ROMANCE: Regency Romance: Fated to His Kiss (Historical Victorian Romance) (Historical Regency Romance Fantasy Short Stories)

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Fated to His Kiss

Regency Romance

By: Eva Madden

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Fated to His Kiss

              “You will be my wife,” Henry said, preening away.

              “I will do no such thing!” cried Anabelle, indignant. “When I am grown, I will be my own lady, own my own stables, and no husband or brother or father will tell me what I am to do with myself.”

              “But Anabelle,” pleaded Henry earnestly, “that is not what wives DO.”

              “But I will,” said Anabelle, tossing the ball they were throwing around deep into the lake. “I will be my own person.”

              She knew that her mother would not be happy to hear her saying these things, but eight year old Anabelle Givens frankly did not give a damn, even though she knew damn was a bad word because of God. But if she could not share it with the neighbor boy, who was so close to her in age that it almost did not count, who could she share it with?

              Henry Princely, aged eleven years and three months, did not know quite what to make of the fire-locked girl before him. On one hand, she had been taking over all of his toys and mastering riding lessons well before he did, and on the other, she was so darned interesting to look at. It was certain that her sister, Isadora, was much whispered over by his parents because of her lovely blond hair, but he much preferred the way Anabelle did not seem to care much at all if her own red hair was brushed or not. He had started coming over every day ever since their parents had decided that the racing track was all the rage and begun attending such events together, and it was Anabelle who always set the pace for their explorations.

              The grounds of the Given family household were not extensive, but Anabelle always found the most marvelous games to play. Once, it was that they were pirates of the pond, hunting for treasure, and once, it was a giant tree with a huge knothole in hit where she showed him she hid all of the things that mattered to her. Anabelle was his friend, although he would not admit it to any of the boys he went to school with. He was almost a man now, and it would not do to be playing with a girl, except for the fact that he did not enjoy himself nearly so much playing military constantly. What else was there to do but to marry Anabelle so that he could play with her all the time and nobody else would be the wiser? Except that she was so resistant to the idea!

              “You will be my wife,” Henry insisted, following his ball’s trajectory into the water. It landed with a resounding splash and bobbed up again after a minute.

              “Never!” she cried, and seeing Henry’s outrage, she fled.

She ran like the wind. It was oxygen to her, the way her feet carried her further and further away. When she ran, she felt invincible. It was a shock to hear him coming up behind her, gaining on her, the heavy breath and fall of his footsteps coming ever closer. Her lungs burned with the expenditure, and she knew she could push herself no further. Ahead of her, the stable doors were opened, and although she knew there was no escape, she could see no other path for her to take.

              She barreled towards the doors as if her life depended on it. She knew that gently raised young ladies did not run like this, but her father was not home and she did not care; there was nobody to watch. Besides, the tall walls of the stables offered many places to hide, as did the ladder leading up to the hayloft, located high up so that it was out of everybody’s business. She scrambled for it and climbed, feeling Henry grab at the folds of her skirt as she climbed high out of reach. Hearing him utter a curse behind her, she let loose a giddy, breathless laugh and used the last of her energy to reach the top of the ladder and collapse into a hayloft. She was taller than Henry, and prayed fervently that he would not be able to reach the ladder. The lack of air getting to her brain made her laugh slightly hysterical and uncontrollable, but she did not care. When she leaned over the edge to look below, Henry wore a slightly confused look on his face that made her laugh even harder.

              “Guess you can’t reach me now, can you, Lord Princely?” she taunted, her unruly red locks hanging over her face as she called out to the boy below.

              “Why will you not marry me, Anabelle?” he asked, feeling more choked up than he thought was appropriate.

              Anabelle considered this. “Because I do not want anybody to tell me what to do,” she finally said.

              He looked up at her only once, then backed up several paces, and with a running leap, made for the ladder she had just climbed -and made it. Hanging on with a grip that must have pained him, Henry Princely climbed the ladder just as she had, and Anabelle felt her breath catch. She realized he would gain upon her soon, and all would be lost! Panicking, she looked for a way out, but as she looked out beyond the tiny perimeter of the hayloft, she knew that the only exit that was not being taken over by a determined boy was a perilous fall all the way down all the way next to Pauncy, her beloved horse. There was only one answer. Anabelle began to dig.

              She made a well in the hay, a ditch, a space for her body to fit into. It did not make any sense, she knew, but it was the only thing she could think of. Besides, it added to the game and would surely through Princely off track. She buried herself inside of the pungent straw entirely, and held her breath as Henry’s face came up over the edge of the hayloft.

              She could not see him, but she could hear his hesitation clearly. A bubble of laughter worked its way to Anabelle’s throat, but she willed it shut and willed her body to stop shaking from all the laughter. He began to claw through the hay, and it was not long before she felt the weight of his body on her, the strangest sensation she had encountered in her entire life. He was on top of her, pinning her down with his body, and he was heavier than she would have thought possible. Henry was in control now, and it was a thought that thrilled her for no particular reason she could possibly name at the time. Hands were raking the hay off her face, and light was dawning above Anabelle.

              “Marry me,” he demanded.

              “You will ask forever, and my answer will still be no!” she shouted, exhilaration filling her senses, triumphant even in the face of being dominated.

              Suddenly, her face was thrown into the streaks of sunlight that were shining directly into the hayloft, and Lord Henry Princely’s tiny face was peering directly into hers.

              It was a moment when time stood literally still. Too young to know what was happening to them, too simple to understand the rush of emotions coursing through their bodies, Anabelle Givens and Henry Princely stared hard at each other, both of them breathing hard. And then, before he had any idea he was doing anything in particular, Henry Princely mashed his mouth against hers.

