The Love Affair of an English Lord

304 Pages·2005·1.08 MB·English

by  Hunter Jillian

“W hat are you waiting for?” she whispered.
He leaned down to kiss her pouting mouth again. “Do you really want to give
yourself to a man like me?” he asked softly.
“Only to a man like you,” she said without hesitation.
He closed his eyes. “You honor me, Chloe.”
“I don’t want to honor you, you scoundrel. I want you to . . . to finish what you
started. Dominic, for God’s sake, have a little mercy. I have never felt like this
before.”
“My God, I hope not.” The thought was intolerable to him. If he had met her
before his life had fallen apart, he had no doubt he would be approaching her
brothers for her hand. “Chloe,” he said, the intensity of his expression easing,
“you’re the best thing that has ever happened to me. I’m afraid the same does not
hold true in reverse.”
“You’re wrong,” she whispered. “And you aren’t going to change my mind.”
“God help me,” he said in a low voice, “I don’t intend to.”
Chapter 1
England
1814
The late Dominic Breckland, Viscount Stratfield, was returning to life in a sea
of women’s underwear. From ear to ankle he fought a sensual undertow of lacy
shifts and white silk stockings, his muscular arms tangled in the ties and tapes of
lavender-scented buckram stays, his heavy thighs wrapped in a pair of dainty
French percale pantalettes. Like a wounded beast of the night, he had eluded
capture and taken refuge in the last place his pursuer would think to look.
Summoning a primitive instinct for survival, he had climbed the sturdy oak
tree outside the manor house and hauled his bruised and bleeding six-foot frame
over the windowsill. Hopeful he had outwitted the man who chased him, he had
then collapsed—into an open trunk stuffed with personal female attire and
frivolous accessories.
He was not too exhausted to appreciate the irony of the situation.
For now at least he had managed to escape the man who was hunting for him.
Yet moment by moment his life’s blood was saturating an unknown woman’s
muslin petticoats and blush-pink stockings. Pain seared his upper body. Gritting
his teeth, he unraveled from his elbow a flimsy lawn chemise embroidered with
blue silk forget-me-nots. His gaze unfocused and brimming with deviltry, he
examined it in the moonlight.
If he was going to die, for the second time in a month, he might as well go out
on a rousing sexual fantasy. “Well,” he murmured, “what sort of woman are you
anyway? Fast or merely fashionable? Do I have a choice? Then give me fast.”
Unfortunately the maidenly garment failed to inspire a potent sexual image in
his mind. The owner did appear to possess a decent pair of breasts, although
Dominic was admittedly not capable of objective appraisal in his current
condition.
God help them both—the poor woman would suffer a heart seizure when she
found his carcass buried in her drawers. It seemed to him that he had once
owned this creaky old manor house, at some time in the murky past, and he tried
to remember who had bought it from him. To his frustration his brain refused to
focus, images flitting elusively behind his eyes like moths in the shadows.
A retired sea captain, wasn’t it? Sir Hickory or Humpty Something, his wife
and daughter. Their names escaped Dominic at the moment. Bleeding to death,
he hoped he would be forgiven the lapse in manners.
“Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,” he muttered. “But who the devil was his
wife?” If he was wallowing in the women’s underclothes, he ought at least to
know her name.
Many would remark that Dominic being found dead in a trunk of petticoats
was not surprising for a former English scoundrel who had thumbed his nose at
society. His closest friends might even have chosen to bury him in a shroud of
female underclothing as a loving tribute to his past sins.
Except that Dominic had been officially “buried” a month ago, mourned by a
few, cursed by many. Aside from the persistent rumors of his ghost popping up
in the oddest places and doing the naughtiest things, no one really expected to
see him again.
Not his servants or scattered acquaintances.
He trusted only one person. The man who had helped him arrange his own
funeral.
The late-evening silence of the country estate was marred by thumping
footsteps, a bucket being kicked over, and an irate male voice coming from the
front of the house.
“Somebody open the bloody gate!” the gardener shouted from the driveway
below. “The carriage is coming over the bridge!”
“The bloody gate has been open for an hour!” the groom shouted back.
“Company,” Dominic said with a mordant sigh, tossing the embroidered
chemise over his shoulder. “I suppose I ought to tidy myself up—if I’m expected
to entertain.”
