The Counterfeit Lady_A Regency Romance

by Alina K. Field

  “Is there a husband lurking about who I’m going to have to duel with?”

  The pink creeping up her neck turned a brighter shade and his gut clenched.

  Was she running away from a husband?

  Or…what was more likely, a prospective husband? Shaldon was no doubt pressing her to marry his choice of lordling. It was the way of their class.

  “Who told you the house would be mine when I marry?” The words came out in a rush of air, and she stood, towering over him, fists balled.

  Heat shot to his groin. He took her hand, squelching the instinct to pull her on to his lap. “Your mother told me years ago. You haven’t married, have you?”

  She blinked. He saw the sheen there and slipped his fingers around her other hand, gentling them.

  “This was your mother’s house, Perry.” Shaldon should have told her. It should not have been left to a lusting retainer like him.

  Her mouth firmed again, her eyes widening, assessing. “You’ve been here before?” she whispered shakily.

  He firmed his grip. She’d made a leap that he must set straight. “You didn’t know about this cottage? No. Of course you wouldn’t be told.”

  “Were you here…before?”

  “Yes.”

  “With my mother?” She choked out the question.

  “Yes.” He shook his head. “Not in the way you’re thinking.” He stood, still grasping her hands. “Come. The rain has stopped.” He pulled a knitted wrap from the sofa, draped it around her shoulders, and opened the French door to the damp terrace beyond.

  Perry took big gulps of the damp, sea-drenched air, struggling to keep the spinning at bay. Fox had trapped her hand again, skin to skin, and she shamefully held on. The shallow balcony’s rail was waist high for a short person. The two of them could topple over far more easily. His grip on her hand, the view down the rocks, and the news, the awful mention of him being here with Mama—she was reeling.

  He shifted hands and put an arm around her, tugging her into his warmth. “I won’t let you fall.”

  Her insides rattled as if a war had been torched within. She, who stood eye to eye with men, the awkward, towering Long Meg…next to Fox she felt womanly. Hadn’t his height always been one of his draws? Until he’d begun to tease her like an insufferable older brother, turning her feelings upside down. And then her mother’s treasured painting went missing the same time as Fox. If she clung to those unpleasant memories…

  She closed her eyes and all of her senses went to the places where his body touched hers, sending delicious warmth through her, tingles, shivers and a feeling of perilous safety. One strong hand fitted with hers, the other cradled her shoulder. She struggled to breathe.

  “Perpetua.” He gave her a gentle shake. “Perry.”

  She opened her eyes. Only the closest family and friends called her Perry.

  There was real concern in his gaze, the teasing absent. As it had been when they’d danced together at her brother’s ball.

  In fact, other than a few lapses tonight, he’d been more serious than he’d been all those years ago at Cransdall.

  But he’d never, ever touched her like this, not even when they were dancing, not even when as a girl, he’d helped her up after she’d fallen out of the tree right in front of him.

  “I’m fine now,” she said, only she wasn’t. She’d never be fine again. “It’s the elevation, and all this wild crashing.” She made herself walk to the edge where the parapet hit her below her hips. He trailed along with her, still attached.

  She forced her gaze to the wild waves below.

  “Tell me…” She cleared her throat and spoke louder so he would hear over the tumult. “Tell me what you were doing here with my mother.”

  “At her request I escorted her here.”

  “At her request?”

  He turned her to face him. “It was not what you’re thinking. She came here to meet your father.”

  “My father?” She sounded stupid, even to her. She cleared the moisture from her throat again. “My father was in…Spain. Or France.” She gazed out over the water. “Or somewhere.” Always somewhere else, her father had been during those years of the war.

  “Yes. She came here to meet him when he could get away. She was meeting him then.”

  “But she brought you along.”

  “She came here to meet your father. She asked me to escort her here, which I did. And then I left.”

  She shook her head. “She would have asked Bakeley to bring her.”

  “He wasn’t around.”

