Passion's Song (A Georgian Historical Romance) (38 page)

Though Nicholas became passionately attached to a
suitable young lady, the attachment was not quite deep enough since
toward the end of 1839 she married a baronet. On the advice of
Chester, Nicholas distracted himself from his admittedly mild
disappointment by building a conservatory. Upon its completion he
filled it with orchids and was soon thoroughly enamored of the
hobby. The pastime enthralled him. He spent hours caring for the
delicate flowers, and he quickly discovered he was able to
concentrate his thoughts most efficiently while working in the
carefully controlled environment, pruning, cutting, grafting, or
cataloging his precious orchids. In the confines of his
conservatory, Nicholas was utterly free to construct, test,
analyze, and refine his plans for the future until he was certain
they were foolproof.

places to get Stolen Love

The Spare: Regency Historical
Romance

Pennhyll Castle, Cumbria, January 3, 1812

Captain Sebastian Alexander, late of His Majesty's
Royal Navy, glared at his valet's reflection with eyes reputed to
have frozen boiling water on the spot. To no avail. McNaught
continued mixing another noxious remedy guaranteed to taste like
poison. Sebastian turned on his chair and found the motion did not
pain him as much as he expected. He ignored McNaught and his
potion. “I am not mad, James,” he said to the man beside him. A
hound the color of a thunderhead raised its muzzle and sniffed the
air. He stroked the dog’s head.

“
You are an Alexander.” James did
not look away from his collection of essays by Montaigne. “You are
too practical for madness. Besides, you aren’t old enough to fear
your mind in danger of infirmity.”

“
I saw a sailor go mad once, and
he not yet twenty.” At rest, Sebastian’s face marked him as a young
man, barely thirty, a handsome man with blue eyes and hair just shy
of black. Certainly, unquestionably, his eyes were blue. As
bitterly cold as ice at dawn. From across a room, his eyes pierced
with a rapier’s thrust to the heart.

James gave him a look. “I’ll warrant his madness was
not from age.”

“
The ocean broke his mind. We were
becalmed seven weeks on water smooth as glass.”

“
Your mind is sound, of that I am
convinced.”

“
I’m not to be back at sea for
weeks yet. What am I to do with myself until then?” He shuddered.
The hound at his side rose, and Sebastian rested a hand on its
sleek shoulder. “If I don’t get another ship right away, I might be
here even longer.”

“
Stop complaining. Brave naval
captains such as yourself are always at the head of the list for
ships.”

“
Jesus.” He rubbed his face with
both hands, disliking the way his mind whirled all out of order. “I
am ancient, James.”

“
Hardly.”

“
In my soul. Weary to the very
core and adrift. Becalmed. I lack purpose.” He drew in a breath,
felt pain blossom at the peak of inhalation, and then slowly
exhaled. “I want occupation, and I am too exhausted to find
one.”

“
You are in the very prime of
life, Sebastian.” Which James said in a very deliberate and annoyed
manner because the idea of Sebastian Alexander succumbing to
weakness was ludicrous.

Sebastian eased back against his chair. “Listen to
me.” He made a face of self-disgust. “Complaining like an old
woman. A man makes of his life what he can. He doesn’t sit about
bemoaning his fate. I’ll have my ship if I have to get down on my
knees and beg for it.”

James sat straighter. “You are Tiern-Cope. The world
comes begging to you, not the other way round.” He gestured, a wave
that took in everything. “Forget the sea. Pennhyll is your purpose.
Your position in life is now your occupation. You oughtn’t go back
at all. Your duty lies here.”

Sebastian sighed. “I never wanted this.”

“
I daresay a gentleman doesn’t
want half the duties that fall to him, but that does not absolve
him of responsibility.”

“
Of that, I am painfully
aware.”

“
Sebastian, you are not old, and
you are certainly not mad.”

“
Not mad.” He laughed softly.
“Last night, I saw—” He pressed his lips together, then continued
because he feared silence would break his mind the way a glassy sea
broke that young sailor. “I dreamed a man stood at the foot of my
bed.”