He looked like a nightmare cast up from hell, and he knew it. His lanky frame
had lost flesh. The hollows below his cheekbones gave his masculine face a
dangerous gauntness. The lugubrious pattern of surgeon’s stitches that
crisscrossed his chest and left shoulder had been torn during his tree-climbing
escapade. Taking a breath that burrowed into his lungs like talons, he felt with
his uninjured arm for the windowsill and hoisted himself upright for a few
moments of enlightening agony.
His gray eyes widened in approval as he took stock of his surroundings.
“Well, isn’t this convenient?” he said, clenching his teeth against a wave of
pain. “A room with a view.”
His own estate lay across the swathe of moonlit road on a wooded rise. Warm
beams of candlelight glowed from the bedroom window where he had been
brutally stabbed “to death” three weeks ago. His uncle, Colonel Sir Edgar
Williams, had already taken possession of the house, and if Dominic had access
to a spyglass, he could have identified the shadowy figure standing behind the
curtains.
The taunting silhouette belonged to a woman, he thought in cynical
detachment. Of that he had no doubt. But whether she was the same lady who
had shared his bed while he was callously being stabbed, he could not say. Nor
did it matter now. That love affair belonged to a past life and had died along
with his previous identity. His feelings for his former mistress were as dead as
she believed him to be.
The clip-clop of approaching horses, the churning of carriage wheels on the
road, interrupted his troubled reflections. Pray God whoever owned this trunk
would not decide to explore her dressing closet tonight. For if he was any judge
of women’s underwear, and it so happened that he was, then the delicately
proportioned owner of these garments would quite indelicately scream her head
off when she discovered a ghost in her intimate garments.
From the stuffy depths of the lumbering carriage, Lady Chloe Boscastle could
discern one of her undergarments dangling like a banner of indecency from her
bedroom window. She leaned forward, her body frozen in disbelief, her face
turning pale. The bulk of her personal belongings had arrived from London just
that morning. She and the maid had barely started to unpack them, let alone put
them on display from her window.
She attempted to close the carriage curtains in a casual manner, hoping the
other passengers would not notice this disconcerting sight. Not that anyone
would be surprised by such a faux pas from Chloe at this point. She had brought
the inglorious label of troublemaker with her from London and was almost
expected to continue her worrying ways. Far be it from her to disappoint her
growing critics.
The errant undergarment—heavens above, it rather looked like her favorite
chemise—could only mean that her scapegrace brother Devon had come and
gone while she had been carted off to a country ball in a cavernous cobwebby
hall.
And what had the rascal pilfered from her room this time? she wondered in
alarm. He had already pawned off a good deal of her jewelry to pay off his debts.
But surely he had not stooped to stealing her underthings. . . .
A more amusing thought jolted her upright. Could Devon be walking about the
countryside disguised as a woman? Or had he found a female companion to give
him shelter? He was supposed to be lying low with an elderly relative in the next
village. Chloe realized her brother, a nobleman who had overnight become a sort
of heroic outlaw due to a stupid prank, felt a little desperate. Being a Boscastle,
she was a very liberal person herself, but even so, there were limits to decent
behavior. Devon seemed to be dangerously testing those limits beyond what a
wicked Boscastle would usually dare.
She turned away from the window as the ancient carriage labored between the
rusty iron gates of the modest estate, making enough noise to raise the dead. A
furtive glance at the endearingly blank faces of her aunt and uncle, also ancient
in her eyes, reassured her they had not noticed the wayward article in the
window of their wayward niece’s bedroom.
“As I was saying,” Uncle Humphrey continued to his wife, “the cat was only
being a cat, Gwennie. He did not drag the dead mouse to the parson’s chair
deliberately to embarrass you. It was an offering of the hunt.”
Aunt Gwendolyn gave a delicate shudder, her bosom lifting and falling like a
wave. “I was mortified beyond words. It happened right when the poor parson
was recounting the latest antics of the Stratfield Ghost.”
“Not that deuced ghost again, Gwennie. Not in front of Chloe.”
Chloe was only half listening anyway, more intent on her own impending
doom than a dead man’s imaginary exploits. She released a sigh of relief as the
carriage rounded the drive and came to a jolting stop. No one would believe that
she had hung her chemise from the window to dry—her improper conduct was a
source of both prurient interest and kindly concern in this dull backwater parish.
Even worse than being shunned, Chloe’s country relatives had engaged the
entire village to reform her. She was surrounded by moral zealots on every side,
well-intentioned people who knew of her past sin.