  Of course, he was right, blast him. Bakeley had gone off to buy horses before Mother left, and Perry had been sent off to visit a distant cousin.

  “Charley was there.”

  “He was too young then.”

  The kindness in his gaze angered her.

  Her mind went to that time. Her mother had grown thinner with some worry. She’d been vague and distracted about it and once had even become angry when Perry had railed against being restricted to riding with at least two armed grooms.

  She’d been a dreadful child during that time. She squeezed her eyes against that load of guilt.

  His hand still warmed her. A shiver went through her. “What were you to her, Fox? Or maybe I should ask, what was she to you? Were you…” She sucked in a breath. “In love with her?”

  “In love?”

  She felt his body rise taller, never releasing her.

  When she opened her eyes, the truth she saw in his gaze pressed all the air from her lungs. “Oh, my God. You. My mother.”

  She was a fool. Fourteen or twenty-four, at any age she was a fool.

  She tried to pull away, but he yanked her closer. “No. Not like that. She was like a…a mother, Perry.”

  “A mother.”

  He nodded, unconvincingly.

  “You and she were not lovers?”

  His gaze darkened, light from the glowing ocean making his eyes sparkle. He turned her to face him and tugged her tighter, pressing them together hip to shoulder, squeezing the air from her, forcing her chin up.

  “Your mother and I were never lovers. Never. Never inclined to be either. You were fourteen. Far too young.” One broad finger touched her lips. “Then.”

  Wild anticipation pulsed through her. He set her back from him. “Come. I’ll show you to your room.”

  Chapter 4

  Fox refilled his glass and swirled the amber liquid. The light from the lamp lit through the brandy, the glints and highlights so like the color of Perry’s hair in the afternoon sun. It had been a near thing on the balcony. It had taken all his resolve to set her back and even more to not follow her afterwards into her mother’s bedchamber.

  He tipped back the glass and let the liquid burn through him. Not a top-notch batch was this.

  Scruggs had supplied it, but he’d been cagey about the source of this brandy. Smuggled, no doubt, and a man in this kind of business had to keep secrets.

  He sensed something more to the man’s reluctance though. Whether Scruggs had recognized the new tenant, Mr. Goodfellow, as the man he’d met briefly all those years ago, was uncertain. It seemed likely that whatever ties and obligations the innkeeper had to Lady Shaldon’s grandfather—and his free trading connections—had died with her. He’d deemed it wise to not mention his true name or his connection to Shaldon.

  The revenue officers, once they had the Kentish coast in hand, would throw more cutters this way. Scruggs had no reason to trust the new tenant at Gorse Cottage, and most certainly not this one. He had a fair handle on all the local ring’s calendars and hideaways.

  He would not be able to go out tonight, though, not with Perry abed and unprotected. If Scruggs knew she was here, so would the whole district. The foolish girl.

  A door snicked shut on the floor below, just loud enough to hear over the ebb of the surf. He loosened his grip on the glass and set it down.

  Locked doors wouldn’t protect Perry. She needed to leave and
go and find a lordling who would marry her and allow her to return to this cottage as the true owner. By that time his own job would be done, and he would be gone.

  And by God, he’d finish this final commission for Lady Shaldon, if he could but bring his attention away from the girl on the floor below.

  He pulled the sketchpad from the table and opened it, tracing a finger over the line his pencil had left. Putting pencil to paper had not cleared this obsession. It was his curse that he’d hold these images in his mind forever.

  Sooner or later, Perry would come snooping in this room. It was a shame to destroy good work, but there it was. The sketches needed to go as well.

  The hair on his neck rose. The staircase had creaked and then he heard them—footsteps, stealthy and soft, approaching his room.

  His weapons lay over near the bed. There was no time to retrieve them.

  The rap on his door was sharp and commanding. So, her snooping would be sooner.

  He was too late in his purpose tonight. He flipped the sketchbook closed, leaned back in the chair, and poured another finger of brandy.

