He came to his feet in a single, fluid motion, all six and a half feet of him, wide as a barn, with fists at the ready.

She waved him back. “’Tis only me.”

He narrowed his dark gaze on her. “What is it?”

She looked to the closed door he guarded. “She is well?”

“Hasn’t made a sound since she retired.”

Relief pressed the air from her lungs.

Christ.

Of course Caroline was well. She was guarded by half a dozen locked doors and as many men in the corridors beyond, and Asriel, who had been with Georgiana for longer than anyone else.

It did not matter. When Caroline was in London, she was at risk. Georgiana preferred the girl in Yorkshire, where she was safe from prying eyes and whispered gossip and hateful insults, where she could play in the sun like a normal child. And when she was in the city, Georgiana preferred the girl at her uncle’s home, far from the Angel.

Far from her mother’s sins. From her father’s.

The thought rankled. Fathers’ sins never seemed to stick. It was the mother who bore the heavy weight of ruin in these situations. The mother who passed it on to the child, as though there were not two involved in the act.

Of course, Georgiana had never spoken his name after he’d left.

She’d never wanted anyone to know the identity of the man who had played havoc with her future and ruined her name. Her brother had asked a thousand times. Had vowed to avenge her. To destroy the man who had left her with child and never looked back. But Georgiana had refused to name him.

He had not been the instrument of her ruin, after all. She’d lain in the hayloft with him under her own power, with her full faculties. It had not been Jonathan who had destroyed her.

It had been Society.

She had broken their rules, and they’d rejected her.

There had been no season, no chance to prove herself worthy. She’d never had hope of that proof – they had played judge and jury. Her scandal had been their entertainment and their cautionary tale.

All because she’d fallen victim to a different tale, pretty and fictional.

Love.

Society hadn’t cared about that bit. No one had – not her family, not her friends. She’d been exiled by all save her brother, the duke who married a scandal of his own and, in doing so, lost the respect of their mother. Of the ton.

And so she’d vowed to make Society beholden to her. She’d collected information on the most powerful among them and, if they owed money they could not pay, she rarely hesitated to use it to wreck them. This whole world – the club, the money, the power – it was all for one thing. To hold court over the world that had shunned her all those years ago. That had turned its back on her, and left her with nothing.

Not nothing.

Caroline.

Everything.

“I hate it when she is here,” she said, to herself more than to Asriel. He knew her well enough not to reply. And yet Georgiana could not help but bring Caroline to London every few months. She told herself that it was because she wanted her daughter to know her uncle. Her cousins. But it wasn’t true.

Georgiana brought Caroline here because she could not bear the emptiness she felt when the girl was far. Because she was never in her life so satisfied as when she placed her hand on her sleeping daughter’s back and felt the rise and fall of her breath, filled with dreams and promise.

Filled with everything Georgiana did not have, and everything that she had promised to give her child.

No dreams of a marriage of convenience turning into a love match?

The words from the prior evening came quick and unwanted, as though Duncan West were with her again, tall and handsome, blond hair falling over his brow begging to be brushed back, to be touched. The man was handsome to a dangerous degree, in large part because he was so intelligent – his mind understanding more than was said, his eyes seeing more than was revealed. And his voice, the darkness of it, the way it traced the peaks and valleys of language, the way it cradled her name, the way it whispered the honorific she so rarely used.

The way it made her want to listen to him for hours.

She resisted the thought. She did not have time to listen to Duncan West. He’d made a generous offer of help, which was all she needed. Nothing else.

She wanted nothing else.

Liar.

The word whispered through her. She ignored it. Returned her attention to her daughter. To the promise she’d made to give her a life. A future.

It had been ten years since Caroline was conceived and Georgiana had run from the world for which she had been bred. Ten years since that world had damned them both. And in the years since, Georgiana had built this empire on Society’s greatest truth – that none of its members was far from ruin. That none of those sneering, insulting, horrible people would survive if their secrets were revealed.

She had partnered with three fallen aristocrats, each stronger and more intelligent than the rest of Society, each ruined without question. Each desperate to hide from the ton even as he ruled it.

And together, they did rule it. Bourne, Cross, Temple, and Chase held London’s most powerful men and women in their thrall. Discovered their darkest truths. Their deepest secrets. But it was Chase alone who reigned, in part because it was Georgiana alone who would never fully be able to return to Society.

Every mistake, every scandal, every humiliation faced by the men of the aristocracy could be wiped away. Titles bought respectability, even for those who had fallen from grace.

Had she not proven it?

She’d chosen her partners for the mistakes they’d made when they were young and stupid. Bourne had lost his entire fortune, Cross had chosen a life of gaming and whoring over a life of responsibility, Temple had landed himself in bed with his father’s fiancée. Not one of them had deserved the punishment Society had meted out.