Christmas Brides

by Suzanne Enoch

  Before he could accept, the door burst open and Lord Hawksword rushed into the room. His eyes widened as he realized he had walked into a potentially violent situation. “Has everyone lost their minds this evening?”

  “What is it, Hawksword?” Vanewright snapped, his temper on edge.

  “I came to warn you—something is amiss. I sent Lady Ellen to the conservatory to stop Lord Netherley from exerting himself.”

  “Let me up, Vanewright, and I will go help her,” Derrick offered.

  Hawksword wasn’t finished with his news. “But that’s not the oddest part. When I returned to the ballroom, your father was sitting on the throne beside his lady. I cannot fathom why he lied to me.”

  “Who?” Derrick said, his stomach aching with dread.

  “Lord Pountney.”

  “Damn, I knew there was a reason why I hated him on sight.” He shoved his future brother-in-law aside.

  Frost scowled. “Besides the obvious, what’s wrong with Pountney?”

  “You are in luck, Vanewright,” Derrick said, allowing him to assist him to his feet. “You might get to murder a man who actually deserves it.”

  Ignoring his companions, he ran out the door to catch up with Ellen. Perhaps he could reach her before she stumbled into Pountney’s trap.

  * * *

  “Lord Pountney, I looked upon you as a friend.”

  The viscount studied her face and sighed. “My dear, Lady Ellen. I had thought—I was wrong. Until I had Hawksword lure you here, you had not figured out the truth about me.” Another weary sigh. “It was quite careless of me. You see, nothing has gone right since Swainsbury’s arrival at Netherley House. I panicked, fearing he might see through my disguise.”

  Staring at the pistol, she silently debated whether lying to a murderer was prudent. In hopes of calming him, she edged away from the door and moved toward her father’s worktable where he concocted his various fertilizer mixtures for the plants and trees in the conservatory. “Your secret is safe. I won’t lie to you and tell you that I haven’t heard the tragic tale of Eloisa Hunt’s death. The loss has tormented Lord Swainsbury. He believes his sister’s murderer is a man named Lord Varndell. A man he has never met … a man who doesn’t exist.” She smiled at him and appeared to clasp her hands behind her back. “I have always liked you, my lord. Mistakes can be forgiven. Allowances made. I see no reason why we cannot let the earl continue to chase Varndell’s elusive specter across England. I will keep your secret.”

  The viscount’s grip tightened on the pistol. “Is that what you promised Swainsbury when you parted your thighs and welcomed him into your bed?”

  Her blush confirmed his suspicions.

  “Foolish little heiress,” Lord Pountney mocked. “I had already spoken to your father before your lover’s arrival. Netherley was merely giving you a few days to accept your fate before he announced our betrothal.” His face twisted into something dark and ugly. “The dowry is mine!”

  “Wrong!” Ellen tossed the contents of the jar she had retrieved from the table into the viscount’s face. Deducing his response to her attack, she lunged to the left as he discharged his pistol.

  “Ellen!”

  She heard Derrick’s anguished cry and the thunder of footsteps. He had come with reinforcements. Staying just beyond Lord Pountney’s reach, Ellen picked up one of her father’s large pots.

  “You are wrong about my father. Dowry or no dowry, the decision is still mine to make.”

  She raised the pot high, and smashed it against Lord Pountney’s thick skull. The viscount ceased scrubbing his eyes and collapsed without a sound.

  Derrick found her standing over Lord Pountney’s unconscious body. Vane, Hawksword, and the other Lords of Vice surrounded them.

  “It looks as if your sister beat you to it,” Frost cheerfully announced.

  “My lord, I believe I have found your sister’s murderer.” Ellen swayed, feeling a bit unsteady. “Drat, I am going to faint.”

  Derrick rushed to her side and she collapsed into his arms. “Don’t worry, love. I’ve got you.”

  She nodded and surrendered to the swallowing darkness.

  Epilogue

  “I cannot believe I fainted,” Ellen complained hours later after the constables had carried off a barely conscious Lord Pountney and had interviewed everyone who was involved. Some of them had lingered to enjoy the Twelfth Night cake.