James closed his book on an index finger. “What an
appalling lack of imagination.”

“
I thought it was
Andrew.”

“
Was it?”

Andrew and his countess both gone and their killer
not brought to justice. By the time the black-bordered letter
caught up with him, his brother was nine months dead, on the very
heels, it seemed, of the death of their father. And then he’d been
wounded and given leave to recuperate and put his affairs and
estate in order. Six weeks of his leave passed in a fog of pain.
Nothing had been the same since he came to Pennhyll. Nothing.
“Andrew is dead.”

“
Well, yes, of course he is. But
this is Pennhyll, after all.”

Sebastian almost let the subject drop right there.
Except he couldn’t. The mood of his dream clung to him like the
scent of smoke on a man who went too near a fire. “Andrew never had
eyes like that.” He remembered the impact of staring into those
eyes as if it had really happened. Blue eyes. Alexander eyes.
Instead of the affable gleam so typical of his brother, eyes of
keen appraisal. “Like ice in the morning.”

“
Is that all he did? Stand at the
foot of your bed?”

Sebastian stared at the blanket on his lap. He did
not like feeling ridiculous, and he was uncomfortably aware of the
absurdity of implying a dream was more than a dream. Jesus, he must
be mad. “He spoke.”

“
And?”

“
As if my life depended upon what
he said.” The hound rested its head on his lap. With an absent
fondness, his fingers stroked the grey dome of the dog’s head. Even
at rest, there was about him the promise of action, as if he might
at any moment leap to his feet.

“
And?”

“
I could not hear him.”

“
Actually,” James said, lowering
his voice and leaning with one hand at the side of his mouth. “It’s
normal to have dreams. Lots of people have them. I had one myself
last night. About a lusty widow who—”

“
I saw him as clear and solid as I
see you right now, and then he disappeared. I don’t want that.”
Sebastian pushed away the glass proffered by his valet.

“
Pennhyll, my dear Captain
Alexander, is haunted—”

“
Damn potions addle my
brains.”

“—
however—”

McNaught’s round cheeks drooped. “A new tonic, my
lord. Prepared—”

“
Jesus! That smells like—” At his
side, James’s book snap closed. “Awful.”

James shook his head. “I doubt you saw Andrew last
night.”

“
Hell.”

McNaught stared at the glass in his hands. “Wouldn’t
be proper medicine if it didn’t, my lord.”

A smile flickered on James’s face. “You saw not
Andrew, but the fourth Lord Tiern-Cope.”

“
Sod off. Not you,
McNaught.”

“
The Black Earl, dead these four
hundred years and more, appears to the Lords Tiern-Cope to warn of
impending doom.”

“
I mean it, James.”

James’s flint-grey eyes widened in mock horror.
“It’s plain why he appeared to you, Sebastian.” He waved a hand and
came perilously close to knocking aside McNaught’s potion. “A fate
worse than death itself awaits you.”

“
Bugger yourself.”

“
Not what I had in mind.” James
pretended to dodge a blow and McNaught, seeing his potion once more
in danger of being dashed to the floor, clutched the glass to his
chest. “My dear Captain,” James said in a drawl that sent Sebastian
to the very brink of irritation, “you are not mad. You saw the
Black Earl last night—”

“
I didn’t.”

“—
because your bride, the future
countess of Tiern-Cope, is here. At Pennhyll. Or, more precisely,
there.” He pointed at the window before them.

“
Where?” The glass-paned
conservatory wall reflected his image, though faintly, as if this,
too, had been depleted by injury. He saw a leaner man than he used
to be, with a pale face below dark hair. Next to him, James’s
seated reflection held a book on his lap. A third figure showed in
the glass, looming just behind. McNaught, of course, though for an
instant his heart jumped unpleasantly. Some trick of optics made
his servant appear quite tall. Nearly as tall as Sebastian himself.
McNaught, however, stood no higher than Napoleon and a full foot
short of his employer’s height. Quite the trick of light for his
rotund little servant to seem twice his height and half his
weight.

