Worth the Wait

by Chasity Bowlin

  Worth The Wait

  Chasity Bowlin

  Contents

  Contacting the Author

  Also by Chasity Bowlin

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Contacting the Author

  Also by Chasity Bowlin

  Copyright © 2017 by Chasity Bowlin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  I’m dedicating this book to my wonderful husband. Thank you so much for all you do for me, for helping me to become the person and the author that I want to be. I love you.

  Contacting the Author

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  Please email me at ChasityBowlin@ChasityBowlin.com if you have any questions or comments.

  Also by Chasity Bowlin

  THE DARK REGENCY SERIES, PART ONE

  The Haunting of a Duke

  The Redemption of a Rogue

  The Enticement of an Earl

  THE DARK REGENCY SERIES, PART TWO

  A Love So Dark

  A Passion So Strong

  A Heart So Wicked

  STANDALONE

  The Beast of Bath

  The Last Offer

  Worth the Wait

  AND COMING SOON FROM DRAGONBLADE PUBLISHING, THE LOST LORDS SERIES

  The Lost Lord of Castle Black (Sept. 2017)

  The Vanishing of Lord Vale (Nov. 2017)

  The Missing Marquess of Althorn (Feb. 2018)

  THE BOURBON & BLOOD SERIES

  Bennett

  Ciaran (novella)

  Clayton

  Carter

  Quentin

  Emmitt (Coming Soon)

  Matt (Coming Soon)

  Savannah (Coming Soon)

  THE DUCHAMPS’ DYNASTY SERIES

  Been Loving You Too Long

  Have A Little Faith In Me

  I’ll Take Care Of You

  Prologue

  The house was unnaturally quiet as he climbed the stars. It had been thus for weeks, each day growing progressively more quiet, more subdued. A pall hung over the house and all of its occupants, from the lowest to the highest. Death hovered over them, waiting to take one they cherished.

  Hugh paused outside the door to their chamber, his heart heavy and battered by the thought of facing her again. He loved his wife. He’d come to care deeply for her in the near dozen years of their marriage, but he wasn’t in love with her. That kind of romantic fancy had never been part of their arrangement. But they’d made a kind of peace with their lot in life and now it was one of the most difficult things in the world to enter her chamber and sit with her while she faced something he could not even begin to comprehend. She was just shy of thirty years old and the days she had left on this earth could more than likely be numbered on one hand.

  Taking a fortifying breath, he knocked softly, but didn’t wait for her to bid him enter. Her voice was too weak and he’d never be able to hear it anyway. When he entered, she was propped up on the pillows in her bed—pale and gaunt, every breath labored.

  “Good evening, Felicity,” he said, as he walked over to inspect the tray that had been brought up for her dinner. It was untouched, as it had been the night before, and again that day at luncheon. “Was the soup not to your liking?”

  “I’ve no appetite Hugh,” she answered. “I’m sure it was fine.”

  He turned and approached the bed, taking up his usual seat in the chair adjacent it. “You must eat. You cannot possibly get better without nourishment!”

  She looked at him then. As she turned her head, the tendons in her neck stood out in stark relief. In the last two months, she’d grown impossibly thin and frail, her body withering before his eyes. She raised one emaciated hand and placed it over his. “I am not going to get better. One does not recover from consumption, Hugh.”

  “Let me get another doctor,” he urged. “There are treatments we have not yet tried.”

  “No more doctors, Hugh,” she stated adamantly. “If there was one left in Christendom that we have not seen, I cannot imagine it. No more cures or treatments or trips to the baths. I’m tired, darling… I’m so tired.”

  He knew that. He’d known it for days now, but it was not any easier to accept. Her quiet strength and fortitude in accepting it, acknowledging it, shamed him. “I would take this from you if I could.”

  “And I would never burden you with this when I have already burdened you with so much,” she said. “You did not have to be kind to me. You did not have to be a loving and attentive husband. I did not deserve such from you.”

  “That was a lifetime ago,” he said. “None of that matters now.”

  “It does matter,” she insisted. “I am paying for my sins, Fitzhugh.”

  Hugh leaned back in his chair, scrubbed his hands over his face and considered his next words carefully. His gaze wandered to the bottle of laudanum on the bedside table. It was taking more and more of it to ease her pain, to give her the few moments each day where she could lay awake and speak sensibly to him or anyone else. “There is nothing you could have done, nothing that anyone could ever have done, to deserve the fate that has befallen you.”

  “Promise me that when I am gone, Hugh,” she urged, “that you will find her. Live the life that I denied you, sweet man.”

  “I cannot,” he insisted. “I will not reopen such wounds… not for myself or for her.”

  “It is your destiny, Hugh,” she insisted. “It will happen whether you wish it or not… The universe will have its way.”

  He didn’t argue further or try to dissuade her. Her eyes had fluttered closed on the last word, the opium induced sleep claiming her.