  “You were not the only one feeling dizzy.” Derrick pressed a kiss to her temple. “Did you see your brother’s face? Dare had to wave your mother’s smelling salts under Vanewright’s nose when you retold your harrowing tale to the constable.”

  “I missed that part.” Her fingers drew tiny circles on his palm. “It is Catherine who has my sympathies. Mama said that the poor woman went into labor when Pountney fired the pistol. Before the night has ended, you and the others might need to use those smelling salts on Saint.”

  Derrick wondered if he would ever recover from finding Ellen standing over his sister’s killer.

  “He was planning to shoot me. All that mattered to him was my cursed dowry,” she fumed. “It has brought me nothing but trouble, I tell you.”

  Derrick stilled. “I disagree. If not for your father’s high-handedness about finding you a husband, I would have never come to London.”

  “Or caught Eloisa’s murderer.”

  She tried to stand, but he dragged her back onto his lap.

  He tilted her chin up with his finger. “You caught Pountney. I only viewed him as a rival for your affections and was too blinded by my jealousy to consider he was pursuing you for less noble reasons. After all, he was a friend of the family.”

  Ellen wrinkled her nose at the reminder that Pountney had fooled all of them.

  “Do you think we’ll ever learn his real name?”

  Derrick was no longer interested in talking about the viscount. “I doubt it. His name won’t do him any good when they hang him for murder.” Eloisa would have justice thanks to the woman in his arms. “There are more important questions that need to be addressed.”

  Ellen gazed up at him with her vulnerable blue-green eyes. “Such as?”

  Just because Vanewright was resigned to having him for a brother-in-law, it didn’t mean he had won his lady’s heart. “You never gave me your answer.”

  “About what?”

  He had the urge to shake her when he caught on that she was teasing him. “Marry me, Lady Ellen Courtland. I’ve already told your father that I don’t want your dowry. I want…”

  He floundered at the objection darkening her face.

  “What do you want, my lord?” she asked tenderly.

  “I want to marry you,” he said without hesitation. “I want to share my home by the sea with you … show you the world if you’ll let me.”

  “And children?”

  His eyes gleamed with unshed tears. “If you have no objection, I would like to name our first daughter Eloisa, to honor my sister.”

  “I have only one question.”

  “What is it, my love … the only true keeper of my heart?”

  Ellen wrapped her arms around his neck and tried her best to throttle him. “Oh, never mind, you have already given me my answer. I love you, too,” she whispered into his ear. She pulled back. “However, I disagree about the dowry. You should keep it.”

  Derrick glanced over her shoulder and sighed. “Let’s argue about this when we have less of an audience.”

  From their gilded throne that was surrounded by her father’s orange trees, the newly crowned king and queen of Twelfth Night surveyed their subjects, who were observing their exchange with undisguised interest.

  Not far from the couple, Lord Netherley wiped his eyes with the handkerchief his beloved wife handed him.

  The Scandal Before Christmas

  Elizabeth Essex

  Prologue

  Portsmouth, England

  December 1816

  It was only fitting that a ramshackl
e fellow like Ian Worth should arrange to take a girl to wife in the dim, drafty taproom of the Ball and Anchor, a tumbledown public house on the road to nowhere. Nowhere—in Ian’s case—being Portsmouth Harbor, where his ship rode restively at anchor in the dripping, swollen Solent.

  Time and tide were running out.

  “We’re agreed to it, then?” His companion struck out his hand, and took one last, narrow look at Ian through the tavern’s thin blue smoke, as if he were belatedly trying to gauge the level of Ian’s sobriety.

  But Ian wasn’t drunk. He was hungover. And desperate. “Agreed.”

  This was what he had come to—ordering up a wife with the same casual trepidation he normally reserved for stowing volatile powder aboard his cutter. Gingerly taking on dangerous, combustible cargo.

  The likelihood of a hasty, patched-up marriage not blowing up in his face like so much black powder was practically nil, but no less than he deserved for trying to become engaged in a taproom.

  But damn his eyes if such hazardous odds weren’t exactly his favorite sort of gamble.

