Changing the Earl's Mind (The Lords of Whitehall Book 3)

by Kristen McLean

  Yorkshire 1833

  Drake knew as soon as he opened his eyes that he had slept too late. He only hoped the nurse had managed to keep packages from being torn into and chaos from erupting downstairs. She was a formidable woman when she had to be, but the opposition was even more formidable in numbers and occasionally deviously mischievous.

  He could hear them coming from down the hall now, their little feet tapping against the floor furiously as they rushed into his room.

  “Papa! Wake up, wake up!”

  Little hands pushed on his arm and tugged his hand.

  “It’s Christmas!”

  “No, it isn’t, Patience,” he mumbled, turning his face into his pillow. “Christmas was yesterday. We missed it.”

  “What! No, we did not!” Patience paused a moment, then, “Did we, Robert?”

  “No. Father thinks he is amusing.”

  “It is not amusing,” piped in Janie, in all her four-year-old wisdom.

  He grinned into his pillow before turning to glance at his wife beside him. She had her eyes slammed shut and her lips pressed firmly together, but he could see her shoulders shaking.

  “What do you think, Mama?” he asked, moving aside a lock of hair that had fallen over her face. “Is it Christmas today?”

  Her eyes squinted open, landing on the bright-faced children surrounding the bed. In that moment, whether she had been thinking to continue their teasing or not, she was indisputably wrapped around three tiny fingers.

  Four tiny fingers. An out of breath Alistair ran into the room, wrapped tightly in a small, red robe with white embroidery along the hem.

  “There are presents under the tree!” his little voice rang out. “Big ones!”

  “Looks like we’re outnumbered, dear,” Sarah muttered, grinning.

  “Nonsense,” he teased. “I am positive I could convince David and Eliza to our side.”

  “David and Eliza are infants!” Robert protested.

  “Which only ensures my success,” Drake returned smugly.

  Sarah swatted his arm. “Be kind, Drake. All right, children. Allow your father and me to put on our robes, and then we shall meet you downstairs.”

  In a flurry of movement, the children vanished from the room. Ten minutes later, Sarah and Drake joined them in the cozy parlor, baby Eliza in her arms, and little David in his, while the children began sifting through presents.

  “This is the best Christmas so far,” Sarah murmured, settling a light kiss on Eliza’s forehead.

  “You say that every year,” Drake accused lightly.

  “It’s true every year.”

  The children had managed to sort the presents into piles with Robert’s strict guidance.

  “Here is David’s pile, Father,” he said, pointing to a mound of packages.

  David wriggled, his little hands reaching toward the presents.

  Drake set him on his feet and laughed as he rushed forward.

  “Robert is the very image of you, love,” Sarah murmured.

  “Nonsense,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest as he watched his eldest son. “He is much more austere and starchy than I ever was.”

  She laughed, but said nothing. She didn’t have to. Anyone who ever met Robert knew instantly who his sire was. Stiff stance, angled jaw, chestnut curls, and the greenest eyes anyone had ever seen. Introductions were entirely unnecessary.

  He sent his lovely wife a sideways glance. “Usually you wait until you opened your present before making that declaration.”

  “What declaration?”

  “About this being the best Christmas so far.”

  Sarah smiled, and as always, he felt its warmth deep in his bones.

  He grinned, moving backward until he reached the piano. She followed him, rocking Eliza gently as she walked.

  “I love it when you play,” she said, leaning her perfectly rounded hip against the instrument.

  “Not nearly as much as I love the way your face lights up when I play,” he returned, his fingers moving deftly over the keys in melodic preparation. “And so, I have written a new tune for Christmas, but that isn’t your present.”

  Her brows knit delicately. “What is it, then?”

  He shook his head, his fingers coaxing a lulling melody. “Mine first.”

  She laughed. “You have become such a child.”

  “I can accept that.” He grinned.

  Her laugh filled the room with light as it always did. “Very well.”