  Chapter 1

  “It’s so very exciting, Augusta! I cannot help but think the house will be lovely!”

  Augusta Penworth smiled at her friend’s excitement. For the past year she’d been sharing a small house in London with Mrs. Rachel Wilmont, a widow who happily enjoyed her husbandless state. It had been only a month earlier when Rachel had received a letter from her cousin with news of a property to let on their estate near Bath. They had both longed to get away from town, out of the city and back into the countryside. The promise of a small cottage on a beautifully landscaped estate, far from the painful reminders of her past, had seemed an answer to their prayers.

  But over the course of their journey, Augusta’s own excitement had faded as every step of the way had been beset by difficulty. It had rained nonstop since they’d left London, one downpour bleeding into another made the roads nearly impassible in certain places and forcing them to travel at a snail’s pace. A broken wheel, a lame horse, a driver fallen ill—one minor disaster after another had made their journey interminable. They’d had to hire another coach at the last inn and while it was just as shabby as the first, it was significantly less clean. As if the very heavens were conspiring against them, as they were setting out from the inn th
at morning, the small break in the rain that had come during the night ended in dramatic fashion. Great torrents of water had lashed the carriage as they traveled on, along with occasional bolts of lightning and the roll of thunder. How Rachel could maintain her enthusiasm was simply beyond Augusta’s ken.

  “I’m sure it will be very fine,” Augusta agreed, though her tone betrayed her growing lack of enthusiasm.

  Rachel rolled her eyes. “You could at least attempt to feign a bit of elation at having our fondest wish granted, Augusta! From the very day we met you’ve spoken quite animatedly of your desire to leave London and now that we have you’re practically in a doldrum!”

  “And if the misfortunes we have faced on this journey is any indication of what this change of locality will bring us then I say in a doldrum is exactly where I should be,” Augusta replied with tart amusement. She’d grown inordinately fond of Rachel in the time they’d shared her small house, but at times she had to wonder just how far removed from the reality of their existence Rachel truly was.

  “Oh, pish! We’ve had a few minor setbacks, that is all,” she stated with a nod of her head that set her pretty curls to bouncing. “Do you regret leaving the city, Augusta? Isn’t living in the country what you said you wanted?”

  Still marveling at the fact that Rachel’s hair had remained perfectly curled beneath her bonnet while she herself resembled nothing so much as a drowned rat, Augusta sighed. “It is and I do want to be away from London and all the misery that it holds for both of us, not to mention the less than genteel poverty we have endured as neither of us receives the sort of generous annuity required to live there comfortably. Still, I cannot help but wonder at the remarkably reasonable rents that are being asked for this house. What if we are we trading one hovel for another?”

  “My cousin would not have recommended it to us were it a hovel,” the other woman insisted. “Can you not allow yourself to feel any excitement or hope? Are you still so bitter, Augusta, that the very idea of good things coming into your life is anathema to you?”

  Is that truly how she appeared? It wasn’t bitterness, she reasoned, but rationality. Pretending the world was a fine place filled with rainbows and sunshine, kindness and goodwill, did not make it so, and she’d accustomed herself to the idea that difficulty and struggle were simply a part of her daily life. It was realism and not bitterness that dictated her interpretation of their current situation. “No, Rachel. It isn’t bitterness at all, but if I were a superstitious person, this journey would surely fall under the category of bad omens. It’s practically a harbinger of doom!”

  Rachel’s lips curved upward in a slight smile. “It has been a difficult journey, but it will all be worth it in the end. I promise! We’ll have a lovely visit with my cousin at her husband’s estate and then make our way to our new home. A house party, Augusta—just think of it! Neither of us has had such gay entertainment in years!”

  Augusta had been thinking of it, more than she’d like to admit. She’d thought of it as she examined every remaining gown in her meager wardrobe. Those clothes had once been so fine, purchased before her grandfather’s death and with what she hadn’t realized at the time was the very last of his fortune. All of it had been done in the hopes of landing her a husband who would care for her after he was gone and she all alone. Like so many things her grandfather had done in his life, that venture had been an epic failure. Now those gowns were sad— threadbare and years out of fashion. Hopefully, in the country and with most of the nobility and gentry gone into town for the Season, she would not look so dreadfully out of place.

  “We’ll stick out like sore thumbs, you and I,” Augusta warned. “You at least have the benefit of being a relation to the hostess. I haven’t even that. Society women can be impossibly brutal, Rachel… I don’t think you understand just how vicious they can be.” Augusta’s voice was pitched low as she strained to control the pain of memories still fresh in her mind.

  Rachel clasped her hands together in her lap, looking all that was prim and proper. “My cousin would never invite us to stay if we were only to be objects of ridicule. I cannot believe that she would allow such viperous individuals to sully our stay with her. Please, have some hope, Augusta! Have some faith! Allow yourself to enjoy the beautiful scenery and to appreciate the fact that we are well away from London with all its ugly memories and our less than genteel poverty there!”

