Colin moved to stand with Aidan, who still gazed at the closed door where recently had passed a troubled man hand in hand with a tiny pirate. “Will it work, d’you think?”
Aidan shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. He seems more remote than ever.” He let out a long breath. “Still, if Melody can’t reach him, I very much fear that no one ever will.”
Melody leaned away from the circle of Button’s arms and gazed at him in stunned surprise.
“I can’t believe it. Everything happened just like Uncle Colin’s second novel, Bride of the Pirate, when Captain Collins goes in search of his lost love Giselle and finds all those characters on the journey. And there really is a Pomme, just like in the book? And Giselle is the actress Chantal Marchant, the one who died? And the black pirate Gafferty, that was this Gaffin fellow? Gafferty always scared me to pieces. Did Aunt Pru really kick him?”
“Most assuredly.” Button smiled with satisfaction. “Furthermore, she tricked him so thoroughly that he never did find Chantal, not unless it was her grave he visited. Dear Lord Bertram hid her away and took such wonderful care of her. She lived much longer than anyone expected her to, and they were deliriously happy, right to the end.”
Melody shook her head in wonder. “I cannot believe it.” Then she sat up. “Of course! Uncle Aidan and Aunt Maddie—that was Uncle Colin’s first novel, My Lady’s Shadow!” Laughing, she leaned back into Button’s shoulder again. “Clever Uncle Colin!”
Button smiled. “Oh, yes. You know he wrote about your parents, as well.”
Melody giggled. “Well, it certainly wasn’t in his next book, Queen in the Tower!” She sighed. “I love that story the best of all of his books.”
“I’m not surprised, since it happened to you.” Button raised a brow.
Melody turned her head to stare at him in consternation. “But that book could never truly happen!”
“Is that right?”
Her puzzlement grew. “But . . . it had an elf!”
Button’s smile became very mysterious indeed as he leaned back into the cushions and began again. “Once upon a time . . .”
Read on for an excerpt from
Celeste Bradley’s next book
SCOUNDREL
IN MY DREAMS
Coming soon from
St. Martin’s Paperbacks
“Once upon a time there was a man
who had lost everything . . .”
“Papa! I can see the house! It’s a big house!”
It was quite possible that no one in the world could be as excited as not-quite-four-year-old Melody could be excited. She jumped on the sprung carriage seat, she hung from the window, she even forgot her rather loathsome rag doll for two consecutive minutes.
Jack, or rather Lord John Redgrave, heir to the Marquis of Strickland, picked up his tiny daughter’s doll from the floor of the carriage and put it back on Melody’s seat. Gordy Ann looked like a tatty cravat tied into knots and then dragged behind a mule team for a year or so.
Yet Melody’s love for her knew no bounds. Jack could hardly complain, for that expansive circle of love now included him as well.
I rank somewhere after Gordy Ann and before berry trifle. Well, perhaps I am tied even with berry trifle.
It was an acceptable place to stand. After all, he was rather partial to berry trifle himself.
Or rather, he had been long ago when the world had consisted of colors other than gray and tastes other than sand.
Beside him, Melody bounced on the seat and sent him a gleeful look over her shoulder. “Papa, I can see the door!” Her big baby-blue eyes sparkled.
Things were looking up. His world of gray now included the color blue.
They were her mother’s eyes exactly. Eyes like morning sky, like blue topaz, like the egg of a robin. Amaryllis’s eyes could tease and flash and twinkle, turning unwary fellows into brainless wax in her hands.
And those eyes could turn as cold as the shadows of a glacier, like the ones he’d seen in the north seas. Like the one he carried inside his chest.
Tiring of the unchanging view from the window, for they still drove slowly up the lengthy winding drive, Melody scrambled over to the other seat to fetch Gordy Ann and then returned to Jack. Without hesitation, Melody climbed into his lap and leaned contentedly against his chest. Looking down, Jack tried to decide if he ought to put his arm about her for safety. She looked secure enough, so he let her be.
Tirelessly affectionate, Melody was like a candle flame, trying to thaw that glacier inside him. Yet even a tiny thaw might become a summer, given time enough. He tucked his arm about her, just in case the carriage hit a pothole.
He was a little surprised that she wasn’t intimidated by him. Most children were, as were most adults, now that he thought upon it. Melody, however, had simply adopted him as part of the strange and unlikely family of Brown’s Club for Distinguished Gentlemen and had instantly accepted him as her very own Papa.