  “The bed is fresh made,” Fox had said at the door of Perry’s bedchamber. Then she’d heard their bags touch the floor and when she’d turned, he’d disappeared.

  He’d left her steaming and stewing in a hot and cold mix of emotions as tangled as the knots of her stays. It took Jenny, once she’d arrived from the kitchen, long, clucking minutes to undo the mess Perry had made of the laces.

  She’d tried to breathe her way through it but every inhalation brought her mother’s scent, a light touch of lilac, with it. This room with its green-papered walls and tester bed was so like her mother’s room at Cransdall.

  For years she’d shunned the countess’s rooms at all of their family homes. All of them held too much of the spirit of the woman who’d left them so suddenly, so cruelly.

  Nor could she here, tonight, dodge her mother’s spirit. The pineapple carved into the mantelpiece would have made her mother smile. The apple green Bells of Ireland woven into the counterpane were so like the ones Mother had nurtured in the garden. And the painting—that was Mama’s first pony. There’d been a similar one in Mama’s dressing room at Cransdall. Mama had painted both pictures herself from memory.

  And if that bed were freshly made, Fox had laid these sheets. Every part of her quaked, unsettled and restless and hot. She threw back the stifling bedclothes and paced the room barefoot. Not so much as a feather tickled her toes. The room had been kept as if waiting for Mama to return.

  Mama had left Cransdall the same time as Fox.

  She paced to the window and opened it. Damp fog slicked her body. She found her dressing gown, shrugged into it, and went back to the window. Here and there, the layer of moisture shifted, the iron-gray sea dappling and cresting and holding its secrets.

  At the inn where she and Jenny had stayed the night before, Perry had used a false name, to throw off whatever pursuers Father might set upon her. Surely her mother had stopped there also on her secret journey ten years earlier before the last grueling leg along those cliffs.

  Pain stabbed at her chest. Those cliffs.

  Her mother had perished in a carriage accident, one so violent it had taken her lady’s maid and her coachman also. She’d heard whispers of a wheel falling off the carriage, not such a great catastrophe on a straight stretch of road. Yet no one had lived, not even the horses.

  When word of the accident had reached Perry, she’d rushed back to Cransdall and met Bakeley and Charley escorting three coffins. Both her brothers were so closed-in with grief and grimness she’d been unable to break through. Mama and two of the servants she’d known all her life were dead, and there’d been no one to grieve with.

  And then Perry had discovered that Mama’s priceless masterpiece, a colonial Spanish artist’s rendering of Saints Felicity and Perpetua before their martyrdom, had gone missing.

  Fresh grief pushed her back to the edge of the bed. She wrapped her arms tightly and tried not to sob. Her mother’s death had been no accident and somehow Fox was involved. Or if he was not involved, he knew something.

  He’d distracted her earlier, touching, holding, almost kissing her. He’d cooked for her, readied her bed, and steered her away from her questions.

  It was a kind of seduction. She’d observed Charley, her brother, in his days as a rake bantering with widows, dodging straight answers, leading them up to the brink, luring them in. Some of the women were just as clever, if one could count such nonsense without purpose as cleverness. Perry didn’t.

  But of course, Fox had a purpose. He didn’t truly care for her, he was just stirring the embers of the girlish attraction she’d felt all those years ago.

  He’d had lovers among the women he’d painted. He was skilled at seduction, surely a liar, and likely knew more about her mother’s death. She found her dagger and strapped it around her arm, under her sleeve. Without Jenny’s help, it was awkward. She must get used to that awkwardness if she was to live as an independent woman.

  She went up the stairs. Had he told her he was on the top floor, or was it just something she knew about him, that he would choose a high floor with the best afternoon light?

  She gripped the banister. In their conversations so far, she’d let her attention jump around, let him lead her astray. She’d not paid attention to what he wasn’t saying.

  At the door, she knocked firmly and heard an equally firm order to enter.

