The Amorous Heiress

by Carrie Alexander

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Excerpt

  Dear Reader

  Title Page

  A funny thing happened…

  Books by Carrie Alexander

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

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  11

  Copyright

  Jed decided he’d had enough.

  If he was going to play outsider, he’d prefer to be literally outside rather than sitting at a table with these stuffy prigs. He stood. “It’s been swell, Mrs. Throckmorton, but I’ve got a full day tomorrow.”

  Augustina followed and cornered him in the vestibule. “I’ll walk you back to the carriage house,” she said.

  “You confuse me,” Jed confessed.

  How marvelous, Augustina almost blurted. She’d always been a mouse, yet Jed was actually noticing her.

  She snatched off her glasses.

  But what next? What would her sister do at a moment like this? “I’m sorry you missed dessert,” she whispered.

  “Yeah, well, I sort of got the feeling that I’d said something wrong.”

  She didn’t want to explain about their neighbor Vanessa Van Pelt and her penchant for sleeping with her gardeners, not when a similar notion had seized Augustina’s own mind. Strangely, even that delighted her. Who in all of Sheepshead Bay would believe that Gussy Gutless actually had something in common with Vanessa Van Vixen?

  “Well,” she said, “I’d like to make it up to you.”

  Jed cocked one brow. “Did you have something in mind?”

  Did she ever. Do it, she thought Do it. She wasn’t very good at this type of thing, but before she could chicken out, she said, “Sweets for the sweet,” and pounced on him.

  Dear Reader,

  Our Let’s Celebrate! promotion is coming to an end this month, so take advantage of your last chance to enter our sweepstakes. A fabulous collection of romantic comedy videos is the prize.

  Carrie Alexander, a RITA nominee, continues the adventures of the peculiar but fascinating Fairchild family from The Madcap Heiress with Augustina Fairchild’s story. The Amorous Heiress is a truly delightful romp.

  Longtime and incredibly successful romance author Kristine Rolofson joins our Matchmaking Mothers (from Hell) lineup with Pillow Talk. As a mother of six who has also published over twenty books, Kristine is obviously a woman who is able to balance a busy career and family life very well. (Perhaps with a lot of love and laughter?) She certainly handled the matchmaking mother concept with ease. We can’t help but wonder if her own children are getting a little nervous?

  Wishing you another month filled with much love and laughter,

  MalleVallik

  Associate Senior Editor

  The Amorous Heiress

  Carrie Alexander

  A funny thing happened…

  Imagination and inspiration are tools of the trade for a writer. That’s why I love movies. Where else do you find villas and vineyards, costume balls, beach umbrellas, sleeping compartments, gondolas, cigarette holders and striped garden tents abounding? How often in real life do you hobnob with women in Dior and diamonds and men in spiffy white dinner jackets? When was the last time you sunbathed on the French Riviera or checked in to an Italian castle filled with wisteria and sunshine? Just thinking about those things enables me to look outside at the waist-high snow and smile.

  This particular book was inspired by touches of the truth (I really do know a soap-eating dog!), the fortuitous (I took the title The Amorous Heiress from a movie synopsis in the TV listings) and of course, the cinematic. (Look for the Sense and Sensibility kiss scene—it’s my favorite.)

  Here’s wishing you your own moments of romantic inspiration, whether they come from a movie, a book…or the Cary Grant of your dreams. And here’s to another year of sparkling romantic comedies from LOVE & LAUGHTER!

  —Carrie Alexander

  Books by Carrie Alexander

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  1

  The Mouse and the Matriarch

  AUGUSTINA FAIRCHILD threw open the chintz curtains with a theatrical flourish and stepped up to the center of the window. The old saying was trite but true: this was the first day of the rest of her life.

  And from now on she was not only going to direct the show, she was going to play the starring role.

  She raised the window and took a deep breath. The morning was sunny and clear. Even though she couldn’t see the ocean from her second-floor bedroom at the front of Throckmorton Cottage, she could hear the crash of the surf and smell its salty tang mixed with the scents of sweet lavender from the garden and of the pungent piney wood beyond.

  Her view was as familiar as ever—dark treetops, the. long green lawn bordered by a terrace wall, straight gravel paths that converged at a small fountain, then the sheared mounds of boxwood and, closest to the house, the herbaceous border’s skeins of color, glistening with dew. It was only her inner viewpoint that had changed.

  “You go, girl,” she said out loud, trying to bolster herself for the challenge ahead. The present-day vernacular didn’t suit either Augustina or the Gilded Age sensibilities of Throckmorton Cottage, but there you were. It was time for her to stop changing to suit the family estate and its inhabitants. Well past time.

  She rested her hands on the sun-warmed sill. She was almost twenty-five years old and she was as useless as her grandmother’s Victorian gimcracks and bibelots. In other words, strictly decorative, cluttering things up and collecting more dust with each passing day.

