Harlequin Historical May 2020--Box Set 1 of 2

by Sophia James

  Most women of his acquaintance would never have been happy with an inexperienced junior maid, yet Adelia seemed to have no qualms whatsoever.

  ‘Who did your hair in London when you were here for the Season?’

  ‘I did it myself generally. I kept to simple styles.’

  ‘Was your father with you much?’

  ‘No. He wasn’t a family man. But I think you know what he was like, Mr Morgan, so that truth cannot come as a surprise to you.’

  ‘Did your mother not mind his…dalliances?’

  ‘She is a Scottish woman who much prefers the quiet of Athelridge Hall over anything else society can offer. I am sure you must have already formed some opinion about her character, as well.’

  ‘She seemed fearful.’

  ‘People without certainty in their lives often are.’

  ‘Unlike you?’

  ‘I have always found it is easier to be…more direct.’

  He laughed at that. ‘Your baldly given deceit about your father giving me Athelridge Hall as your dowry being a case in point?’

  She blushed, but stood very still.

  ‘That was wrong of me and I am sorry for it. Usually I do not resort to lying.’

  ‘And your use of my drunkenness on the night of our wedding?’

  ‘You came to me, Mr Morgan. When you fell over I had few options.’

  ‘Apart from scrambling into bed behind me and pretending we had consummated our marriage?’

  ‘Annulling our marriage because of non-consummation would be as damaging to your reputation as anything else might be. Better to have a wife far from London who would make no fuss at all about anything you should wish to do.’

  ‘The carte blanche you promised me?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Did such a policy make your mother happy?’

  ‘It did not, but then I am not my mother.’

  ‘So your sole purpose of pressing for this marriage of ours was to keep your family content?’

  ‘Put like that, I suppose you could say it was.’

  ‘A sacrifice for the greater good?’

  ‘And one to escape the obvious bad.’

  ‘Like homelessness?’

  ‘If you have never faced such a thing, you may not understand the difficulties inherent in such a state, Mr Morgan.’

  ‘But I have, Adelia, and many a time, too.’

  ‘When you were young? Society paints a picture of a childhood that was hardly easy.’ She looked interested, her green eyes focused fully upon him.

  ‘I found that the bottom of the barrel had its advantages for any small slice of luck or fortune can only lead one way. Up.’

  ‘So you did not simply surrender to your fate?’

  * * *

  Simeon Morgan seemed taken aback by her question and, instead of answering, he turned to finish his drink, looking outside the window at the trees opposite bending in the breeze of an early autumn dusk.

  She had never had such a conversation with anyone like this before, full of innuendo, secrets and some vague anger, but underplayed by a truth that was startling. He had allowed her to see into his life, into his difficulties, because she had done the same. Was this a pathway that would allow them some growth? As it stood they’d always been balanced on the opposite sides of the spectrum. His mistress. Her family. Her need. His bounty. Her place in society and his place out of it. Opposites in nearly every way she could imagine and yet…

  With the lights shining on the darkness of his hair, she saw a hue of a deep and startling red, the darker tone of his skin alluding to ancestors from sunnier climes than that of a cold and pasty England. The jacket he wore stretched across his shoulders, outlining the muscles beneath. Not a sedentary man, she thought, and not a weak one. She remembered back to the first time they had met, the sheen on his bare chest and his trousers moulded around masculine flesh in a way that had sent colour to her cheeks then, as the mere memory of it did now.

  He was not vain like those lords she had been introduced to in society, full of their own self-importance and their rather feminine beauty. No, Simeon Morgan would run circles around all the frail and delicate men of note with his menace, his fierce intelligence and his truths. She wanted to help him make his railway empire. She wanted the luck he hadn’t been born with to continue and the fact that he had asked for her assistance made her feel powerful after so many years of vulnerability and hopelessness.

  Although she might not expect love from this marriage, mutual respect lay in a good second place. Her own father had not respected her mother and look at the catastrophe there. For the first time in months a small worm of hope wriggled to the surface, an optimism that Adelia had not expected from such a betrothal, and the potential to at least be needed was a confidence that delighted her.

  The wine was doing its work, too, softening worry and alleviating concerns.

  ‘Society holds its own patterns of control over those who were not born into the ruling classes, Mr Morgan, but I always thought that such authority had its limits. People like you worry the aristocracy for they resent the equal status of an intelligent and rising merchant class. Instead, they wish for the old status quo and the continuation to rule unthreatened themselves, despite their many shortcomings.’

  He frowned at that and gave her answer. ‘Change can be productive for everyone should the aristocracy loosen their grasp on desperation and listen to what is being said.’

  ‘Which is…?’

  She was thrilled with the way he sought her opinions, giving his own back in the manner that his past had informed him. He was not condescending or patronising by any means for the traditional boundaries between classes were being eclipsed at a rapid rate and he knew it.

  ‘Every man deserves a sense of social place that relies on respect.’