He’d known she was his at once, for she looked exactly like the only woman he’d ever loved. Even without such a reference point, Melody had seemed to simply know him.
She called him “Papa” to his face and “Cap’n Jack” to everyone else. He was a captain, actually, for he held his uncle’s fleet of ships—ships that would someday soon be his when the Marquis finally let go the tenuous thread of his existence.
Melody was his child and his responsibility, yet over the last three days she had become something much, much more than that. Melody was the first person in a very long time to make him feel anything at all.
Which made him doubly furious that Miss Amaryllis Clarke could abandon his child to half-hearted foster care and go on her merry way!
Anger was also something new to his gray world. Interesting thing, anger. Anger meant that he cared about something. Each new/old emotion unfolded before his numbed soul like a letter written by him but long forgotten. Familiar, yet entirely untried.
The carriage rolled to a smooth halt. Jack looked through the window to see a vast and luxurious house. His view was limited mostly to the semi-circle of costly marble steps that led to the richly carved front doors. A flurry of liveried grooms came forward to hold the horses and to open the carriage door.
Jack was unimpressed. Strickland was older but every bit as luxurious, with five times the estate of this place. Amaryllis had married well. She was a wealthy baroness. If she’d waited a little, she could have been an obnoxiously rich countess, who might or might not deign to notice a mere wealthy baroness.
Amaryllis had never been a patient sort.
Jack and Melody were admitted at once and installed in an ostentatiously formal parlor. The room was so grand and gilded and dripping with crystal that the usually irrepressible Melody clung to Jack’s leg and stuck a corner of Gordy Ann into her mouth, gazing about her with wide eyes.
Jack didn’t sit. He remembered that much about anger. Anger was done better standing.
In an almost-but-not-quite-rude amount of time, the door opened and Amaryllis drifted in. Tall and elegant, hair as dark as fine mink, eyes like cool blue pools. Perfect features, inviting figure, exacting fashion sense. Her gown was as black as a mourning gown, but the cut was perfection.
She was every bit as lovely as the last time he’d seen her, when she was furiously demanding that her father throw him from the house, but now her liveliness was replaced by a layer of acquired ennui.
She watched him closely for his reaction, though she pretended stylish lassitude. “Jack? Is that really you? Heavens, what in the world brings you to this dull old house?
Jack waited curiously, but the sight of Amaryllis left him entirely cold. Except for the anger.
“I’ve come to speak to you about our child.”
Amaryllis flicked a bored glance in Melody’s general direction, then focused on Jack with a calculating gleam. “I don’t have children, darling. Everyone knows that.”
Without another word, Jack turned and walked Mel
ody to the door of the parlor. He pointed at the bottom step of the grand winding staircase. “Sit.”
Melody sat, clutching Gordy Ann close. She gazed up at him with those eyes—couldn’t Amaryllis recognize her own features in miniature?—and her bottom lip slowly emerged.
Jack gazed at her, nonplussed.
She thinks you’re angry at her.
Oh. “I’m not angry at you, Melody.”
Big blue eyes blinked. And dampened.
Oh, God. Alarm was a new feeling. Definitely one for the list.
“Melody, I am angry, but I am angry at the lady in the parlor. I am going to say some rather rude things to her now and I don’t want you to have to hear them. If you sit here with Gordy Ann, I will come out in a few moments to fetch you.”
As he watched, the lower lip began to retreat and the eyes blinked back the moisture. “You’re angry at the lady?”
“I am.”
“Gordy Ann doesn’t like the lady.”
Oh damn. “Gordy Ann might like the lady better after a while.”
Melody nodded, but Jack had to admit that Gordy Ann didn’t look very forgiving.
“Will you stay here?”
Melody nodded again, this time seeming her usual self.
Jack left her sliding Gordy Ann up and down the polished banister at the bottom of the stairs and returned to the parlor.
Amaryllis had arranged herself attractively on a sofa. There was plenty of room for Jack to join her, but he remained standing.
“How can you deny you had my child?”
Amaryllis blew out a breath and abandoned her seductive pose, instead reaching for a chocolate from a box on the table next to her. “I don’t have children, Jack. I’d never ruin my figure so.”
Frowning, Jack sent an assessing glance over that figure. He was no expert, but Amaryllis looked exactly the same as she had four years ago. Possibly slimmer.
