The Rogue Not Taken (Scandal & Scoundrel #1)(3)

This world she hated.

She followed her brother-in-law, wanting nothing more than to avenge her sister.

He turned, possibly because he heard the desperation with which her sister called her name, or possibly because the sound of a woman running toward him was strange enough to surprise, or possibly because Sophie couldn’t help but voice her frustration, the sound echoing loud and nearly feral in the glass enclosure.

She pushed him as hard as she could.

If he hadn’t been turning, already off balance . . .

If she hadn’t had momentum on her side . . .

If the ground beneath him hadn’t been slick from the gardeners’ thorough attention to their duties earlier in the day . . .

If the Countess of Liverpool hadn’t had such a fondness for her fish . . .

“You little shrew!” the duke cried from the spot where he landed, at the center of the fishpond, knees drawn up, dark hair plastered to his head, eyes full of fury, making a promise he did not have to voice, but did nonetheless. “I shall destroy you!”

Sophie took a deep breath—knowing with utter certainty that, in this case, in for a penny was most definitely in for a pound—and stood, arms akimbo, at the edge of the pool, staring down on her usually imposing brother-in-law.

Not so imposing, now.

She grinned, unable to help herself. “I should like to see you try.”

“Sophie,” her sister said, and she heard the dismay and regret and sorrow in her name.

“Oh, Sera,” she said, turning her smile on her sister, ignoring the dulcet tones of her brother-in-law’s sputtering. “Tell me you didn’t thoroughly enjoy that.”

Sophie hadn’t had such a pleasing moment in all her time in London.

“I did,” her sister allowed quietly, “But I am, unfortunately, not the only one.”

The duchess pointed over Sophie’s shoulder, and she turned, dread pooling, to find the entirety of London staring at her through the enormous glass wall of the greenhouse.

The shaming came almost immediately.

It did not matter that her brother-in-law had deserved every bit of wet clothing, ruined boots, and embarrassment. It did not matter that any man who flaunted his sexual escapades before his increasing wife and her unmarried sister was the worst kind of beast. It did not matter that the scandal should have belonged wholly and exclusively to him.

Scandal did not stick to dukes.

To the young ladies Talbot, however, it stuck like honey on horsehair.

Once Jack Talbot had become the Earl of Wight and all of London had directed its attention and its disdain at the coarse, unrefined, supremely unaristocratic family, it had stuck, and it had stayed. That the newly minted earl’s fortune had come from coal made the jests easy—the sisters were called the Soiled S’s, which Sophie assumed was considered clever because the Talbot sisters were named, in order, Seraphina, Sesily, Seleste, Seline, and Sophie.

Though Sophie would prefer the Soiled S’s to the other, less flattering moniker—whispered in ballrooms and tearooms and especially gentlemen’s clubs, she had no doubt. A warning, ever since Seraphina had famously trapped her perfect duke into marriage. The meaning was clear; money might have purchased the earldom, the home in Mayfair, the beautiful—if extravagant—clothes, the perfect horseflesh, the overly gilded carriages, but it could never purchase a proper bloodline, and the girls might do anything necessary to marry into long-standing aristocratic circles.

The Dangerous Daughters.

The label was borne out by her three unmarried older sisters, each of whom was in the midst of an extravagant courtship with an equally extravagant suitor—courtships that bordered on the scandalous, and were at constant risk of remaining unfulfilled. Sesily was widely known to be the muse of Derek Hawkins, renowned artist and proprietor and star of the Hawkins Theater. Hawkins did not boast a title, but he boasted in every other imaginable way, and that was enough to win Sesily’s heart—though Sophie couldn’t for the life of her understand what her sister, or anyone else in Society, saw in the insufferable man.

Seleste was in a deeply emotional, exceedingly public back-and-forth with the wickedly handsome and unfortunately impoverished Earl of Clare. They were the most dramatic pair Sophie could imagine, arguing in front of entire ballrooms as often as they swooned into each other’s arms. Seline, the second youngest sister, was courted by Mark Landry, owner of Landry’s Bloodstock, which was giving Tattersall’s a run for its money. Landry was crass and loud and hadn’t a drop of blue blood, but if he married Seline—and Sophie thought he might—she would be the wealthiest of the sisters by far.

The courtships drew constant public attention and commentary, and the young ladies Talbot adored the scrutiny, each doing her best to tempt the scandal sheets—much to their mother’s dismay. The sisters flourished under Society’s censure, every tut behind a doyenne’s fan driving them to more outrageous behavior.

All the sisters but Sophie, that was. At twenty-one, Sophie had always been the daughter whom scandal had avoided. She’d always assumed it was because she cared little for Society and their dictates and opinions, and somehow, Society seemed to understand that.

But now that the Duke of Haven was doused in water from the fishpond, with several pieces of freshwater flora stuck to his previously impeccably turned out trousers, it seemed that Society was no longer interested in leaving Sophie Talbot—widely considered to be “the quiet one” of the Dangerous Daughters—alone.