Harlequin Historical July 2021--Box Set 1 of 2

by Virginia Heath

  And rightly so.

  Being drunk was no excuse for kissing her, so she was well within her rights to have torn him off a strip—and she certainly had.

  After a month struggling with the fake politeness and the rigid code of behaviour in society, he’d rather enjoyed that too. Hope said what she meant and didn’t suffer fools gladly. When one added those refreshing attributes to the list alongside the intelligence, the looks, the magnificent figure, the crackling hair and the hidden well of passion, she was one hell of a woman!

  He grinned and closed his eyes, grateful to finally be contemplating much more pleasant things at bedtime than his woes with Abigail and all the burdens of his unwanted Marquessate. For good measure, and because he could barely remember the last time he had been with a woman, he decided to think about the delectable Miss Hope Brookes some more to help banish all those other unpleasant thoughts away.

  The sultry smell of her perfume.

  The perfect curve of her generous hip beneath his palm. The soft sigh she expelled into his mouth as her lips fused with his, so real in his imagination he could almost feel it again as bone-weary tiredness tugged him gratefully into sleep.

  In his dream, Hope deepened the kiss, her hand smoothing down his naked chest until it boldly wrapped itself around his erection, her triumphant chuckle at the way his body yearned for her touch.

  Then he felt another whisper against his lips.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you desire wouldn’t be a problem between us, Lucius?’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Rumour has it that, for reasons best known to himself, the Viscount Eastwood presented his lovely new wife with a sturdy Chippendale armchair as a wedding gift...

  Whispers from Behind the Fan

  May 1814

  ‘Well?’ Their mother dropped her toast as a grinning Charity bustled through the door from the early morning stroll she had insisted upon taking in the middle of breakfast. ‘Did you discover anything about our new next-door neighbours?’ They had seen lights in the adjacent house late last night when they returned from Faith’s wedding celebrations in Richmond. ‘Please tell me it’s a nice young family or an old lady or even a crusty and eccentric bachelor who collects butterflies and nasty bugs. I am not sure my poor nerves could take another scandalous H-U-S-S-Y right on our doorstep.’

  Number Twenty-Two Bedford Place, Bloomsbury had been vacant for three months ever since the Earl of Clacton’s former mistress had moved out. While she hadn’t been there particularly long, four months to be exact, she had been an interesting neighbour, lacking both morals and any shame that she was a thoroughly kept woman who enjoyed the company of vigorous males far too much. But this morning, a laden cart had arrived containing an enormous bed, a couple of substantial-looking wingbacks as well as the biggest bathtub any of them had ever seen.

  ‘It’s a single gentleman according to Colonel Wigstock, who said he thinks he saw the fellow arrive some time around eight last night, although nobody else has seen him since to confirm that.’

  ‘Old? Young?’ Their father loved gossip even though he liked to pretend he was above such things.

  Charity shrugged. ‘You know Wigstock—he’s reliably unreliable about those sorts of details. He thinks he might be a naval man.’

  ‘Why?’ As much as Hope liked to think she was above such things too, this was a new neighbour and she was more than a little intrigued. For the last hour, a succession of merchants and tradesmen had been delivering all manner of things to the house. The food alone had looked enough to feed the five thousand. If he was a sailor, he was a very hungry one.

  ‘He’s very dapper, fair and has a military bearing apparently.’ Charity stole Hope’s perfectly buttered slice of toast and took a huge bite out of it before she could snatch it back. ‘He also has a pirate as a manservant.’

  ‘A pirate!’ Their mother was appalled. ‘The C-U-T-T-H-R-O-A-T sort?’

  Both sisters rolled their eyes at this because even though the youngest of them was already past one and twenty, their overprotective mother still insisted on spelling out any words she considered too unsavoury for their tender ears.

