The Importance of Being Wanton - Christi Caldwell Page 0,86

for Sylvia before, she no longer had that worry in quite the same way, having been afforded the luxury of protection that came from being married to one of London’s most honorable lords.

“To invite the wrong man,” Owen went on, “is to invite peril to the ladies who are here, and I fear that is why he’s urging you in this direction.”

Murmurs rolled around the parlor.

Emma frowned. There would have been a time once where she’d been of the same exact wariness where Charles was concerned. She’d believed him to be heartless. She’d thought him incapable of thinking about anything beyond his own self-interests. And yet . . . these past weeks, he’d proven himself to be . . . different . . . in ways she had never expected. “I do not believe Ch—” The eyes of every person in the room sharpened on Emma. “Lord Scarsdale’s,” she substituted, “motives are dishonorable in this.”

“That is certainly a shift,” Annalee noted without inflection.

“He’s agreed to cease distributing pamphlets on Waverton Street,” Emma felt inclined to point out. “No one was out there today.”

“And stealing our members?” Olivia demanded. “Is that the act of an honorable man?”

She’d been of the same opinion. She’d been angry and resentful for every woman who’d been a member of the Mismatch who’d instead found her way to Charles’s group. Only to realize pride had been the reason for those sentiments. “Is it really stealing if they left of their own volition?” Emma put the same question to the members that she had made to herself.

Morgan shot up an arm. “If I may, as a valued member, offer my opinion?”

“You are neither, pup,” Annalee quipped, and this time, she leaned over and ruffled the top of Morgan’s dark curls. “Not yet, anyway,” she added with a wink.

A dazed glimmer lit his eyes, and Emma suppressed a smile. Yes, any person, man or woman, was more than a bit besotted by the free-spirited socialite.

“You were saying, brother?” his twin nudged.

Morgan blinked several times, and then a bright blush filled his cheeks. “Er . . . uh . . . yes, I was merely pointing out as—”

“An unvalued maybe-member?” Pierce supplied.

His brother, however, continued on with his train of thought this time. “—a gentleman who knows Lord Scarsdale, he’s not so very bad. He’s, in fact, quite a decent fellow.”

“Aside from the part of his breaking your sister’s heart?” Valerie asked, her expression deadpan.

Morgan nodded enthusiastically. “Precisely.”

His concurrence was met with a series of groans, and it was the moment Emma knew her brother had lost the attention of the Mismatch. Yet again she’d been possessed of the same outrage over that disloyalty. But it wasn’t really disloyalty. Morgan, just as much as her parents and Pierce, spoke of Charles with a knowledge that came from a lifetime of knowing him.

“She was jesting, brother.” Pierce’s whisper was loud enough to be picked up by anyone in any corner of the room, which Emma would wager was no coincidence on the part of the younger twin. “She was jesting.”

“Oh,” Morgan said weakly.

And whatever brief truce he’d arrived at with Annalee died a swift death as she leaned away, putting distance between them.

“I don’t believe a person is all good or all bad,” Emma ventured, and she received such a pitying look from her sister that it took a physical effort to hold her disappointed gaze.

“You’re singing a very different tune,” Isla remarked.

“Ahem, if I may?” Owen called out, and Emma was grateful for that unwanted attention being shifted his way.

Except . . . this time, as he spoke, he made a point of avoiding her eyes. “I took it upon myself to make inquiries into the increasingly vitriolic words being spoken about the Mismatch Society.” Bending down, he retrieved several folded missives from the small leather satchel at his feet.

The ladies arched their necks collectively, attempting to look at those notes.

“I’d noticed a shift in the tone,” he explained. “Frequently disparaging, the attacks appeared to become more”—this time, he did slide a glance Emma’s way—“pointed.”

Her belly churned. Yes, there had seemed to be a change . . . one that she’d not paid too much attention to until now. Until Owen sifted through those notes . . . and refused to look her way once more.

“I made inquiries at The Londoner and found a certain earl, the Earl of Scarsdale, has been paying for certain placements.”

Emma’s entire body went whipcord straight, and around her, Owen’s pronouncement was met with