Adam took a deep breath, trying to ease the tightening that occurred in his chest whenever this subject arose. “I am glad you know my secret, Mia. Now you understand why the girls can never marry.”
“No, Adam, I don’t understand.”
He blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“This is not a decision you can make for them, Adam. It is one they must make for themselves.”
“But—”
“It is a terrible burden they will bear, Adam. But they are not without hope.”
Her words angered, rather than soothed. “How can you say that?”
“Veronica was ill but her brother was not; neither was her mother. The girls are not Veronica, Adam. They have a chance, a good one, of escaping the taint and living normal lives.”
Adam gaped at her, stunned speechless by the simple sense of her words.
What a fool he’d been! All these years he’d thought only of what might be—never what might not be. Adam had always believed sequestering his daughters at Exham had been the best decision for them—for their happiness. Now he realized it had only been the safest choice. Mia was correct: they had a chance and he must let them take it, no matter how much he hated and feared the thought of them being exposed to public ridicule and cruelty.
“They must be told, Adam. Catherine is old enough now to be given such a responsibility, and soon Eva will be, too. This is not your secret, Adam, it is theirs. Each of them must decide how they will manage the information and whom they will share it with. Just as you have with me.”
Her words sent fear arrowing through him. “But what will happen if they fall in love? If they wish to marry? If people know of their secret, they will be ostracized and rejected. You and I know that is a terrible existence, Mia.”
“That is true, Adam, but we both know it is an easier burden to bear when you have somebody you love to share it.”
Adam stared down at her, overwhelmed by the truth of her words and astounded by his amazing good fortune. “Is it possible you are correct, my love?”
“Of course I am.”
He chuckled. “What did I ever do to deserve you, Mia?”
She smiled, and this time there was a distinctly wicked gleam in her eyes. “I don’t know. But I think you should make an effort to show some gratitude.” Her small hand slid from beneath the covers into his lap.
Adam threw back his head and laughed. “Is that all you ever think about?”
She smiled and began unbuttoning his breeches. “Yes.”
He lowered his mouth over hers. “Me too.”
Epilogue
London, five years later
Jibril tossed the reins to the waiting groom and swung down from his horse. The front door to Exley House flew open and Eva came galloping down the stairs.
“Gabriel! You’re finally home!”
He laughed. “Are you trying to knock me down, Evil?” He gave his half sister a rough hug to go along with the nickname.
“Don’t call me that.” The muffled reply came from his now ruined cravat but lacked any real heat. He held her at arm’s length.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his chest tensing when he saw her tear-stained face.
“Mama and Papa are insisting on this dreadful ball.”
He sighed. “Come along. Let’s talk about this somewhere other than the front steps. You know how your father is.” Jibril—or Gabriel as he was now accustomed to being called—liked his stepfather well enough, but knew what a stickler he could be.
“Make them let me go home, Gabe,” she wailed as they entered the foyer.
“Hello, Hill.” Gabriel handed the butler his hat and gloves.
“Welcome home, Master Gabriel.”
“Is my mother here?”
“I believe she is in the nursery. Will you be staying long, sir?”
Gabriel grinned. “That depends on His Lordship.”
“Will Drake be joining you?”
“Yes, he’s coming with the rest of my things later today.”
Gabriel’s dour valet had not been pleased by his employer’s latest stunt, which had resulted in him being sent down. But Gabriel was relieved. At almost twenty-three, he was older than all of his friends at Oxford except Viscount Byer, who at twenty-six would probably never leave school.
He was tired of books, papers, and studies. Now that he’d been banished from school for good, there was no way his mother could insist he return. He could only hope neither Lord Exley nor his grandfather would exert any influence to get the powers that be at Oxford to relent.
“Tell my mother I’ll be in the blue sitting room,” he told Hill. “Come on, Brat.” He grabbed Eva’s arm and pulled her up the stairs.
