The Wayward Son

by Warfield, Caroline

  Rob walked toward Eli, Ellis, and Goodfellow, clustered around kegs of the Willow’s ale, intending to ask a favor and puzzling over David’s expression. He reached over to refill his tankard, and realization forced him to glance back at David. Envy. He envies me my father.

  Family is messy, Rob thought, looking around and shaking his head, and that’s the truth.

  “Where’s your bride, Robbie? Did you lose her already,” Ellis teased to general laughter.

  “She’s—” he turned to where he’d seen her with his sisters, but she was gone. He ran his free hand through his hair. “Somewhere. She’s here somewhere. Actually, Ellis, I was wondering—”

  “Anxious to get her alone, Robbie,” Ellis asked with a leering grin.

  Rob’s glare meant to quell impertinence but only drew laughter. He gave in. “Should the guests of honor disappear, do you suppose you could make sure this crowd is safely on its way by dark?”

  “Mrs. Spears and Mrs. Morris have already begun to clear things to the kitchen. I’ll see them on their way to the Willow,” Goodfellow said, his color rising.

  “Emma will manage the thing,” Eli added, “But don’t expect discretion.”

  Rob groaned and rolled his eyes. He started again toward the bench where he’d seen her before, only to find Morgan deep in conversation with Maddy. He diverted his path toward the side of the house, smiling at those who attempted to greet him, sidestepping the children now engaged in some circle game only they understood, and peering around for Lucy.

  He reached the corner of the house, where lush bushes lined the side, but didn’t see her.

  “Running away?” Lucy’s voice behind him stopped him cold. Awareness skittered up his spine; he could feel her breath on the back of his neck. He reached back, grabbed her hand, and pulled her between two of the bushes that towered above his head. Several drugging kisses later, he pulled away and dropped his forehead to hers, their breaths heaving.

  “Better,” he said, diving in for another kiss. “But not enough.”

  “We have guests,” she sighed. The sound of revelry continued, muffled by the foliage and the house.

  “No, our family has guests…”

  Her grin, slow and full of promise, sent his senses reeling. “Have Ihave shown you the back stairway?” she asked.

  “Why, no, Lady Benson. I don’t believe you have. You’ve been holding out on me.”

  “Never,” she sighed into his mouth.

  She pulled him along the side of the house to the ground-level door in the kitchen garden. Stifling their laughter and attempting to make no sound, they tried and failed to slip past the women in the kitchen unnoticed. Agnes and Annie let loose cheeky grins before turning ostentatiously to pretend they saw nothing while Lucy and Rob sped up the stairs.

  Someone had turned Lucy’s chamber into a bower of pink roses and white delphinium. A lace coverlet lay over the bed, and a delicately embroidered nightgown had been laid out on top. Neither noticed any of it. They ran in, shut the door behind them, and collapsed onto the bed in a heap of laughter.

  Laughter gave way to desire, and the dance they had begun among the lilacs burst back to life. Just before the feel of her, warm and willing in his arms, destroyed his last thread of control, Rob pulled back.

  “I mean to take care, Lucy. You don’t need a rampaging beast on your wedding night,” he murmured, pushing himself up.

  Lucy followed him, tossing her slippers to the floor, while he sat on the edge of the bed pulling off his boots. She pulled up on her knees next to him with a pout. “How disappointing. I was rather hoping for the rampaging beast.”

  He dropped the last boot. “Be careful what you wish for,” he said, his voice a deep rumble that drew her hand to his chest to feel the vibration of it.

  She leaned in, her mouth touching his ear. “I’m not fragile, Rob. Rampage away.”

  Even a rampaging beast, it turned out, retained some semblance of being a gentleman. Hours later, they lay spent, the carefully prepared bedcovers in disarray, the delicate nightgown nowhere to be found, and their clothing strewn around the room. The rampaging beast had managed to confine destruction of her wedding gown to a few buttons. His worship of her body had been thorough indeed.

