Also by Connie Brockway
HISTORICALS
Anything for Love
A Dangerous Man
As You Desire
All Through the Night
My Dearest Enemy
McClairen’s Isle: The Passionate One
McClairen’s Isle: The Reckless One
McClairen’s Isle: The Ravishing One
The Bridal Season
Once Upon a Pillow, with Christina Dodd
Bridal Favors
The Rose Hunters: My Seduction
The Rose Hunters: My Pleasure
The Rose Hunters: My Surrender
So Enchanting
The Golden Season
The Lady Most Likely, with Christina Dodd and Eloisa James
The Other Guy’s Bride
The Lady Most Willing, with Christina Dodd and Eloisa James
No Place for a Dame
CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE
Hot Dish
Skinny Dipping
ANTHOLOGIES
Outlaw Love, “Heaven with a Gun”
My Scottish Summer, “Lassie, Go Home”
The True Love Wedding Dress, “Glad Rags”
Cupid Cats, “Cat, Scratch Fever”
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 1994, 2013 by Connie Brockway
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
First published by Dell Publishing a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. in 1994.
This edition published by Montlake Romance in 2013, Seattle
www.apub.com
ISBN-13: 9781477849088
ISBN-10: 1477849084
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Illustrated by Dana Ashton France
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013911409
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
About the Author
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Chapter 1
July 1814
Lady Catherine “Cat” Sinclair was hot. The heavy blue worsted habit she had donned in hopes of making a good impression had dark, wet rings beneath her arms. Her hair hung in a dusty, fast-uncoiling knot on the damp nape of her neck. Sweat trickled down her back.
She was also lost. After two days of listening to her great-aunt Hecuba read “bowdlerized” Defoe, Cat had escaped their shabby hired coach. Commandeering a sidesaddle from the last posting house, she had lit off on one of the outriders’ steeds, only to find herself wandering the high Dover moors without any clue as to where she was. Now her London-bred horse was skittering nervously away from yet another group of blasted sheep emerging from a break in the hedgerow.
No one appeared to live on this high, windswept land. No one, that is, until she saw a lone herder half-buried in a nearby thicket. With a sigh of relief, Cat spurred her mare toward him. She was a third of the distance before she discovered he was half-naked. Quickly she reined in her horse.
Cat had seen men without their shirts before. She was, after all, the eldest in a family of three brothers and two sisters. But her brothers’ slender torsos in no way prepared her for this man. His was nothing like their slight adolescent forms.
He was simply enormous. He was tall, broad, and deep, from his impossibly wide shoulders to the long, thick thews of his thighs straining the fabric of his workman’s pants. She called out; he didn’t so much as glance back at her. His back, gleaming with sweat and streaked with grime, bulged with muscle as he attempted to pull a large, anxious ewe from the thicket of briar in which she had entangled herself.
Cat called again. And waited.
“Fellow! You there!” She called more loudly, certain he would have answered had he heard her. He remained firmly oblivious. Abruptly, Cat realized the brute was deliberately ignoring her. “You there! Man!” Mongrel, jackass, toad, she added silently, edging the mare closer. “I’m speaking to you, fellow!”
She was quite near him now. Close enough to see that his hair was shockingly long and black, sprinkled with dust—or gray—and curling damply on the wide nape of his neck. Still he continued to ignore her, linking his arms around the girth of the ewe and heaving against the purchase her front quarters had gained in the ground.
Determined to be dismissed no longer, Cat stretched out an elegantly booted foot and nudged him in his sweat-slicked side with her toe. At the same moment the ewe lost her foothold in the thicket, and with a grunt, the giant wrenched her free.
The momentum threw him back into Cat’s mount. It proved too much for the poor mare. She reared back, pitching Cat forward in the saddle. Cat yanked back on the reins, trying to bring her mount’s head down. The horse lunged, kicking out her hindquarters, flinging Cat halfway from the saddle. Her hat flew off and her hair tumbled down over her eyes as she clutched fistfuls of mane, fighting to regain her seat. As suddenly as she had startled, the mare went still.
Gingerly Cat edged herself back into the saddle and, with a shaking hand, adjusted her bonnet. The man was holding the reins tight up under her mount’s mouth.
His face was as bold as his figure: a squarely cut chin, cleft and darkened nearly blue by what looked to be several days’ growth of beard, wide lips set in a hard line, and black eyes gleaming dangerously from behind a fringe of blacker lashes.
“Now, what the bloody hell do you want?” The mare shied, but a mere flex of his huge wrist quieted her.
His tone stiffened Cat’s back. She raised her chin. “You will inform me as to the whereabouts of the Montrose estate.”
“The what?”
“Mister Thomas Montrose’s estate.”
“Estate?” the great beast of a man asked, so slowly and in so perplexed a manner that Cat wondered if he might be mentally deficient.
“Yes. Thomas Montrose. Lives somewhere hereabout. In a big house. A nice house. Do you know where the nice, big house is?”
