A Heart Too Proud

by Laura London

  Returning my breathing to what I optimistically believed to be the rhythmic cadences of sleep, I leaned limply over onto Lord Dearborne’s shoulder with what I hoped was the guileless innocence of a slumbering child. It was a pretty lame trick, I’ll admit, but it was the best that I could think of on the spur of the moment. Lord Dearborne stiffened momentarily, then pulled his hand from his pocket and slid it obligingly around my shoulders. I was lying there trying to think up a way to provoke further action when I felt the back of my wicked lover’s hand rubbing lightly against my breast.

  I wrenched myself upright.

  “Rake! How dare you take advantage of a woman pretending to be asleep? How did you know that I was awake?”

  “I don’t know—intuition, I guess.” I could hear the laughter in his voice. “I’m afraid that I’ve taken advantage of you in so many situations that I’ve lost count. How do you feel?”

  “Terrible. I hate your horse!”

  “If you’re sore from the ride, it serves you right,” said Lord Dearborne, with something less than loverlike devotion. “Jupiter is trained to take no one on his back but myself or my groom, Jason. I can’t understand why that stupid glue bait didn’t dump you at the first crossroads. Mayhap your charms work on horses as well as men, my violet-eyed witch?”

  “Well, he wasn’t charmed at all,” I returned crossly. “In fact, I had a more comfortable time of it under the not-so-tender mercies of a bunch of villainous spies. That brutish animal tossed me off twice, conked me senseless by tossing his neck, and carried me under a low-hanging branch that almost knocked my head off. Did you catch him, then?”

  “Yes, he came trotting into the Fox and Feathers outside Dyle and demanded his oats as though he owned the place. The stablehands there recognized him and obliged the poor fellow. Lesley is returning to Petersperch tomorrow and will bring him back.” There was a low shelf under the seat. Lord Dearborne opened it and drew out a small flask, which he unscrewed and handed to me. “Here, you still feel so cold.”

  “You are always forcing spirits on me,” I complained, but took a swallow of the bitter liquid nonetheless. The devil take your liquor, Milord, I thought, and looked up at him provocatively. “Now, aren’t you going to ask me if I’ve been, let me see, how did you phrase it? Ah, hurt in any other way?” I laughed.

  He smiled at me wistfully and with heart-stopping tenderness said, “I don’t know which can move me more, your laughter or your tears. Sometimes at Barfrestly I would be sitting in the library frowning over pages of Department reports and I would hear you outside in the garden playing at some silly game or other with your sisters or Kit. Every once in a while, then, I could hear you laugh, like sunlight on crystal, fresh, sparkling, innocently alive; all the things that you are and I am not. I tried so hard not to fall in love with you.” He brought one finger up to delicately trace the outline of my cheek. The casual affection of the gesture brought tears to my eyes.

  When the marquis spoke again, his voice was curiously tender:

  “God knows that I’ve made mistakes before, but that night in London when Lesley brought you home, wrapped up in his cloak, you stood there so still and white… I almost went out of my mind. I know it was my own fault that you wouldn’t confide in me, I’ve acted like a damned coxcomb since the first day we met. And that night I found you in Lesley’s bed, I was so jealous that I lost my control. There’s never been a woman before you… dammit, you little wretch, will you wait until I finish my sentence before laughing at me? I’m trying to say that…”

  I knew I should be cherishing this rare moment of humility in my beloved, but it was so out of character that it was too much for me. So I had to interrupt him.

  “Nicky,” I whispered, twining my arms around his neck, “hush up and take advantage of me.”

  It was some time before I regained the breath to speak. Then I was sitting curled on Milord’s lap with my warmly flushed cheek leaning against his chest.

  “Nicky?” This time I said his name tentatively, savoring it.

  “What is it, love?” His lips were in my hair.

  “If there has never been a woman before me, then where did you learn all those excellent things?” I asked quizzically.

  “Brat. Laugh at my love talk, will you? What I was trying to tell you was that there has never been a woman who has ever meant anything to me. God, I don’t know anything about being in love.”

