Promise Me Heaven
Authors: Connie Brockway
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Historical, #General
Also by Connie Brockway
HISTORICALS
Anything for Love
A Dangerous Man
As You Desire
All Through the Night
My Dearest Enemy
McClairen’s Isle: The Passionate One
McClairen’s Isle: The Reckless One
McClairen’s Isle: The Ravishing One
The Bridal Season
Once Upon a Pillow,
with Christina Dodd
Bridal Favors
The Rose Hunters: My Seduction
The Rose Hunters: My Pleasure
The Rose Hunters: My Surrender
So Enchanting
The Golden Season
The Lady Most Likely
, with Christina Dodd and Eloisa James
The Other Guy’s Bride
The Lady Most Willing
, with Christina Dodd and Eloisa James
No Place for a Dame
CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE
Hot Dish
Skinny Dipping
ANTHOLOGIES
Outlaw Love
, “Heaven with a Gun”
My Scottish Summer
, “Lassie, Go Home”
The True Love Wedding Dress
, “Glad Rags”
Cupid Cats
, “Cat, Scratch Fever”
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 1994, 2013 by Connie Brockway
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
First published by Dell Publishing a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. in 1994.
This edition published by Montlake Romance in 2013, Seattle
ISBN-13: 9781477849088
ISBN-10: 1477849084
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Illustrated by Dana Ashton France
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013911409
Contents
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Chapter 1
July 1814
L
ady Catherine “Cat” Sinclair was hot. The heavy blue worsted habit she had donned in hopes of making a good impression had dark, wet rings beneath her arms. Her hair hung in a dusty, fast-uncoiling knot on the damp nape of her neck. Sweat trickled down her back.
She was also lost. After two days of listening to her great-aunt Hecuba read “bowdlerized” Defoe, Cat had escaped their shabby hired coach. Commandeering a sidesaddle from the last posting house, she had lit off on one of the outriders’ steeds, only to find herself wandering the high Dover moors without any clue as to where she was. Now her London-bred horse was skittering nervously away from yet another group of blasted sheep emerging from a break in the hedgerow.
No one appeared to live on this high, windswept land. No one, that is, until she saw a lone herder half-buried in a nearby thicket. With a sigh of relief, Cat spurred her mare toward him. She was a third of the distance before she discovered he was half-naked. Quickly she reined in her horse.
Cat had seen men without their shirts before. She was, after all, the eldest in a family of three brothers and two sisters. But her brothers’ slender torsos in no way prepared her for this man. His was nothing like their slight adolescent forms.
He was simply enormous. He was tall, broad, and deep, from his impossibly wide shoulders to the long, thick thews of his thighs straining the fabric of his workman’s pants. She called out; he didn’t so much as glance back at her. His back, gleaming with sweat and streaked with grime, bulged with muscle as he attempted to pull a large, anxious ewe from the thicket of briar in which she had entangled herself.
Cat called again. And waited.
“Fellow! You there!” She called more loudly, certain he would have answered had he heard her. He remained firmly oblivious. Abruptly, Cat realized the brute was deliberately ignoring her. “You there! Man!”
Mongrel, jackass, toad
, she added silently, edging the mare closer. “I’m speaking to you, fellow!”
She was quite near him now. Close enough to see that his hair was shockingly long and black, sprinkled with dust—or gray—and curling damply on the wide nape of his neck. Still he continued to ignore her, linking his arms around the girth of the ewe and heaving against the purchase her front quarters had gained in the ground.
Determined to be dismissed no longer, Cat stretched out an elegantly booted foot and nudged him in his sweat-slicked side with her toe. At the same moment the ewe lost her foothold in the thicket, and with a grunt, the giant wrenched her free.
The momentum threw him back into Cat’s mount. It proved too much for the poor mare. She reared back, pitching Cat forward in the saddle. Cat yanked back on the reins, trying to bring her mount’s head down. The horse lunged, kicking out her hindquarters, flinging Cat halfway from the saddle. Her hat flew off and her hair tumbled down over her eyes as she clutched fistfuls of mane, fighting to regain her seat. As suddenly as she had startled, the mare went still.
Gingerly Cat edged herself back into the saddle and, with a shaking hand, adjusted her bonnet. The man was holding the reins tight up under her mount’s mouth.
His face was as bold as his figure: a squarely cut chin, cleft and darkened nearly blue by what looked to be several days’ growth of beard, wide lips set in a hard line, and black eyes gleaming dangerously from behind a fringe of blacker lashes.
“Now, what the bloody hell do you want?” The mare shied, but a mere flex of his huge wrist quieted her.
His tone stiffened Cat’s back. She raised her chin. “You will inform me as to the whereabouts of the Montrose estate.”
“The what?”
“Mister Thomas Montrose’s estate.”
“Estate?” the great beast of a man asked, so slowly and in so perplexed a manner that Cat wondered if he might be mentally deficient.
“Yes. Thomas Montrose. Lives somewhere hereabout. In a big house. A nice house. Do you know where the nice, big house is?”
“Why?”
“
Why?
” Mentally deficient or not, Cat had had just about enough. Her temper, suspect at best and tested by her journey, was stretched beyond its limits. “Because, you great unwashed Vulcan, you Minotauran horror,
I wish to go there!
”
His gypsy-dark eyes narrowed between a thicket of sooty lashes. “Why?”
“The devil take you. Because I am… I am his, er, niece.
Now
do you understand?”
A sneer slowly replaced his scowl and he turned the mare’s head so that Cat’s foot was caught between the wall of his hard chest and her saddle. Even through the boot leather she could feel his heat. She attempted to twist her leg free from the disturbing contact, but he only grinned up at her and reached out his other hand to capture the lip on the back of her saddle. Her leg was trapped, bracketed by the long, oiled bronze sinews of his arms. She refused to amuse him with her discomfort and glared defiantly down into his dark face.
“Thomas Montrose does not have any nieces, you little baggage,” he said in a deep, velvety bass. “I should know, for you see,
I
am Thomas Montrose. Now, who
the bloody hell
are you?”
Thomas Montrose released the mare’s reins, stepping back. The young woman with the tumbled russet hair and peculiar gray-green eyes was looking at him with something akin to horror. She did not even seem to notice he was no longer imprisoning her leg. It was a tact that had done much to quell the imperious manner in which she had spoken to him, as though he should have just dropped the confounded sheep and scuttled to her knee, doffing an imaginary cap as he awaited her command.
She was eyeing him now with distinct distaste, and Thomas was uncomfortably reminded that he was not only unclad but filthy. His embarrassment irritated him, and he inhaled deeply, marshaling his temper. That he had to marshal his temper at all further angered him. He had spent the better part of the past year successfully maneuvering the most difficult of Russian, Austrian, and Prussian political adversaries. And he had done so with characteristic aplomb.