Harlequin Historical July 2021--Box Set 1 of 2 Read online

  ‘There was a frisson between you.’

  ‘There wasn’t.’

  ‘You were smiling.’

  ‘I do smile upon occasion.’

  ‘Not at handsome and charming gentlemen who know they are both handsome and charming, you don’t.’

  Hope strode towards the kitchen. ‘Mama sent me for tea.’

  ‘He kept staring at you.’

  ‘I cannot say I noticed.’

  ‘Probably because you were too busy sighing at him yourself.’

  Hope’s fingers dropped from the doorknob as she glared at her sister, her hands going defiantly to her hips while her pulse called her a liar. ‘If anyone was sighing, Sister dearest, it was you. Shamelessly batting your eyelashes at him and seductively caressing his chair. I don’t know why you don’t just wear a placard stating you are ripe and ready for a flirtation and be done with it!’

  ‘I was merely testing him to see if he was a natural flirt by nature or if it was just you who captivated him. Which it was by the way, so your jealousy is misplaced.’

  ‘Do not judge me by your lowly standards. I have never been as easily swayed by a handsome face as you are. Nor do I practice flirting—ever—because flirting only gives men ideas and they all seem to have quite enough of those about me already without any encouragement whatsoever. And as for your ludicrous idea that I would be jealous of you for flirting with him, I can categorically assure you that I am not the least bit...’ She found herself talking to her sister’s raised palm.

  ‘Oh, save your breath, Hope! For I am not the least bit convinced by your forceful denials to the contrary and you are an unconvincing liar. The poor man looks at you as if no other woman in the world exists for him, and you know it.’ A comment which both thrilled and alarmed Hope in equal measure. ‘Which begs the obvious question as to why, when one considers how fresh and new your acquaintance is...unless it isn’t of course, which puts an entirely different slant on things.’

  ‘I have no control over how Lord Thundersley does or doesn’t look at me—any more than I have any sway over the way most men gawp and leer at me.’

  ‘You pushed him in the fountain, didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Why did you push him in the fountain, Hope? What wicked and presumptuous thing did the dissolute new Marquess do?’

  ‘I swear I never met him before yesterday.’

  ‘Did he flirt with you at the Writtles’? Or was it worse? Did he make a saucy comment about your figure like that hapless officer at Gunter’s the other week?’ Charity was laughing, obviously enjoying herself while Hope squirmed. ‘Or maybe he tried to steal a kiss.’ Hope’s spine involuntarily stiffened before she could summon the bravado to deny it, and although she covered it quickly, her canny sister saw it because her jaw slackened in shock. ‘Was he successful?’

  As she floundered for the correct words to express her outrage at the accusation, her younger and most annoying sibling threw her head back and roared. ‘Oh, good Lord! You’re as red as your hair because he did kiss you, didn’t he? Didn’t he?’ She prodded her hard in the arm with her finger. ‘You—you!—kissed our sinfully handsome, possibly dissolute pirate neighbour at Faith’s engagement ball! That’s why you leapt to his defence so vociferously earlier too. You kissed him and you liked it!’

  ‘I did nothing of the sort!’ But her crimson face was confirmation enough so there was no point in denying it. Nothing ever escaped either of her sisters for long, and she was long past the point of protesting too much. ‘If you must know he kissed me, quite unexpectedly and out of the blue, and got to swim in the fountain for his impertinence!’

  This confession earned her a jab in the ribs this time from her sister’s pointed finger. ‘I knew it! I knew there was an odd air between the pair of you. It certainly explains why you are so mute around him. Both yesterday on the street and today in the drawing room, you were uncharacteristically quiet and much too polite. So much so I barely recognised you as my acerbic, acidic and cynical sister!’

  ‘Will you keep your voice down!’

  ‘I cannot believe you kissed Lord Thundersley over a week ago and kept it all to yourself.’ Charity bounced on the spot, clearly beside herself with joy at having such a delicious faux pas to hold against her. ‘It must have been a truly magnificent kiss for him to have moved to Bloomsbury on the back of it.’