Sebastian stared hard at the shadowed orbits of his
eyes. Penetrating the reflected trio of invalid, friend and
servant, he looked through himself. Outside himself. Thick hedge
the height of a man’s thighs marked the nearest garden limits and
beyond that, lawns and more gardens. Instead of grey reflection, he
saw filtered sunlight on a winter’s palette. A freshly swept
flagstone path led up-slope to a lawn twenty yards distant where,
through the gap in the border, he could see people strolling or
lounging on chairs. In the sizeable area of lawn cleared of snow,
two women played tennis, watched by several men intent on the
contestants.

James re-opened his book. “You were sleeping when
they got here.” He shot a glance behind them. “McNaught, bless him,
as much as told me it’d be my life if I disturbed your rest.
Besides, I’m certain I mentioned she’d be here any day.”

“
Thirteen.”

“
Fourteen. Sixteen counting the
two of us.”

“
You said a few.” He didn’t even
try to keep the peevishness from his voice. “Only a few guests.”
What he wanted was the comfort of a ship under his feet and failing
that, one night without dreams that felt more real than the stones
of Pennhyll Castle.

“
Sixteen is a very good number for
a country outing.”

“
It’s a damn crowd.”

“
You oughtn’t complain of me,
Sebastian. I’ve got you four ripe country lasses to choose from,
any one of whom would be thrilled out of her stockings to be the
next chatelaine of Pennhyll.”

“
I do not want any guests at all.”
He had never been the most social of men. Now, he was realizing how
much he’d come to enjoy solitude during his years at sea. As for
Pennhyll and his title; he didn’t want either.

James shrugged.

“
I don’t want a wife.”

“
A problem, my dear
Captain.”

“
I know I must.” He snorted. “The
earl must be married so he may start his nursery and ensure the
succession.”

“
Special license at the ready, I
trust.”

He lifted a hand in a gesture of disinterest
guaranteed to dash the hopes of feminine hearts. “All I need is a
bride I don’t want.”

“
Well, then.”

“
What I want is to go back to sea.
If I cannot have that, I want to be left alone. And if I cannot
have that, then I want to be married without the bother of country
outings, or parties or wooing or of pretending emotion I do not
feel. And never will feel.”

“
Sebastian, Sebastian,
Sebastian.”

“
I want a wife happy to leave me
my solitude, who makes no demands for love or affection. Will one
of those young ladies do that?” He pointed, then stared out the
window. Imagining him in command of a ship, cool in crisis, took no
effort whatever. “There are six young ladies, James. You said there
were four.”

“
One of them is my sister. And
though Diana is young, she’s hardly a country lass.”

“
Which one is she?”

James looked out the window. “The one with the
largest dowry.”

Sebastian tried not to laugh but not hard enough to
succeed. God save him, James did make him laugh, even when he
didn’t want to. The smile warmed his features and threatened to put
life in his eyes.

“
She’s playing tennis. The
brunette.”

“
Ah.”

“
Of the gentlemen, I’ve made sure
you’ve no competition there. None are as rich as you are now, they
haven’t titles, and they’re quite dull. I don’t think even one of
them has been to London in a decade or so the least. Good squires
and yeomen all, I’m sure. And, aside from me, of course, none are
as handsome as you, either. You ought to thank me.”

“
Why did you say there were four
to choose from when there are six?”

“
Why, indeed.”

“
If you were a sailor, I’d have
you keelhauled for your insolence.” His father echoed in his voice,
a fullness of confidence and arrogance. He’d never once thought
he’d be the last of the Alexander men. Instead, the youngest of
three sons, he’d embraced a career at sea and found that, like his
father, he was born to command. He wanted that again, to return to
the sea and to command, because then his life would be his own once
more. Ever since he knew he would not die of his wound, if he
reached for the man he used to be, he found nothing he recognized.
The certainty of his life and his place in it had forever sunk
beneath the waves, washed away in a tide of pain. He wanted his old
self, his real self, back.