  “Mmmmm. You seem to be doing all right. My word, what an odd place for you to kiss me. I never realized that people kissed other people in that spot before. N-ick-y…?”

  “What is the matter, am I frightening you, sweetheart? It’s all right, I’ll stop.”

  “No! Stu-pid. I just wanted to know why you didn’t tell me that you loved me before, when you asked me to marry you?”

  Lord Dearborne sighed and tilted my chin back so that I was looking directly into his eyes.

  “After tumbling you about like a scullery maid, I could hardly brazen out a declaration of love. Especially with Christopher snarling at me and hovering over you like an eagle protecting its only egg. Kit and I made up, by the way; this morning. We had a long talk and he gave me a lot of sage advice. Elizabeth, are you listening?”

  “Yes, yes. But, Nicky, I didn’t mind being tumbled around like a scullery maid. It was only that I was so sick. Actually, I wanted to be tumbled…”

  His lips stopped mine with a long, searching kiss, then he said huskily, “I can see that we are going to have to find a very strict chaperone for you until our wedding. What do you say about staying with my grandmother, the Duchess of Windham?”

  “If you want a strict chaperone, then not her, Nicky. She’s much too anxious to see your heir!”

  About the Author

  Laura London is the pen name for the husband and wife writing team Tom and Sharon Curtis. Married more than forty years, Tom and Sharon published ten historical and contemporary romance novels from 1976 to 1986, many of which have come to be regarded as classics in the genre. The Windflower is in numerous top 100 lists of best romances of the twentieth century, including Goodreads, The Romance Reader, All About Romance, and Dear Author. Tom and Sharon have been featured on both The Today Show and Good Morning America.

  The daughter of a petroleum geologist father and historian and magazine editor mother, Sharon was raised overseas and lived in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Canary Islands, Turkey, and Iran, and attended high school in London. As an adult, she worked in bookstore management.

  Tom attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison and has worked for a public television station as a writer and on-air reporter. He is currently employed as a semi-truck driver for a chemical company and plays guitar with a Celtic band that includes a son on bodhran and a daughter on fiddle. Together they have played eighteen years of annual performances at the largest Irish musical festival in the world.

  Find out the latest at www.facebook.com/lauralondonauthor.

  Also by Laura London

  The Bad Baron’s Daughter

  Gypsy Heiress

  The Windflower

  Moonlight Mist

  Love’s a Stage

  Sunshine and Shadow

  The Testimony

  The Golden Touch

  Mistakenly swept aboard an infamous pirate ship, Merry Wilding finds herself at the mercy of a wicked crew… and one sinfully handsome pirate.

  Please see the next page for a special excerpt of the beloved classic

  The Windflower and more from Laura London.

  Chapter One

  FAIRFIELD, VIRGINIA. AUGUST 1813

  Merry Patricia Wilding was sitting on a cobblestone wall, sketching three rutabagas and daydreaming about the unicorn. A spray of shade from the swelling branches of the walnut tree covered her and most of the kitchen garden, but even so, it was hotter here than it had been inside. A large taffy-colored dog with thick fur stole past the fence; she noticed it as a flicker of movement in the corner of her vision. Light dust
floated in the air and settled on the helpless leaves. The breeze brought the scent of baking ground and sun-burnt greens.

  There was no one about to disturb her solitary concentration, or to mark the intriguing contrast she made with the homey products of the earth that grew freely near her soft-shod feet. Her appearance suggested a fragile, pale icon: lace and frail blossoms rather than fallen leaves and parsley plants. She was a slender girl, with delicate cheekbones set high in an oval face, and dark-lashed eyes, lazy from the day. Early that morning she had put up her heavy hair in anticipation of the heat, but the ivory combs and brass hairpins were working loose and silky red-gold strands had begun to collapse on the back of her neck. It never occurred to her that some might find the effect charming; it merely made her feel hot, untidy, and vaguely guilty, as though she ought to return to her bedroom and wind her hair back up. She would have been so much more comfortable, she thought, if she dared sit as the housemaids did on the back stoop in the evening, with the hems of their skirts pulled up past their knees, laps open, bare heels dug into the cool dirt. A slight smile touched her lips as she imagined her aunt’s reaction, should that lady discover her niece, Merry Patricia, in such a posture.