Gabriel pushed her toward a chair and dropped down across from her. “Where’s Mel?”
“She’s gone to visit Lady Moira. I was invited but didn’t want to go.” Eva twisted a thick strand of glossy black hair around her finger, the action mute testimony to how the rest of her hair had come loose. She looked like she’d been beaten by high winds.
Gabriel sighed. “Now tell me, why don’t you want a Season?”
Her pink dress had a tear at the hem and one of her shoes was stained with something that looked like horseshit, and probably was. Gabriel’s younger stepsister always made his heart ache. Even though they shared no blood, he felt very close to her. Growing up in Babba Hassan’s palace had meant he was raised with dozens of half siblings. Thanks to Assad, those half brothers and sisters were now lost to him.
It had been a relief to come to England and find three sisters waiting for him. Catherine had been a little older than he and too eager for her Season to have much time for a younger, foreign stepbrother. Melissa had been little more than a child, but Eva had been only two years younger and had behaved more like a boy than a girl. She’d also thought her new stepbrother was magnificent. Of course, she was unaware of how badly he’d botched everything in Oran, almost getting his mother and stepfather killed, while managing to lose control of his father’s empire in the process. No, Eva thought he was wonderful.
“I hate it.” Her quiet words yanked him from his reverie.
“Hate what?”
“All of it. The clothes, the dancing, the pointless chatter.”
He smiled. “You won’t once the young men start flocking.”
She scowled.
“What?”
“They won’t come flocking.” She held out her arms. “Look at me, Gabe.”
He frowned. “So you’re a bit . . .”
“Not a bit, a lot. I’m a bloody mess.”
Gabe wasn’t shocked by her swearing. In fact, he’d been the one to teach her how to swear in two other languages.
“Just a small mess,” he joked.
But she didn’t smile. Instead she dropped her head against the chair back.
“Mama is so kind, but there is only so much she can do. She can help me choose attractive garments, but she can’t wear my clothes for me.” She looked at him. “And then there is Father.”
“He probably can’t wear your clothes, either.”
She threw a cushion at him, clearly annoyed by his attempts to cheer her out of her unhappy state. “I am a constant source of disappointment to him, and it will only get worse if I am forced to make a spectacle of myself in front of the entire ton.”
Gabriel grimaced. He knew what she meant. The Marquess of Exley was one of the most inscrutable, coldest, and haughtiest men he’d ever met. Oh, he liked the man well enough, but he feared him almost as much as he respected him.
Although Exley was shorter and slighter than Gabriel, he possessed an air of menace that caused even men like Baron Ramsay to treat him with careful respect. The Marquess of Exley was a very, very dangerous man. Obviously, he would not skewer his daughter with his rapier, but he did have a rapier-like wit that was almost as lethal. And his eyes. Gabe shuddered; the man’s eyes cut worse than his short sword.
Not only that, but he was
also inhumanly well turned out. He even made Gabriel feel like a mess, and Gabriel put a lot of time and effort into his daily toilet. Unlike Eva.
While Gabriel had never heard the marquess say anything to his messy, clumsy daughter, he knew he could do as much damage with an eyebrow as most men could do with a whip.
“What do you want to do, Eva? You’ve already managed to weasel out of having a Season longer than any other young lady I know.”
She shrugged, miserably twisting her hands in her skirt, wrinkling the delicate muslin beyond repair. Gabriel opened his mouth and then closed it. What good would telling her to stop be?
The door to the sitting room opened and his mother swept in like a small, colorful storm.
“Jibril, darling, you’re home early!” She was the only one to still call him by his real name.
He stood and received her enthusiastic embrace and then submitted to her raptor-like exam.
“You are thin,” she declared. She turned to Eva. “Don’t you think he is thin?”
“He appears to have lost a few pounds,” his wretched sister agreed, smirking at him when his mother commenced clucking. “Maybe even a stone.”
