Rexanne Becnel
Authors: The Heartbreaker
He could tell she wanted him.
He tilted her chin up and searched the unblinking hazel depths of her eyes. She was so innocent. That was the only contrary ripple in the tidal wave of certainty that rushed over him. Too innocent to know what was best for herself.
But he ignored that ripple. He wanted her.
No, it was more than that. He needed her.
“Phoebe,” he murmured her name against her lips and felt her mouth answer.
“James.”
One syllable, yet he’d never heard anything so erotic. His name in her low, breathy voice.
“Ah, damn,” he muttered. He was well and truly lost. His weariness fled, replaced by full-blown desire. Her breasts pressed soft and warm against his chest, and yielding. Her supple waist fitted the curve of his arm, and her mouth…
Her sweet, luscious mouth was created for him and his pleasure.
He wanted to devour her, to consume her for his own selfish pleasure. At the same time he was determined to make her burn with desire for him.
For Clifford Rex Chauvin
Thanks, Dad
The London Tattler
—
January 18
After nearly two years’ absence from town society, James Lindford, Viscount Farley, has returned from his second sojourn to the Orient. His mother and stepfather, Viscount and Viscountess Acton, hosted an exclusive dinner party for him at their home on Portman Square. He plans to make his first social appearance at the Edgerton Ball, Tuesday next.
The London Tattler
—
January 22
The Earl and Countess of Basingstoke have formally announced the betrothal of their youngest daughter, the beauteous Lady Catherine to James Lindford, Viscount Farley. Though some were surprised by the announcement, your faithful correspondent has long suspected that the pair would wed. After all, Lord Farley has a strong interest in the foreign affairs of our great land, and the Earl of Basingstoke is one of the king’s most trusted advisors in such matters. It can only be hoped that Lord Farley will be content now to reside in his home country and make foreign policy, and leave the actual adventuring to unattached young gentlemen.
The London Tattler
—
January 30
The lovely Lady Catherine Winfield was spied arm in arm with her fiancé, James Lindford, Lord Farley, at the French Opera House. They are widely agreed to be the handsomest couple presently on the scene, and word has it that their wedding celebration will surpass that of the Duke and Duchess of Ashbourne.
The London Tattler
—
February 4
Half the ton ought to be sick in bed today, for despite the blizzard attacking the city last night, the engagement party at the Basingstoke manse was a veritable crush, with more bared arms, shoulders, and bosoms on display than at a midsummer ball. Lady Catherine, shortly to become Viscountess Farley, was aglow and the undisputed star of the evening with her admiring beau circling close attendance on her.
The London Tattler
—
February 6
An ugly rumor has arisen, only to be proven no rumor at all, but rather, the unadulterated truth. Your faithful correspondent has learned that less than three weeks after the formalization of their betrothal, the much feted Basingstoke–Farley union may dissolve before it has rightly begun. It seems the proper Lord Farley has behaved in a decidedly improper manner—not that most young men abroad have not. But he has the apparent effrontery to bring the results of his indiscretions into his own household. Poor Lady Catherine has taken to her bed in shock.
The London Tattler
—
February 9
The latest word on the Farley brouhaha is that the viscount’s bachelor household now boasts both a small girl and a baby as its newest residents. Two children from his past. Could there be more? Your faithful correspondent has seen them, and regrets to report that one of them is a dark-skinned infant, obviously the result of a dalliance with some exotic eastern creature. There can be no doubt now about Lord Farley’s scandalous escapades while abroad. Inquiring minds wonder, since his itinerary took him to Lisbon, Naples, Cairo, and Bombay, does he intend to present his fiancée with a by-blow from each of those ports?
The London Tattler
—
February 14
Saint Valentine sends felicitations to lovers everywhere. But the patron saint of love cannot mend the damage Lord Farley has inflicted upon the heart of the woman who so faithfully awaited his return from his lengthy sojourns abroad. Your faithful correspondent is the first to report the legal dissolution of the betrothal contract between the grievously wounded Lady Catherine and the philandering Lord Farley. Rumor has it that Lord Farley’s political aspirations cannot help but suffer as well: Lord Basingstoke is not known for his forgiving nature.
The London Tattler
—
February 19
The Fleet Street Haberdasher’s near Chancery Lane was the site of a near brawl between the widely castigated Lord Farley and the Honorable Mr. Peter Wilkerson, middle son of the Marquis of Gorham. Were it not for the cool head of Mr. Kerrigan Fairchild, blood surely would have been spilt. It seems Lady Catherine has many defenders who cannot forgive Lord Farley the grave disservice he has done his former fiancée.
