The Princess Stakes

by Amalie Howard

  “Grow a pair of ballocks, Hunt,” the newly minted duke growled.

  Her voice lowered. “I can’t.” She peered up at him, though she kept her chin tilted down. There was still a chance she could salvage everything by not giving away exactly who she was, at least in public. “I’m female.”

  The whispered confession seemed to stump him for a second, but then his face hardened. “Being female doesn’t win you leniency.”

  Gracious, he truly was without a heart, but enough was enough.

  Ravenna drew up her shoulders, channeled her mother’s hauteur that had been drilled into her since birth, and met his burning gaze. “You are making a grave mistake, Your Grace,” she told him in clipped British accents that left no doubt that she was female and of unquestionable high birth. “Either release me at once, or you will not like the consequences, I assure you.”

  A menacing growl ripped from his throat. “Don’t threaten me.”

  She’d never met such an autocratic man in all her life. One would imagine he was made of fire and brimstone with a clockwork heart beating in his chest. A chill settled over her—this was it, the point of no return. She should have known her freedom or anonymity wasn’t going to last. She had one last hope.

  “Then in that case, I doubt the Duke of Embry would appreciate you sending his sister to jail, regardless of any error in judgment on your part.”

  “Embry’s sister?” he echoed, dark eyes glinting.

  He studied her, his face giving away nothing as the chatter in the salon around them grew, the whispers of her identity a delicious on-dit. Scandal tended to have its own decibel level, after all. Ravenna breathed out. “What a delightful surprise to see you alive and well, Cordy.”

  * * *

  The little hoyden from the neighboring estate in Kettering had grown up into a spitfire. Wearing men’s clothing and cheating at cards in his hotel. What were the odds?

  Lady Ravenna Huntley.

  Courtland didn’t doubt who she said she was. When he’d thought her a young gent, something about her face and swagger had struck a vague chord of recognition in him, and when she’d claimed to know him via Richard Huntley, it had clicked. He’d assumed her to be a cousin or some such. But now, as he took in her heart-shaped face, huge eyes, and trembling lips, he saw distinct signs of the girl he once knew. Though she wasn’t a girl anymore—she was grown. In spite of her clever disguise, that much was obvious. His lip curled in irritation. What the devil had she been thinking?

  As if she could sense his thoughts, her chin lifted and she met his gaze with defiance.

  “Does Embry know you’re here?” he demanded.

  “What do you think?” Her tongue was as cutting as he remembered.

  “I think he should put you over his knee.”

  She rolled her eyes. “My brother is not a barbarian.”

  “Then perhaps the task should fall to me.”

  A furious copper gaze slammed into his. “Touch me and you will be the one missing a finger, I promise you. I’ve learned a few things since we were children.”

  His brow dipped. He didn’t doubt that, considering she was here, and not tucked away in a ducal residence somewhere in England, being waited on hand and foot like the gently reared lady she was. What the hell was she doing here? And come to think of it, did she have a lick of sense left in that idiot head of hers? She had just announced her identity in a public drawing room while scandalously dressed in men’s clothing. And yes, it was a far step away from London, but oceans didn’t stop gossip.

  Swearing under his breath, he shrugged out of his own coat, draped it over her shoulders, and shepherded her from the room to his personal offices, which he should have done from the start. Then his own ill-timed ducal news as well as her revelation would have occurred behind private, closed doors. Too late for any of that.

  Bloody hell.

  “Drink?” he asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  In silence, he poured two fingers of imported French brandy into a tumbler and took a healthy sip. Coppery irises of the same changing hues as the brandy met his. Had her eyes always been that color? He’d remembered them being brown. Her shorn hair was a surprise, the close-cropped curls lying flat beneath the copious pomade. As a girl, her long hair had been braided tight to her scalp and gingery-red—to the point where her brothers had called her gingersnap mercilessly—and not such a dark auburn.

