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  After the Scandal

  Elizabeth Essex

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or person, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Essex

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For information regarding rights, please contact the Publisher.

  * * *

  ERB Publishing, LLC

  3904 Elm Street

  Suite B

  Dallas, Texas 75226

  * * *

  Edited by Holly Ingraham

  Cover photography: Jenn LeBlanc, Studio Smexy

  Cover design: Teresa Spreckelmeyer, Midnight Muse

  Created with Vellum

  For the Plotting Princesses:

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  Vicki Batman, Kathleeen Baldwin,

  Karilyn Bentley, Jillian Burns, Barb Han, Kathy Ivan, Chris Keniston, Kelly Lee,

  Liz Lipperman, Sylvia McDaniel,

  Phyllis Middleton, Michelle Miles,

  Liese Sherwood-Fabre, Alisha Paige,

  Linda Steinberg, Pamela Stone,

  Sasha Summers, and Mary Sullivan;

  * * *

  for services joyfully and so brilliantly rendered in all matters of plot and story line.

  Author’s Note

  April, 2020

  * * *

  My Dear Readers,

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  I am very pleased to bring you this Second Edition of After the Scandal, with a new cover. However new it may look, rest assured that it still contains the same story of unrequited love, a larcenous duke, a determined lady, heart-stopping adventure and almost impossible true love. Just the way you like it!

  * * *

  Wishing you happy reading!

  * * *

  Cheers, EEx

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Thank You from the Author

  Excerpt from: A Scandal to Remember

  Also by Elizabeth Essex

  Prologue

  Richmond upon Thames

  August 1815

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  Tanner Evans, ninth Duke of Fenmore, should have known he would never truly be satisfied with a bride he hadn’t stolen, fair and square.

  Despite years and years of careful training in the arcane arts of being a Duke of Fenmore, the more honest and useful art of larceny still ran red and ruddy within his veins.

  So when the opportunity to make the inestimable Lady Claire Jellicoe his very own dropped into his hand like a pilfered purse full of shining, golden guineas, he palmed it deep into the hidden pocket next to his heart, and held fast.

  He stole her from the garden of his grandmother’s magnificent, ancient manor house in Richmond, during a ball, on a moonlit summer night so sweet and warm and comfortable, it never should have needed anything approaching larcenous stealth or guile.

  But even on such a soft evening, and even after all the years and years of training in the polite proprieties, stealth and guile came to him quite naturally. Like old friends out of the silent night.

  Old friends he could trust.

  The need for larceny came to his attention directly after the fourth couple of dances. Tanner had been standing along the north wall of the cavernous old greatroom—it was one of the sacrifices he made to preserve the honor of the dukedom, this standing about against walls, just to be seen—when he saw her.

  He always saw everything—every ferocious little detail that others either didn’t notice, or didn’t want to see. All the things they did not want him to see—their nervous glances and telling looks, their nasty bad habits and impulsive, informing foibles. He saw them think, just as clearly and easily as if he were reading a broadsheet.

  He saw the shift of their eyes and the clutch of their hands when they intended to cheat at cards. He saw their backhanded smiles and snide pleasure when they made plans to cuckold their friends. He saw them stuff silver salvers into their reticules, and stand idly by while innocent servants were given the sack.

  He saw them laugh and cry and flatter and flirt and lie and cheat and steal.

  He saw it all.

  But he had never seen Lady Claire Jellicoe do any of those things, not once, though he had watched her for years, in ballroom after ballroom, from London to Leicestershire. He was helpless not to—an informing foible he should have long overcome, but had not.

  He could not.

  She was as tiny and staggeringly beautiful as the fragile orchid blooms that filled his grandmother’s conservatory, and just as full of wondrous, vibrant life.

  She was always smiling, always laughing and chatting, always serenely happy, glowing with luminous vitality—a rare white orchid he fervently admired, but could never touch.

  But others did touch. Others danced and twirled and took her hand—the young lordlings who were meant to be his peers, the men who were as different from Tanner as sharp chalk was from soft cheese.

  Because no matter how hard he tried, or how carefully he had trained himself to become the ninth Duke of Fenmore, Tanner Evans knew he could never wash himself clean of the sulfurous stink of his years on the streets.

  And so he had given up trying, and settled for being different, for retreating into the fortress of his mind, and preserving his still savage pride behind a wall of eccentric silence.

  His sister had laughed at the change in him. Never shut up when you were a boy, Meggs had teased.

  But he had learned to hold his tongue now, and refrained from talking, though he watched them still.