  That dangerous avenue of speculation needed nipping in the bud. ‘It was an instantly forgettable kiss.’ One that made her lips tingle just thinking about it. ‘Which only came about because he was saving me from Lord Harlington’s advances...’

  ‘The plot thickens...’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake!’ Sometimes, only the truth would do, even if it was applied sparingly. ‘I went to hide in the garden because Horrid Harlington refused to leave me alone and wanted a waltz. While I was there, Lord Thundersley stumbled across me by the fountain and when we heard Harlington heading towards us, I hastily asked him if he would help me get rid of him. I was hoping he would do so by intimidating him with his height, but in his drunken state, he chose to pretend we were having a tryst instead. It was all over in seconds. Lord Harlington stormed off in a huff at being spurned and your pirate ended up in the fountain exactly as he deserved!’ She would omit the naked balcony scene, and indeed balconies altogether alongside the cosy chats they had while on them. ‘That would have been an end to it until coincidence moved him in next door and we collided on the pavement yesterday. Where I insisted he pretend we had no prior acquaintance as I had lied about having anything to do with the fountain and nobly he agreed.’

  ‘Oh, he is noble now as well as charming, is he?’

  ‘After the blistering lecture Mama and Papa gave me about my temper when that idiot soldier propositioned me at Gunter’s and I covered him in ice cream, it seemed prudent to deny my hand in that within scant days of the other incident.’ Hope squared her shoulders, crossed her fingers behind her back and looked her sister dead in the eye. ‘That is the whole truth, and the sum total of all my dealings with Lord Thundersley to date, I swear it. Please keep it to yourself. He has since apologised for his drunken misunderstanding, but even so—can you imagine our parents’ overreaction if they knew the truth? It would be blown out of all proportion by Mama as all things invariably always are, especially when the guilty party is sat in our very own drawing room.’

  Charity stared at her for several moments while she forced herself to stare back unflinching. ‘And there is nothing else? Only you did seem uncharacteristically quiet and occupied, and you did keep glancing at him when you thought nobody was looking.’

  ‘Hardly a surprise when he was but feet away and a single wrong word from him could bring my flimsy lie crashing around my ears.’

  ‘But you are never so gushing about a man. You usually loathe them before they even open their mouths.’

  Usually because they had already leered at her chest before they opened them.

  ‘Hargreaves is a good chap. Honest too...’ Her father’s voice suddenly drifted down the hallway from the direction of the studio, signalling they were done. ‘And if you are prepared to pay a small premium to expediate things, he’ll make your place presentable in no time.’

  ‘I am in your debt, Augustus.’ Luke’s deep voice made her stupid lips tingle again. ‘For both the sound advice and for taking pity on me and inviting me to dinner tonight. Are you sure your lovely wife will not mind the intrusion...?’

  Not dinner! Please God, not dinner too!

  ‘Dinner was Roberta’s idea and she will not take no for an answer...’

  She was doomed. ‘Please, Charity! I am begging you, keep my secret.’

  Her sister grinned. ‘Of course I’ll keep your secret because that is what good sisters do.’

  She then spun on her heel and sauntered back towards the voices now in t
he drawing room, then paused to toss one final salvo over her shoulder before she turned the corner. ‘But do not for one second think that I am the slightest bit convinced by your obviously abridged and edited version of events, Hope. Because I have eyes and I can see, and what I can plainly see is, frankly...fascinating.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Once again, the new Marquess of T. was seen out with the B. family of Bloomsbury. However, the jury is still out as to which of Mr B.’s beautiful daughters he prefers as both were spotted on his arm at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition yesterday. Miss C. has all the charm and congeniality, but as we well know, Gentle Reader, Miss H. has all the fire...

  Whispers Behind the Fan

  June 1814

  ‘Your father left you nothing?’ Hope reached across the balcony railings to accept the second cup of tea he had poured her from the pot he had brought up expressly for their nightly chat.