The London Tattler
—
February 24
Two longtime servants in the Farley town house have abandoned their posts. Although neither felt at liberty to discuss the tumult that reigns in their former place of employment, neither denied that a front window was shattered three days ago, that the laundry shed was set afire, and that the curtains in one of the downstairs rooms were ripped down from their hangings.
It is abundantly clear to this correspondent that Lord Farley has taken complete leave of his senses. Perhaps his foreign travels have fevered his brain. Whatever the cause, it is fortunate for Lady Catherine that she has discovered his moral weakness prior to binding herself to him in perpetuity.
And speaking of the beauteous Lady Catherine, on Monday evening she made a triumphant return to society at the Dowager Countess Bedham’s annual rout. Wearing a spectacular gown of golden gauze overlaid on a darker golden silk underskirt, and adorned with rosettes of embroidered seed pearls, she entered on the arm of the Honorable Mr. Percival Langley, widely known as her staunchest defender and admirer…
The wailing could be heard throughout the entire house. Though the nursery was on the third floor of Farley Park’s east wing and the master’s apartments occupied the second floor of the west wing, the baby’s crying carried there, faint, but no less distressing. Even when James Lindford retreated to the book-lined estate office on the first level, he could not entirely blot it out.
What was wrong with the child that she spent every night screaming? Frustrated, he ran one hand through his disheveled hair, then turned and stalked away from the tall window and its view of the night-shrouded countryside.
More to the point, what was wrong with the nurse he’d hired that she could not appease the poor babe?
He ought to be able to sleep through the din. Young Clarissa had no trouble doing so. But then, the older of his two daughters
had
to sleep at night. She expended so much energy creating chaos during the day that she collapsed exhausted every night, only to begin the cycle anew come the morn.
He paused before the liquor cabinet, straining to hear. Was that silence?
Then it came again, little Leya’s angry, sobbing wail. So far away, yet she might as well have been in the same room, for her cries pierced his heart and tortured him with guilt.
How had he gotten himself into such an insane situation? What had possessed him to think he could be a good parent to the two little girls he’d so casually fathered? If the investigators he’d hired ever located his third child and she turned out to be even half as unruly as these two, he’d end up in Bedlam.
Somewhere a cock crowed, though dawn was only a hint upon the horizon.
He would get no more sleep this night than he had any other during the past week. Rather than console himself with whisky, he ought to go up to the nursery and comfort his poor motherless child. Perhaps if he were lucky, Clarissa would sleep later than usual, and he would only have to deal with one unhappy daughter at a time.
In the nursery a solitary candle burned, but it revealed more than enough. The nurse lay on her cot, hidden beneath a heavy counterpane with a pillow clasped over her head. Meanwhile Leya sat in her bed, sobbing as if her heart were broken.
Guilt poured over James like frigid winter rain. The poor little girl was nine months old, yet already her mother had died, her mother’s family had rejected her for her mixed Indian and English blood, and she’d been dragged halfway around the world to live in a chilly foreign land nothing at all like her warm native India. Cared for by strangers and an inept father, was it any wonder she wailed? Her heart
was
broken.
It was his responsibility, however, to mend it. So with another sigh, this time of resolution, he crossed the room, vowing to discharge the coldhearted, incompetent nurse and find someone—anyone—who could ease his little daughter’s unhappiness.
“Hello, Leya. Hello,” he said, hoping his raspy voice sounded more soothing to her ears than it did to his own.
Startled, she looked up, a sob catching in her throat. Her little chin trembled as if she were about to let out another wail. But a yawn overtook her first, and before she could work herself back up to a scream, he lifted her, tangled bed linens and all, and began to waltz her around the slant-ceilinged nursery. “One, two, three. One two three. It’s time to dance with me.”
He held her snug against him, for he’d learned that she cried less that way, as if the security of his hold was some sort of comfort. “One, two, three. One two three. We’re just fine, you and me.”
Leya yawned again, a huge, trembling exhalation, and after a moment the weight of her head came to rest on his shoulder. James smiled and nuzzled his cheek against the baby’s silky black locks. Notwithstanding her unhappy temperament, she was the most amazing little thing, incredibly beautiful with blue-gray eyes set within thick black lashes. Right now those lashes were clumped together with tears, and even in sleep her little chin and baby lips trembled from her emotional storm. So he kept on waltzing, though slower now, and reduced his singing to a humming version of Strauss’s latest offering.