“Why?”
“Why?” Mentally deficient or not, Cat had had just about enough. Her temper, suspect at best and tested by her journey, was stretched beyond its limits. “Because, you great unwashed Vulcan, you Minotauran horror, I wish to go there!”
His gypsy-dark eyes narrowed between a thicket of sooty lashes. “Why?”
“The devil take you. Because I am… I am his, er, niece. Now do you understand?”
A sneer slowly replaced his scowl and he turned the mare’s head so that Cat’s foot was caught between the wall of his hard chest and her saddle. Even through the boot leather she could feel his h
eat. She attempted to twist her leg free from the disturbing contact, but he only grinned up at her and reached out his other hand to capture the lip on the back of her saddle. Her leg was trapped, bracketed by the long, oiled bronze sinews of his arms. She refused to amuse him with her discomfort and glared defiantly down into his dark face.
“Thomas Montrose does not have any nieces, you little baggage,” he said in a deep, velvety bass. “I should know, for you see, I am Thomas Montrose. Now, who the bloody hell are you?”
Thomas Montrose released the mare’s reins, stepping back. The young woman with the tumbled russet hair and peculiar gray-green eyes was looking at him with something akin to horror. She did not even seem to notice he was no longer imprisoning her leg. It was a tact that had done much to quell the imperious manner in which she had spoken to him, as though he should have just dropped the confounded sheep and scuttled to her knee, doffing an imaginary cap as he awaited her command.
She was eyeing him now with distinct distaste, and Thomas was uncomfortably reminded that he was not only unclad but filthy. His embarrassment irritated him, and he inhaled deeply, marshaling his temper. That he had to marshal his temper at all further angered him. He had spent the better part of the past year successfully maneuvering the most difficult of Russian, Austrian, and Prussian political adversaries. And he had done so with characteristic aplomb.
Now, with a few vitriolic gibes and a lift of a dark, arched brow, this haughty, tousled wench threatened his much-vaunted composure. It was intolerable. And who the devil was she at any rate?
When she had first stuttered out her ridiculous demand to know where he lived, he had assumed she was attempting to pass herself off as his by-blow by one of his former mistresses. He was grimly amused she would have thought it could work. She was at the least twenty-one, which would have had him bedding wenches at—what? Twelve?
But it was another thing entirely to claim she was his half brother’s get. Philip did not now nor had ever had any of Thomas’s carnal proclivities and it angered him that she would paint his half brother with the same brush. She was regarding him with open dismay. He waited for her to speak, the notion that she would shortly demand he produce birth records to confirm his claim causing his lips to curve ruefully.
She appeared to come to a decision, one that did not make her happy, though she managed to summon up a sort of smile. She inclined her head as politely as though they were being introduced at some fashionable town house fete rather then on the moors of Devon, he half-naked and she with her long, burnished hair falling about her shoulders.
“Thomas Montrose, sir. I am Lady Catherine Sinclair.”
“Yes?” His tenuous hold on the situation dissolved further. Was he supposed to know who the hell Catherine Sinclair was?
“Your half brother, Philip, has these last years been married to my mother. Lady Ringtree.”
Philip’s wife! The beautiful and much-married Lady Ringtree. He had known she had children. Lots of children, if memory served correct. By lots of different fathers. That fact had not deterred his older brother, who had taken leave of his scholarly senses and proceeded to shock established society by marrying one of its brighter stars. And not with the discreet rectitude one might expect when the bride was embarking on her fifth trip down the aisle, but with all the bells and whistles. It had been an elaborate, sumptuous affair. And yes, Thomas did seem to remember several skinny girl children flitting about. This must be one of them.
“And what might I do for you, Lady Catherine?”
She drew in a deep breath. “I have come on an important mission, sir. I have brought something of value to you. Not only to yourself, but to the literary world at large. Indeed, its value is so great, I felt I could not entrust its keeping to just anyone and have brought it to you myself. I have found your brother’s opus.” Though she seemed to be trying to engender a tone of breathless awe, the words came out as if by rote, trailing off in an increasingly unconvincing tone.
“Yes?” he prompted, intrigued in spite of himself. This must be some ploy to appropriate money from him. Opus? Philip never wrote about anything but birds. Yes, the chit was undoubtedly going to ask him for funds. From the preamble he had no doubt the touch would extend into many figures. He acquiesced silently, if cynically. His sense of family was strong, and Philip was his closest living relative. Thomas loved him deeply and loyally, even if he, too, had looked askance at Philip’s chosen bride. If Philip’s adopted family was in dun territory, Thomas would rectify it.
“Yes, I have no doubt,” her voice lowered to a mumble, “I have acted for the best. I know my unannounced visit might seem a bit precipitous, but…” The gel was coloring up delightfully now.
Thomas watched her fade off into obvious embarrassment and found he would have to take pity on her. Perhaps asking for handouts on the merit of a trumped-up relationship and suspect manuscripts was as onerous to her as it appeared to be.