  Chapter One

  The event that precipitated such a dire state of wagering, and the casting of Ian’s anchor deep into the still waters of matrimony, had been the arrival of his father, the esteemed Viscount Rainesford. The old man barged into Ian’s until-that-moment-peaceful breakfast room within the cozy confines of Gull Cottage, and barked, “I need you to marry.”

  His father the viscount, despite the advantages of wealth and breeding—or perhaps because of them—was forever barging in. And forever barking. Forever insisting upon having his way.

  But even at such an early hour, Ian was not about to let the old man gain sea room. “Certainly not before breakfast, sir.” Ian made his voice as bland as bathwater. “Do you care for coffee?”

  “Don’t you try to give me the dry end of your wit.” The old man ground the words out of his mouth like grist for his unreasoning anger. “Your brother has broken his damned fool back. Fell from that bloody-minded hunter of mine three days ago. They tell me he’ll never walk again, much less sire children, damn it all to hell. So I need you to have a wife by Christmas.”

  “Good God.” Not Ross. Dutiful, obedient, golden Ross. Ian tried not to react to his father’s latest blatant manipulation, but fear for Ross exploded like grapeshot in Ian’s chest, propelling him up and out of his chair, even as his father flung himself down into one. “What has been done for him?”

  His father pounded his fist on the table by way of an answer. “Nothing can be done. He’s a damned cripple. If he lives. Useless to me. You will need to take over his duties immediately.”

  Devil take the poor bastard. How could this have happened to Ross? Ross—the brother who had spent his entire life trying to please their unpleasable father, willingly living as the old man directed, serving the family name honestly and dutifully, without a murmur of complaint. Unlike Ian, who had gone to his duty—the career his father had chosen for him in the Royal Navy—grudgingly at best, and cursing his father every queasy step of the way.

  And all Ian could think was that it should have been he who was crippled—he was the expendable one. Their father had always said so, and no doubt the old man had always expected his recalcitrant younger son to be put to bed with a cannonball. More than twelve years in the service of His Royal Majesty’s Navy had put Ian in harm’s way enough times to make his early death both possible and entirely probable.

  But Ian had always had the devil’s own luck, and despite those twelve years spent staring down the business end of a cannon, he had emerged relatively unscathed—still the irascible, standby second son.

  But now his father wanted him to do more than stand by. He wanted Ian to take his broken brother’s place.

  “Sell out of your navy business immediately, and return home. We must see to the business of making your brother’s betrothal over to you instead.”

  The thought was not to be borne. Ian could only be appalled at the idea of so cold-bloodedly transferring his brother’s betrothal—his brother’s very life—to himself. In the face of his father’s angry bluster, he strove for calm. “What has been done for Ross?”

  “Nothing. I’ve had them all, the doctors—locals from Gloucester, consultants from London, and specialists from the continent alike. They all say the same thing. Nothing further can be done. Nothing. I wouldn’t have bothered to fetch you if I thought anything more could be done.”

  “Jesus God.”

  “Best accommodate yourself to being my heir. Sir Joseph Lewis’s daughter Honoria is his only child and his heir, and I expect…”

  Ian had shut his mind to his father’s expectations and machinations. It mattered little what else his father had to say. His initial instruction had been all that mattered—the same as all the previous directives that had come with regularity throughout all the years of Ian’s life. The Viscount Rainesford spoke, and expected the world to jump to do his bidding.

  But Ian was no longer a boy to be intimidated by his father’s perpetual scowl. He was an officer of His Majesty’s Royal Navy. Devil take him, he’d learned to eat colder stares for breakfast.

  No. He had accommodated his father enough. He had done his duty, against his will and against his inclinations, and learned to do it brilliantly. And he’d not have it said that Ian Worth had robbed his brother of his rightful inheritance before he’d even breathed his last. All it needed to make a miserable scandal was for the Viscount Rainesford to settle everything on his vagabond younger son, only to have Ross recover.

  No. While his brother lived, Ian would do all he could to protect them both from his father’s selfish thoughtlessness.

