up her cane, jabbing it in Lydia’s general direction. “Have a care there. You are, in fact, six months younger than me, and I’m not yet fifty. Old, indeed,” her friend muttered. “Speak for yourself, dear girl.”
Her lips twitched, and she forced them into a line. “My apologies.” Either way, the truth remained that her eyes had begun to develop little wrinkles in their corners, and her breasts weren’t pert, having gone round and heavier with age. “As you have pointed out numerous times, age is just a number.” Though, on occasion, it was also now joints that creaked when walking, announcing a lady like a calling card.
Dorothy inclined her head. “You are forgiven, but only because you are attending.”
And through her amusement this day, the solemn set to her friends’ features registered. Their very serious, very determined facial expressions indicated several things—one, her friends weren’t jesting about any of this, and two, they expected Lydia would join them.
“But—”
“No, buts, Lydia,” Dorothy cut her off. “Come along, Althea.”
She needn’t have bothered with that command. The baroness set down her teacup and stood.
Lydia groaned. “What are you—?”
“I put Dorothy in charge of costumes, so you needn’t worry about that.”
A costume was the least of Lydia’s worries.
“Your ensemble is complete. We will return for you this evening—”
Lydia jumped up. “But…”
Her protestations proved futile.
Her friends were already on a steady march for the door.
When Althea made her grand exit, Dorothy paused long enough to pass a regretful glance over her shoulder. “My apologies,” she whispered loudly.
“Come along,” Althea ordered from the corridor, her voice reaching back into the parlor.
Finding her footing, Lydia raced across the room. Catching the doorjamb, she leaned out. “This is really rather ridiculous, you know.”
Althea didn’t even pause in her forward march. “You’re going, Lydia.”
“I’m not!”
Her friends were being absurd. The idea that she—that they—would attend an affair such as the one in that invitation was utterly preposterous. She had absolutely no intention of attending such an affair. She’d not done so before her husband, and she’d certainly never done anything so scandalous as long as he’d been alive.
And whatever her friends wanted or expected of her, Lydia didn’t had absolutely no intention of going.
Ever.
Chapter 2
When Geoffrey, the Duke of Bentley, had been younger, he’d attended all manner of scandalous affairs.
In fact, the more wicked, the better.
No sight had been too much.
But, in that moment, as he stood at the entryway to the Marquess of Mardel’s ballroom, taking in the outrageous tableau of couples in the throes of lovemaking, some with multiple partners whom they freely traded among them, there was just one thought that stood out above all the rest.
By God, he was too old for this.
“I cannot believe you’ve dragged us here,” Geoffrey muttered, flanked on each side by his lifelong friends, the Duke of Mowbray and Baron Davenport. The three men took in the ballroom that had been converted into a den of sin.
“Oh, stuff it,” Davenport said. “When did you become a proper bore that you couldn’t be bothered to attend this?”
The orchestra’s haunting strains reached a crescendo, nearly deafening.
“I’d say about two decades ago,” Geoffrey said out of the side of his mouth to the one responsible for dragging him to this infernal affair.
Thumping Geoffrey hard on the back, Davenport laughed like he’d told the most hilarious of jests. “It was a rhetorical, my good friend. Purely rhetorical.” The baron’s robust amusement earned several curious stares from the wicked couples nearby, who eyed them with the circumspection they deserved.
After all, what a trio they must be to the men and women present.
Some two or three decades older than most of the thinly disguised people in attendance, they stood out, the way a debutante in white would while attending an orgy filled with only naked people.
“We needed better costumes,” Mowbray whispered, steering them deeper into the ballroom until he brought them to a stop on the fringe of the activity, thankfully as far away as they could be from the festivities. “A black domino?” Mowbray adjusted his hood. “This was your idea?”
“I had short notice,” Davenport protested.
“I gave you several days,” Mowbray shot back. “Certainly enough to come up with something where we might escape notice. The last thing I need is for him to see me.”
With that, the other duke glanced around the enormous column and searched for the “him” in question—none other than Lord Mardel, Mowbray’s eldest child and heir and also the most scandalous of his three sons.
“I do say it makes