  ‘Again, Mama, we only have Colonel Wigstock’s word on that so it’s hardly to be trusted. After all, he did tell the whole street Faith’s new husband was a wandering gypsy simply because Piers happens to have dark hair.’ Charity glided to the fireplace, no doubt to check her own hair in the big mirror over it. ‘But so far, there doesn’t appear to be any sign of either a wife or the sort of feminine accoutrements which go along with one, therefore I think it is fairly safe to assume our new neighbour is indeed a bachelor. Whether or not he is a crusty old one who collects insects is yet to be established.’ Her sister glanced at the clock on the sideboard, then tugged on one of her perfect blonde ringlets to stare at it with disgust. ‘What time is Evan bringing the carriage around again?’

  Now that he was mobile again after a nasty fall which had broken his leg, their father was about to embark on another portrait commission in Mayfair and their talented mother’s return to the Theatre Royal in Così fan Tutte had been so successful, the opera’s run had been extended for another few weeks. Having secured her first singing engagement in the chorus, Charity always accompanied their mother to the theatre on rehearsal days, which would leave Hope all alone in the house for the first time in months.

  ‘In ten minutes.’ Their father gave the youngest his most stern look, as they all knew that the charmingly vain and chaotic Charity had a casual attitude towards timekeeping. ‘So if you are going to have poor Lily redo your coiffure, you’d best be quick sharp about it or you’ll be walking to Covent Garden!’ He bashed the floor decisively with his jauntily painted new walking stick. ‘I mean it this time, young lady. If you aren’t down here the moment it pulls up outside, then we are leaving without you!’

  ‘I’ll be less than ten minutes, I promise, Papa.’

  As Charity sauntered out as if she had all the time in the world, he turned back to Hope. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to come with me to Lady Bulphan’s? We could have a nice late luncheon at Gunter’s afterwards.’

  ‘I’d much rather finish writing my chapter here than at Lady Bulphan’s. I am so close to writing the end that my head is spinning with it all. I’d be very poor company at Gunter’s today. I am too consumed.’

  Which was only partially the truth.

  While she really did have a head full of words and characters’ voices—because she always had a head crammed full of the things—she was also quite content to avoid Mayfair, and Berkeley Square in particular, for as long as possible after the regrettable incident with Lucius Duff by the fountain last week.

  She still wasn’t entirely sure what had come over her that night. She wasn’t usually so open with a gentleman as she had been him, or so uncharacteristically enthusiastic about kissing one either. Men, under all normal circumstances, were usually best avoided as they only ever wanted one thing. Not that she was resigned to a life of spinsterhood, or at least she hoped she wasn’t, but it would certainly have to be a very special and unusual gentleman indeed to ever tempt her and he certainly wasn’t that. Nor was she the sort who allowed one to dominate her thoughts for longer than was necessary. Hope was more for moving forward than looking back, except since that unfortunate but oh-so-enlightening kiss under the moonlight, even immersed in the excitement of her sister’s wedding, she hadn’t quite been able to shake the memory of it.

  Or him.

  What was it about him that scrambled her usually sound and cynical wits? He wasn’t the sensible and intellectual sort of gentleman she traditionally favoured. The sort who preferred books to women. In fact, he hadn’t seemed the least bit scholarly and academic and he certainly didn’t look like that sort of gentleman either. Not that he resembled any sort of gentleman at all, truth be told. He was big and drunk and tactless. Too dark. Too tall. Too i
nsightful and much too manly. Exactly as he had said, he looked like trouble—and even that hadn’t stopped her from attaching herself to him like a barnacle!

  It had been mortifying enough in the first place to have plastered herself breathlessly up against plain old Mr Duff—the transient stranger who would rapidly disappear out of her life—but now that she knew he also happened to be the new Marquess of Thundersley and therefore likely unavoidable in society, she was nowhere near ready to face him again yet.

  Especially as he had been so gallingly smug about it all.

  No indeed! When she collided with him again, she would be composed enough to glare at him in disgust, armed with an arsenal of pithy comments so that Lord Just-Call-Me-Luke knew in no uncertain terms that she considered him as vile and unworthy as the hideous Lord Harlington he had rescued her from.