  He watched as she stepped away, laying Eliza in the cradle by the settee. Then she moved around the piano and took up a small box.

  Heaven above, he was a lucky soul. Perhaps the luckiest on this earth. The warmth that came over him during these moments with his family overwhelmed him, and by the time Sarah turned around to hand him the gift, his throat was thick with emotion.

  “Here you are.”

  The music stopped while he opened his present. Beneath the brown paper and twine was a dark cherry box, and when he opened it up to realize what was inside that box… his heart melted and tears stung his eyes.

  Inside the lid were seven miniatures. The first one was of his wife, followed by all six children. Even baby Eliza had been captured with paint in all her infantile perfection. In the box was one pair of Eliza’s tiny booties, David’s rattle, Alistair’s miniature pony—his absolute favorite toy until his recent birthday when it had been replaced by a newer, larger one—Janie’s hair ribbon, Patience’s very first watercolor, and Robert’s little wooden soldier.

  By the time he noticed the last item, his throat felt constricted and his vision blurred.

  “You little thief,” he muttered, reaching for the shoe he had removed from her foot the day they had met. He wiped his eyes and looked up into his wife’s smiling face.

  “To be fair, it was from all of us,” she admitted. “I figured the shoe would be best in this box. Better than anything else I could have put in it.”

  He nodded, unable to force a single syllable past his lips if he wanted to.

  Good heavens, how he loved her. How he loved his children.

  He no longer felt that fear that had kept him alone for so long. Instead, he felt joy, gratitude. It left him humbled and incurably happy.

  “Now it’s my turn.”

  His mouth pulled into a smile. “You will have to wait for yours,” he said, setting the box aside and putting his fingers back on the keys.

  Sarah blinked. “But I gave you yours.”

  “Don’t be too upset. My special gift to the children will have to wait, also.”

  “How long?”

  “We leave tomorrow.”

  He watched as the confusion and disappointment slowly turned to excitement. “Where are we going?”

  He shook his head, tsking. “If I told you, it would ruin the surprise.”

  For a day, at least. Tomorrow, in the carriage, she would wring it out of him, he had no doubt. There was no possible way he could keep a secret from her and keep his sanity at the same time. However, he was relatively certain they could keep it from the children.

  He finished the new piece he had written and began playing “Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful” while the children opened their gifts, periodically beaming at him and running to hug him and Sarah before opening another.

  They would especially enjoy this trip, considering the playmates waiting for them. Drake had accepted an invitation from Ainsley and Pembridge, who were taking holiday in Florence with the Duke and Duchess of Béarn.

  Drake shook his head at the incredulity of the situation. He and Ainsley had actually become friends, if one could believe it. Since he had taken a less demanding position as a consultant at the Home Office in order to give all his attention to his family and estates, he had found himself in a room with Ainsley and Pembridge more and more, and their families. He was relatively certain his wife was responsible for this, and he was eternally grateful because, for the first time in his life, Drake could claim friends.
True friends who he cared about and who cared about him. And he saw the same friendships budding between their children.

  Gad, there would be fourteen children running wild when they arrived in Florence, though the Ramsey children would make up almost half of them. Even Pembridge’s adopted son, André, would stay for a few days, stopping by while on his grand tour. He grew into quite a sharp, handsome fellow, and made his father proud, as Pembridge would tell anyone and everyone, ad nauseam.

  Sarah appeared at his shoulder, her voice lightly humming along while their children played with their new toys just a few feet from them.

  Later this morning, his mother and Lady Umberton would arrive to luncheon with them. They would stay the night and leave with them in the morning. Then Sarah’s parents would meet them at port, as Drake had arranged as a special surprise for Sarah.

  Since they refused to sell their farm and take up permanent residence in England, Drake arranged for them to visit at least once a year, and Sarah was always overjoyed.

  She bent to kiss his cheek, and he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was, indeed, the luckiest man on earth.

  Behind The Marquess's Mask

  The Lords of Whitehall, #1

  Kristen McLean

  Available Now!