  Lucy stretched lazily, and he pulled her in, as if he could bring her even closer than she was, tucked against his chest.

  “Rob?”

  “Mmm,” he murmured, more than half asleep. How can she even begin to think straight, he wondered.

  “I’m glad we had our wedding night here.” He had no answer for that. It didn’t matter; she went on. “It feels like home.”

  He lifted his head. “Willowbrook?” The thought that she might hate leaving with him in two days placed a pall over his contentment.

  “Yes. And no. I would have told you yesterday that Willowbrook is home. But now I know it is here.”

  Satiated and sleepy, he couldn’t begin to follow her very feminine—which is to say convoluted—logic. “Here? This is Willowbrook.”

  “No, silly, I mean here,” she said, feathering her hand across his chest. “With you. Like this, no matter where we go. Home.”

  Home. The word seeped deep into his bones. He had no words. He clutched her to his heart, kissed the top of her head, and vowed it would always be so.

  And it was.

  Author’s Note

  The Ashmead Heirs came to me, as stories often do, on a plane trip. Having spent several days with a group of brilliant authors laughing and networking in costume and out, I felt a call to write a simple story set in an English village. An overactive muse gave me a welcoming inn, filled with people great and not-so-elevated. As The Wayward Son developed in my mind, I realized I had a complicated extended family, or rather two overlapping families, living side by side in an idyllic—but not always peaceful—valley.

  Several of them have stories begging to be told. You met some of them in this book. Others are lurking in my imagination. With Rob and Lucy settled, at least for now, I’m nudging some of the others to seek their own happy endings. It can be terrifying, but if you’ve read my stories, you know that I truly believe love is worth the risk.

  Coming Next: The Defiant Daughter

  Lady Madelyn Tavernash, Dowager Duchess of Glenmoor, never over imbibed. At least, hardly ever, although a brother’s wedding might give cause for an excess of indulgence, particularly the wedding of a brother she had thought lost to her for fifteen years.

  As purple seeped over the oranges and reds of the spectacular sunset, blessing the celebration on the lawn of Willowbrook, guests began drifting away in twos and threes and family groups. Maddy sat alone.

  The bride and groom, her half-brother Robert Benson and Lucy, her closest friend, slipped away hours before. Their other brother, the legitimate one, the earl, left some time ago to take his exhausted children home. She couldn’t bring herself to leave with them and had assured him she would ask someone to take her home, but she had neglected to do so.

  No one seemed to notice her in the gloaming where she leaned against the high back of a wicker bench set among viburnum shrubs. She ought to stir herself before night fell, but she still felt reluctant to move. Nothing waited for her in the dower house except silence.

  “Waiting for me, are you?” Rob’s cheeky friend Brynn Morgan had teased her all afternoon, turning up intermittently out of the sea of guests—what felt like the entire county—bringing mugs of ale and daring her to mingle and even to dance.

  Once, as the day grew late, she had let him lead her out to a vigorous country dance with the villagers, kicking up her heels to the sound of the fiddles, until she collapsed back on her seat laughing as she hadn’t in many years. Her mother would have lacerated her with a stone-face tirade over it, but her mother had disappeared to the continent, to Maddy’s relief.

  Morgan loomed out of the shadows, his black eyes glittering.

  “You came looking for me.”

  He sat down next to he
r without her bidding. “I didn’t see you leave with the earl. One worries over foolish women who keep to themselves.”

  “It was too early to leave this lovely celebration. I told him I’d ask someone to see me home. I thought to ask the Corbins, but they left before I could, and the vicar—”

  “Is long gone. Did you plan to spend the night on this bench, or would you let me escort you home?”

  “Please.” Her voice sounded very small to her own ears.

  He put one big hand on each of his muscular thighs and gazed upward. “We best get moving before full dark. We’re lucky there’s a full moon tonight as it is.” He turned to peer at her directly. “I came on horseback. I don’t suppose…”

  She groaned. Riding up behind him would be undignified any day. If she were honest, her brother’s stout ale left her wobbly on her feet as well.

