The Betting Season (A Regency Season Book) by Jerrica Knight-Catania, Catherine Gayle, Ava Stone, Jane Charles Page A

the patronesses to look down their lofty noses through their ever-present lorgnettes upon the Bexley-Smythe family, so Lady Stalbridge might not suspect the truth simply from that anomaly.
    Perhaps more pressing than keeping the ladies in the dark about Georgie’s name being in the book, Cedric knew without a doubt that he would have to protect her from the bet itself. Haworth couldn’t step one single foot near the girl. Bewilderingly intelligent she may be, but common sense had never been one of Georgie’s best attributes. She’d fall for the man’s charms and be lost in an instant.
    And then there was the small matter of her brother. Whether Bridge intended to grace London with his presence before mid-May was anyone’s guess. The man’s ability to settle his debts upon whatever occasion he arrived, however, was not a matter of conjecture for anyone who knew him. Percy Bexley-Smythe, Marquess of Stalbridge was, to be plain, strapped. Everything not carefully placed in trust by the previous marquess for Bridge’s mother and sisters was gone, and Bridge had accumulated debts up to his eyeballs in the two years since he’d inherited the marquessate.
    Probably higher than his eyeballs, truth be told, and he was quite a tall man.
    Bridge’s mother and sisters had already suffered more than enough from his folly, but Cedric was damned if he knew what he could do to alter their fortunes…aside from trying to ease their way in society a bit.
    His ruminations came to a sharp halt when little Lady Edwina Bexley-Smythe breezed into the room and squealed in delight at the sight of him. “Oh, Monty, isn’t it wonderful?” Edie asked dreamily as she flopped down onto a settee, sending her blonde curls flying about behind her. Then she all of a sudden remembered herself, apparently, and straightened to a proper posture with her hands folded decorously in her lap. The elation never left her eyes, however.
    Cedric bit back a laugh, not wanting her to think him overly amused by her antics, despite the fact that she already knew full well that he was wrapped around her proverbial little finger. “Isn’t what wonderful?”
    She gave him a withering you-can’t-possibly-be-serious look and threw up her hands. “ This! All of it. Town, the Season, all of the balls and soirees and musicales...”
    “ All of those events you can’t take part in because you’re still not out?” Cedric shook his head, more than just a little perplexed. He was certain Edie would be devastated that she was the last of the Bexley-Smythe sisters left in the schoolroom at a mere fifteen years of age, the only one to be left out of the festivities and gaiety entirely. “What on earth could you, of all people, find so perfectly wonderful about it?”
    Her jaw dropped, in that manner she’d had since she was a small girl, the one which made it clear she thought him no more than an average dolt. “ Really , Monty. It’s all just so…so…exciting. So invigorating!”
    “ So smelly,” he added, just to goad her temper.
    Edie let out a thoroughly unladylike harrumph just as the door pushed open. Eloise came in and set down her tea tray. Before the maid could make her departure, Lady Stalbridge and her three older daughters all joined them in the drawing room.
    Cedric rose and smiled in greeting at the Bexley-Smythe family—the family which, for all intents and purposes, was the only family he’d ever known.
    “ I do hope that was a sneeze, Edwina,” the matron said to her youngest daughter with a frown. “Ladies do not snort or make other such distasteful sounds.”
    Edie merely rolled her eyes in her mother’s direction.
    Lady Stalbridge took a seat on the sofa directly across from Cedric. Frederica and Matilda, the eldest two sisters better known as Freddie and Mattie, took up their seats on either side of their mother, and Georgianna—the sweet Georgie in question—scurried with aplomb into the leather armchair her father had always