Gabriel looked over his tiny mother’s head and mouthed, You shall pay for that. He extricated himself from his mother’s grasp. “I’m fine, Mama. You look blooming, as usual.”
His mother dropped a small hand to her rounded stomach and smiled smugly, the fine lines around her eyes the only proof that she was closer to forty than thirty.
“I am well.”
Gabriel knew well enough not to ask if this was going to be her final child. The last time he’d opened his mouth she’d volunteered the unwanted information that she would continue her favorite activity with her husband as long as she was able. She’d dropped this piece of conversational artillery at the breakfast table.
The marquess had only lowered the paper a fraction of an inch, his eyes narrowing in their sinister fashion, as if Gabriel might be stupid enough to pursue such a repulsive topic.
“And how are Anna and Beatrix and George?” he inquired.
“Your little sisters are doing well. They were both delighted to hear you were coming home.”
Gabriel raised his eyebrows. The twins were not yet five and the heir was hardly two; just how excited could they be?
His mother ignored the skeptical look and dropped down on the chaise longue, propping her head on her hand and smiling from Eva to him.
“Did I interrupt something interesting?”
“No,” Eva said hastily.
Lady Exley lowered her lashes and Gabriel shook his head. Eva had lived with his mother almost five years and still didn’t know how to handle her insatiably curious nature.
“We were speaking of Eva’s Season.” He ignored Eva’s scandalized look.
“That’s odd,” Eva said, her eyes narrowing with grim satisfaction. “I thought we were talking about the fact you’d just been sent down from school.”
His mother gasped. “Oh, Jibril! What have you done now?”
Gabriel dropped his head back and closed his eyes. He would kill Eva.
“Still,” his mother said in a musing tone, “I suppose this is as good a time as any for you to have returned home.”
Gabriel opened his eyes and lowered his head. “What do you mean, Mother?”
She smiled, her green eyes sparkling. “Why, you will be the perfect person to escort Eva about this Season.”
Gabriel let out an agonized groan but the sound was drowned out by the delighted laughter of his evil mother and stepsister.
Author’s Note
To write historical fiction is to walk a fine line: How much history? How much fiction? I have stayed true to major historical events and mores but I have allowed my imagination some freedom in minor matters.
There was no Beauleaux’s fencing salon in London, at least not as far as I know. However, there were similar salons and gentlemen were still engaging in swordplay during the early nineteenth century as a form of exercise and a sign of status.
I have my characters drinking champagne, which may or may not have been available to them, depending on what source of information one uses. Would they have drunk, eaten, or played cards in a theater box? There is ample evidence that all kinds of “non-theater” activity went on in private boxes.
Barbary corsairs really did kidnap hundreds of thousands of people—some estimates run well over a million—between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The United States Navy was, in large part, formed to combat the threat of the Barbary pirates. While some of these pirates were lone operators, many corsairs were in league with the coastal rulers of North Africa, some of whom were corsairs themselves. These men relied on both the steady supply of slaves and the ransom money they received for captives—like the author Cervantes, who was held for five years before his family could buy his freedom.
My sultan is fictional, as is his palace outside of Oran and the caves that run beneath the city. The Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, Turkey, is the inspiration for Sultan Babba Hassan’s seraglio/palace.
Don’t miss the second title in Minerva Spencer’s witty and daring Outcasts series,
BARBAROUS
Sussex, England, 1811
Daphne’s head rang louder, but less joyously, than the twelve bells of St. Paul’s—perhaps head-butting Cousin Malcolm in the face had not been the best decision?
The thought had barely entered her head when a deafening ringing and agonizing pain drove it out again. She staggered back several steps and collided with one of the ancient tree stumps that circled the clearing. Black spots danced in front of her eyes and she clutched the rough wood to steady herself, blinking hard. When she could see—somewhat—she touched her throbbing forehead and winced. Her fingers came away with blood: hers or Cousin Malcolm’s or both. She pulled her eyes from her bloody hand and looked across the small glade.