  After a week of casual unplanned but habitual clandestine conversations which seemed to last longer the more they got to know one another, he decided he might as well turn up prepared. The tea was still almost drinkable but the mound of hot buttered toast which he had also brought to share was long gone.

  ‘Not exactly. He left me the Tregally house we live in, although it wasn’t in the best state then, the one hundred and forty acres of grazing pasture surrounding it and a tin mine without any tin in it. He left my mother—his wife—nothing. Not a single brass farthing. But he did leave instructions to my brother to deal with her exactly as he saw fit.’ Which had been to have her unjustly locked in a notorious private madhouse for three years until Luke had reached the age of majority and was able to get her out of it.

  But he wouldn’t mention that bit.

  It was a buzzing hornets’ nest and much too complicated and close to his heart to lay it open for dissection. He had learned, at great cost, to be careful who he shared it with as most people judged him differently as a result, but worse, treated his poor mother like a pariah. Even back home in Cornwall, only a few trusted servants were aware of some his mother’s struggles because first his father and then Luke had concealed them so well. Only Clowance was privy to the full extent of them all, and as they were ultimately his mother’s struggles and she was so very ashamed of them she couldn’t bring herself to even talk about them, it wasn’t his place to discuss them—even with someone he trusted like Hope.

  ‘He also made Cassius my guardian, although a fat lot of good that did me, because my dear brother wanted to immediately shove me in a uniform and dispatch me to the war.’ Yet another thing they had come to blows over, because his brother knew Luke would never desert his mother and that gave him the perfect excuse to cut them both loose. ‘When I refused he washed his hands of me and I was left to fend for us both.’ Except it had been too late to save her from his brother’s well-laid vengeful plans and by the time he had returned home to Tregally, his poor mother had been taken. Bound in a straitwaistcoat and gagged in his absence, then incarcerated in a hellhole a good hundred and fifty miles from her now completely penniless, powerless, and underage son. ‘I had to earn my own living from that day forth.’

  ‘Hence the stint as a herring fisherman.’ She shook her head, appalled. ‘The more I hear of Cassius, the more I dislike him. What I don’t understand, what I struggle to understand when I am so close to my own sisters, is what he had against you?’

  ‘He had it in for my mother.’ An understatement. If he could have, Cassius would have had her thrown anonymously in Bedlam as a pauper and made sure they tossed away the key. A mad marchioness was an unacceptable embarrassment to the Thundersley name, ergo, they had worked hard for a good quarter of a century to erase all evidence of her. That’s why his father had banished her to Cornwall in the first place after all, when Luke had still been in leading strings, and there she remained until Cassius had had her dragged kicking and screaming to the Mill House. Her unpalatable mental deficiencies were also the reason why he had also been exiled with her, because the presence of a motherless child might remind all and sundry to enquire about the mother. Not to mention the likelihood he had inherited the same weaknesses from that mother and her inferior blood, which made him as good as worthless as far as they were all concerned, and therefore best dealt with on the sly before it all became a problem too.

  They were two dirty secrets brushed ruthlessly under the carpet. The family had done such a thorough job of it, he had lost count of the times he’d had to explain that he was indeed Cassius’s brother and not a distant cousin out of the direct blood line who had inherited, and that his mother was still alive when they all thought her long dead. Because his father had, he had only recently discovered, told everyone that was the case.

  ‘From the outset, Cassius refused to accept her and resented her for replacing his own mother as the mistress of the house, even though his own mother died several years before they married. He was fourteen when I came along and he didn’t take to the arrival of a brother any better than he did a new stepmother.’

  It was likely then that his only sibling’s relentless campaign of vitriol had begun, and as the heir and because his father wasn’t particularly bothered about mending the rift when Luke was just the spare, it slowly undermined their status within the family until they were unceremoniously pushed out of it. Not all his brother’s doing, of course, because his father had always been stubbornly cut from the same cloth, but he had certainly fanned the flames before he had poured lamp oil on them later on. ‘The best word I can think of to encompass our sibling relationship was hostile.’ If they hadn’t been already dead, Luke would certainly have enjoyed strangling both men with his bare hands.

