Once Upon an Earl_Heirs of High Society_A Regency Romance Book

by Eleanor Meyers

  God, there was a time not all that long ago when I would have been thrilled to have my own sausage stand. I would have gone to fairs all over the county and kept my own pigs and pondered over the best spices to set off the sausages I made.

  She knew that being a vendor at the fairs was hardly a life free from care, but it certainly felt much simpler than what her own life had become.

  She was just finishing her sausage when a pair of men in flashy clothes came to stand above her. They wore silk and satin, but it was worn thin, and Clarine felt an immediate unease.

  "Hey, pretty little thing. Don't tell me you're so pretty and alone out here?" one of them had the audacity to say to her.

  "I am not, as a matter of fact. My father has just gone to get more sausage."

  The lie was easy, a necessity for the girl she had once been. It struck her with a vague sense of wonder that if the men had known who she really was, they never would have dared to approach her.

  "Well, surely your papa won't mind if we sit with you for a spell, would he? Anyway, he might like to hear about what kind of work his pretty daughter could get."

  Panders, Clarine thought with a shiver of disgust. And they think I'm alone and easy prey.

  "I think not. I am going to go find him now."

  She stood up, ignoring one man's offered hand, and walked back to the main crush of people, ignoring the hissed insults from the men as she passed.

  It was a reminder of the fact that life was never all that free of risk, even when she and her mother had lived in Monmouth, but at least then, she had known how to deal with it.

  She quickly forgot the men as she walked into the tumult of the fair again. After all, why would she be worried when there were jugglers and acrobats to see?

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  2

  CHAPTER

  TWO

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  Two weeks after deciding to leave London, Lucas was ready to return, even if it meant suffering a storm of scandal and controversy. He had gone to the country to rusticate like any other nobleman once the Season was done, but in most of the more fashionable parts of the countryside, the sophisticated ton tended to take their society life with them. The endless round of hunts and balls would hold everyone over until the return to London, and life barely seemed to skip a beat

  In West Riding, life seemed to come to a stand-still entirely, and Lucas was bored out of his mind. In addition to his irritation with the slow pace of country life, his clothes hadn't quite made the transition with him. A few pieces of luggage still floated somewhere on the road with his clothes in them, and Lucas had to resort to wearing the rough clothes sported by the men of all work in the area.

  When he heard about the fair in nearby Waverly, he had first assumed that he was going to ignore it. Sheer boredom drove him out of the cottage, however, and he took his gelding out for the day.

  The fair proved to be more interesting and engaging than he had thought. It was lively and large, similar to some of the London street fairs, if more inclined to showcase rural goods and entertainments than urban ones.

  Lucas let out a breath as he wandered the busy streets, sipping a cool cider that had been tapped from jugs taken from a nearby spring house. He supposed that it could be worse.

  As he was looking over a display of fire breathers, a young servant girl bumped into him. She could only have been twenty-two or twenty-three, and the wisps of hair escaping her rather old-fashioned mob cap were a deep honey blond. What really captured him, however, were her eyes. They were strange, deep and violet, and her sooty black lashes made them look large and surprised.

  "Oh, I do beg your pardon!"

  "No need to do that, lass, but perhaps you'll make up for it by sharing a drink with me?"

  Her face closed off, and she drew herself up to her full height. "I'm sorry, but I am not available. Excuse me, I have places to be."

  She stalked off in high dudgeon, making Lucas laugh a little at his own foolishness. He really had grown far too used to people falling over themselves to win his favor.

  Apparently, I am far less charming when people assume that I am not, in fact, a marquis.

  It was a good lesson, he decided, and he passed a decent afternoon sauntering down the thoroughfare, sampling some of the local foods and flirting with the locals. It might have been more difficult to get women to look at him without his high-quality clothing, but it was far from impossible. Some women definitely looked as if they might be interested in sharing more than a drink with him, and he made a note to return to Waverly sometime in the future. For the moment, he was content to simply wander the fair.

  As evening fell, someone set up a ring of torches in the town center. As workers set up tall poles with platforms at the top, Lucas realized they were setting up an acrobat act, one with a tightrope involved.

  The two tightrope walkers were a middle-aged couple, dressed in clothes that sparkled in the torchlight as they performed flips and somersaults high over the heads of the crowd.

  They were quite good, and Lucas applauded their act, cheering as it went on. Lucas thought he was as loud as anyone, but he was quiet compared to the girl slightly to his right. She cheered them as wildly as if they were at the circus in London. After a moment, Lucas recognized the servant girl he had seen earlier.