  Her major accomplishments up to now had been overseeing the gardens—with the aid of a part-time gardener, so that hardly counted—and finally finishing the needlepoint rug she’d worked on for one year, two months and fifteen days. Not a lot to be proud of when she considered that one of her classmates from Miss Fibbing-White’s had already married and gestated and launched a sideline career designing amusing little handbags that had been featured in Vogue. Another was in Brazil protecting rain forests. Augustina—Gussy to them—had received postcards. Even the awful Phoebe Beecham had been photographed with Duchess Fergie for the tabloids, whereas Gussy’s greatest social triumph up to now had been her appointment as head of the garden club’s regatta refreshment table.

  She looked at the oval, flower-patterned rug carelessly tossed over the back of a skirted slipper chair. Yesterday had been stormy; she’d been stuck inside all afternoon with Grandmother Throckmorton. Sitting in the library before the fire, Gussy had stitched the last stitch and knotted the last knot, then knelt to lay the completed piece across the faded baize carpet. Grandmother had set aside her own needlepoint project and reached down to smooth a wrinkle from the rug. “There you go, Augustina,” she’d said, so pleasantly smug and snug that in contrast Augustina had felt positively itchy with undefined yearnings. “Wasn’t all that handwork worth the effort? Doesn’t producing something so pretty and practical give you an immense sense of accomplishment?”

  Suddenly, irrationally, she had wanted to explode. She’d wanted to stand up and shout. “No!” at the top of her lungs, though of course she’d contained herself. She always did. The sheer inertia of playing the obedient grandd
aughter had her in its grip, and besides, Grandmother Throckmorton considered shouting shockingly rude. Gussy had tamped down her rebellion, rolled up the rug and gone meekly to bed.

  She hadn’t slept. She’d flopped from stomach to spine and squiggled from side to side until 2:00 a.m., when she’d opened her eyes and made up her mind, once and for all, that she was going to take charge of her life. For real. She didn’t want to wake up thirty years from now and discover herself to be a carbon copy of Grandmother Throckmorton—rigid, stern and so comfortably settled that her life held absolutely no excitement, little turbulence or complication and certainly no surprise.

  Starting first thing in the morning, Augustina Isobel Throckmorton Fairchild would change her life.

  Settling on the exact details of how she should go about doing so hadn’t occurred to her until the alarm clock awakened her at seven o’clock on the dot, as it had every morning for the past four years. Then she remembered her doubts, and an inconvenient tidbit she’d learned at a boarding-school science class. One of the properties of inertia—in this case Gussy’s—was that she would continue to carry out her uniform motions unless acted upon by an outside force. She wasn’t sure that the cycle could be broken by strength from within, especially when her own force of will had up to now mustered barely enough strength to refuse oatmeal at breakfast.

  Augustina knew that change would take a certain courage of conviction. Having never found the need to develop courage, or, for that matter, conviction, she certainly didn’t know how to acquire it at this late date. Growing up, she’d found it easiest to behave in an agreeable and placable manner and be rewarded by her grandparents for being a “good girl.” She’d known from the cradle that she wasn’t glamorous and flamboyant like April, her older sister. Nor was she sophisticated and adventurous like her globe-trotting parents.

  She was Gussy, plain old Gussy, quiet and solid as a rock, often overlooked. Which rocks usually were…until someone tripped over them.

  Well, she’d stumbled and fallen flat on her face last night and hadn’t liked it at all. So the alternative was clear. She must change her life. She must find a way to defy her grandmother’s expectations.

  Not to mention her great-grandfather’s.

  At the thought of Great-grandfather two doors away, Gussy conscientiously turned back to close the window before going down to breakfast. Elias Quincy Throckmorton was ninety-four, bedridden, hard of hearing, riddled with cataracts and gout, but he could sense within minutes if there was a window open anywhere on the second floor. One could say he was a draft savant.

  But he was also the undeniable head of the household. Even Grandmother deferred to him, and Gussy…Gussy positively quaked in his presence.

  Sliding the window shut, she glimpsed a figure in white crossing the terraced lawn from the direction of the parking court. Sunshine reflected off blond hair. Andrews Lowell, she thought, not without a touch of comfortable condescension.

  Andrews was Grandmother’s chosen suitor for Augustina’s fair hand. He was almost as reliable and rocklike as Gussy herself, and though having Andrews to count on was convenient, it was also hopelessly predictable. Fiftyodd years ago, Marian May Andrews had married E. Q. Throckmorton, Jr., and eventually become known—at least to Gussy and her sister—as Grandmother-with-acapital-G. So if Augustina Fairchild were to complete the circle by marrying Andrews Lowell, fifty years from now Gussy would become…

  She shuddered delicately. It was too gruesome a future to contemplate.

  As she double-checked the window, since Great-grandfather would know if even a cubic inch of fresh air made its way inside, Gussy’s gaze was again drawn by a movement on the graveled path. Another male figure was approaching the house, but this one was unknown to her.

  She blinked. Absolutely unknown. Thrillingly so.

  The stranger, and there weren’t many of them in tiny Sheepshead Bay, Maine, except during tourist season, was reminiscent of the type of male that the teenaged Gussy and April had been warned about by both Grandmother and the headmistress at Miss Fibbing-White’s. Naturally, that meant April had carried on a forbidden flirtation with every stable boy and black-leather-jacketed townie who sneaked past their chaperons. For her part, Gussy had only admired the type from afar…and developed the kind of inappropriate fantasy life even Grandmother Throckmorton couldn’t control.

