Gaelen Foley - [Inferno Club 06]
Page 34
Gazing at herself in the glass, Grace saw a woman transformed by the changes in her body, and indeed, in her life. She was glowing. Then from the corner of her eye, she noticed Trevor watching her, arrested.
“Radiant,” he whispered. “Absolutely luscious, and all mine.”
She cast him a tremulous smile.
“Now stop dawdling,” he ordered, grabbing her hand. He tugged her toward the door and outside, past all the reconstruction work under way inside the house.
This morning, Papa would be marrying George and Callie, and the festivities were sure to last for days to come. But it was just as well that Grace’s morning sickness delayed their exit from the Grange, for if they had left on time, they would have missed the messenger who came galloping up the drive.
“Lord Trevor Montgomery?” the courier called.
“Yes?” he answered, as they walked outside.
“Delivery for you, sir!”
“Good timing.” Trevor took the letter and quickly paid for it.
“Who’s it from?” Grace asked, as he helped her up into his finest carriage, newly brought down from London.
“The Beauchamps.” Joining her in the coach, he absently ordered Nelson to stay but told his coachman to hurry. At last, they were on their way to the wedding. Trevor cracked the waxen seal and unfolded the letter.
She waited while he skimmed a few lines in curiosity.
“Are they back in London?”
“No, this came all the way from France. They’re still on holiday.”
“It must be rather urgent. What’s the big news?”
Trevor lowered the letter with a stunned look. “Why, that sneaky old Scot! I can’t believe it. He always said he had no family . . .”
“What is it?” Grace touched his arm and looked at him in concern. “Not bad news, I hope?”
“No, no. Nothing like that . . .” He shook his head to clear it. “Seems Beau caught a whiff of information in Paris and decided to follow the trail.”
“But he’s on holiday!”
“Once a spy, my love,” he said absently. “And I’m sure Carissa insisted on ‘helping.’ ”
“Aha,” she murmured. “So what did he find out? Or can’t you tell me?”
“Well, confidentially—it’s about our old Scottish handler, Virgil Banks.”
“Oh, yes, you’ve mentioned him before. How he was like a father to you all, and how difficult it was for you when he was murdered.” The grim subject took some of the glow out of the day before them.
“Well, as it turns out, the old Scot was even more of a mystery than we suspected.” He shook his head in wonder. “I can’t believe he never told us!”
“Told you what?” she exclaimed impatiently.
He shook his head in wonder. “Virgil had a daughter.”
Grace frowned, seeing that his full attention had gone off on this astonishing news. She plucked the letter out of his hand. “No spy business today!”
“But you don’t understand. We never knew he had any family!”
“Husband, we are on our way to a wedding! This is a day for love, not intrigue. Please?”
He paused, then smiled ruefully. “You’re right.” As stunned as he was by the news, he did his best to put it aside and drew her into his arms. “I want everyone in the world to be as happy as we are.”
“Even Callie and George,” she agreed.
“Now that they’re both ready.” When he looked at her, she saw the love and husbandly concern in his gray-blue eyes and felt her heart lift again. “You all right?” he murmured.
“Never better,” she whispered, giving way to a warm smile, which he reflected back to her.
Then he bent his head and kissed her, and once more, the day, indeed, their entire future glowed.
As long as they were one.
Author’s Note
Lovers of nineteenth-century literature may recognize Grace Kenwood, the heroine of this story, as an homage to those most famous of preacher’s daughters: Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. The Reverend George Austen was the vicar of Steventon and Deane in Hampshire for more than thirty years, while the Reverend Patrick Brontë, born in County Down, Ireland, became the Anglican incumbent at Haworth in Yorkshire in 1820 and served there till his death in 1861.
Another research topic that I thought readers might like to know more about is the massive eruption of Mount Tambora, which turned 1816 into the infamous “year without a summer.” Located in Indonesia along the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” mighty Mount Tambora was a fourteen-thousand-foot-high mountain before it woke up from its five-thousand-year nap to spew columns of ash and steam some twenty-six miles into the stratosphere.
It was this great height to which the ash cloud flew that enabled it to spread so effectively, encircling the globe. Veiling the sun, it dropped global temperatures an average of five degrees Fahrenheit over the next year or so, until it finally dispersed.
The volume of material that Tambora blasted into the atmosphere is hard to imagine. It is estimated to have been 10 times greater than Italy’s Mt. Vesuvius (which buried Pompeii) and 150 times greater than the Mt. Saint Helens’ eruption of 1980. Even Indonesia’s gigantic Krakatoa, which erupted in the 1880s, is estimated to have been the equivalent of twenty Hiroshima bombs going off simultaneously. Yet Mount Tambora was one order of magnitude on the VEI (Volcanic Explosivity Index) greater than that!