She was watching him look at her. “Do you like what you see, handsome Jack?” She ran a fingertip along her neckline, ending at her cleavage. “You used to like it quite a bit, if I recall.”
“I don’t recall, actually.” He narrowed his eyes. “Amaryllis, no more games. Four years ago, you came to my bed. The next day you announced your engagement to another man. Nine months later, you deposited our child with a nurse and left her there. Two months ago, you ceased paying that nurse, whereupon she abandoned our child on the doorstep of my club. Go on, admit it!”
As he’d spoken, her face had undergone a journey from amusement to surprise to outright confusion. Now she gazed at him with her jaw frankly slack and her eyes blinking uncomprehendingly.
Then she shut her jaw, opened her mouth to say something, closed it, blinked, and then laughed out loud. “God, you’ve gotten so droll, Jack! It’s a silly joke, but it has brightened an otherwise deadly day immeasurably.” She chuckled. “A secret baby! Good lord, what a thought!”
Jack gazed at her, his anger turning to furious bewilderment. “Amaryllis, this is deadly serious! How could you do such a thing? And why, of all things, did you stop paying the nurse two months ago? You obviously have not suffered from some sort of financial upheaval, unless all this is riding on debt!”
At that, her eyes snapped. “Of course it isn’t and I’ll thank you not to spread such rumors!” She stood, angry herself now, and advanced on him. “For your information, Lord John, you are intruding on my mourning with your nonsense! I think it is high time you left—or shall I have you tossed out on your arse, again?”
Mourning? The black gown. “Your husband?”
She rolled her eyes. “How I wish. No, it is my father. His heart, eight weeks ago.”
Jack reeled in his fresh, unaccustomed anger and took a step back. He bowed. “My apologies. I shall go. Give my sympathies to your mother and sister.”
Amaryllis plunked back down on the sofa and took another chocolate. “Mother died a year ago. Laurel wasn’t fond of Papa anyway.”
Jack turned and walked slowly from the room. Amaryllis might be lying, yet her confusion had seemed entirely genuine. She sincerely had no idea what he was talking about!
Melody looked up from her little spot on the stairs and blinked Amaryllis’s blue eyes at him.
Could Amaryllis have forgotten that night?
That night . . . the night that he could not erase from his mind. No matter that she had refused his proposal the next day, no matter that she was quite thoroughly married now.
That one night still ranked as the only moment in the last few years that he’d felt even remotely human—that one night where the world was not cold and gray and grim.
Lost in his swirling thoughts, Jack took Melody’s little hand and walked her down the hall toward the great doors.
Amaryllis had looked at Melody like some sort of unpleasant subspecies, as if at any moment the little girl might lunge at her with grubby paws extended, intent on soiling her gown.
No, Amaryllis was no one’s mother.
Which meant that he, Jack, was no one’s father. Then who was Melody?
Lost in thought, he passed a dark-clad woman in the hall without truly registering her presence. She dropped the book she carried as he passed. Quite automatically, he bent to retrieve it and pressed it back into her hands. “Pardon me, madam.”
Melody waved at her, opening and closing her pudgy fingers in the manner in which tiny children wave.
How in the world was he going to break it to Aidan and Colin that the little girl they loved so much was of no connection to them whatsoever?
Miss Laurel Clarke, clad in black mourning—but not for the parents she’d despised!—never married, never asked, stood in the hallway of her wealthy sister’s house and watched the man and child walk away from her to the door. Her shaking hands held a book with a grip that turned her knuckles white with strain.
The world had just spun wildly on its axis and had come down in an entirely different shape.
Memories. Fear. Pain. Then at last, the tiny furious wail.
The midwife who wouldn’t meet her gaze. Born dead. Poor little mite. It happens.
Now, the man in the doorway, the man who couldn’t be there, the man who had just walked past her as if she didn’t exist. He knelt before the child at the open door. “It looks like rain,” he said quietly. “Are you buttoned up?” He stood and extended his hand down. “Come along, Melody.”
Blue eyes.
Melody.
Just like hers.
Melody.
Born dead.
“I heard her cry.” The words slipped from her numb lips like a whisper, like a battle roar, like the last words of a defiant prisoner.
She’d heard that cry. She’d believed that cry. So she’d named her child, despite all the argument and disbelief.
Melody.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
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
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
C
hapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Epilogue
Rogue in My Arms: The Runaway Brides Page 31