  Not that this man looked disreputable, exactly. He just didn’t look like anyone Gussy had ever made the acquaintance of. He was too rugged. Too rangy. Too…male.

  Practically a foreign species, in Gussy’s experience of overly Waspish trust-fund milksops like Andrews Lowell.

  Which was probably why her nose was squashed against the windowpane. She forced herself to step back, then leaned closer again, squinting to make out the details. “Hold on, hold on,” she muttered to the stranger, darting to her nightstand to retrieve her glasses. She slipped on the gold wire frames and rushed back to the window.

  Ah, yes—he was still there. In fact, he was kneeling beside one of the peonies that flanked the broad front steps, rooting about in the mulch. How strange. Perhaps he’d dropped something. She hoped not a wedding ring.

  Gussy pressed her cheek to the window, trying to get a better angle for a closer look. Of his buns, she thought, suppressing a surprised giggle as his head and shoulders disappeared beneath the bushy peony. Gracious, it was turning out that the new Augustina Fairchild was the teensiest bit naughty.

  “Still, he does have nice ones,” she whispered, admiring the body-hugging fit of his jeans even though that wasn’t exactly the kind of stimulation she’d decided her life was lacking. But now that she thought about it…it was.

  The man stood and climbed the steps, dusting off his hands before he put them in his back pockets and surveyed the front terrace garden and the wood beyond. A nature lover, Gussy decided with a sigh. They’d have something in common.

  He had dark brown hair, cut short, and wide shoulders beneath an olive green camp shirt with the sleeves rolled up almost to his biceps. Gussy couldn’t tell for sure even with her glasses on, but she had a premonition that his muscular arms bore at least one tattoo. Grandmother Throckmorton thought tattoos were terribly lowbrow. Gussy was secretly of another opinion.

  She sighed. Even at this distance, the mysterious stranger seemed so vigorously sexy that she couldn’t help but surrender to her vivid imagination and picture him reclining naked in her canopy bed. His skin would look very brown in contrast to her pristine white sheets, the dark hair on his chest and arms crisp against the smooth cotton, the tattoos decorating his sculpted muscles so very masculine among her ruffled pillows. His hands would be callused and roughened but gentle, very gentle, as he lifted the crocheted hem of the sheet and gestured for her to join him…

  She shook her head. Naughty? Why, the new Augustina Fairchild was positively wicked!

  When she looked again, the as-yet-faceless stranger had disappeared. Something inside her shivered. He was knocking at the front door, asking for her. Or so she hoped, and not without reason.

  Ever since Grandmother had decided that Gussy was getting a bit long in the tooth for a readily marriageable young lady and had put out the word among her cronies, various single males—family friends mainly, except for the occasional visiting cousin from Newport or Westchester—had begun presenting themselves at Throckmorton Cottage for Gussy’s approval. While she hadn’t found any of the prospects all that exciting, she’d compliantly accepted their invitations for picnics and sailing, for golfing at the country club. She’d gone on more dates in the past four weeks than she had in the previous four years. Which still wasn’t all that many compared to April’s Debof-the-Year whirl, but there you were.

  Resisting the urge to pinch herself, Gussy went to peer inside her closet. The itchy feeling was back, crawling under the top layer of her skin. She told herself that chances were very remote that the stranger on the doorstep was yet another version of the out-of-town cousin, simply an in
triguing little bend in the family tree of one of Sheepshead Bay’s founding families. And Grandmother Throckmorton wouldn’t approve even if he was, but, then, Gussy had decided to take charge of her own life, hadn’t she?

  And although she might not be a raving beauty, there was no reason to meet him wearing an ancient Camp Skowhegan sweatshirt and frayed L.L. Bean shorts. A flattering sundress with a long full skirt would do much better. Grandmother would approve only if she neglected to notice the halter top, which left Gussy’s back essentially bare. That wasn’t likely, so Gussy tied a lightweight watermelon-colored sweater around her shoulders. The new Gussy could compromise as long as she didn’t knuckle under.

  She brushed her long straight hair and slipped on one of her customary headbands without considering otherwise. Mascara, for once? Yes. And a smudge of smoky blue eyeliner at the corner of each eye was warranted as well.

  Gussy smiled at herself in the mirror of her dressing table. Well, she wasn’t gorgeous, but anticipating an encounter with the mystery man downstairs had goosed her pulse enough to produce two spots of rosy color in her cheeks and a sparkle in her eyes. Without her glasses—she tossed them down—she was presentable.

  In the hallway, Gussy met Rozalinda, Elias Throckmorton’s soft-spoken, round-as-a-beachball Jamaican night nurse, and Schwarthoff, the starchy, broad-beamed German day nurse, as they changed shifts. Nurse Schwarthoff nodded briskly without pause and continued down the hall with the breakfast tray, her orthopedic shoes soundless on the Oriental runner. Rozalinda rolled her eyes, her big, pink-gummed smile lighting up her ebony face. Schwarthoff knocked once for form before entering the invalid patriarch’s sanctum. The heavy mahogany door thunked shut behind her.