Considering that it hit in April 1815, while the Congress of Vienna was under way on the other side of the world, it was spectacularly bad timing for war-weary Europe. The exhausted armies of both the Allies and the Napoleonic forces alike were finally marching home after twenty years of war. Economies and infrastructure were already in shambles when the ash clouds rolled in and killed the crops. For a still mostly agrarian world, where new, scientific agricultural “improvements” were only just being implemented by the more foresighted landlords, this spelled disaster not just for the human population but for the horses they relied on for transportation and for the farm animals that provided food. With dire Malthusian warnings of overpopulation and starvation ringing in their ears, the people of the nineteenth century wondered if the end of the world was at hand as they watched the snow fall in July and August.
In France, the wine grapes died on the vine, while in Germany, the skyrocketing cost of fuel (i.e. oats for horses) became such a problem than an enterprising nobleman and gentleman-inventor, Baron Karl von Drais, invented the first bicycle. “The Running Machine” (later dubbed the velocipede) didn’t have pedals or brakes: You sat on the equestrian-inspired saddle and pushed along the ground with your feet. Throughout the world, weird-colored sunsets were the norm. Across the Pond in President Madison’s America, pioneers whose crops had been ruined by the snows pushed farther west into the wilderness, hoping to find areas unaffected by the malfunctioning weather. Up in Canada, Quebec City got a foot of snow in the middle of June. Because of the food shortages, there were frequent riots and looting in many places, and when populations are weakened by famine, they soon become vulnerable to disease. Eastern and Southern Europe were especially hard hit by typhus. It sounds like I’m describing the setting for a dystopian novel rather than the “glittering” Regency period, doesn’t it? But such is history. Personally, I find it encouraging in our uncertain times to hear about how our forebears dealt with times of severe adversity like the “year without a summer.”
Thanks again for reading, and I hope you’ll look for Nick’s story, the next (and final!) installment of the Inferno Club series, coming sometime next year.
Best wishes,
Sneak Peek!
Keep reading to find out what happens next to
Nick, Baron Forrester,
as The Inferno Club continues . . .
A Proposition from a Lady
“Visitor!�
�
Shit. Nick wasn’t sure which was worse, being banished down here to this hellhole by himself or having to face his friends on their occasional visits after how he’d let them down.
Their generosity in bothering with him at all still humbled him, however. It gave him the strength to tuck his despair away and put on a smile.
As the sound of the guard’s heavy footfalls grew louder from the black tunnel that housed the stairway, Nick tossed aside his latest reading, sent to him by Trevor, the first published account of the journey of Monsieurs Lewis and Clark into the American wilderness.
He’d read the whole thing five times now. No wonder his eyes were smarting from the dimness of the feeble candlelight in his cell. He whipped off the small spectacles that he needed in order to read these days, a damned worrisome development for an expert sniper.
No doubt his long-range vision would be ruined, too, the longer he stayed in this dungeon. Not that he deserved to be anywhere else.
He took a deep breath and rose from where he’d been sprawled out on his cot; dragging a hand through his hair in a halfhearted effort to make himself presentable.
He wondered who was coming. Probably Beauchamp back from France, he thought. But then, just a heartbeat before the warden emerged from the tunnel, Nick cocked his head to listen to the second pair of footsteps trailing the guard’s heavy-booted clomps.
A light, whispering prowl of a stride.
A rustle of satin, a whiff of perfume on the dank air.
Good God!
His eyes widened, but he ignored the guard as a gorgeous, pale-skinned woman stepped into view.
“Hm, cozy,” she remarked with a glance around at his cavelike quarters.
Nick barely heard. It was the first time in months he’d seen a female of any kind, and this one was . . . spectacular.
“Visitor, you scum!” the guard informed him.
“So I see.” Nick looked her up and down. When his stare came to the silky V of her chest displayed in a tailored white shirt, layered beneath her dark-hued gown, and opened low enough to show off exquisite cleavage, he reckoned that she was lucky there were iron bars between them.
His mouth watering, he gripped the bars and offered her a smile, praying—in vain, he feared—that she was a harlot, generously sent to him by Beauchamp.
But she merely arched a brow in cynical amusement at his leer; the air of command in the jut of her chin and the even hold of her steely blue eyes made him doubt this woman had ever been for sale.