  And if he could do only that for Ross, Ian would also do this one thing for himself. “I can’t possibly accommodate you, sir,” he lied. “You see, I’m already married.”

  Chapter Two

  Which was how Ian found himself staring down the empty end of a tankard in the Ball and Anchor. He’d given his word.

  He’d also seen Ross—dosed into a stupor of laudanum—and after accepting that there really was nothing to be done but give Ross time to try and recover, Ian had retreated to the public house full of morose desperation.

  Ian knocked the empty tankard against the table, and motioned to the stout publican. “Another bitters.” Marriage, he felt sure, should not be contemplated on an empty stomach, or with an empty glass.

  Marriage. A wife. A woman to have, to hold, and to keep until death did them part. God help him and the devil take him, she’d have to be a lady, especially if the dire prognostication about Ross’s eminent demise proved to be true—which Ian did not believe—and not just another one of his father’s tricks to get him to do his bidding. Because God knew the old man didn’t want Ian to be the next viscount.

  Yet Ian had given his word, and therefore needed to find himself a wife. But damn his eyes, he hadn’t the faintest idea of how to go about the business. Ian didn’t actually know any young ladies. Females—barmaids, widows, and women of all sorts of earthy, working denominations—yes. Ladies of the gently bred and gently spoken type—not at all.

  Unlike his obedient older brother, Ian had never gone to London and done the pretty with the society ingénues and their ilk—because he was reasonably sure that you couldn’t have a romping good fuck with an ingénue the way he had with Betty, the charmingly sympathetic, milky-thighed barmaid last night.

  How on earth was he going to abide some gently bred young lady—the same woman day in and day out—for the rest of his life? God’s balls. Here today and gone tomorrow had been the way of his life. And it was the only way he wanted to continue.

  And while many men—navy men in particular—would have been perfectly content to breeze through marriage taking their pleasure where they may, the idea held little appeal to Ian. Blame it on his father’s hypocritical example—Ian may have been a bit of a libertine, or at the very least a thoroughgoing sensualist, but it seemed downright dishones
t to require fidelity from one’s spouse if one were not prepared to be faithful in return. And he knew, despite thoroughly enjoying sowing his wild oats, that in his own marriage he would require absolute faithfulness. He just hadn’t counted on requiring it quite so soon.

  So therein lay the rub. And the trap. And there wasn’t enough ale in all of England to get him out of it.

  “I say … Worth, is that you?” A hearty voice boomed across the low-ceilinged taproom. A tall, ruddy-faced man in his forties strode toward Ian with his hand extended.

  “Colonel Lesley.” Ian pushed back his chair to rise and greet the marine. “God’s balls. I haven’t seen you since the old Audacious. What brings you to the Ball and Anchor?”

  “This filthy weather,” Colonel Oliver Lesley answered jovially, slapping Ian on the back. “I’m selling out, Worth, my boy, selling out. You poor navy fellows can’t sell your commissions to turn any profit like those of us with the foresight to go into His Majesty’s Marine Forces. Ho, Barkeep!” He sat. “Selling out before I’m put on half pay for the peace, like at least half the fleet. And the wife wanted me back. Need to see to the business of my own family the way I’ve seen to England’s, she said. And what about you? I’d heard you’d landed a plum little commission commanding a dispatch cutter.”

  “I have,” Ian agreed. The perfect commission for a navy man who did not like the sea. A commission he did not mean to give up. Channel service put him home—his own home where everything was cheerful and easy, with no one to please and no one to disappoint—once a fortnight. “But come have a drink with me, and keep me from being morose.”

  “Happy to oblige. Ale and kidneys if you have ’em.” The colonel ordered his breakfast, and eyed Ian with some amusement. “But what on earth would a young man like you have to be morose about?”

  Ian was too desperate for secrecy—his misery wanted company. “My father requires that I be married by Christmas.”

  Lesley let out a low whistle. “Six days? But marriage is a young man’s lot—once he has a career and a fortune, he must marry. Still, all in all, I’d rather have your job than mine. You only have to marry—I have daughters I’ve got to marry off.”