Read Online A Scandalous Proposal by Kasey Michaels - Free Book Online Page B

believe the countess has already considered selling some of her jewelry to pay him. The man isn’t stupid, demanding more than she could possibly manage to produce.”
    â€œNot as much investment involved penning sappy, soppy letters to unhappy young matrons. I imagine he considers the amount a fair return on his efforts. No more than fifty pounds to blackmail our own Prinny, and even then he’d probably only receive our royal debtor’s scribbled vowels in return.”
    â€œYou’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
    â€œNot at all. I’m merely looking at the thing from our blackmailer’s point of view, and must applaud his thinking. Five pounds from a shoemaker who passes off inferior leathers by means of clever dyes. Ten pounds six from the seamstress who delivers gowns and picks up various little rewards from milady’s shelves and tucks them up in her sewing basket while inside the residence. That sort of thing could take considerable effort for small reward, but one has to begin somewhere, doesn’t one? Gain polish, slowly grow your profits and then move on to larger targets?”
    â€œYou speak of this as if you’re contemplating joining the man’s ranks.”
    Darby grinned. “I join nobody, although I wonder why I never considered such a venture.”
    â€œI hesitate to guess, but perhaps because you’re bloody rich as Croesus?”
    â€œTrue enough. But the fact remains that there are few people who know more secrets than I do. Happily for the world, I am also a gentleman. Although I will say that if there’s any truth to the fellow’s veiled hint about your particular secret reaching all the way to the highest levels of the Crown, then either he’s more daring than even I would be, or he has access to some prodigiously important people. We’re looking to the ton for our blackmailer, Coop. You’ve figured that much on your own, I’m sure.”
    Coop downed the remaining contents of his glass. “I have. I flirted momentarily with the idea that a well-placed secretary or servant could be privy to many secrets, but it would take an entire small army of coconspirators to engineer something on this grand a scale. If there is a grand scale, and the more I think, the more I believe this is not one ambitious man, acting alone.”
    â€œThere’s an entire other world moving about in Mayfair, one many of us are sadly unaware of, I agree. So many consider them invisible, not to mention deaf and dumb. Ladies’ maids, valets, tweenies quietly repairing the fire, footmen with large ears listening in foyers. But it would take someone to cultivate them, enlist them. The scope of such an enterprise, all the bits and pieces that make up the whole? I believe I’m feeling the headache coming on.”
    â€œGranted, it makes sense to believe there is an organized gang wreaking havoc all across Mayfair. Or we’re wrong, and our blackmailer is just one person and his carefully selected targets.”
    â€œOh, but what are the odds of that? Only one blackmailer and these few carefully selected targets of yours, and two of them they just happen to bump into each other on Bond Street—literally—and end up sharing their common predicaments?”
    â€œI didn’t share anything.”
    â€œNo, but you’ll have to at some point. For one, Miss Foster is far too clever to believe you’ll be hunting down this scoundrel with all speed and fervor strictly because you’re a hero. She took my measure within a heartbeat, much as it pains me to admit it, and found me both foolish and unnecessary.”
    â€œDon’t go into a sulk. The countess doesn’t want you involved. I doubt she wants me involved, for that matter. She’s closeted herself in her chambers, refusing to come out again, even to shepherd her sister through the Little Season.”
    â€œThe minx won’t take that one lying