  ‘It is my opinion Lord Grey would hold to that.’

  ‘But there are many who refuse to.’

  ‘Because they are scared?’

  ‘Well, change is always confusing and it takes time to accept it.’

  ‘But you don’t have that? Time, I mean, for the building of your railway?’

  He laughed then, loudly.

  ‘With you at my side I might manage it.’ He held up the bottle of wine in a silent offer of more, but she shook her head.

  She needed all her wits around a man like this, a man who kept changing on her, one moment distant and the next congenial. One moment a product of his upbringing and the next a captain of industry who was nobody’s servant. He spoke with wisdom and honesty and was not unsettled by the fact that she returned her advice in the exact same way. He did not stifle her or reprimand her. He did not bore her, either.

  The clock in the corner struck the hour of nine, reminding them of the passing of time and the oncoming night. The real world crept back in, the problems and the reality of what they were to each other. Or weren’t.

  ‘You must be tired after your journey. I will bid you goodnight, Adelia. I hope my housekeeper has provided you with all that is needed.’

  ‘She has.’

  The awkwardness was back and the detachment. With a small tip of his head he was gone, disappeared into one of the many rooms of this vast house, vanished from her.

  Her left hand lay on the table and her wedding ring caught the light.

  Not yours, it said. Be careful.

  Such changing whims of fortune sent her head spinning, the wine strong and potent.

  ‘Just like Simeon Morgan himself,’ she whispered and stood, a servant coming forward to help her from her chair. Tomorrow was another day and she would face it as it came. Tonight, although she was exhausted, she also felt alive and animated and the distant turmoil she was more accustomed to was a long way from here.

  She walked back up the grand staircase and wondered who t
he portraits lining the walls were of, grand people rendered with an excellence in tempera and oils. Perhaps they had come with the house when he had purchased it and he had simply left them there, a replacement for all his missing family and the history he had never had.

  ‘You. My family,’ he had said, and she felt the warmth of this statement settle in around her heart.

  * * *

  She dreamed that night of her father.

  The gun was pointed at her, the dark stare of death and his finger on the trigger. She smelt the alcohol on his breath and saw the scratches she had left across his cheek, deep and weeping, from defending herself as he had lashed out at her with his fists.

  ‘You’ve never been easy ever since you were a child with your set opinions and your arrogance and all the beatings I gave you made no damn difference.’

  ‘Respect was all I have ever asked for from you because I understood that there could never be more.’ She resisted adding the word Papa. It had been so long since she had called him that.

  She felt the bruises where he had hit out at her intransigence, felt the wounds inside, too, from a lifetime of living with a man who’d always hated her. She stood there, daring him to pull the trigger, strong with fury and bitterness and hurt. She did not look away. For so many times and over so many years her father had been a violent and brutal man, punishing her with his fists and his anger, making her understand that he was to be obeyed in everything and at all times. There was no sense in him, no wisdom, no fairness that she might have understood. It seemed every word or expression he did not like was another reason to discipline her.

  But the use of a firearm to threaten her was a new thing. ‘I hope the husband you finally manage to procure will force some sense into your stupid head, though God knows who would ever want you with your ridiculously high standards of behaviour. It’s why your Season was such a failure and all the damned money I spent on that rigmarole went to nothing. They could see it, those young men, see the rot inside you…’

  She laughed at that because diffidence was the only weapon that might dissipate his anger and because suddenly she simply did not care.

  If he killed her, then that was that, but if he didn’t she could not see how they might go on from here.

  ‘Your mother at least learnt what her place in the world was. You, on the other hand, have opposed me every single moment you could, you have questioned my authority as the head of the house and thrown it back in my face. You are a lying bitch with all your criticisms of me and I am sick to death of your righteous and holier-than-thou ways.’

  ‘Just as I am sick of you, Lionel, and I wish to God that you were not my father.’

  As his grip and the direction of the gun altered she drew in a breath and when the gun went off all she saw was empty space where his face had been one second before. Her words had killed him, Adelia thought then, and a guilt unlike any other had risen inside her. She had finally told him exactly what she had thought of him and this was the result.

  A hand pulled her back into the night, into the room, into the now, and her husband was leaning across her, dark and frowning.

  ‘You were shouting out. I thought…’

  He stopped, and she scrambled up, ruching the sheets, rearranging her shift, panting in fright. She couldn’t stop shaking, her breath coming in gasps and the light spots obscuring her vision as they always did after a nightmare. He had her head down in her lap before she could stop him, his fingers threading through her unbound hair, the sweat on her scalp a damp coldness.

  ‘Just breathe slowly, don’t hurry it.’

  She did as he said, her thready heartbeat slowing, the dizziness diminishing and the images of death fading. Shame flooded into the spaces where fright had lingered, leaving only humiliation. Shaking him off, she tried to find her inner reserves of strength.

  ‘I am sorry for waking you.’