  He watched her still—his lovely, luminous orchid of a girl. Because watching her gave him a pleasure so incomprehensible and inexplicable and vast, it was beyond his understanding. And beyond his power to stop.

  So when Lady Claire Jellicoe turned her wide, sparkling blue eyes upon her dance partner, and smiled that smile that absolutely slayed Tanner—the smile that was warm and open and entirely without guile—the spurt of some small pain that would be very much like jealousy, if he allowed it to be, made him follow the line of her gaze to her partner. Lord Peter Rosing.

  God’s balls. God’s bloody, bleeding balls.

  The walls of the greatroom tilted inward—narrowing to the spot where she stood. Beneath his spotless gloves, Tanner’s palms went damp and itchy, and his back propelled itself out of his slouch. Not Rosing. Anybody but Rosing.

  Tanner controlled himself enough to stop his face from contorting into a sneer, and immediately scanned the crowd.

  He tried to place Lady Claire’s parents, the Earl and Countess Sanderson, where he had seen them last, chatting with his grandmother near one of the greatroom’s arching doorways. Or her oldest brother, James, Viscount Jeffrey.
Or his wife, the shy Viscountess.

  One of them had to be near enough to act. One of them had to see and know and understand just how vile Rosing truly was beneath his charming veneer. One of them had to stop him.

  One of them had to save her.

  Because Rosing was as slick and plausible and cunning as he was opportunistic. And he was nothing if not opportunistic, the amoral bastard, because he took Lady Claire Jellicoe’s elbow in his filthy grip, and escorted her out the tall, open doors at the foot of the room so smoothly and quickly, no one seemed to notice they were gone.

  No one but Tanner.

  Tanner knew that out in the shadowed dark, where the garden plummeted into the river, Lady Claire would soon stop smiling her open, honest, guileless smile. Because people were terrible, awful, cruel creatures of habit, and Rosing was the most terrible, habitually cruel creature of them all.

  Rosing indulged himself with lethal impunity.

  It might have terrified Tanner to realize this was the moment—the moment that all the years of watching and waiting were done. That he had to decide—he had to take action now, or nevermore.

  But his mind had already prompted him into movement, already prepared him to employ lethal habits of his own—his old friends stealth and guile.

  Stealth and guile, and single-minded devotion.

  Because he was devoted to Lady Claire Jellicoe, this exquisite orchid of a young woman he had never met, never danced with, never so much as spoken one single word to in all his years of propping up ballroom walls.

  He had never dared.

  Tanner Evans, ninth Duke of Fenmore, was madly, deeply, irrationally, and altogether secretly in love.

  Chapter 1

  Lady Claire Jellicoe hadn’t thought to protest. She hadn’t thought someone she’d just met on a ballroom floor could ever wish her irreparable harm.

  She simply hadn’t thought.

  She had smiled.

  She had smiled because she was Lady Claire Jellicoe, pretty, privileged daughter of the Earl Sanderson.

  She had smiled because she was polite and considerate, and did as she was asked—she had been asked to dance with the handsome, fair-haired heir of the Marquess of Hadleigh.

  She had been taught to smile, and say yes.

  “No,” was what she said now. “No. No. No.”

  No, when Lord Peter Rosing pushed her into the dark seclusion of the boathouse at the Dowager Duchess of Fenmore’s lovely riverside villa in Richmond. No, when he pulled Claire’s arm, and grabbed her by the neck.

  No, no, no, when he shoved her face-first against the rough brick wall.

  The brick was hard, and hurt. Stone bit into her face. Sharp grit clawed and scratched against her skin and tasted like dust. But the chalky, bitter bile in her mouth was really fear.

  Fear that for the first time in her life, she was powerless.

  Powerless because she had been spoiled. Powerless because all her life, she had been pampered and cosseted and buffered and protected from all the truly ugly unpleasantness of the world.

  And she had never known it until that exact moment when she screamed, “No.”

  Because her voice was too small—shadowed with the fear pouring like acid down her throat, filling her chest with the high suffocating heat of panic.

  She bit the gloved hand choked across her mouth as instinctively as a wild animal caught in a trap. Her teeth tore through the thick fabric, and the taste of blood suffused her mouth with the metallic tang of hatred and shame.

  But all she got for her desperation was a low profanity spewed hot into her ear, the shifting of his grip to grind her face into the brick, and the bloody glove shoved into her mouth, and held there as a gag.

  He was everywhere around her, covering her mouth, standing on the train of her gown, pinning her against the wall with his weight. Closing out everything else, every hope of help, every thought of action.

  There was nothing but his body and his breath and his smell and his power.

  And she had none.

  She couldn’t scream, and she couldn’t move, and she couldn’t stop Lord Peter Rosing.