Malcolm lay where he’d fallen, sprawled amidst the wreckage of the picnic lunch Daphne had been unpacking when he accosted her. Her cousin had aged greatly in the decade since she’d last seen him. His brown hair, once thick and lustrous, had thinned and lost its shine, and his bloated body was a far cry from the slim, elegant dandy who’d briefly—and disastrously—held her future in his hands. There were eleven years between them and every one of them was etched into his thirty-eight-year-old face. A face now wreathed in pain and fury.
Malcolm scrambled into a seated position and shot her a murderous glare before yanking off his cravat and lifting it to his hemorrhaging nose.
Daphne couldn’t help thinking that a bloody, ringing forehead was a small price to pay for Malcolm’s obvious suffering. When she squinted to get a better look at his face, his puffy, bloodshot eyes shifted and blurred. She touched the bridge of her nose and bit back a groan. Blast! He must have knocked the spectacles from her face during their struggle.
She lowered herself into a crouch, angling her body to keep Malcolm in sight while searching the grass around her feet. The glasses were special, made with a split in the lenses to accommodate her poor vision. They were also the last gift from her husband before his death. If she lost them, it would be like losing even more of Thomas. It would be—
“Well, well, what have we here?” a deep voice boomed.
Daphne squawked like a startled hen and tipped forward onto her hands and knees, her eyes flickering over the surrounding foliage for the voice’s owner. A distorted shadow emerged from between two big elms and grew larger, shifting into the recognizable shape of a man on a horse. A huge man on an enormous horse.
His features became clearer—and more remarkable—with every step. He reined in midway between Daphne and Malcolm. The massive shire horse was at least seventeen-and-a-half hands high and the man astride the beast matched his mount in both size and magnificence.
Deeply sun-bronzed skin and golden blond hair were an exotic surprise against the pallid gray of the English sky. But it was the black eye pat
ch that covered his left eye and the savage scar that disappeared beneath it that were truly arresting. He lacked only a battered tricorn and cutlass between his teeth to be every maiden’s fantasy of a handsome pirate. Was he lost on his way to a masquerade ball?
Daphne blinked at the ludicrous notion and her thoughts, usually as well regimented as Wellington’s soldiers, broke and ran when the stranger fixed her with his single green eye and smiled, submitting to her blatant inspection with obvious good humor.
“Are you quite all right, Lady Davenport?” In spite of his exotic appearance, he sounded very much like an English gentleman.
“How—” she began, and then noticed his attention had become stuck at the level of her chest. She looked down and gasped. Her coat was ripped open from neck to waist and exposing a mortifying amount of chemise and flesh. She pinched the torn garment closed with her fingers and forced herself to look up.
But the stranger had turned to Malcolm and was staring at him as if he’d forgotten all about her. He slid from his huge horse in a single fluid motion and took a step toward the other man before raising an ornate gold quizzing glass. His blond eyebrows inched up his forehead as he examined the bedraggled, bleeding man on the picnic blanket.
Only the distant tweeting of birds broke the tense silence, which stretched and stretched and—
“Ramsay?” Malcolm’s voice was muffled by the bloody cravat that covered his nose and lips and he hastily lowered the ruined garment, his mouth agape.
Daphne looked from her cousin to the stranger and squinted—as if that might sharpen her hearing as well as her vision. Had Malcolm said Ramsay? The name teased her memory. Ramsay, Ramsay . . . wasn’t Ramsay the title of Thomas’s deceased nephew Hugh Redvers? Daphne worried her lower lip as she cudgeled her memory. Yes, he’d inherited the title through his mother—one of the rare hereditary baronies through the female line.
Her eyes opened wider and she looked at Malcolm, who was still staring at the huge stranger. Surely the idiot could not mean Baron Ramsay—Hugh Redvers? Daphne reached out to steady herself. Perhaps the injury to her head was worse than she’d thought?
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