But it would buy her mother nothing but snide barbs and hushed whispers. No additional respect, no additional care. Few of the aristocracy into which she was born would ever consider her worthy of their civility, let alone their forgiveness.

Hypocrisy was the bedrock of the peerage.

Georgiana knew it – he’d seen it in her gaze and heard it in her voice as she’d talked to him, far more fascinating than he would have ever imagined. She was willing to wager everything for her daughter, and there was tremendous nobility in that.

She was like no woman he’d ever known.

He wondered, vaguely, what it might be like to grow with the love of a parent willing to sacrifice all happiness for one’s sake. He’d had the love, but it had been fleeting.

And then he’d become the caretaker.

He resisted the memory and returned his attention to the dance.

Langley was a good choice. Handsome and intelligent and charming, and a skilled dancer, gliding the lady across the ballroom floor, underscoring her grace with his own. West watched her ivory skirts caress the viscount’s trouser leg as he turned her. Something about the way silk clung to wool briefly before giving in to gravity’s pull irritated him. Something about the way they moved, all grace and skill, grated.

He shouldn’t care. He was here for something else entirely.

So what had he been doing on a balcony making silly promises of social redemption to a girl he didn’t know?

Guilt was a powerful motivator.

The damn cartoon. He’d dragged her through the muck, as surely as her peers had done so a decade earlier. He’d been irate when it had run – hated the way it teased and mocked an unwed mother, a child who’d had no choice in the matter. He didn’t read The Scandal Sheet the way he read the rest of his papers, as he had little taste for gossip. He’d missed the cartoon, inserted at the last minute, before the pages went to print.

He’d sacked the editor in charge the moment he’d seen it. But it had been too late.

And he’d helped to further scandalize the girl.

She smiled up at Langley, and something tugged at West’s memory. He did not remember meeting the lady before, but he could not shake the idea that he had at some point. That they’d spoken. That she’d smiled at him in just the same way.

Lady Disrepute, they called her, in no small part because of him. It did not matter that she was everything they adored – young, aristocratic, and more beautiful than one woman should be.

Perhaps her beauty mattered most of all. Society hated the most beautiful among it nearly as much as it hated the least. It was beauty that made scandal so compelling – after all, if only Eve had not been so beautiful, perhaps the serpent would have left her alone.

But it was Eve who was vilified, never the serpent. Just as it was the lady who was ruined, never the man.

He wondered about the man in her case, again. Had she loved him?

The thought left a foul taste.

Yes, he would redeem the girl. He would make her the star of the season. It would be easy enough – Society adored its gossip pages, and easily believed the things it read in them. A few well-placed columns, and Lady Georgiana would marry her viscount and leave West’s conscience appeased and his focus on other, more important matters.

Matters that would ensure his freedom.

“You are not dancing.”

He’d expected the meeting – had attended the ball for it – but went cold at the words nevertheless, spoken with false cordiality at his elbow. “I do not dance.”

The Earl of Tremley chuckled. “Of course you don’t.”

West was mere days older than Tremley; he’d known the earl for his entire life, and hated him for nearly that long. But now Tremley was one of King William’s most trusted advisors, with tens of thousands of acres of the lushest land in Suffolk that earned him close to fifty thousand pounds a year. He was rich as a fictional king and had the ear of a real one.

West deliberately kept his focus on Georgiana, something about her helping to keep him calm. “What do you want?”

Tremley feigned shock. “So cold. You should show more respect to your betters.”

“You should be grateful that I resist pummeling you in public,” West said, taking his gaze from Georgiana, not liking the idea that his unwelcome companion might discover his interest.

“Big words. As though you would take such a risk.”

West grew more irritated, loathing the fear that whispered through him at Tremley’s words. Hating it. “I’ll ask again. Why are you here?”

“I noticed your column last week.”

He stilled. “I write a great deal of columns.”

“This one was in favor of abolition of the death penalty for theft. A brazen choice, for someone so… close to the situation.”

West did not reply. There was nothing to say here, in this room filled with people who did not worry about their futures. Who were not terrified of their pasts.

Who did not wait, every day, to be discovered. Punished.

Hanged.

Lady Georgiana spun away on the arm of her future husband, lost in the crowd as Tremley sighed. “It is so tiresome, having to threaten you. If only you would accept that this is our arrangement – I command, you act – it would make our conversations much more palatable.”

West looked to his enemy. “I own five of the most successful newspapers on the globe. You grow ever closer to destruction at the stroke of my pen.”

Tremley’s tone went cold and direct. “You own them thanks to my benevolence. That pen stroke would be your last, and you know it. Even if you got your law passed.”