Harlequin Historical May 2020--Box Set 1 of 2

by Sophia James

  Left alone, Simeon saw the utter ridiculousness in this whole situation. Why the hell did he not simply state his refusal to marry her and leave or, failing that, threaten her with the exposure of her unwise visit alone to his town house? It was the look in her eyes, he was to think later, an injured desperation that made him hesitate. The secrets were back, too, and the fear. He knew full well what people looked like when they had very little left to lose.

  ‘Please…’ She gestured, her arm visibly shaking, and because of this he followed her into a room, situated on one side of the entrance hall, that was small but tidy.

  Shutting the door behind him, she leant against the portal, reminding him forcibly of their first encounter.

  ‘I am sorry, Mr Morgan.’

  Her voice was soft, uncertain, and he suddenly fancied her on the edge of tears.

  ‘Sorry for all your lies and treachery?’ He waited until she nodded. ‘Take them back, then. Renounce your ridiculous inaccuracies and we shall both go our separate ways. We will never need to see each other again.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Athelridge Hall is my family home. We cannot be without it.’

  ‘I will gift it back to you, then. As soon as I return to town.’

  ‘No.’ This was said in a different tone. One far more strident. ‘It is permanence I want.’

  He could not believe it. He could not even consider that she might stick to such a course given his obvious dislike of her.

  ‘You would force a marriage to take place between us that holds nothing save revulsion on my behalf? I do not wish for this union, Miss Worthington, in any form or any shape. I would pay handsomely to be rid of the hold you feel you have upon me and that will be the end of it. It is what I want. A complete and utter separation, a severance.’ He could not make it plainer. ‘I won’t marry you under any circumstance.’

  ‘But I think you may have to.’ Her voice was quiet, edged with a kind of unbelievable certainty.

  Was she mad? Was she beautiful on the outside and utterly rotten within? God, it was getting worse by the moment.

  ‘There are rules by which all men must abide in our society, Mr Morgan, and you would lose much should you rail against them.’

  ‘Lose what?’

  He could feel his heartbeat quicken. The remnants of his recent illness, he supposed. He had been sick for over a fortnight and her lies had offered no respite from stress.

  ‘Business relies on competence and honour. It is how the system functions.’ Her voice was silken. ‘Any divergence from that causes disturbance.’

  ‘You are threatening me?’

  ‘I do not wish to, but if I must…’

  ‘Are you serious?’ he whispered then, the incredulity in his question answered when she nodded.

  ‘I should not impede you, Mr Morgan, in anything you might want after our marriage. I should only be a help to you. I have told you of this and once again I reiterate how much I mean to stand by such a pledge.’

  At this she turned, the cloak tight around her thinness, but the door had opened and the old man he had seen before stood there, a small gun in hand.

  ‘You need to leave. Now.’

  His wrinkled hands were shaking and Simeon heard Adelia Worthington gasp even as the blaze of a bullet seared across the room, pain catching him in the side of his head.

  Then he was falling. The last thing he remembered was her moving forward, her arms held out to him as if in infirmity she might finally claim him, all arguments sealed in the touch of her skin, a ragged nail raking down the top of his right hand and drawing blood.

  * * *

  Was he dead?

  Had Cranston killed him? The old servant was speaking now, telling her something of Simeon Morgan being a threat to her and of how he was only trying to help and had not meant to touch the trigger at all. The gun lay on the floor, the smell of fresh-lit powder in the air, the seconds between horror and disbelief multiplying.

  Her first finger pressed into the skin at his throat and she felt a pulse. Thready and fast.

  Undoing his necktie, she laid him down, propping his feet on a pillow and loosening the buttons on his waistcoat. The wound on the top of his head was bleeding profusely and, using the cloth under the teapot to try to wipe it away, she was relieved when she saw the bullet had left only a shallow runnel in his scalp. It had not pierced in further and there was no sign of a deadlier reality. She pushed down harder on the graze.

  ‘He needs fresh air.’ She said this as much to herself as she did to Cranston. Simeon Morgan was still, the sweat moistening his pale face easily discernible. ‘Here, Cranston, you must hold this and press. The bleeding needs to stop.’

  Reaching for the bell, she crossed to the window and threw open the glass, a strong northerly breeze rushing into the room. Mr Morgan would live—already his colour was returning a little and he was stirring.

  Shooing her elderly servant away after finding whisky, Adelia poured a good slug of it into a crystal glass before swallowing a substantial amount herself straight from the mouth of the bottle.

  She needed fortification.

  If Simeon Morgan had died, that would have been the end of everything. Her father would have won.

  She saw he was awake and watching her as she wiped the liquor from her mouth. Most unladylike. Barely civil. He was staring at her with such disgust she had to look away.

  ‘You are…a drunk…like…your…father?’

  ‘Hardly.’

  His words were slurred, slightly disjointed, and the bruise on his forehead was swelling already with an alarming rapidity, dark clots of blood beneath the skin.

  Then his hands were there, fending her off, trying to put a distance between them.