Caught kissing a young baron in a park, she had been promptly banished from
London by her brother, the Marquess of Sedgecroft, to the home of her retired
uncle Sir Humphrey Dewhurst. It was the worst punishment imaginable for a
social-minded young woman. Chloe might have already considered the rest of
the year doomed had she not met the most charming man in Chistlebury at the
ball earlier tonight. Her waist still felt warm where he had held her—far too long
to be proper, not long enough to be considered an advance by those observing
them. It seemed there might be hope for her, after all. Her exile might even
provide a little excitement. The village matchmakers had watched in
encouragement as she and Lord St. John had flirted across the dance floor.
Practically bouncing out of the carriage, she ignored her aunt’s tsk of
annoyance and made a beeline for the house. She slipped off her high-heeled
tapestry dancing pumps at the lichen-coated front steps. It wasn’t a proper manor
house at all, more of a glorified stone farmhouse with a pond of noisy ducks
beneath her window. She missed the smelly bustle and dangers of London , the
gossip and daily social rounds. She missed her friends, although most had
already forgotten her by now, their lives full of gaiety, parties, and glittering
social affairs.
“Chloe!” Her tiny aunt came bearing down upon her like Attila the Hun, her
horsehair petticoats bristling against the door. “I noticed that your bedroom
window was open before we left tonight,” she said, holding her blue-veined hand
to her heart as she caught her breath.
Chloe turned, catching the eye of the curly red-haired young woman standing
inside the hall. It was her cousin Pamela, who had missed the ball due to a
wrenched ankle and who was making strange, undecipherable hand signals
behind Aunt Gwendolyn’s back.
“It wasn’t the bedroom window,” Chloe said slowly. She was struggling to
interpret Pamela’s gesticulations. “It was the dressing closet, and—”
“I opened it to give the closet a good airing,” Pamela inserted, motioning for
Chloe to be quiet. “The smell of powder and perfume was a bit powerful.”
Aunt Gwendolyn was too busy unbundling her petite frame from a fox-
trimmed pelisse to take much notice of this secret pantomime. “Well, make sure
it is securely closed before we retire. Everyone at the ball tonight was discussing
the latest antics of the Stratfield Ghost.”
Pamela’s eyes grew round, her attempt to help Chloe apparently forgotten.
“Ooh, and what has our wicked ghostie done now?”
Aunt Gwendolyn paused for effect, one hand pressed to the onyx buttons at her
throat. There was not a woman in the parish, with the possible exception of
newcomer Chloe, who had not avidly followed the life and death of the terribly
exciting, terribly wicked Viscount Stratfield.
From his war heroics to his brutal murder in bed almost a month ago, there was
little the viscount had done that did not titillate the villagers. His killer had not
been caught, but bets were still being laid in the local pub that an irate husband
had taken revenge.
Naturally, a woman had been at his side at the time of his death. In fact,
according to rumor, she had not only been at his side but had lain naked beneath
him as he was stabbed. And it was her hysterical recounting of the crime,
committed by a masked intruder, that had rocked this sleepy village to its soul.
Aunt Gwendolyn lowered her voice to a rather lurid tone as her husband
entered the house. “The handsome devil seduced Miss Beryl Waterbridge as she
knelt at her evening prayers last night.”
Uncle Humphrey came to a full stop in the crowded hallway, his brown eyes
twinkling in amusement at Chloe. “I did nothing of the sort. I was here in this
house all last night playing cards with my dear niece. Isn’t that right, Chloe?
Will you provide my alibi?”
Chloe peeled off her lightweight rose wool mantle; she wondered absently
when she would see the handsome Justin Linton, Lord St. John again. As they
had parted, he’d vowed he couldn’t live without her. Chloe had laughed at his
romantic nonsense. “I can vouch for you, Uncle Humphrey,” she said stoutly,
sharing a grin with him over her shoulder. “You did not seduce a single person
that I noticed.”
She caught her reflection in the hall-stand looking glass and tried to see herself
as Justin would have done tonight. True, he had danced with her twice, but she
couldn’t help feeling that his attention might have strayed to another young
woman whose hair was lighter than Chloe’s, whose voice was a little sweeter,
whose manner was more demure.
She frowned at herself. Could that be her fatal flaw? Her inability to be . . .
demure like other young ladies? Sadly enough, this seemed to be a family trait,
and Chloe wasn’t sure she would change it even if she could. She supposed she
ought to pretend to be demure to seem more appealing, her sister Emma had
always advised this, but deep in her heart she really wished to be loved at her
absolute worst.
“And her screams summoned her poor father, who broke a toe trying to rescue