  It was no wonder he hadn’t recognized her outright, though some instinct deep within him had sensed…something.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Why what?”

  Thick russet lashes lifted and he questioned how he’d ever thought she was male. Even with smudges of dark ink on her chin and cheeks, she was comely. Too much so. Courtland shrugged. The now defunct mustache, obviously fake, had been a damned convincing touch.

  But now, he couldn’t stop thinking of her as a woman—scrutinizing each of her features—including those copper-bright eyes and the rosy pout that he hadn’t noticed before. The meddlesome, nosy little Lady Ravenna had grown up to be a beauty, one whom gentlemanly suitors in London drawing rooms would have been fawning over.

  Speaking of, why wasn’t she married? Was she married? He was only two years older than she was, so she should be three-and-twenty or thereabouts. Long past marrying age.

  “Why are you here?” he asked, enunciating each word.

  “My grand tour?” she replied. “A pleasure trip?”

  He couldn’t help noticing that the huskiness in her voice stayed that way. Put together with the fact that she was female, the raspy just-waking-up-after-hours-and-hours-of-sex sound of it shaping the word pleasure arrowed straight to his groin. Scowling at the reaction, he moved behind his desk. “Women don’t do grand tours.”

  “Hence my ingenious disguise,” she said. “At least until today.”

  “You would have been found out eventually. Be glad it was by me and not someone else.” He cringed to think that he’d nearly sent her to a public jail. “So I take it Embry doesn’t know you’re here then.”

  Courtland wasn’t close with the duke though they were close in age. The sons of the Duke of Embry had all gone to Eton when he’d been fighting for his life at Harrow. Even in Antigua, however, he’d learned about the tragic fire that had made the youngest Huntley duke, and then the news had come four years ago about the duke’s shocking nuptials with an Anglo-Indian princess. Good for them, he remembered thinking.

  If only the marchioness and his own brother had been that accepting, the path his life had taken might have been vastly different, though the final destination had turned out to be inevitable. While his grandfather had written steadily over the years, always knowing exactly where he was—first in Spain, and then Antigua—they hadn’t cared.

  Courtland had received all of the letters, but had refused to read them. He’d instructed Rawley to dispose of them. If he was being summoned to Ashvale Park, he didn’t want to know. He had no intention of going back to England.

  Without Courtland’s presence, his ambitious stepbrother would no doubt have led a charge to prove he was the Duke of Ashvale’s true heir. Courtland wondered idly if his stepmother had tried to have him declared dead through the courts. He wondered what his grandfather might have had to say about that.

  Scowling as fresh feelings of bitterness rose, Courtland stalked forward to refill Ravenna’s glass and then his, lifting a brow and waiting for her answer. Her brother would never have condoned this, that much he knew.

  “Stop dithering around and answer me—what does Embry believe?”

  “He thinks I’m in Scotland with Clara.”

  “Clara?”

  “A recently married dear friend. She wed a Scottish earl.”

  Courtland frowned. “How is Embry not worried?”

  “I wrote several letters i
n advance, which she will mail out at monthly intervals, and swore Clara to secrecy as long as I was in good health.” She lifted her glass and sipped. “Which as you can see I am. No need to trouble my brother.”

  “And this Clara considers you a friend?” He didn’t hide his sardonic tone.

  Her eyes narrowed on him. “The best kind.”

  “Forgive me if I’ve been out of London society too long, but friends don’t force friends to lie on their behalf. Much less lie to a respected and rather formidable peer of the realm.”

  Ravenna tossed her head. “What Embry doesn’t know won’t hurt him, and besides, he’s just had a new baby and deserves every joy. If he knew where I was, he’d be frantic with worry instead of focusing on his own happiness.”

  “For good reason, you daft girl!”

  “Because I’m female?” she shot back. “Why should men have all the adventure and women be forced to sit at home tending the hearth? We are not possessions or brainless biddable toys designed for male consumption.”