  Adelia felt like crying. She felt like lying down beside him and simply giving up. But she could not. Instead, she slipped a plain gold ring off her own hand and placed it over his smallest finger because she could hear voices outside.

  ‘My troth stands,’ she said in the sternest voice she could manage and rose.

  He was trying to sit up now, but was shaking badly. Then, having been fetched by Cranston, a groom and two Morgan men in livery filed in to give him a hand up. Simeon Morgan’s vulnerability was more attractive than his bravado and she nearly blurted out a further apology, but she held it in even as he was half-carried out.

  A moment later there was silence save for the quiet footsteps of Mrs Cranston.

  ‘What will happen now, Miss Adelia?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I have no idea, though perhaps your husband might put his head down for the next few weeks and lie low if any strangers turn up here. If Mr Morgan wishes for retribution…’ She could not finish the sentence.

  The trouble was she couldn’t even contemplate what to do next. Was Simeon Morgan more badly hurt than she had imagined? Would he be back with the law at his heels and revenge in his heart? Could they all be implicated in an attempted murder case? Disclosure and protections. They came in so many forms and in so many ways she was exhausted by the demands of them. Another fight? A further battle?

  ‘You are too alone.’ There was shock in Mrs Cranston’s eyes at all that had transpired. ‘You shoulder too much by yourself, Miss Adelia. It is not right.’

  Adelia smiled, trying to reassure the woman as well as trying to steady her own racing heart.

  ‘I am fine.’

  Her hands were fastened under her cloak and she hated how they shook. Her father would have chided her at such a weakness even as he shouted and hit her.

  But Mr Simeon Morgan had not struck out even given such extreme provocation. He had already passed that test. Picking up the gun at her feet, she opened a small trapdoor built into the foot of the far wall and dropped it inside. Better to have no sign of the thing if Simeon Mor
gan returned to accuse them. That was at least one thing that she was sure of.

  The quiet tears still falling down Mrs Cranston’s cheeks shocked her, too, for the old servant was a woman who seldom cried.

  Outside, she could hear a team of horses begin to move off, the jangle of bits and stirrups, the turning of wheels on the stones. A large and well-appointed conveyance fit for a fast trip down to London. She prayed that the motion would not kill him and the bleeding would not begin again as she grasped her golden cross in hand.

  * * *

  Simeon leaned back and closed his eyes. The movement of the carriage made him feel ill, but so did the throb at the side of his head. Carefully, he felt around the area, deducing a swelling lump under his fingers, spongy and hot.

  Was he going to be sick? His stomach heaved and sweat beaded on his upper lip. A small gold ring on his littlest finger glinted in the light.

  ‘Hell.’

  He fought for calm and equanimity.

  Nothing was as it should have been, he thought, for when Adelia Worthington had rushed to find the whisky her cloak had fallen back and he saw she had been wearing trousers. Filthy trousers, marked with dirt and clay, her feet bootless, too-large woollen socks darned in many places.

  She wanted his money. No, she needed it. It was for his fortune she had picked him out and tied a proposal to her father’s near bankruptcy. His world turned.

  She was like a spider setting her webs and reeling him in, stuck like prey to the strange workings of her mind. He’d seen her taking the whisky straight from the bottle when he had awoken, no small sips either, the overflow running down her chin and on to her clothes.

  A drunk and crazy woman with a treacherous and dangerous beauty. A Catholic, too, for the picture of Jesus on the wall with his crown of thorns had been bedecked with a rosary.

  Was there no end to her defects?

  Outside he could see the traffic on the northern road building like it always did at this time of day. There were people walking, talking and laughing. A summer Wednesday, the weather warm, the sun peeping through the thinning clouds. A dog barking.

  Inside, he felt frozen, motionless. He felt as though his blood had stopped running and his life had ground to a halt, incapable of thought, powerless to fashion his future in the way he wished it to go.

  He shook his head and stopped. Even the slightest of movements made him dizzy and he cursed the old servant with his shaking fingers and fear. He was certain the man had not meant the thing to go off, but even knowing that was of little comfort. The house gave the impression it was only just standing and if everything was broken within it, then Miss Adelia Worthington was by far the most broken of them all.

  He wished he was in bed with Teddy, the sun slanting in on their naked bodies, nothing save ecstasy and soft physical touches on the agenda. His mother’s desperate marriages sat in his mind as well, both ill-mannered and ill-tempered alliances that had brought with them only disappointment and violence.

  The running threads of his past unravelled. He’d been so careful in the interim years to weave the pieces of bitterness and fear into a perfect and faultless whole. No one had ever been allowed a peek into all the things he had once been and that was why marriage and its accompanying intimacies had been such a mystery to him and something he himself had never desired to experience again.

  He did not want to have someone so unremittingly close to him, close enough to see gaps in the persona he presented to everyone whom he did business with. Not just business, either. In his personal relationships a void had always existed, filled with the past.

  A child of the streets and a boy who was thrust into the hands of men with no care for him. A vagabond, homeless and ill fed, all the disparate patches in his clothing duplicated inside his skin.

  His head ached and the thin golden ring on his little finger seemed to draw in towards the bone, cutting off his circulation.