  “Bad idea, that. We’ll borrow Lucy’s pony and trap. Wait here.”

  She called him back when he rose to go and agreed to meet him at the lane. I’m not so wobbly I can’t walk to the lane. People would think it odd, a duchess riding home in a pony cart with a half-pay colonel in the dark. Let them. Life had taught her not to let others control her behavior. She took kindness when offered.

  They rode in silence down the lane and across the bridge over the steep-sided creek in the fading light. When they reached the road, the moon rose northwest of the village, as Morgan had predicted, hovering huge and bright.

  “I would expect a duchess to keep a carriage. You don’t. Perhaps that’s my good fortune,” he said as they turned toward Clarion Hall and the dower house.

  She ignored that last part. “I can’t afford one, nor a coachman to drive it.”

  “The duke left you poorly provided for,” he murmured.

  She bit her tongue. She wouldn’t discuss her reasons for refusing money from the Glenmoor estate with anyone, least of all Brynn Morgan. He respected her silence. She liked that about him.

  Moments later, he spoke again. “Your father, too, I gather. I know he treated the earl poorly, but why did he leave you so little?”

  “You know about the will, Morgan. It all went to his unofficial children. David and I got the least he could give us, which in my case meant exactly nothing. ‘To my defiant daughter, Madelyn, I leave nothing.’”

  His bark of laughter startled her so much she bounced in her seat. “Defiant? Lady Madelyn Tavernash? What in the name of the angels did you ever do to the man?”

  “I ran after Rob.”

  “What? When the ever-belligerent Robert Benson shook the dust of Ashmead from his shoes and took the king’s shilling, you went with him?” He sounded both fascinated and horrified.

  “Not with. After. I got almost to Nottingham before my father’s men caught up with me. They locked me in my room for a week.”

  “Did you run again?”

  “I had few opportunities, and it seemed pointless. Mother told Father she’d warned him I was a hoyden. They hired a vicious woman as governess and set maids to watching me. If I rebelled, I was beaten. If David tried to help, it got worse. Two years later, after a bit of a Season, they sold me to Glenmoor, or as good as.” She bit her lip against tears. I really did drink too much today.

  “How old were you? They can’t marry you off without your will.” His voice had become soft with sympathy.

  “Rising seventeen. I agreed. I assumed even marriage as an old man’s ornament would be better.” She choked on the last.

  He didn’t speak again until they drew up in front of the dower house. A single candle shown in the window. Hher maid-of-all-work, Esther, would be waiting. He dropped the reins into his lap. “You were wrong, weren’t you? About Glenmoor.”

  Maddy never discussed her marriage. Not with anyone. She gazed at her lap, lost in ugly memories.

  Morgan climbed down and came around to help her down. She thought for a moment he would grasp her waist, but, ever respectful, he took her hand instead. She stepped down in front of him, so close that the scent of sandalwood and pine, subtle and masculine, enveloped her. “Thank you, Morgan,” she whispered. She swayed toward him, unable to help herself.

  He grasped her shoulders. She couldn’t quite make out his expression, but his eyes gleamed into hers. “Careful, Duchess,” he whispered. “A man without scruples might take advantage of a woman in her cups.”

  Brynn Morgan is not such a man, more’s the pity. She took his arm when offered and let him walk her to the door.

  About the Author

  Award winning author of family centered romance set in the Regency and Victorian eras, Caroline Warfield has been many things (even a nun), but above all she is a romantic. Someone who begins life as an army brat develops a wide view of life, and a love for travel. Now settled in the urban wilds of eastern Pennsylvania, she reckons she is on at least her third act. When she isn’t off seeking adventures with her Beloved or her grandson down the block, she works happily in an office surrounded by windows where she lets her characters lead her to even more adventures in England and the far-flung corners of the British Empire. She nudges them to explore the riskiest territory of all, the human heart, because love is worth the risk.

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