  Prologue

  France 1818

  Grey had been the Marquess of Ainsley for nigh on a decade, his numerous estates being some of the most profitable in England. Numerous estates with enormous, warm, coma-inducing beds, each one piled high with mountains of pillows.

  Why the devil was he now lying on the coldest, most uncomfortable cot in all of Christendom?

  “He is awake.”

  Someone spoke in French. If anyone were speaking French in his boudoir, it ought to be with a husky, feminine drawl, not the rough growl he had just heard. Now that he thought of it, along with the pillows, there was a shocking lack of silk and feathers.

  This was all wrong, very wrong.

  He opened his eyes, and the large, cold stones forming the ceiling slowly came into focus. That along with the cool feel of iron at his wrists and ankles and the two men glaring menacingly in his direction made it profoundly clear the nightmare he had been plagued with was quite real.

  He was still in France, only now he was in prison. He had been caught.

  “We want their names.”

  “I have no names,” Grey lied. “I am utterly nameless.” It wasn’t meant to be a slurred mumble, but his mouth felt stuffed full of cotton, and his lips wouldn’t move. They were swollen, stiff, as was the rest of him.

  “Your friend is dead,” one of them said. “Do you wish to join him?”

  That meant Johnny had kept silent to the end. He had been a good lad—just a lad—and had died a nobody with no funeral or grave for loved ones to visit. Disappearing without notice, he would have no honor, no glory, no great eulogy commending his bravery in the face of torture and death—all things Grey had told him would happen the day he had signed on.

  “Go to hell,” Grey growled.

  One of the men, an overly large behemoth with an atrocious moustache, laughed as he brandished a long knife with a thick blade. He moved to stand next to Grey, who was strapped on his back to a wooden table. Arguably, it was not the best position to be in whilst issuing threats.

  What shall be first? Grey wondered. His ears? His fingers, maybe? Not his tongue; they needed that.

  “The man you sliced from ear to ear,” the behemoth said, “was my brother.”

  Ears, then.

  The man in question had been stealing the names of England’s best agents to sell to her enemies. Had he succeeded, the death toll would have been devastating, though more in quality than in quantity. Grey had caught him in a bordello and taken him out the same way the bastard was known to have done to some of Grey’s comrades, drawing notice like a loggerheaded rookie.

  Then Grey had been caught, which he had expected. What he had not expected was to find Johnny five feet behind him instead of across the street where he should have been. That was when Grey had learned it was much harder to escape with a green lad hanging on to his coattails.

  Grey lifted his head with an icy smile. “He cried, begged for his life.”

  A meaty fist pounded into Grey’s face, forcing his head back into the table. His head spun, but he swallowed back the nausea, refusing to give the cur the satisfaction of seeing the impact of the blow or giving the misapprehension that he’d had enough. Grey had not been punished nearly enough.

  The coppery taste of blood gathered in his mouth. How accommodating. He amassed a glob of blood on his tongue and sent it flying at the commodious mammoth. Then he grinned, no doubt looking utterly ridiculous with crimson covering his teeth and dribbling down his chin.

  The man growled, his hand flexing around the knife. “I can make you cry. I can make you beg for your life.”

  Grey’s grin turned into a grimace as the knife dug into his shoulder. He was accustomed to pain. He could handle it.

  He shut his eyes as the blade slowly began tearing a jagged trail across his chest like a sash, agonizingly deep. Every inch was unbearable. His hands fisted and his teeth ached from the pressure of his jaw, but hell if he would scream so easily. Not out loud, at any rate.

  Progress on the new canal halted midway through.

  “Rather unsporting to stop now,” Grey forced out. “Carry on.” Get the bloody thing over with! was what he meant to say.

  He heard voices, people arguing, and then liquid was splashed over the wound, rendering the pain a hair past excruciating. A moment later, the knife was back to finish its work.

  The rut the colossus was gouging reached his cracked ribs, and soon, Grey was growling through gritted teeth. His were not the torturous screams Johnny’s had been. Those would come later—he had no doubt—but not yet.