  * * *

  A day later Simeon received a letter that left him reeling. Lord Grey, an aristocrat who was interested in investing in the proposed railway outside Birmingham, had sent his congratulations on his forthcoming wedding.

  Just when he’d imagined that the situation could not get any worse it had. He’d seriously thought about simply refusing Miss Worthington’s ridiculous blackmail and seeing what the consequences would be, but now when the said consequences were staring him so baldly in the face it was a different story.

  Money was safety to him, pure and simple, the bolster between who he had been and who he had become with graft and sacrifice and sweat and blood.

  He could leave England, he supposed, simply pick up and disappear. But what of Flora Rountree? He’d been bought up lost between adults who valued neither responsibility nor honour. If he departed for the Americas, he would be subjecting the little girl to the same uncertainties that he himself had known as an eight-year-old. No home. No safety. No mercy.

  No, he just could not do it. He would have to marry her, Miss Adelia Worthington, with all her faults and peculiarities, with her drunkenness and her lies and threats. There was nothing else for it. He would set up a life that was as separate as the one she had promised him, a wife without tenure save for that in name only.

  The very thought made him sick, because it was exactly what his mother had done all those years ago, married his father because of her pregnancy, and look at what had happened there. She’d been a girl from a good family who had made a decision that would affect the rest of her life, a woman who could read and write and who had once loved books. His mother and father had barely had a year of marriage together before they had broken up, and whereas other women in her position might simply have admitted their error and thrown themselves back on the good will of their family, she had not. No, she had pressed on with him beside her and married again and they had fallen further and further in grace, the academic lessons he had treasured for the first ten years of his life becoming less common and food and shelter less certain. She’d been eaten up with bitter regret and rampant unhappiness, finally dying at thirty-five from syphilis, a disease that took flesh and teeth until there was very little left of her save the longing for a taste of opium pills coated in varnish and mercury.

  Then his mother’s uncle, James Morgan, a man of principle and learning, had found him and taken him from the streets to his own home in the north of Manchester, worlds away from the poverty and hopelessness of Angel Meadow. Without Uncle Jamie his life would have turned out so differently and Simeon had missed him terribly each and every day since his death six years ago.

  God, what would have Jamie thought of him now, caught in this conundrum with Adelia Worthington and trying to make sense of it? He shook his head hard and made a decision.

  There was nothing he could do save to sign the marriage contract, temper it with conditions and grin and bear it. With luck he could still live the life he was used to. He had to at least hope for that.

  His first wife, Susan Downing, had been a poor choice, too. She had married him one day and he had known by the next one that their relationship was doomed. The melancholy she had hidden well was suddenly all he saw and any attempts at intimacy were met with a cloying sadness. She’d died from too much drink barely a year after they had married. At the time he’d felt only numbness, but later the guilt had settled in. A further fault in him. Another punishment.

  He pulled his thoughts back to the now. The doctor had arrived yesterday afternoon and looked over the wound on his head, proclaiming both luck that he was not dead and disbelief that this whole thing had happened in the first place. Today the eye nearest the wound had darkened again, yellow and red bruises joining the blackness and swelling. He could barely see out of it.

  Every person who had seen his wound had pressed him to notify the constabulary and demand redress, but the thought of the old deaf servant being thrown into prison simply for defending
his mistress’s honour held little satisfaction and so he’d left it. Cranston had looked absolutely petrified of retribution and the old woman behind him, presumably his wife, had been sobbing loudly.

  Hell and damnation. The squalor of his early life had been so long gone he’d thought never to see such need again and yet here it was returned in force, the headache he suffered today underlining the very guts of it all.

  Crossing to the cabinet near the window, he removed a bottle and a glass and poured himself a generous drink. The doctor had said it was unwise to touch alcohol after shock, but right now he needed the sharpness taken off his pain and the aged Rémy Martin should do that nicely.

  His stepbrother had died of a knife wound, caught between the anger of warring gangs. There one moment and gone the next, the lesson of impermanence and danger indelibly scored into his brain.

  His mother had not even cried as she had handed him the news, instead reaching for her pills without a word and sliding into unconsciousness. It had been left to him to see Geordie blessed and buried—without any ready money, he’d needed to resort to other forms of payment.

  Memories buried by necessity began to well up and he took another decent swallow of the cognac, smiling even as he did so. Perhaps he and his mother were more alike than he had thought after all, their vices different, but their methods of coping exactly the same.

  Sorrow claimed him and shame followed. Like a pack of cards, his life seemed to be falling around his feet in pieces.

  CHAPTER THREE

  She knew he hated her.

  She knew he was furious.

  She knew by every single piece of correspondence sent from his lawyers that he was fighting this sham of a betrothal with every armament in his very extensive artillery, stridently and desperately. If she was a different woman, she might have simply let him go, cut him loose, a fish on a hook that had pulled her overboard with such force she was now struggling for her own life, for air, for ever. But she was not that woman and she hadn’t been for such a long time.

  Oh, granted, she should never have lied about things in the first place. But after that original unsettling visit to his town house she had taken stock of her options and seen that there was, in reality, only the one.