How to Disgrace a Lady. Bronwyn Scott

the interview that the lady in question was Lady Alixe. Jamie will not be pleased,’ Ashe said quietly.

      ‘Jamie is not to know.’

      ‘Are wedding bells in your future?’ Riordan slurred, offering Merrick his flask.

      Merrick waved it a way with a rueful smile. ‘Sort of.’ He explained the agreement to hush up the indiscretion if he ‘helped’ Lady Alixe become the Toast of London.

      ‘Then you have truly become a cicisbeo, a man whose status and welfare in society rests on his ability to please a lady,’ Riordan slurred, unmistakably well into his cups. ‘You know, in Italy it works this way, too. Usually it’s the husband who picks a cicisbeo for his wife, but in this case, her father has picked you to bring her out into society.’

      ‘I don’t think it’s an apt comparison at all,’ Merrick snapped, eager to cut off Riordan’s rambling. He was showing all the characteristic signs of launching into a full-blown lecture on Italian culture.

      Ashe idly twirled the stem of an empty snifter. ‘Do you remember that night at Oxford when we formed the cicisbei club?’

      Merrick nodded, losing himself for a moment in the reminiscences of a long-ago time. They’d been foolhardy and a bit naïve. It had seemed a wicked thrill to commit themselves to a lifestyle of ‘love’, to devote themselves to the pursuit of beauty in all its feminine forms.

      ‘I suppose I’ve been a cicisbeo long before tonight,’ Merrick sighed in response to Riordan’s comment. He’d made a large part of his living based on charm and romance. He might not be a ‘kept’ man who was obviously dependent on a woman’s gifts to him, but if he looked closely enough at his life, he was dependent in other ways, not that the honesty made him proud to admit it.

      A ‘life of love’ wasn’t as glamorous as they’d imagined it all those years ago sitting in a student-populated tavern. Then, the road to the future had been long and untravelled—anything was possible. They’d toasted the fact that they were second sons with no expectations placed upon them. There was nothing to inherit but a future they’d carve for themselves. They’d make great reputations as London’s finest lovers. It had seemed like jolly good fun at the time.