  Well, even if she doesn't want to drink, she knows how to have a good time at least.

  He wouldn't have noticed what happened next if he hadn't been looking straight at her. He was just getting ready to turn back to the acrobats when two men came out of the surging crowd behind her. One clamped his hand over her mouth, preventing her from shouting, and the other dragged her back, straight into the shadows between the houses.

  The torchlight flickered, and in just a moment, it was as if the girl had never been there.

  Before he could stop himself, Lucas took off after the girl and her kidnappers. He had heard the stories, of course, of men who stole young girls who did not have proper protection when they went out. They were swept away to serve in houses of ill-repute in Spain and France. He had not expected to find those stories fulfilled in a sleepy northern village, but now Lucas was pelting down the street, chasing after a flicker of movement in front of him, hoping he was not too late.

  He rounded a corner, cut off from the noise of the fair, and suddenly in a much different world of shadows. Lucas cast up and down the narrow lane, and for a moment, he thought he had lost them, and the poor girl was a victim to her fate.

  Then he saw movement, saw a cart pulling away with bags of produce in the rear. Some of the bags were open, revealing their innocuous cargo, but one was laid oddly across the rear of the cart, and its drawstring was tied tight.

  "Stop!"

  The cart instead moved faster, and Lucas put on a burst of speed, drawing level with the cart before it left the alley.

  One man sat on the driver's seat, and Lucas remembered to look for the other just as he stepped out of the shadows, swinging a length of wood.

  Lucas might have been a nobleman, but he had fought brawls in the London stews since he was sixteen. He dodged the first swing and then, taking the man's wrist, smashed it into an iron handrail nearby. The man screamed, his wrist flopping at an unnatural angle, and he fell to his knees.

  Good enough.

  Lucas lunged up onto the cart, now able to hear muffled cries from the bag in question. His first instinct was to get the girl to safety, but that would leave these two running around the world, terrorizing innocent girls until the next time some stranger decided to stop them.

  The second man actually drew a pistol on him, but he made the mistake of trying to threaten Lucas with it while Lucas closed the distance between them. He wrestled the gun from the man's hand, but before he could make the man surrender, his accomplice recovered enough to crack the dropped whip over the cart horse's head. The animal lurched forward, trot
ting a few thundering strides before stilling.

  It wasn't much, but it allowed both panders to squirm away, running off into the shadows. Lucas wanted badly to chase them and teach them a lesson about abducting women from the fair, but then he realized it would leave their precious cargo all alone.

  Once he secured the cart horse and made sure the men were not simply lying in wait for his guard to drop, he leaped down and ran to the back. He cursed them silently as he used a pocket knife to rip open the knots that held the bag together. She was bound hand and foot, her cap had disappeared somewhere, and the point of her chin was bruised, but she was smiling.

  "My hero."

  "Well, I don't know about that—"

  Before he could say anything else, she fainted dead away, and Lucas swore, wondering what in the world he was going to do next.

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  3

  CHAPTER

  THREE

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  Waking up was like swimming through a deep mass of seaweed, the light obscured by tendrils of darkness that wanted to drown her.

  Am I back in Sao Paolo with Mother? I thought Mother was gone, long before Father went.

  The thought brought stinging tears to her eyes, but it pushed her the rest of the way awake. She sat up abruptly, her head spinning so badly she had to press both hands against her throbbing forehead. When she took her hands away and looked down, she realized she was in a place she had never been before.

  The warm wooden room had a low roof, a large hearth taking up one entire wall. People sat in their quiet booths or at one of the large round communal tables, their voices loud and jolly.

  For a moment, it was as if the entire preceding four months had never happened, and Clarine felt as if something inside her wept with relief. Then memory returned, and she realized that something was deeply wrong.

  I need to get out of here. I need to run. What if those terrible men brought me here?

  She was just getting ready to rise and to make a dash for the door when a tall man dressed in workers' clothes appeared, carrying two earthenware mugs. He was tall and dark, lean rather than burly, and he glanced at her with a wry grin.

  "Ah, good. You're up. I was going to give you another ten minutes or so before I went for the doctor."

  "You... didn't go for the doctor right away?"

  The man took a familiar seat next to her and nodded at the hearth, where a man in dark clothes seemed to be regaling a group of slightly horrified onlookers with something unpleasant.

  "That's the town doctor, apparently. I thought it might be good not to bother him unless we absolutely had to. Also, if we had to get a doctor involved, we might have to involve your people as well."

  "My people—"

  For a moment, Clarine was confused, but then she realized he meant her employers. She was dressed neatly, but in a style favored by the younger maids of the town.