Despite the pandemonium her presence had introduced into his life, James freely admitted that Leya was his child and his responsibility. So were Clarissa and another child whom he hadn’t yet located.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t known about his children. He’d supported every one of them from the moment of their births. For years he’d convinced himself that he was meeting his obligations by providing their respective mothers with adequate income to house, clothe, feed, and educate them. But two years ago his complacency about his role in their lives had been shaken when Marshall MacDougal had arrived from America looking for the man who’d so casually fathered him, then abandoned him.
That man had turned out to be James’s first stepfather—his sister Olivia’s father. But even though his stepfather had been dead for years, the man’s long-ago actions might very well have ruined Olivia and their mother, as well as cast serious shadows on James’s reputation and that of their other half-sister, Sarah.
But instead of ruining them all by claiming the inheritance that was rightfully his, Marsh had fallen madly in love with Sarah. After a tumultuous courtship they’d married and he’d taken her back to America with him. A happy ending for all involved. But James was acutely aware of the catastrophe barely averted. Property, money, inheritance claims—they had all teetered precariously near disaster, and all because Olivia’s father had selfishly chosen to ignore one of his children.
Marsh’s situation had started James thinking about the two children he’d fathered—especially since he finally had begun to seriously consider taking a wife. But James hadn’t gone so far as to do anything about his daughters. Then he discovered he had sired another child, for on one of his trips to Bombay, Leya’s grandfather had appeared at his door, announcing Senita’s death from a sudden fever and shoving her baby into James’s arms. His baby…
That day had changed everything. From his refusing at first to take the babe, to his coming to love her, the transition had been swift, if not smooth. It had taken two months to return from Bombay to London with the little girl, enough time for him to decide it was time to locate his other two natural-born children.
No child of his would have reason to destroy his legitimate family’s life or reputation, he’d resolved. He would meet his daughters, get to know them, and supervise their education. He meant also to see to their future needs by providing adequate dowries for them.
Like all his business decisions, it had been a course of action based on practicality and his conviction that the investment of his time and money would someday prove to be well spent.
He could never have anticipated, however, the Pandora’s box that simple decision would open. For when he’d located Clarissa, he’d discovered a creature as unlike innocent little Leya as possible: a ten-year-old street urchin whom he’d mistaken for a dirty little boy. A dirty, foul-mouthed pickpocket of a boy.
Her mother, once a gorgeous opera singer, had become over the years a drunken, abusive harlot. From what he could tell, she drank up every penny of the money he’d sent her for Clarissa’s expenses.
Worse, he didn’t doubt that given another year or two, Clarissa would have been pushed into the same line of work as her mother. It had sickened him to even imagine such a thing. But it had made his decision easy. He had no choice but to remove her from her mother’s care and the threat of a life earned on her back.
Her mother had driven a hard bargain, but he’d paid her off. Only he’d found, to his daily despair, that Clarissa—Izzy, as she demanded he call her—was far more difficult to deal with than her pitiful, grasping mother. As determined as he was to educate her and make her presentable, she was even more determined to oppose him. She was like a feral kitten with her claws always at the ready, always hissing and looking for a way to escape.
To complicate matters further, it had proven impossible to hide the child’s presence. Before he could explain the situation to Catherine and to her father, the truth had come out in one of those rags that called themselves newspapers. By then it was too late, for neither his humiliated fiancée nor her enraged father would listen.
Like a speedy galleon come to ruin on uncharted rocks, both his social and political careers had been wrecked. Basingstoke had known precisely whom to talk to in government, while the gossip rags had done the rest. In frustration James had retreated with his daughters to Yorkshire to wait for the gossip to die down and reconsider how best to gloss over the situation.
As bad as the situation was, it was only a detour on the path to his ultimate goal of becoming the King’s Counsel on Foreign Affairs. It wasn’t a dead end; he wouldn’t let it be. For now all he had to do was wait—and deal with his children.
He eased into a rocking chair, careful not to jostle Leya awake. Removing Clarissa from London had been a good idea, he told himself, as he leaned back in the rocker and closed his eyes. She’d run away twice in London, but she couldn’t do that here. In the countryside she was completely out of her element. By the time she was brave enough to try another escape, maybe she would have come to trust him enough not to want to escape.