  He was distantly aware of a door swinging open and the knife being lifted, but by then he was fading in and out of consciousness. Reality rippled into obscurity. Only the pain kept him rooted in the present, reminding him where he was and what was happening to him.

  There was so much blood. He felt it streaming off his torso like a damned waterfall onto the table, but he couldn’t open his eyes to survey the damage. He hadn’t the strength. He had been held in a cell without food and with very little water for days. How could they possibly expect him to rattle off the twenty-two names if he hadn’t the strength to speak?

  Of course, he would cut out his own tongue before he gave them a single syllable.

  “Greydon!”

  The Earl of Grenville’s voice echoed in his head, but Grenville was still in Calais, heading up the other team there. Grey must be dying or already dead.

  “Too fast,” he mumbled. “Should hurt more. Don’t deserve—”

  “Greydon, goddammit, pull yourself together. It’s merely a flesh wound!”

  It was just like Grenville to understate the circumstances. Control panic, he always said, control the situation.

  Grey laughed feebly, but it cost him. The pain was monstrous. His fractured bones vied for precedence over the nasty geyser of blood across his chest. Then he was sinking again into the black depths of unconsciousness where the pain ebbed, where the duty and disappointments of this life slipped away to nothingness. There were no more shadows to chase, innocents to protect, or king and country to defend. He had been waiting some time for this kind of black abyss to swallow him up.

  Now he let it, gladly.

  London 1819

  Arctic winds cut through London, exacerbating an already harsh winter and causing the snows of February to linger into March. The cobblestones were transformed into a generous layer of muddy slush as horses and carriages passed through the streets with their usual ferocity. The gray sky, thick fog, and slush, which splattered over anything and everything daring to venture out of doors, quickly turned the beautiful capital into a dirty heap of depression.

  Kathryn understood exactly why so many de
cided to quit such a condensed package of cold, miserable filth for the solitude of the country or warmth of Italy.

  They were sane.

  The unlucky few who were forced to stay or too dense to leave would not part with the warmth of their own parlors without promise of diversion in a well-lit, fashionable, and quite clean venue. Kathryn might have been born with enough brains to avoid London’s winters, but she had never had the best of luck, which was why she, along with a couple hundred of her peers, had crammed into Covent Garden to attend an opera they had all been to before.

  Kathryn sat patiently in her seat well into the second aria as the latecomers straggled in to take their seats. However, now that everyone was nicely settled and properly pretending to enjoy the production below, Kathryn was slipping out. Thankfully, Lord Huntly and her mother, Lady Grenville, were seated in front of her, so they shouldn’t see her leave. As for the gentleman sitting next to her, well, he ought to wake up in about half an hour.

  Kathryn had business to tend to that she had been painstakingly piecing together for weeks, important business for the Home Office. The Home Office might not exactly be aware she was taking care of it for them, but it was something they would be grateful to have done once it was off their plate. Surely.

  She was bored with the little tasks the Home Office had been handing her, so she had taken the file from the Director of Covert Affairs’ desk when she had brought him the fruitcakes. Father’s old military crony, he might be; organized, he was not. He hadn’t even noticed it missing. Now she finally had an adventure amidst the humdrum of the London season.

  And here she thought this would be just another year of enduring pitying glances and barely veiled insults toward being six and twenty and unwed. As if that were all a female could want in life. A man who could tempt Kathryn to a life of boring matronly duties did not exist, not after the horrors her aunt had faced under a husband’s booted heel.

  As she had expected, the crème-paneled hall was empty. She picked up her skirts so she would not trip over them as she hurried through the halls and down the stairs toward the foyer. Thoughts swirled in her head of shadowed figures in capes and hoods, exchanging envelopes in dark alleys and whispering. Surely, it was not truly that exciting, but her heart began racing all the same, and she had to suppress a girlish giggle when her eyes fixed on the large doors opening out into the street.