              It wasn’t the sensation of it but rather the act itself that amazed Anabelle wholly. His mouth was a little grimy and wet, and neither one of them had any idea what this could or should mean; Henry had acted purely on impulse upon seeing how pretty Anabelle’s eyes looked shining in the light of the sun. He had seen his father do this to his mother countless times, and had always imagined that since his mother was so pretty, this was the exact course of action he should take. Anabelle, on her part, was changed forever in a way which she might never be able to put words to. In that moment, she had crossed over from a plane where she and Henry were equals, two snotty-nosed playmates, into territory where an imbalance of power would plague them forever. It was an adult world, and it was heady.

              With a loud smacking noise, Henry broke away from Anabelle’s mouth, and she did the only thing she could think of to do—she whacked him upside the head.

              He was still clutching it when she ambled down the hayloft ladder, nimble as a cat. How was he to know how badly her stick-thin legs were shaking and how hard her too-young heart was pounding? She ran until her legs burned, ran until she collapsed in her bed, startling all the servants on the way, and ran until she could outrun the idea of what had just occurred. It settled on her finally in bed, and she turned over, staring at the crown moldings on the ceiling, reveling in the rush of emotions until the housemaid called her down to dinner.

10 YEARS LATER

              “Your Grace.”

              “Your Grace.”

              “Your Grace.”

              “Your Grace.”

              And then the trio of men collapsed into laughter.

              So they were all in the cups, though Henry Princely. Was that so bad? He himself chose not to imbibe these days, but perhaps that was from his time abroad more than anything else. It had proved difficult to maintain the ever-popular lifestyle of drinking until cards, cards until dinner, dinner until women, and women until marriage when he had been doing his Grand Tour. His father had managed to procure some connections with the royal houses of Rome and Madrid, and Henry had enjoyed the lavishness he had been presented with when he was there. But when he stepped out of the palace to his own quarters, he had happened upon the starving children in the slums there in one city and then the next, and the disparity between the wealth of the privileged few and the underserved had struck him most acutely, had sobered him into seriousness earlier than he had expected. When he had hasten back to London due to his father’s illness, the remains of that particular lifestyle had disappeared entirely, and Henry’s days had become a familiar routine of bills, nurses, and keeping all the decanters around his home empty for his mother had become well-acquainted with that particular devil in her struggle to cope with the happenings-on.

              Truth be told, there was little amusing about the fact that he had now inherited his father’s title almost a year hence and had been mired in an ocean of paperwork when he could have been grieving for what had gone on. But when his London friends decided upon that little formal greeting, they had been unable to resist addressing each other in turn until the hilarity of the appointments had washed over them all as they shook hands. Maintaining that they all now had new responsibilities was perhaps not amusing in the conventional sense, but Henry preferred it this way—it was easier to laugh than to cry, and he felt the old camaraderie settle over him like a balm.

              “Fitzy St. Hubert is having her coming out ball tonight,” Jack Whetstone informed Henry companionably as they all piled into the carriage together.

              “Where is she coming out of, the stables?” joked Rafe, and the three of them chortled companionably. The lady in question did indeed have something vaguely horse-like about her face, but her mother was not about to let a little toothiness stand in the way of pushing her daughter’s not insubstantial dowry under the nose of every eligible bachelor in town. Henry had no doubt that despite their teasing, one of his friends would surely take the lady under consideration tonight, considering the extent of their own gambling debts. It was not long before the carriage rumbled into view of the great mansion and trio of men tumbled out.

              The dance room was abuzz. It had been many years since Henry had seen most of the crowd before him, and many came by to offer him their condolences on the death of his father, the late Lord Princely. “A king amongst men!” one particularly hysterical neighbor had wept. “An absolute KING!” Which was all well and good, but Henry did wish the woman would control herself; he had no desire to be reminded of what had consumed the last year of his life at such a gay event.

              His eyes swept over the crowd and settled on a familiar face. “Is that Haversham?” he asked Rafe.

              His friend looked in the general direction. “Yes. I hear he’s been wasting his fortune away at the races, and now he’s dangerously close to the poorhouse. He better hope those dreamy blue eyes of his snag some wealthy heiress soon, or the only way he’ll be able to bet on a horse is if its meat is in his soup or not.”

              From the looks of it, Lord Devon Haversham would have no trouble at all snaring himself a wealthy wife, but for his sake, Henry hoped that she would hold tight to the purse strings, or Devon would find himself ruining not one, but two fortunes. The handsome young man with his full head of wavy black hair and charmingly tied cravat was deep in an intimate conversation with a dreamy-eyed blonde who clung to his well-muscled arm and hung on his every word. Henry could tell immediately that she was a dangerous type. Her naiveté and loveliness would blind most men to an incessant neediness and wild flights of imagination; just look at the gaze she had trained on Devon now! Still, there was something about her that stirred his memory delicately. He nudged Jack, who was busy acquainting himself with Fitzy St. Hubert, horse like teeth notwithstanding.

              “Who is that lady?”

              Jack peeked over and his face softened. “Ah,” he said lazily, his voice stretching out as if he was eating a particularly tasty candy, “That is Isadora Givens, the youngest daughter of the late Lord Givens. Your childhood neighbors, I believe.”

              Henry’s memory poked at him. “Isadora! What happened to her father?”

              Jack shook his head ruefully. “Darndest thing. He was never quite right after Lady Givens passed, and he became as obsessed with the horse races as Haversham. The story goes that he had a small fortune riding on Flibbertigibbet, this yearling from Marlborough, and at the last minute, the jockey wouldn’t ride because. So Givens decides to ride instead of him.”