  Not picking up on her confusion, he set a mug in front of her full of something warm and steaming. It reminded her of how chilly nights in Waverly still got despite the thaw, but she looked at it warily.

  "Suppose you're getting that drink with me after all. Don't worry, it's safe. It's just a bit of warmed apple cider with some spices in it. Harmless, I swear."

  Clarine gave the man a suspicious look. Even if the drink was harmless, she would have bet a great deal of money that he wasn't. She wondered if he was one of those itinerant workmen who wandered from county to county, following the odd jobs where they could. At the moment, though, he seemed content to simply sit with her and drink.

  The drink was delicious, and she sipped it carefully for a few moments before turning to the man next to her. "What happened to the two men who tried to take me?"

  "Vanished, I'm afraid. They are short a cart and horse though; those are with the constable now. You're safe, lass, I promise. I'll walk you to your door if that won't get you in trouble, and I'll walk you most of the way if it will."

  Clarine smiled tentatively at him. "I'm sorry I was so short with you earlier."

  He laughed, and she thought how nice it sounded. "Some monsters who looked like humans tried to kidnap you an hour later. I would think that that would make you more wary, not less."

  "I only said that I was sorry, not that I was going to change the way I talked to strangers."

  "Well, that's a very good thing, then. Pretty little thing like you, you're probably good at warding off trouble."

  The hint of teasing flirtation in his voice, from another man in another time, would have made her wary. Instead, Clarine only laughed. "Would I be less good at it if I were homely?"

  "Perhaps you would be warding off a different kind of trouble, then. I can tell you've got spirit to spare though, and no mistake. Do they breed for stubbornness and beauty among the maids of Waverly, then?"

  "Definitely for stubbornness, and as for beauty..." She shrugged, suddenly a little shy. "I suppose that is something you need to decide for yourself."

  She hadn't realized how very close he had gotten. In the dim light of the tavern, the green in his eyes had been reduced to green edges around darker pupils, and he was so close she could smell him. Instead of smelling like sweat and old bedding, as laborers mostly did, she could only smell fresh hay and cider, and underneath it something that drew her forward.

  "I am definitely deciding for myself, and I think you are one of the most beautiful things that I have seen in a long while."

  She opened her mouth to answer him, but then he moved forward. Her eyes fluttered closed, and in the next moment, his mouth slanted over hers, his touch as light and sweet as a spring breeze. He tasted of apples and cinnamon. Without thinking, Clarine opened her mouth to taste him more fully, her heart beating a hard tattoo in her chest.

  Oh, hello, I've found you, something in her whispered.

  She got to enjoy the kiss for another few moments before she realized exactly what it was she was doing. With a gasp, she drew back. She rocked backward in her chair, and she might have tumbled all the way back to the floor if he hadn't steadied her.

  "You can't do that!"

  "I suppose not. But you did."

  Clarine knew her face was flaming red, and damn him, the man only looked amused. She wished he was not so handsome, suddenly; if he wasn't, then surely that kiss would never have happened at all.

  "I did not kiss you."

  "You tilted your head forward."

  "I- I..."

  He took pity on her, rising from the table and tossing down a few coins. "Have it your way. I kissed you, and it was my fault."

  "It most certainly was!"

  He grinned. "Should I make it my fault again?"

  "No!" A new voice from deep inside her demurred, but she was not listening to it right now.

  "Ah, well, as my lady pleases. Come on. It's getting late, and I do not know where you live."

  She rose to follow him, but then she hesitated.

  "I don't really walk home with strangers."

  "Well, then, my name is Lucas Tolland. Is that good enough for you?"

  "It is."

  It wasn't until they were out of the inn and walking down the lane that Lucas glanced at her.

  "I don't know your name, either."

  Unbidden, the title she had gained when her father died floated through her mind. Almost viciously, she pushed it away. She didn't think she hated it, but her feelings were rather close to hatred, she realized.

  "Just call me Clarine, please."

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  4

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

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  Lucas knew three things about Clarine by the time they approached her residence. The first was that she was beautiful, and it was not a beauty he had often seen. The current mode of beauty for the ton was tall,
statuesque, and so pale a blonde that it made a man's eyes water. Clarine had an elfin kind of loveliness, her deep golden hair recalling waves of autumn grain, and her violet eyes unlike any gem Lucas had ever seen.

  The second thing he knew about Clarine was that no matter how much she broke the current mode, he desired her. Lady Wentworth, the cause of his current exile, was thought to be one of the great beauties of London, but she had never stirred up the kind of sweet and delicious heat he had experienced when he shared a kiss with Clarine.