  ‘That is so sad—for you and your mother. To have no family...’

  Luke nodded, because he supposed it was, although he had never known any different. ‘Sadder for my mother than me I think because her own family were so far away she had no one. Although her mother was English, her father was Spanish and she grew up in Andalucía, so she was basically a foreigner in my brother’s eyes. And because my father married her solely because she was beautiful and had a very distant and tenuous family link to the monarch of Spain—perhaps not the best criteria for choosing a wife—they had nothing in common. It was an arranged marriage which never worked. She was too young and a fish out of water. He was too old and set in his ways and saw no earthly reason why he should have to change them. Their temperaments clashed, their cultures and customs clashed, and they never ever really even liked one another.’

  Talking about it all so openly over tea, when it was never discussed at all, was churning up all manner of forgotten memories, most of which wholly unsuitable for a discussion. ‘In fact, now that I think upon it, when either mentioned the other, even in the most general and innocuous sense, it was always with pursed lips. That they lasted two years living under the same roof was a miracle.’

  It was only later, as an adult, that he learned she had basically been little more than a prisoner in the Berkeley Square house for the last year she lived there.

  She could, he conceded, have been deemed too ill to go out on physician’s orders, which might well have been the case, and be misremembering what happened. Thanks to her illness, his mother’s memory of certain periods was unreliable and she had none at all of huge swathes of time. Luke had certainly been too young to remember the truth. All he recalled were her constant tears during those early years in Cornwall and days when she never seemed to leave her bedchamber. A familiar pattern which had repeated itself after he had liberated her from Mill House and the main reason he was plagued with guilt now at having been gone so long from her side. When news of Cassius’s untimely death reached Cornwall, his mother had insisted he head to London, urging him to use the opportunity to have an adventure. But every day he feared hearing her health had declined again and worried about not being there for her and by default, her recovery going rapidly backwards. Clowance
was a godsend, but when she was in the grip of her demons, his mother had always needed him more.

  Another buzzing hornets’ nest.

  Hope’s auburn brows were furrowed in anger on his behalf. ‘Still, it was your father’s responsibility to have made proper provisions. It was thanks to his negligence that you were both allowed to be abandoned by your nasty brother.’

  ‘That it was. But...’ Luke shrugged. He had spent years feeling angry and bitter about it until he had realised all that vengeful negativity really only harmed him. His father hadn’t cared two hoots either way and in his self-righteous hatred, Cassius thoroughly enjoyed having the upper hand but fate had certainly punished him by taking him so early. That he had been taken before he could ensure his hated half-brother couldn’t inherit a penny would also ensure the bastard couldn’t rest in peace, and that petty knowledge made Luke’s unwanted inheritance slightly more bearable. He hoped the snake spun in his grave for eternity. He deserved nothing less. ‘That neglect also made me the man that I am. I wouldn’t be half as resourceful, resilient and utterly irresistible otherwise.’

  ‘Or quite so arrogant.’ She stared at him blandly over the rim of her cup. ‘How did you get from herring to slate?’

  All her curiosity told him that she liked him. At least in private when they were alone. In the week since her parents had taken him under their wing, Hope had been careful to be either uninterested or dismissive of his company during the two dinners he had attended. Even when he had been dragged to the Royal Academy by Augustus to see his eldest daughter’s painting, she had kept her distance. But out here, when it was just the two of them beneath the moonlight and Charity wasn’t watching them like a hawk, she lowered those defences and they talked.

  And talked and talked.

  ‘It’s an ironic twist of fate, I owe my stingy father for that too. Because the useless tin mine might not have had any tin left in it, but the land around it and the caverns it left below were all slate. I figured people always need roofs, so I started chiselling the stuff out to sell locally and it grew from there.’