To Tempt an Heiress

by Susanna Craig

  “And when,” she asked, tilting her head, “have I ever done what’s safe?”

  His hand traveled across her shoulder to her throat and then rose to cup her ear. She rested her head easily against his palm. “Never.”

  The kiss seemed slow in coming, torturously slow, as he sank back on his haunches and then drew her toward him, never looking away, never allowing her to break his gaze, never letting her doubt his intentions. When his mouth finally met hers, she did not know whether to expect firmness or gentleness, a mere brush of his lips or a brand. Unwilling to wait to find out, she parted her lips and kissed him first, taking his breath for her own, sealing their bond in a way that felt more real than a ring ever could.

  “And you are sure you can be satisfied with such an arrangement? Staying in England—with me? Returning to Antigua every few years, at best?”

  “I suppose I have given you good reason to fear that I make only rash decisions I’ll later regret,” she whispered as she pulled back. “I swear that has not always been the case. I cannot promise never to be homesick. But coming here has made me see things differently. Home is—”

  “Please tell me you are not about to say, ‘home is where the heart is,’” he interrupted with a wry twist to his lips. “I did not have you pegged as a sentimentalist.”

  “Worse,” she confessed with a wobbly smile. “I was going to say, ‘Home is wherever you love.’ ” She fixed her gaze on the knot of his cravat, wondering absently who had tied it for him. “All my life, love has been linked with pain. Now I know it can be—”

  “Pleasure?” he suggested in a tone that sent a bolt of heat through her core.

  “I was not thinking of... That is, I . . .” She knew she blushed, for the few desultory snowflakes still wandering down from the sky stung her hot cheeks and melted away like tears. Slipping her arms beneath his greatcoat, she buried her face against his chest.

  “Yes. Pleasure. And for the pleasure of being with you, I’ll risk the pain.” A pause, then the necessary question: “Andrew, will you marry me?”

  He shifted slightly, perhaps to see her face, perhaps because kneeling on the frozen ground was far from comfortable. Whatever it was, her center of gravity followed his, and before she quite knew what had happened, the two of them had toppled into the snow, he on his back, she across his chest.

  “Ooof.”

  Whether it was the sound or the movement or the little puff of snow that rose around them as they fell, she was not sure, but before she could recover, she realized Caliban’s attention had been attracted to their predicament. He was loping toward them at full speed, hare forgotten, mouth wide in a doggy grin, and she could see on his face his eagerness to join their snowy scrum.

  Andrew’s anticipatory grimace of pain gave her a sudden vision of Caliban sailing through the air to land atop them. She did the only thing she could think to do.

  “Caliban, stop.”

  It was not a shout, not a scream. She had learned from her dealings with Jasper the monkey that a firm tone required neither and usually got better results. Still, she held her breath, waiting for the order to travel from her lips to the dog’s ears, wondering if he would heed.

  Bewildered, Caliban braced his front legs and sat on his hind ones, plowing snow up before him as he skidded to a halt, stopping only inches away, quivering.

  A breath of relief sighed from her lips. “Good dog.”

  “I should have known what I was in for that very first day,” Andrew said, the rumble of his words traveling through his chest and into her own.

  Startled to discover she was still sprawled across him, she tried to rise. But he was holding her tight, and she felt warm all over, despite the snow that had found its way beneath her skirts. “What do you mean?”

  “The day I met you. The day Caliban stopped listening to my orders in favor of yours. The day he ceased to be my dog.” There was laughter in his tone, she thought. If only she could see his face. “He knew before I did . . . as did Beals and Bewick and the rest.”

  “Knew what?”

  “Who was really in command during the Colleen’s last voyage.”

  When he shifted beneath her, she understood that he wanted her to rise, so she pushed herself upright and scrambled to her feet. The dog danced around her ankles, rising up only once, forepaws at her waist, to be petted and praised for his good behavior, before allowing Andrew to make use of him to stand. As he got up, he brushed snow from her skirt, she from his shoulders, and in another moment she found herself bundled into his coat.