  Augusta sighed as the carriage lumbered on, hitting a particularly deep rut in the road that nearly jolted her off the seat. Rubbing her abused hip after it connected rather painfully with the carriage wall, she said, “Fine. But I am reserving the right to say I told you so!”

  “About the journey, the house party, our new rental property, or… I forget now how many dire warnings you’ve issued,” Rachel stated with a mock frown.

  Augusta rolled her eyes. “Any and all of those things, Rachel. Mark my words!”

  At that moment, an ominous crack sounded and the carriage began to list alarmingly to one side.

  “Do not say it yet!” Rachel shouted as the vehicle bounced along the roadway.

  Their reticules and the sewing basket that Rachel kept with her always were spilling out inside the vehicle, small items rolling over the floor. From the window, Augusta could see several of their bags falling from where they’d been stowed behind the carriage, crashing to the muddy road. Their meager but precious belongings littered the roadway as the vehicle finally came to a rest nearly on its side.

  “What on earth happened?” Rachel asked as she picked herself up from the dirty floor of their hired conveyance.

  “I would imagine we’ve a broken yet another wheel on yet another carriage. If we’re lucky it will be only the wheel… If we are unlucky it will be the axle. Therefore, it is undoubtedly the axle,” Augusta stated grimly.

  Rachel said nothing in response to that, but her lips firmed and her expression was telling enough.

  Augusta did not utter the ‘I told you so’ that hovered on her lips. Instead, she rose to her feet and managed to get to the door of the carriage and push it open. What she saw made her gasp.

  “What is it?” Rachel demanded.

  Augusta didn’t answer immediately. The carriage was poised on the brink of utter disaster. Perched on a small ledge with a rushing, rain-swollen stream only a few feet below them, their unfortunate accident had the potential to become an actual tragedy. With all the rain, the stream was moving swiftly and the small bit of muddy bank separating their damaged vehicle from the waterway was being washed away by every raindrop that fell.

  Rachel rose and moved toward her. “What is it, Augusta?”

  The carriage began to tip alarmingly. The broken wheel sinking deeper into the muddy bank that had only inches to spare before they plunged into the brisk water.

  “Sit down, Rachel! On the far side of the carriage… we need to keep as much weight as possible over there.”

  “Tell me what’s happening!”

  Augusta turned her head, cautious of every movement and how it might unbalance the conveyance. “We’re precariously close to the edge of a steep embankment. I fear any sudden movements or shifting too much weight to this side of the carriage might send the whole thing toppling down into the water. Now, stay where you are and I’m going to ease toward the door over there and get out.”

  “It’s so high! With the carriage tipped up, you’ll have to jump down and you will break your ankle or twist it at the very least,” Rachel insisted.

  “I’m wearing sturdy boots,” Augusta stated firmly as she backed slowly away from the listing side of the carriage and towards the opposite door. “I will be fine, I assure you. Our driver must be injured or he would have already called out to check on us.”

  “Oh, dear,” Rachel said, wringing her hands. “What if he isn’t injured at all? What if the unthinkable has happened?”

  “The coachman isn’t dead, Rachel! The accident was not that serious!”

  “I didn’t mea
n that! What if this was all some elaborate ploy, Augusta? What if we’ve been stranded here to be set upon by unscrupulous parties? This could be the rendezvous point!” Her tone was rising toward hysteria as she undoubtedly envisioned half a dozen horrible ends that involved harems and bell towers.

  Augusta did not roll her eyes. The urge was intense and far more tempting than she cared to admit, but somehow she refrained. “It’s a disabled carriage, Rachel. Nothing more. And if I see you with another of those gothic novels in your hands, I will take it from you and smack you on the head with it!”

  Rachel made a sound of distress. She was so taken by her own fanciful worries that nothing Augusta said in that moment would sway her anyway. Augusta opened the carriage door and looked down at the road. It was higher than she’d imagined, and the steps were of no use to her. They’d been damaged by the broken pieces of the wheel flying off and were now a ruin. She’d have to jump down from the height of the carriage, and tilted at an angle as it was, the jump was no less than five feet, not much less than her own height.

  Easing to the floor, scooting forward until only her bottom rested on the edge of the carriage reduced the height of the jump by half, making it much less terrifying. It was now only moderately alarming, she thought sarcastically. Pushing off with her hands, Augusta landed with a squelch as her boots sank into the mud. She tipped forward but managed to right herself by grabbing onto the coach.

  Extricating herself from the oozing mud was no easy task. Finally free but covered in muck, she made her way to the front of the carriage and found their driver still slumped in the seat, tied to it with a length of rope.

  “What in the world?” she exclaimed aloud. The man’s only reply was a snore and a muttered name in his sleep as he clutched a now empty bottle in his hand.