  Setting down her pencil, Merry spread and flexed her fingers and watched as a tiny yellow butterfly skimmed her shoulder to light on the ground, its thin wings fluttering against the flushing bulge of a carrot. The beans were heavy with plump rods, and there would be good eating from the sturdy ruby stalks of the rhubarb. Merry looked back to her drawing and lifted her pencil.

  The rutabagas weren’t coming out right. The front one had a hairy, trailing root that jutted upward at an awkwardly foreshortened angle. Though she had corrected the drawing several times, the result remained an unhappy one. It would make a better exercise to continue reworking the picture until she had captured the very essence of the vegetable, in all its humble, mottled-purple symmetry… Merry was disappointed to discover in herself a flagging interest in the rutabagas… discipline, discipline.

  Discipline and a hot afternoon sun are the poorest allies, and while Merry forced her pencil back to its labor the dream invaded her mind once more.

  Last night the unicorn had come again.

  Ten years ago she had had the first unicorn dream, after seeing an impression of the creature fixed into the sealing wax of a letter to her aunt from England. Merry had been eight years old then, and as she slept the unicorn had come to her, like a tiny toy with great soft eyes, and she could pull it after her on a string. As she grew the dream had altered. She would dream of meeting with the unicorn in an enchanted wood, and they would run between the trees, a race which neither won, and afterward they would drink from a secret spring. She wasn’t allowed to have pets; but her dream unicorn was satisfying, exclusively hers, and would always come again if she went to the edge of the woods and called. Her aunt would never find out about it because it lived in the wild and was only tame for her.

  Then it left her dreams and hadn’t returned for years—until last night. It had burst through the window in a frightening rush of energy, glass flying everywhere, and it had reared in the corner of the room, pawing and snorting, looking bigger than it had been before, its muscles white and glistening beneath its creamy hide, its chest broad and heaving, its horn poised and thick. She had cowered beneath the covers, but curiosity caused her to look in small peeps and then long gazes. Its eyes were different now, still big, but there was knowledge there, a frightening intelligence, and it tossed its head, beckoning to her.

  He wants me to ride him, she had thought in her dream. Am I too afraid? She was going to leave her bed and go closer, but before she moved, it turned in a sudden dash and leaped through the window, hooves flashing in the moonlight.

  The fantasy hoofbeats faded slowly from her daydream, slipping away into the dimly lit part of the mind where dreams lie in safekeeping. Merry came back to reality as the soft walking rhythm of a flesh-and-blood horse prosaically replaced her midnight creature.

  She had been expecting no visitors, so she looked up quickly toward the sound, toward the narrow pebbled carriageway that split her aunt’s two-story red-brick house from the old frame barn. From behind the potent green of a ridge of lilac bushes, she saw her only brother emerge and watched with unbelieving elation as he worked his sweaty animal over to the shaded wall beside her.

  “Carl! Oh, Carl, hello! Hail! Salutations! Guten Morgen!”

  Leaning forward in the saddle, her brother said, “I take that to mean I haven’t arrived at an unwelcome moment? Who’s been teaching you German?”

  “Henry Cork—but that’s all he knows, so it was a short lesson.” Grinning her delight in a way she was sure must look foolish, Merry set down her sketch pad and extended her hand. Three months it had been since she had seen him, a comparatively short interval. Heroes, it seemed, didn’t make the most attentive brothers. “How did you know to find me back here?”

  “One of your abigails told me—Bess, I think. She’s sitting around front, shelling peas and dickering with a trunk-peddler over a card of buttons,” he said, taking her offered hand. “I imagine it will ruffle April’s feathers that I didn’t have myself announced.”