Meanwhile he had to find a governess for the child and hire another nurse for Leya…
High noon was not the best time for fishing, but the early spring day was so warm and lovely that Phoebe Churchill could not resist her niece Helen’s entreaties to go afield. After all, the household chores were done, and they’d seen to the goats, the chickens, the bees, and the garden. There was no reason why seven-year-old Helen could not do her daily lessons outdoors just as well as she could indoors.
“How about things that begin with an
l
?” Phoebe suggested as she cast her line toward the deepest part of the pond.
“Hmm.” The golden-haired little girl’s brow puckered in concentration. “Ladybirds.”
“Very good.”
“And licorice sticks.”
“Even better,” Phoebe said, as she played the lure deftly across the surface of the quiet pond.
“Let’s see. Love, and loons, and…lucky four-leaf clover!” Helen crowed, holding one up. “Look, Phoebe. Look what I’ve found!”
A strike on Phoebe’s line just then prevented her looking. “I’ve hooked one. A big one too!”
“Don’t lose him!” Helen shouted, scrambling to Phoebe’s side.
“Come along, Master Trout,” Phoebe coaxed as she fought the game creature, moving down along the pond bank. “You shall make a lovely meal. Or two,” she added. He felt that big and strong.
It took several minutes of teasing him to the bank before she could land the silvery creature, and they were in high spirits as they made their way back to their lunch basket.
Except that their old willow basket was gone.
“What in the world?” Phoebe stared around in confusion. Not only was the basket and its half-loaf of bread, jar of pickles, and hunk of cheese gone, so was the tattered old blanket they’d spread in a grassy area near the trees.
“What happened to our lunch?” Helen asked, looking around as if their picnic were only misplaced.
“I don’t know,” Phoebe muttered, glaring toward the woods, searching for any sign of the guilty party. “Maybe Gypsies.”
“Gypsies?” At once Helen pressed up against Phoebe’s side. “Let’s go home, Phoebe. Gypsies are bad. Grandma said they’re murdering thieves who steal bad children right out of their beds.”
A little shiver coursed through Phoebe as she scanned the familiar, yet now threatening forest. But to Helen she said, “Then you’ve nothing to fear, do you? For you’re a very good child. The best.”
They left at once. At least they had the trout, and her fishing rig. But that was little comfort to Phoebe. Maybe Mr. Blackstock was right, she fretted. Maybe they did live too far from town for safety. For if a thief could steal from them at midday, what might he do at night?
Or when they were away from the house!
“Hurry,” she said, breaking into a trot.
“Are they after us too?” Helen asked, squeezing Phoebe’s hand so hard it hurt.
“Oh, no, sweetheart. I’m just hungry, that’s all.”
Everything at home appeared fine. The three goats were still in the meadow; the chickens ranged around the yard and garden, and none appeared missing. But even so, Phoebe’s worries did not abate. She would have to inform the magistrate about this the next time she went into Swansford, even though she knew Mr. Blackstock would point to this as one more reason why she must sell her cottage and farm, and move into town. But Phoebe refused to do that, at least not until she’d exhausted all her resources.
Come the morning, however, the bucket at the well came up missing, as did her little gardening bench. She could see the marks in the grass where it had been dragged away.
But why would Gypsies steal a bucket and a bench when a goat would be so much more useful to them? It made no sense. Perhaps it wasn’t Gypsies at all. But then who?
“Put on your mourning dress,” she told Helen. “We’re going to town.” She didn’t have to explain why when she turned the barely used key in the ancient door lock. Too bad she couldn’t lock up the carrots and turnips in the garden, or the tools in the shed next to the chicken house.
Dew still clung to the grass and heather as they made the two-mile walk to the small village of Swansford. Phoebe carried three dozen eggs, and Helen carried a round of soft goat cheese. They meant to exchange them at Leake’s Emporium for flour, soap, and thread. She also had two books to return to Mr. Blackstock, who had the only library in town.
Outside Leake’s, three old women with shopping baskets propped against their hips stood in earnest conversation with the vicar. A large farm wagon stood outside the store. Phoebe recognized it as belonging to Farley Park, though she hadn’t seen it often. Already it was half full of supplies.
“Goodness, they’re buying out the shop,” Phoebe muttered. “Hurry up, Helen.”
Inside, the normally quiet shop was abustle with activity. “D’you have the cakes of soap in there?” a wiry woman asked.