  “What would Miss Wollstonecraft say?” he asked.

  Darting her eyes to his face, she could not quite make out whether he teased only, or whether he knew. Had he been reading her heart all along? “She would not be entirely surprised. ‘Suspense and difficulties exalt the affections,’ she says, and we have certainly had our share of those.”

  His chin lifted in a nod of agreement. “What else?”

  Would he know if she did not tell him the truth? But she could not lie. “Something about how the security of marriage makes the fever of love subside,” she whispered.

  “Hardly a ringing endorsement,” he said. “And you’re sure that’s what you want?”

  Her lip was between her teeth before she could stop herself, and she could only nod.

  “This, from a rational creature.” He laughed. “Then yes, my love, I’ll marry you.” Raising his hand, he dragged his thumb across her chin, tugging her lip free, then brushing his lips lightly across her mouth. “She’s right enough about suspense and difficulties. But they do wear thin after a while.” Another kiss, firmer. “They might even make one look forward to the calm after the storm.” Nibbling, suckling. Her toes curled in her boots. “There’s beauty in a glassy sea.” Her lip between his teeth, now, and the last vestiges of her worry yielded to the flood of heat. “But I fear your Miss Wollstonecraft is wrong about the fever. At sea or on land, I’ll always be a sailor at heart, and I feel quite certain a tempest will always make my pulse rise.”

  Despairing at last of their attention, Caliban snuffled away in search of other prey.

  “I have seen endless proof that when people are tied or bound or chained, it only makes them yearn for freedom all the more,” she said, when her lips were her own again. “They will do anything, risk anything to get free. But I never applied that lesson to my own heart. I thought that if I kept it under lock and key, it would always be under my command. I should have known eventually it would break away, it would fly. And it has flown. To you.”

  “Then I will guard it with my life,” he said, his voice tinged with awe at the responsibility with which she was entrusting him. But he showed no sign of refusing it.

  Moonlight turned the blanket of fresh snow into a crust of diamonds. Perfect stillness. Perfect peace. The crisp air carried the sound of church bells across the moor.

  “Happy Christmas, my love,” she whispered, laying her cheek against his chest.

  For answer, his good arm tightened around her shoulders, a band of strength and support, and her heart knew true freedom at last.

  Historical Note

  The 1790s were a tumultuous decade for Great Britain. Even as Enlightenment ideals fostered demands for increased liberty, revolutionary fervor in France pushed Britain into war. Radical thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in support of the Rights of Man (and Woman), while publishers of such works faced imprisonment for treason.

  In those same years, the British slave trade reached its peak, carrying captives from Africa to places like Antigua, one of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean Sea. Just twelve miles wide, Antigua was Britain’s third-highest sugar-producing colony, after Jamaica and Barbados. In the late eighteenth century, it had a population of approximately fifty thousand people, 90 percent of whom were enslaved.

  Not coincidentally, the movement to abolish slavery also had its origins in that era of conflict and change. Quakers led the charge, aided in their efforts by ma
ny individuals: Former slaves, such as Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, told their stories and captured public sympathy; William Wilberforce campaigned on the matter before Parliament; Granville Sharp helped to found Sierra Leone, an African settlement for free people of African descent who had been enslaved in the British colonies; Thomas Clarkson supported legislative action by conducting research into the horrors of the slave trade; and Josiah Wedgwood mass-produced popular cameos bearing an image of a slave in chains and the motto, “Am I not a Man and a Brother?”

  The abolitionists’ work eventually paid off. An 1807 Act of Parliament officially ended the slave trade in the British Empire. Despite the Royal Navy’s enforcement of the act and heavy penalties for its violation, however, smugglers continued the trade on a smaller scale. When Parliament abolished slavery in Britain’s colonies in 1833, they created provisions for gradual emancipation over the course of several years, and included £20 million for compensation to slave owners for their lost “property,” but no reparations for the slaves themselves.