“This must be a matter of some import,” he said. “Being so, it deserves more than a discussion amidst a flock of sheep on an open moor.”
She gazed at him helplessly.
“See here, Lady Catherine. My ‘estate’ is just down this lane, over the next rise. A harridan shall greet you at the door. That is my housekeeper, Mrs. Medge. Ignore her. No, you’d better tell her you are expected, but you must also inform her promptly—before she even opens her mouth—that you are my, er, niece. She is very circumspect. To have a young woman appear on my doorstep will no doubt excite her most vulgar specu—”
“I do have a chaperone, sir. I am not blind to the proprieties of an unaccompanied—”
“Merely uninvited,” Thomas cut in. That bloody, haughty tone of hers had set his teeth on edge just in remembrance. “And who is this estimable individual?”
“My great-aunt Hecuba.”
“Hecuba?”
“Lady Hecuba Montaigne White.”
“Hundreds Hecuba?” An abrupt bark of incredulous laughter escaped him. Thirty years ago Lady Montaigne White, or “Hundreds Hecuba” as she was better known, had been the most notorious grande dame of a notably lax society. Her liaisons were legion; her escapades were recounted in scintillating detail by the boys at the school where he had boarded. Quite a chaperone this lovely little beggar had brought.
“While I do not understand the appellation, sir, I can surmise its reason. I look forward to your meeting with my great-aunt,” Cat said.
“No more than I, Lady Catherine. Her visit alone is worth any inconvenience. Why, the stories she must have to relay! I quite look forward to dinner. It may prove worth its cost.”
The moss-eyed beauty frowned before nodding and turning her horse’s head. Thomas could not quite make out the words she uttered as she trotted off, but it sounded oddly as though she were saying, “Catherine, you ass, you fool, you dolt…”
Chapter 2
That could not be Thomas Montrose! That huge behemoth. That monolithic male. Impossible.
Cat was no green girl. She had made her come-out four years ago and traveled in the more exalted circles. While her personal concourse with rogues was slight, she knew their attributes: a pale countenance, a bored mien, drawled bon mots, and studied ennui.
How could that man have garnered such a reputation? Thomas Montrose was the stuff of legends among the beau monde. His notoriety was nearly mythic. How often, when her friends had discovered her tangential relationship with him, had Cat watched their eyes grow round with titillation? More times than she could count.
There had to be some mistake. She could not—no, she simply could not—conceive of that much… masculinity lounging about a fashionable London drawing room. She could, however, easily imagine him stomping up to some poor woman and throwing her over his huge shoulder, grunting, “You be mine!”
Well perhaps he wouldn’t grunt, she amended fairly. He did have a lovely, deep, cultured voice. But nothing else about him was the least bit refined.
Well, she sighed, now s
he had met the legend. As she rounded the corner leading to the front of his house, her eyes widened with further disappointment.
Thomas Montrose’s “estate” was a small country house made of local stone; its mullioned windows were covered by encroaching ivy, its front door bare of decoration. A large, crumbling fieldstone stable stretched out behind, flanking one side of the house. A paddock of ill-repaired raw timber held a bellicose-looking ram and a few scrawny chickens. It looked impoverished. It looked like her home, like Bellingcourt, hardly the sumptuous den of iniquity Cat had imagined. It was unlikely there would be any French ladybirds in amongst the chickens, delivering smoldering come-hither glances at the ram.
A stableboy beshook himself from an afternoon nap to take her horse. Before Cat had even begun to mount the steps, the door swung open upon the grim visage of a middle-aged, tight-faced hornet of a woman. Presumably, this was Mrs. Medge. Cat picked up her skirts and approached the door.
“Who are you?” the woman demanded.
“I am Lady Catherine Sinclair. I am the guest of Thomas Montrose,” Cat replied with dignity.
“Master Montrose doesn’t have any ‘lady’ guests,” the termagant announced as she started to close the door.
“Stop!” The woman hesitated. Disappointment had been heaped on disappointment and just at the moment Cat was incapable of having to charm anyone, particularly not this dragon. “You know,” she said tightly, “this grows tiresome in the extreme. Have the Americans lately annexed Devon? Because this local custom of democracy is wearing. Or is it only Mr. Montrose who allows his servants a vote in whom will be allowed in his home? Let me make myself clear.” She fixed the woman with a glare. “I am Mr. Montrose’s… niece.”
“Ha!”
“I was invited.”
“Ha!”
On a sudden impulse, Cat slid her foot past Mrs. Medge’s skirts and gave the door a kick, sending it banging open. Calmly, she walked past the gaped-mouthed woman and into the house.
The entry was spotless. The flagstones shone with wax, and the unadorned walls, painted a silvery blue, were clear, light expanses. There were none of the dusty deer heads, antlers, or other dismembered pieces of animal anatomy Cat had half anticipated, and none of the field mud she had fully expected. It was a simple, clean, and well-maintained structure.
Promise Me Heaven Page 1
