions to ensure he didn’t litter bastards about. Nay, Emma took him for the manner of man who’d leave some woman to the shame which came from birthing a bastard, and never offering that woman his name . . . because in short, that was what he’d done . . . on the surface.
And he’d do so again gladly. Protecting the sister he’d failed had been all that mattered.
However, he’d not properly considered . . . Emma. Nay, he had not considered her in any way—how such a scandal would reflect upon her. And more importantly, how she would feel at his having a by-blow son. In large part because at that point, she had still been a child and, in larger part, because he failed to see her as his eventual wife. Resentment and the age gap between them had made it entirely too easy to disregard how Emma would feel and be impacted by the lie of Seamus’s birth.
Given those reasons alone, why should her opinion of Charles ever be favorable? In fact, it was a wonder she’d not broken their betrothal off long before she had.