  He almost choked on his drink at the images her provocative words produced, but the hostility beneath was clear. “Because it’s not safe or smart for a woman to be traveling on her own.”

  “I know how to use a pistol, Cordy,” she said. “I was a better shot than you, remember? Or perhaps you choose not to remember how many times I bested you just to preserve your insufferably delicate male pride.”

  He didn’t remember her being this…caustic. Silent laughter rippled through him. Who was he fooling? She’d always been a hothead.

  “We were children then,” he said. “And my name is Courtland, not Cordy.”

  “Apparently, it’s Ashvale now,” she reminded him.

  Yes, it was, apparently. He was going to have to deal with that complication as soon as possible, too. “How did you get here anyway?”

  “I took one of Embry’s clippers.” She lifted an ungloved hand to sift through the pressed strands of her shorn mane. “Hacked off my hair and disguised myself as a boatswain. Learned a lot over the last few years from my brother and his old quartermaster so it was easy. Kept my head down, did the work, and no one was the wiser.”

  Courtland balked in horror—she’d spent close to five weeks on a ship full of male sailors? His hands fisted at his sides at her rashness. “Why not an ocean liner?”

  “Too easily tracked. I didn’t need luxury, I needed to disappear.”

  “Why?”

  Her lip curled. “None of your deuced business.”

  “If you were mine, I’d definitely put you over my knee.” Courtland regretted the words as soon as he said them. The thought of her lying across his lap, her pert bottom bared to his gaze, was not something he wanted to envision, not while she already had him on edge. She busied herself with her gloves, but he could see color flare into her pale cheeks.

  “Good thing I’m not then.”

  Not yet. Courtland had no idea where that thought came from, nor did he want to know. He had no time for a smart-mouthed, self-centered heiress who knew no better than to traipse willy-nilly around the world with no regard for her own welfare. When he thought of the misfortunes that could have befallen her, his anger surged again. “You got lucky, you know. How could you have been so foolish? Things could have been so much worse.”

  “But they weren’t.”

  He was going to throttle her. “They could have been.”

  “Let’s agree to disagree. Are you going to send word to Embry?”

  Controlling his temper, Courtland shook his head. “I won’t have to.”

  He heard her sharp exhale. They both knew what his answer meant. Lady Ravenna would be disgraced just from being in the West Indies on her own without a chaperone. If word got out about her travels on a ship with a bunch of rough-and-tumble sailors, her reputation would take an unrecoverable thrashing.

  But that was none of his business. Her virtue, or lack of it, wasn’t anyone’s concern, but he more than anybody knew the exacting nature of the ton’s rules. Upon her return, they would slice her to ribbons. Any hope for a suitable match would be lost. Courtland felt an expected stroke of pity for what she would face, even if she’d brought the storm upon herself.

  They fell into tense silence.

  “What would it take for you to forget you ever saw me?” she asked after a while.

  Courtland blinked—she couldn’t possibly be asking what he thought she was. “I couldn’t in good conscience do that.”

  “Yet you were willing to throw me in jail an hour ago.”

  “You weren’t you!” He glared at her.

  She cleared her throat. “Look, I’m serious. You know what awaits me if I’m sent back to London. What will it take? Money? You are welcome to whatever I have. My body? Though I don’t know what good it’ll do—it’s as frigid as they come, or so I’ve been told.”

  He ignored the bolt of pure lust at her wicked offer, even as her cheeks flamed. “I’ll protect you.”

  “How? Trust me, you can’t.”

  “Bloody hell, woman, I can’t let you go off on your own.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes, and sighed. “Embry would pulverize my bones to meal. My father would turn in his grave if he knew I abandoned an innocent girl to her own foolish devices.”

  “I’m not innocent or foolish.”

  “Your actions prove otherwise,” he said.

  “Then I’m sorry for this.”

  A noise that sounded uncannily like a cocking gun made his eyelids snap open. He was right—a loaded pocket pistol was pointed right at his face.