  Chapter 5

  Fox lolled in an armchair, coatless, his white shirt flopped open to a muscled, hairy, masculine chest.

  Heat thundered through her and she tore her gaze away. The nearby grate was laid with unlit kindling and wood, freshly placed, she would guess from the shavings that littered the hearth.

  No healthy, dry man would want a fire on a night this mild. Even if he’d gone out after delivering her to her room, he wouldn’t have got himself wet. The rain had stopped.

  He hadn’t stood at her entry, as a gentleman would. Perhaps he was ill.

  She forced her gaze further. A narrow bed had been pushed into a far corner, the linens spread out but rumpled. The tall windows on three walls, east, west, and north, were closed, the curtains pushed wide apart. Near the west window an easel stood, its canvas draped by a white cloth. Two pristine canvases leaned in an open space along the wall.

  “You should not be here.” His deep voice drew her gaze back.

  That heat she’d felt earlier thrummed in her chest, threatening to make her quiver. Looking away hadn’t helped. She steeled herself against her body’s betrayal and spotted the half-empty bottle. “You’re drinking,” she said.

  His smirking smile converted most of the burning inside her to ire. The insufferable ass.

  Still, a drunk man might talk. She moved closer.

  Fox uncurled from the chair and sat up.

  Or, a drunk man might be dangerous.

  Not Fox, though. Not to her. Unless he’d somehow been tied up in Mama’s death.

  She clasped her hands, bringing her knife nearer.

  The bottle, a lamp, and a sketchpad sat on the table. “What are you drawing?” she asked, then silently cursed her distractibility.

  Everything about this man was a distraction.

  He rested his arm over the pad.

  Well, well. They would come back to that. If he truly was here by Father’s invitation, his drawings would have something to do with Father’s work. Unlike many of his peers, Father did not have a passion for art. As far as she knew, he’d only ever personally bought one painting in his life, the stolen masterpiece he’d given her mother years and years ago, and it was completely unrelated to his business of spying.

  She must remember her purpose. “Never mind the sketchpad.” She infused her voice with congeniality, the way Bakeley’s Irish wife, Sirena, might speak. “We didn’t finish our discussion downstairs.” How would Sirena say it? “I confess the sight of all those rocks and crashing waves be
low made me dizzy and distracted.” Not to mention the press of your hands.

  He watched her, his face expressionless.

  There were no other chairs in the room. She looked again at the bed.

  Fox shot to his feet. “Sit here. If you must.”

  “Very well.” The seat held his warmth and his scent, brandy and musk and a tinge of the fine roan gelding she’d seen in the stable.

  That fine horse was too rich for a portrait painter. It was likely from the stables at Cransdall. Her father was being excessively generous.

  “Perhaps I might have a brandy also,” she said.

  He handed her his tumbler. “Here. I only have the one glass.”

  A tingle went through her at the uncomfortable intimacy. She raised the glass to her lips and sniffed.

  “You won’t like it.”

  Insufferable man. The glare she sent him made his lips curve, almost into a smile.

  “What I mean is, it’s not top quality. Not up to the standards of what your father keeps.”

  She took the barest sip and swallowed. The sharp, vinegary taste made her lips pucker and sent heat up her nose. She pinched it to suppress a sneeze.

  His grin said, I told you so.

  “Actually, my brother is the one in charge of searching out the best brandy. I believe Father prefers whisky. Perhaps it’s Kincaid’s influence. He doesn’t much care for brandy.”

  She sloshed the liquid, threads of memory swirling. Mother’s many lessons for Bakeley had included where and how to obtain the best brandy. She understood now—the veiled references had been to smugglers.

  Were there smugglers around here? Was Fox involved with them at her father’s behest? Nothing her father did was random.

  “And neither do you.”

  His words pulled her from her train of thought. He was trying to befuddle her again.

  She sighed, letting him have that point and lifted her chin.

  Around her the air crackled. He towered over her, well over six feet of lean muscled man, his white shirt dangling open right over his heart.