  She could only hear the roar of her heartbeat filling her ears until she was drowning in it. She could only taste the bloody fabric clamped inside her mouth, suffocating out sense. She could only feel the wall cutting into her skin, and the grabbing and pushing and rending of her clothes as he exposed her body.

  She could only think in the tiny, screaming part of her mind that was still capable of thought—no, no, no.

  No, this could not be happening to her. No, he had to stop. No, someone had to stop him.

  Please. Please. Please.

  And then somehow, someway, someone did.

  Rosing fell away from her for one suspended moment. Then his head cracked hard against the bricks two inches from her wide-open eyes. He stared back at her, his own eyes open and blank and uncomprehending for one agonizingly sick moment before his eyes rolled back in his head, and he slid slowly down the wall, collapsing in an untidy, half-clothed heap at her feet.

  Claire clung to the wall, paralyzed and cold and shaking, until something inside her finally rattled free. She spat out the choking glove and scrambled back—away from him, away from the danger.

  But there was no room to go anywhere with the corner of wall at her back. And there was another threat.

  A huge black shadow hung over Rosing’s inert form like a monstrous carrion crow. And then, without saying a word or making a sound, the shadow reared back and stomped viciously on Rosing’s splayed leg.

  A dull, sickening crack bounced up from the brick-paved floor, and lapped upward into the vaulted silence of the boathouse.

  Everything else inside Claire wrenched into a single, tight knot of pain and misery that hollowed out her throat, and clutched its clammy way across the surface of her skin.

  She shrank back into the corner, away from the looming specter.

  And then the specter spoke. “Are you all to rights?”

  The voice was a dark, deep rumble she had never heard before.

  “No.” Her own voice was nothing but a fracture of a whisper.

  “Yes,” was all he said, and Claire couldn’t tell if he was agreeing with, or contradicting her.

  She couldn’t tell anything. “What have you done?” She looked from her rescuing specter to the heap of man and tailoring at her feet who had only moments ago been the duplicitous Lord Peter.

  “Broken his leg, I should think. It’ll be a bloody long time—if he is lucky enough to heal well enough to even walk—before he rapes another girl.”

  There it was. Spoken plainly and ruthlessly.

  Rape.

  She had almost been raped.

  And another girl.

  Claire’s pulse throttled against her throat, but she could think enough to understand exactly what those words must mean—she was just another girl to Lord Peter Rosing, not Lady Claire Jellicoe whom he had asked to walk with in the moonlight because he found her enchanting.

  No matter her name, or her rank, or her fortune, or her parents, she was just another girl for him to do with as he wished. Like a maid or a shopgirl, or anyone else who was as powerless to stop him.

  Anyone.

  The wretched knot within her clenched violently, and she had to close her mouth down around an unbecoming sound very much like a moan. Her hand rose to her throat. “I’m going to be sick.”

  “Try not to.” He leaned nearer—across Rosing’s prone form—as if he were trying to see her more clearly, and the dark, imposing shadow resolved itself into the tall, lean outline of a man she recognized instantly, though she did not really know him. “You haven’t got time. Breathe deeply through your nose. Can you move on your own? Or would you like me to help you? I’m Tanner Evans, by the way. We have not been introduced.”

  It was a ridiculously enormous understatement. He spoke as if they were still within the ballroom, or in a shop, or at a musicale, or anywhere else
upon the earth but standing across the unmoving form of her would-be rapist.

  “I know who you are.”

  But he wasn’t some mere Tanner Evans—he was His Grace, the Duke of Fenmore. The same impassive, impenetrable man she had seen at such events for years, hanging aloofly at the edges of ballrooms, and never being introduced so he might dance.

  She had thought him a strange, different sort of man, with a haunted, far-away look, like the men who had come back from the wars last summer with death stalking behind their eyes.

  Except that she knew the Duke of Fenmore hadn’t gone to war—he had never done anything that she knew of, except stand around ballrooms looking chilly and off-putting.

  And he was still rather more than off-putting now, breaking people’s legs with such violent efficiency, though he also shook out an immaculate white handkerchief, and held it carefully toward her.

  “You’ve blood,” he said quietly, “on your face. Scratches from the coarseness of the mortar between the bricks, I should think. You might also want to put a cut of beefsteak or a potato on them, when you get home. You are so fair, you’re likely to bruise.”

  Beefsteak? Was he mad? Or perhaps it was she who was mad. Perhaps being assaulted by a bastard of the first rank did that to a person—drove them toward Bedlam—judging by the way she flinched from the gloved hand His Grace had extended toward her.