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  Author’s Note

  Hello, readers. I hope you enjoyed Sarani and Rhystan’s story! When I started this book, I knew I wanted to write a story that would incorporate some of my background (I’m a biracial West Indian-American woman, and have been in an interracial marriage for twenty years), but the journey I went on for this novel was more than I’d hoped for. The questions of identity and self-worth are themes that every woman struggles with—especially in areas of friendship, family, and romance. My heroine, Sarani, who changes her name to fit in when she travels to England, embodies that struggle. I changed my name when I went to college because my first name was difficult to pronounce. It stuck, and later on, I found myself torn between the two vastly different identities I had constructed. It took quite a long time for me to bridge the two. What I’ve found, however, is that the creation of separate personas isn’t isolated to cultural or racial differences. Many women have different faces they share with the world. We become who the world needs us to be at any given time, whether that is at home, at work, in relationships, or even with our own families, and sometimes, it’s hard to reconcile those facets of ourselves.

  Lakshmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi, also known as Manu, whom I mention in this novel as a friend of the heroine and who inspired me so much, was an actual Indian queen in the nineteenth century. Born in 1835, she lived in the princely state of Jhansi (inspiration for the fictional princely state of Joor) and was a fierce leader in the Indian Rebellion in 1857, fighting against British rule in India until her death in 1858. She was raised as a trained fighter, horsewoman, and independent thinker. When the maharaja she married (Gangadhar Rao) died, she became regent to their adopted son. However, the boy was not recognized as a true successor, and under the doctrine of lapse, the princely state was annexed to the British Crown. At a mere twenty-two years of age, Lakshmi Bai refused to surrender to the injustice and even pleaded her case to a court in London. As regent of Jhansi, she was at the forefront of the Indian Mutiny, and despite her bravery, she was killed in combat. In Solapur, Maharashtra, there’s a statue of her riding into battle with her son strapped to her back, sword raised and dauntless, which is just inspirational.

  That said, colonialism was a very f
raught period in history, and in no way do I want to make light of some of the terrible and unforgivable atrocities that occurred during this time. Having been born in a colonial country (Trinidad and Tobago got its independence from Britain in 1962) and having grown up on one of those sugar, cocoa, and coffee plantations that was taken over and farmed by locals and descendants of former indentured laborers, I have an intimate idea of the harm that was caused by colonization. My family might have risen out of the ashes of a violent, oppressed past, but we survived and it’s part of my history.

  Writing this book also showed me that there are so many facets to a diaspora. One POC’s experience will not reflect another’s. My experience as a woman of West Indian descent will not be the same as someone who was born or raised in the United States, England, India, or elsewhere. I saw this when working through nine sensitivity reads during revisions (three Indian-Americans, two Muslim-Americans, two British-Indians, one West Indian-American, and one African-American) and each reader had a different but equally relevant worldview. This means that as a writer, I might not be the perfect representation for some South Asian readers or other members of a diasporic community. I can only write from my own experience and through the knowledge of my own sphere of existence. History might be shared, but cultural identity is vastly intersectional, and I hope that more diverse voices will be called to the publishing table to represent the amazingly rich narratives in the world.

  As a result, I cover some hard ground in this story. Parts of it had to be raw because history is raw. But, you say, historical romance is fantasy. I mean…you aren’t wrong. There are nine million dukes, everyone has great hygiene and health, the aristocracy miraculously got their wealth in a non-oppressive way, and people had sex without care for pregnancy or protection. Suspension of disbelief is part of the canon of historical romance. That said, I felt it would be a disservice to my biracial heroine to be disingenuous about some of the ingrained behaviors of the period. Being a character of color would simply be window dressing if she acted and behaved like everyone else. While I could have taken a less problematic route, sanitizing history wasn’t my goal. That was a creative choice…to go a touch less fantasy for the sake of the story. I truly hope it made for a deeper reading experience.