  It was clear from the unemotional tone of his observation that this was not a circumstance that would trouble him overmuch, but because her brother’s casual dislike of their aunt made Merry uncomfortable, she sidestepped the ramifications of his remark and said, “Not at all, Carl. Family needn’t stand on ceremony. How glad I am to see you. But I’m surprised! I thought you were in the capital with Father.” Her expression changed. “Has something happened? Father—is he…”

  “He’s well. Same as always. Tough as a horseshoe, although Mrs. Madison says he doesn’t get enough rest. I don’t know. I didn’t come to talk to you about him.” He gave her hand a brief squeeze before he released it, and then removed his hat, brushed back his hair, which was red-gold like hers but not as thick, and put his hat back on. He was gray with road dust and had tired, fine lines on his lean face, around his eyes, unusual lines on one so young, mapping the intensity within. She could tell he’d ridden hard. He was wearing civilian clothes, riding clothes which flattered him less than his officer’s uniform, making him look more like the young adult of twenty-one he was and less like a man used to drilling recruits.

  He glanced around with shaded eyes. “Can we talk here?”

  “Of course.” She lifted her feet to the top of the wall and hugged her knees, looking up at him with a slight tilt to her lashes. “The only ears here are on the sweet corn.”

  “But the potatoes have eyes,” he answered with a reluctant smile. “Is that what you’ve been doing, sketching vegetables?”

  “Trying,” she said. “There are riches in shape and shading under the leaves, but I’ve a poor hand this afternoon.” She held up her sketch pad for him to see.

  “Hmm. Amazing. Like life. I can’t see what you find amiss with it.”

  Merry only smiled and closed the sketchbook. “Will you come in the house, Carl? It’s almost teatime, and we’ve got cider cooling on ice chips.”

  “Later.” He waved his hand impatiently, as though dismissing an inane courtesy. “I need you again, my girl.”

  Her heart quickened. “To draw, do you mean?”

  It was the pride of her life that twice before she had been able to help him and the American cause. He had taken her once to a coaching inn and once to market day at Richmond, where he had quietly pointed out men suspected of collaborating with the British. She would make her best effort to watch them without seeming to and later had rendered the faces in detailed sketches. Carl saw to it that the drawings were reproduced and circulated, which neutralized the British agents as effectively as if they’d been captured or hanged.

  It had been a small thing to do for her country, especially compared to the ultimate sacrifice American soldiers were prepared to make on the field of battle; the smallness of it had stirred within her embers of d
issatisfaction with the useless gentility of her life. These yearnings would surely have wounded her staunchly pro-British Aunt April, so Merry kept them to herself and tried to find solace in painting watercolor portraits of heroines like the courageous Mrs. Penelope Barker, who, thirty years ago in the First War of Independence, had stopped the British from commandeering her carriage horses by pulling her absent husband’s sword from the wall and slicing to ribbons the reins in the British officer’s hands. Inevitably Merry had tried to daydream herself into Mrs. Barker’s shoes, but even if she’d possessed a sword, Aunt April would never have allowed such a gruesome object to hang on the wall, and the only horse they had was poor old swaybacked, buck-kneed Jacob, whom no one would want to steal. Furthermore, if enemy troops came within a hundred miles, Aunt April would undoubtedly whisk Merry away to a place of safety.

  Carl shoved his hat back over his sweat-lacquered curls. “If you’ll do it. Want to work with me again?”

  “I dearly want to draw for you again, Carl.” She stretched out a hand to stroke the horse’s soft, damp muzzle, smiling at her older brother. Motherless, they had been reared separately; he by their austere, unloving father, she by Aunt April, their mother’s sister. If she had seen Carl twice a year as a child, that was often. His boyhood had seemed to her an entrancing miracle of kite string and fishhooks, Latin tutors and wooden boats that really sailed. Unaware that she herself had become anything more than the awkward, overprotected girl-child who knitted mittens in the winter and stitched samplers in the summer, she watched as Carl grew taller, more clever, more self-confident. He was not an affectionate man. He hadn’t once remembered her on her birthday. He rarely offered himself as a confidant or a protector, and yet, through his patriotic activities he had brought into her life a rare and precious dimension. Teasingly she told him, “You’re my only chance to grab a little glory, you know. I suppose I’m not to tell Aunt April, again?”