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  Chapter 1

  Bath, May 1797

  Despite a gift for spinning stories and building castles in the clouds, Charlotte Blakemore had never gone so far as to imagine that her late husband would leave her a fortune.

  It soon became clear that her stepson had not imagined it either.

  Robert, the new Duke of Langerton, stepped forward and twitched the will from the bespectacled solicitor’s hands, as if he suspected the man of fabricating. Neither of them actually said anything, however.

  The incredulous squeak—“Vraiment?”—could have passed only Charlotte’s lips.

  “Yes, truly,” said Langerton, lowering the parchment and fixing her with a hard stare.

  It was not as if Langerton had been left nothing. As heir to the dukedom, with all its properties and a considerable income attached, Langerton was now one of the wealthiest men in England. Still, it was quite clear he objected to the fact that his father’s substantial private fortune—whatever was not entailed or otherwise bequeathed—was to be divided among him, his sisters, and Charlotte. And not equally, either. Charlotte was to receive half.

  Without saying anything more, Langerton returned the will to the solicitor and resumed his seat. A feeble ray of morning sun poked between the curtains covering the library window and picked out a few silver threads in his dark hair. Although he was not yet forty, the strain of the past few weeks, beginning with his vocal disapproval of his father’s second bride, had aged him.

  The remainder of the will’s terms—gifts to the servants, sundry personal effects to those who would treasure them—passed by without comment. Charlotte hardly heard them. Sitting stiffly beside her, Langerton no doubt imagined she was calculating the interest on her inheritance. The thoughts flitting through her head were actually closer to a disjointed prayer of thanksgiving, however.

  Thank God she would not have to return to her aunt.

  Not that her father’s sister, Baroness Penhurst, had been cruel, exactly. But no one who knew the woman would call her kind. “Bad enough that James had to sow his wild oats with a Frenchwoman,” Charlotte had overheard her sighing more than once. “Did he have to saddle me with the baggage?” “The Earl of Belmont’s natural daughter,” people called her when they were inclined to be polite. Which they rarely were.

  “That’s far more than you would be entitled to by dower rights alone.” Langerton’s voice broke through her ruminations. The solicitor was stuffing papers into his worn leather case. “You must be pleased.”

  Charlotte drew herself up. “Nothing about your dear father’s death has brought me pleasure, Robert.”

  His lip curled. Did he really expect her to address her stepson as “Your Grace”? “Next you’ll claim you were madly in love with him.”

  George Blakemore, fifth Duke of Langerton, had been gentle and caring, and Charlotte might honestly have answered yes. She had loved him, in the way one loves a sweet, grandfatherly man—fitting, since she was just four and twenty and he had been well past seventy when he had proposed. No one had been more taken aback by his offer than Charlotte, not even her aunt and uncle, who had done their best to dissuade their old friend from this act of madness—“kindness,” he had corrected when he and Charlotte were alone.

  “Lady Penhurst always was a right dragon,” George had told her with a laugh. “No need for you to live under her thumb forever, Lottie.”

  No one had negotiated marriage settlements on her behalf. Aunt Penhurst had refused to attend the ceremony. Perhaps it was an inauspicious beginning for wedded bliss—but bliss had been beyond Charlotte’s expectation. It was enough that the exchange of vows in Bath Abbey just a few days after Easter had ushered in six weeks of the closest thing to peace she had ever known. Six weeks, broken by his heart seizure. Not the first he had suffered. Sadly, however, the last.

  “Where will you go?” Robert asked, taking up the position behind the desk once the solicitor had vacated it.

  “London.” A note of wariness crept into her voice. “Your father’s will—”

  “Blakemore House is a residence of the Duke of Langerton.” As he spoke, he began to rearrange various items—the inkstand, a paperweight, his father’s seal—with a possessive hand. “And I do not intend to share it with the fortune-hunting daughter of a French whore.”