  And once she had finished giving him a piece of her mind for his ungentlemanly behaviour she would skewer him some more by lambasting his drunken efforts at kissing. The man was far too good at it and deserved being brought down a peg or two—even though she had greedily kissed him back and thoroughly enjoyed every splendid second of it.

  Not that he ever needed to know that!

  ‘If you are sure, dear.’ Her father smiled affectionately.

  ‘I am. You know I love nothing better than a silent house when the muse strikes. And no disrespect to you, Papa...’

  ‘But I have been under your feet these past months while I have been recuperating.’ He patted her hand. ‘I understand completely as I too value silence as I work. Enjoy the quiet, darling. You’ve doubtless earned it.’

  * * *

  A good half an hour and a great deal of her parents hollering at the tardy Charity later, Hope finally waved them all off. Then armed with a hot cup of tea and promising herself she would not allow that regrettable kiss to intrude on this perfectly splendid day, she took herself upstairs to her bedchamber and out to her lovely little balcony overlooking the private and secluded communal garden beyond their terrace.

  She had fought tooth and nail for this room when they first moved here, arguing that if Faith had her own little artist’s studio downstairs and Charity had her own music room up in the attic, it was only fair she got to have the only balcony the house possessed because she loved to write outside when the weather permitted. It wasn’t particularly spacious. There was only room for one wrought-iron chair and its tiny matching table, but it was private, quiet and surrounded by nature and out here she could forget she was in a big, crowded city and instead pretend to be in the blissful quiet of the countryside.

  As she sipped her tea, she read over the pages she had written the day before, adding corrections as she went as was her habit, so that by the time she reached the end of the words, she had forgotten the rest of the world, and almost forgotten the brute Lord Thundersley existed. Instead, her odd head was teaming with fresh words to add to the story.

  She had a good feeling about this book. Which was staggering really after the blows her confidence had taken over the last one. From the moment the first shoots of the idea formed, it seemed to effortlessly grow and flourish, so much so, she was starting to believe Phantasma might finally be the book to get her published. It certainly felt different from all her previous rejected efforts. Or at least it did on the odd occasion when she allowed herself to feel proud of it, which was a vast improvement on the usual doubts she harboured about her writing talent. Doubts which had increased tenfold after her self-confidence had been eviscerated by the three respected publishing houses she had been brave enough to send her last book to—two of which hadn’t bothered reading beyond the first chapter before they had rejected it out of hand.

  But Phantasma still felt stronger. And not at all what she had seen on any bookshelf before.

  She had left her intrepid heroine all alone in a derelict building on the edges of the slum. The moonlight leaking through the remnants of the long-collapsed roof picked out the cobwebs covering the cold, ancient walls as she climbed the worn wooden stairs upward towards the flapping sounds of bats beneath the creaking eaves. In her mind, the next scene was already fully formed, and the heroine would finally meet the monster. Except the villain wouldn’t be the malevolent ghoul that she and everyone else expected—it would be her fiancé. A man, she would rapidly discover, so twisted by greed and devoid of all conscience he had married repeatedly for money, assuming a new identity each time in case the authorities questioned his motives, then disposed of those unfortunate wives in a shocking, gory and premediated manner once he had complete control over them.

  From there, the intricate Gothic mystery she had diligently constructed over three hundred tightly packed pages would finally unravel as it reached its terrifying crescendo. After all his sickening and twisted secrets had been revealed, and as the heroine battled to free herself from his murderous clutches, the building would burn in a ferocious fire. Then, it would collapse in the inferno, taking the much-feared Phantom of St Giles and all his wicked secrets with it, as she escaped into the night towards freedom.

  Hope’s pen moved quickly as the story flowed and she lost all sense of place and time. The sun was already high in the sky when the nearby slosh of something which sounded like water snapped her out of her fictional world and pulled her attention to the neighbouring balcony at Number Twenty-Two.

  A balcony which, to the best of her knowledge, had never been used in all the years she had lived next door to it. However today, she could hear someone moving about in the room beyond.