“Whenever you’re ready to put your eyes back in your head, Baron Forrester, we can get down to brass tacks.”
“Mind your manners!” The guard banged his truncheon on the rusty bars of his cell for good measure.
“Of course. Apologies, madam. You make a charming chaperone,” he told the jailer, then he looked at the woman again, still grinning at her tart rebuke.
The torchlight danced in gold and ruby spangles on her dark auburn hair. She had long, velvety lashes, and plump, sensuous lips . . .
“Who are you, then?” he asked in a cheeky murmur.
She glanced around again at the grim accommodations housing one of the Order’s former top assassins. “I am Lady Burke, and I’m here with a proposition for you.”
His mind instantly went to the gutter. “Go on.”
“If you agree, I can get you out of here. Today.”
“I see. So you’ve come to get me killed. What can I do for you, darling?”
“I could use a man of your skills, but my main interest is in some of the underworld connections you developed in the field.”
This gave him pause. “Which connections?”
She deigned not to answer. “The mission won’t require more than a month of your time. After that, the Order has agreed to put you on parole.”
“How did you do that?” Nick blurted out in astonishment. The Order had ignored similar pleas for Nick’s freedom, or semifreedom, from all of their top agents, his friends. But again, she left him in the dark.
“Once you complete the mission, you’ll be a free man—for as long as you behave like a law-abiding citizen. From your reputation, I know that’s asking a lot of you,” she added wryly. “But those were the Order’s terms when I spoke to them on your behalf.”
“Why would they listen to you? Who are you?”
Lady Burke gazed at him with an odd mix of pity and mistrust. “If you agree to take this mission—and I can’t imagine why any sane man would refuse, given the alternative—you must understand you’ll be taking your orders from me. Will that be a problem?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Depends on what you want me to do. I’ve given up killing, you know.”
“It’s not a hit. As I’ve said, it’s information I’m after. The people who hold the answers I need don’t trust just anyone. Only people they already know, like you. But I must be frank with you, Lord Forrester—may I call you Nick?”
“You can call me anything you like, love.”
“I’ve done my research on you, you see. I already know your tricks—”
“Do you, indeed?”
“So don’t even think about trying to deceive me,” she finished.
He frowned, warily considering her request.
She folded her slender arms across her chest. “We shall get on handsomely, as long as you’re a very good boy and do exactly as I say.”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll shoot you in the head,” she replied with a smile that held not a trace of humor.
Nick was fascinated. “Who are you, exactly?”
“Virginia, Baroness Burke. My poor baron, alas, is dead,” she said rather boredly.
“Sorry,” Nick managed. “I’ve heard the name, though I don’t believe I ever met him.”
“You weren’t missing much,” she said under her breath.
“Was he—an agent?”
“God, no.”
He paused. “Are you?”
There was an edge to her smile. “You know the Order does not allow women to serve in that capacity.”
“Then who the hell are you?” he exclaimed.
She finally relented, lowering her mask of cool control just a little. “Very well. My mother’s the Countess of Ashton. Her lover, my natural father, was Virgil Banks.”
Nick’s jaw dropped.
“Now will you work with me or not?”
Virgil’s daughter? He just stared.
About the Author
“Foley’s storytelling is consistently entertaining—and her lovers so warm and attractive—that it’s easy to get lost in the romance. And that’s the best gift a writer of happily-ever-after love stories can give her readers.” Lifetime TV Books blog
GAELEN FOLEY is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of nineteen historical romances set in the glittering world of Regency England. Her award-winning novels (Bookseller’s Best, National Reader’s Choice Award, NJRW Golden Leaf, CRW Award of Excellence, the Beacon, Holt Medallion) are available worldwide in sixteen languages. Gaelen holds a B.A. in English Literature and lives in Pennsylvania with schoolteacher-husband, Eric, with whom she also co-writes children’s fantasy adventure novels under the pen-name E.G. Foley. She spends her days reading, writing, and catering to a ridiculously cute bichon frise named Bingley.
Visit her website at www.gaelenfoley.com to learn more about her books and sign up for the newsletter to be notified when her new books are released.
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By Gaelen Foley
My Notorious Gentleman
My Scandalous Viscount
My Ruthless Prince
My Irresistible Earl
My Dangerous Duke
My Wicked Marquess
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
MY NOTORIOUS GENTLEMAN. Copyright © 2013 by Gaelen Foley All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition AUGUST 2013 ISBN: 9780062075772
Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-06-207595-6
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