  ‘You didn’t. I was reading.’

  Her eyes went to the clock. Two thirty. Outside, the darkness was bathed in silence. Even the wind was quiet. She watched as he pulled a chair out from the small writing armoire and sat down on it, his long legs stretched in front of him. The collar of his shirt was loosened and he wore neither necktie nor waistcoat.

  ‘Do you often have bad dreams?’

  This was asked simply.

  ‘Sometimes.’ She did not wish to tell him that she always felt so scared she could barely take in air. She did not say that for so many years she had not slept properly just in case…

  ‘You called out for me to help you. You used my name.’

  A flush of horror stained her cheeks.

  ‘You also cried out to your father to stop.’

  This was a more complex statement and deserved an answer.

  ‘I was there when he shot himself and there was blood. Everywhere.’

  ‘That was the same day I met you for the first time, yet you didn’t behave like a woman who had just seen her father blow his brains out.’

  ‘Because I was glad when he did it. I thought he meant to take me with him, you see, and all I could feel was utter relief and then guilt.’ The truth flooded from her, unstoppable.

  ‘Dear God.’

  She almost smiled at his blasphemy, but didn’t. He could not want to be landed with all these problems, a woman who had tricked him into marriage and now was turning into someone with a growing set of personal disasters behind her. She remembered the beautiful woman whom he had brought to their wedding. Perhaps she was someone he had a great love for. Alexander had certainly intimated it to be so. Perhaps her own insistence on a union between them had ruined Simeon Morgan’s life in a lot more ways than she had thought of. Was she still ruining it? She was hardly a prize and yet here he was in the middle of the night, trying to comfort her.

  With care she began to speak because it might be her only chance to say this. ‘There are so many things that we each of us do not know about the other, Mr Morgan, but perhaps there could be civility at least in our relations? Enough civility to make our situation liveable?’ She tried to imbue a lighter note into her words so that he might agree and was pleased to see him nod his head.

  ‘Problems always seem worse at night, Adelia. Remember that. Will you be able to sleep now?’ The question was softly asked.

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ She bit down on her lower lip in the attempt at a smile. More lies.

  He stood then and walked to the door, but once there turned and waited as if he was trying to formulate exactly what he might say.

  ‘I do not allow my past to define me and I did not have an easy childhood. I would suggest you try to do exactly the same.’

  When he was gone she thought about his advice and what it meant for her. For so long she had been scared to live. For so many years her sole purpose had been the protection of her family. Finding food, providing wood for warmth, believing that it would get better if only they waited long enough.

  Civility.

  She rolled the word on her tongue and felt the lack in it. Simeon Morgan had allowed Athelridge Hall a generous stipend. She liked talking to him. She enjoyed the way he looked at the world. His honesty surprised her.

  Her fingers stroked across the sheets and stilled. If she was truthful she wanted a lot more than simply conversation. She wanted what he had shown her that first time when his tongue had skimmed across her nipple and made her feel things she never had before.

  Civility.

  Such a formal and stiff word.

  Almost on a par with pity.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Simeon strode back to his room and sat looking out of his window. He felt keyed up and furious, all the things that his wife had told him weighing on his mind.

  Perhaps it explained who she was and what she was. Hard-hearted. Cold. Single-minded. Deceitful. She’d had to be all those things simply to survive. She’d
probably had no one to stand in her corner in the draughty halls of Athelridge Hall. Certainly her mother would have been no help at all and her sister was too young.

  She’d arrived here in London alone, without even a maid. That should tell him something. Her bag had been small and she had eaten the offered evening meal with the sort of relish that echoed of true hunger. Other thoughts gelled. What sort of a life had she truly lived? Where were all the gowns he had imagined she had accumulated from her last spectacular Season? She had known she would be going to a dinner party when she had come here, so why had she not thought to bring suitable attire?

  The gowns were gone. That thought came next. Given that she hadn’t had the money to pay for the London accommodation for her Season, the clothing would have brought in something to tide her family over until she’d married him.

  Her Season had been a failure so he could only imagine how her father might have reacted to that. Lionel Worthington was a man who would have been quick to give his opinion and Catherine Rountree had implied he was handy with his fists.

  He remembered the bruises on Adelia when she had come to him that first time, fresh bruises applied with force. She’d said she’d thought her father might blow her brains out and could imagine her fright and relief when he didn’t. She’d come to see him the same night because to wait any more might have negated the purpose, her father’s death untimely and inopportune.

  Tom Brady had said the family had kept it quiet for a few days and he could well see why. She’d needed time to find a husband who would see them safe and because he had the papers to Athelridge Hall he was the first and obvious choice. Suicide was against the law of God and, once the title went and the Worthington finances were uncovered, she knew there would be little hope in snagging any lord of the realm.

  The safety of her family, the retention of her home and the buffer of a man who was wealthy to boot. No wonder she had come to see him and had not been frightened off when he’d told her to undress.