  Intrigued, she craned over the railings to investigate further. The glass on the narrow French doors steamed and dripped with condensation. Behind the misted windows she could see a fuzzy and indiscernible human shape. It paced from one side of the room to the other, its arms constantly moving above its head. Then it stopped and stretched, the skin-coloured smudge practically filling the doors until it flung them open and the mystery occupant strode out to stare over his own railings a split second before she gasped in shock.

  ‘Lord Thundersley!’

  Hope clamped her hand over her mouth as his head whipped around, and then blinked like an idiot as she took in the full extent of the unexpected and scandalous sight of him standing practically nude in broad daylight.

  He was obviously fresh from the bath. Obvious, because he was positively soaking wet and the only thing he was wearing was the towel loosely wrapped around his waist. Droplets of water fell from his shoulder-length hair, over his broad chest and dripped off his pebbled nipples. Others trickled from his short beard to the gully formed by his impressive pectoral muscles down over his abdomen, lazily following the dark dusting of hair that arrowed beneath the folds of the towel.

  ‘Hope?’ He smiled back, more water spiking his black eyelashes, clearly vastly amused to see her. ‘Well as I live and breathe! What a surprise. Don’t tell me you live here?’ His big hands rested on his hips as he laughed, apparently oblivious of his distinct lack of clothing. ‘Fate certainly has a sense of humour.’

  She pushed herself upright in her hurry to escape the unexpected and shocking sight, knocking her forgotten chilled tea all over the top sheets of her precious writing as she did so. Her face burning and her eyes much too curious, she snatched the pages up and clumsily used the front of her dress to mop away the damage while the dry ones decided to flutter haphazardly in the breeze.

  ‘You’re naked!’ The words came out in a mortifyingly missish squeal as she tried and very definitely failed to catch the pages.

  ‘That I am.’

  She crouched down and hastily attempted to gather up the last six months of her work before it flew away on the breeze and entirely failing in her feeble attempts to avert her curious eyes as she did so. ‘What sort of a person walks out on to a balcony in just their birthday suit?’

  Their very impressive, sun-kissed and beautifully sculpted birthday suit.

&nbs
p; ‘The sort who has just got out of their bath and wasn’t expecting to find anyone else out here when nobody seems to get out of bed before noon in Mayfair. Clearly that isn’t the case here in Bloomsbury, so...’ He pointed back towards his doorway with a jerk of his thumb. ‘I’ll spare your blushes and go and put something on.’

  Thankfully, he disappeared back inside leaving a very disconcerted Hope to briskly tidy up the mess she had made. She was frantically picking up the last of her pages when he returned, still shamelessly sporting a towel on his lower half but he had at least donned a shirt to cover the rest of him. She knew he had donned it in haste because he hadn’t bothered drying himself and the soft linen was twisted as it clung to the water and was doing a very good job of translucently moulding itself to his chest like a second skin. Somehow, that effect was even more distracting because she now knew exactly what lay underneath that shirt and her vivid imagination seemed determined to picture it. He bent to pick up a single sheet from his own balcony, which in her panic she hadn’t noticed had escaped, causing the damp fabric to stretch taut over his back, shoulders and muscular arms, which to her shame, flustered her further.

  Good gracious he was something! She had never seen anything quite like it.

  ‘I believe this is yours.’ He stretched the few short feet between the railings to hand it back and she snatched it and clumsily stuffed it into her pile, wishing her stupid face wasn’t glowing like a beacon, her mouth didn’t feel quite so dry and her stupid palms weren’t so moist. ‘I am truly sorry for startling you. I really didn’t expect to see anyone out here.’ He appeared genuinely contrite.

  As well as wet and sinfully and alluringly wicked.

  Drat him!

  ‘I’m a country boy, used to the privacy and solitude which comes with wide open spaces and I am still not acclimatised to the way things are done here.’ Then he smiled, drat him, not in a smug or lecherous or patronising way, but in a rather shy, boyish and attractively lopsided manner as his gaze remained refreshingly locked to her face.