  Long years of practice had taught Charlotte how to disguise what she felt—fear, dismay. Even joy. Although her feet itched to fly from the room, away from her stepson’s smirk, she refused to give him the satisfaction. “Fortunately for you, you needn’t. Your father specified the house was to be mine.”

  “You have at best a lifetime interest in the property, to be clear,” he corrected, crossing his arms behind his back and looking her up and down. “But if I were you, I would not put a great deal of faith in the promises of that particular piece of parchment.”

  Her hard-won composure deserted her. “You mean to—to—?” As sometimes happened when she was distressed, the English words flew from her head, leaving only French, and that she would not speak before him again.

  “Fix my father’s mistakes?” Robert supplied in a mocking attempt at helpfulness. “As best I can. There can be very little doubt that he was not thinking clearly when he married you. To say nothing of his state of mind when he rewrote his will.”

  Her lips parted on a gasp. “How can you be so . . . so cruel?”

  “To you? Nothing so easy, ma’am,” he said, making the last word sound like an insult.

  “To your father,” she corrected. “To the memory of a decent, generous man. You would have him called mad merely to serve your own selfish ends?”

  A dismissive flick of one hand. “The damage is already done. Since your hasty marriage, he’s known far and wide as a crazy old fool. The words are whispered behind every drawing room door in Mayfair, tossed about like dice in a gaming hell. How you must have plotted and connived to pull off that marriage,” he said with a shake of his head, as if reluctantly impressed. “But the world knows it for a farce, Charlotte.”

  “A farce? How dare you suggest—?”

  “I suggest nothing. You convinced a doddering old man to sign his name in a parish register. Can you prove he knew what he was about? No,” he answered his own question. “Because he did not. Then you persuaded him to leave an exorbitant sum to some person he believed to be his wife,” he continued. “But given his mental state, your marriage was invalid from the start. Now it’s up to me to restore the natural order of things.”

  The natural order of things. Spiteful dukes and mean-spirited baronesses on top. The Charlottes of the world on the bottom.

  “Such a ploy w
ill only humiliate the family and tarnish your father’s memory,” she said, lifting her chin. No matter Robert’s accusations, she was a duchess. “I will pray that time tempers your grief enough to make you see it for the foolishness it is.”

  He stepped within arm’s length and fixed her with a narrow-eyed glare. A chill scuttled down her spine. She might have thought he meant her harm—if she could imagine him dirtying his hands with the effort. Should she call a footman? Or the butler? Would they dare to act against the Duke of Langerton if she did?

  In the end, however, he waited only long enough to force her into betraying her own nervousness. She giggled. And when she attempted to stifle the sound, a satisfied smile curved his lips, and he slammed the library door in her face.

  Then, and only then, did she allow herself to run—down the corridor, up the stairs, and to her bedchamber.

  “Was it as bad as you’d feared, ma’am?” asked her maid, Jane, from the dressing room.

  “Worse.” Charlotte paced to the window and looked down on the garden. Just two weeks ago she had sat beside her husband on that very bench and admired the spring blooms. Now a few of them had already begun to fade.

  “Never say His Grace left you with nothing?”

  “If only he had, Jane, I might be better off. Instead he left me so much that his son grows vindictive. He means to forestall my claim to any inheritance by contesting the will . . . by contesting the validity of my marriage . . .” Without conscious thought, her eyes darted to the perfectly made tester bed in the center of the room.

  The sight of it catapulted her back to her wedding night, when her new husband had stood beside her on the threshold to this room, patted her hand, and told her she had no cause to feel apprehensive. “I will not disturb your rest, Lottie dear,” he had told her. And he had not—not that night, nor any other.

  She had not exactly been saddened by the discovery he did not intend to share her bed. Certainly nothing her aunt had told her had given her cause to look forward to what happened between husband and wife. And the late duke had been an old man, hardly the stuff of any girl’s fantasy. Not that she permitted herself those sorts of fantasies.