The Baron’s Betrothal: An On-Again, Off-Again, On-Again Regency Romance (The Horsemen of the Apocalypse Series)

by Miranda Davis

  Contents

  The Baron's Betrothal

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 In which an irresistible force meets an immovable object.

  Chapter 2 In which our hero makes a somewhat triumphal return.

  Chapter 3 In which there are partridges and pranks.

  Chapter 4 In which our hero is no longer the lord of a ring.

  Chapter 5 In which other hopes are dashed.

  Chapter 6 In which the baron is bared.

  Chapter 7 In which our hero and heroine become better acquainted with their differences.

  Chapter 8 In which the impasse continues with one minor development.

  Chapter 9 In which the beast awakes.

  Chapter 10 In which our heroine stops our hero's heart with three little words.

  Chapter 11 In which our heroine is enchanted by a giant in a castle.

  Chapter 12 In which everything that could go pear-shaped does.

  Chapter 13 In which the lady doesn't vanish.

  Chapter 14 In which our hero has a persistent problem on his hands.

  Chapter 15 In which a journey of a thousand leagues ends with one misstep.

  Chapter 16 In which hell hath no Fury (because she's in Mayfair).

  Chapter 17 In which our heroine is determined to help our hero, poor Clun.

  Chapter 18 In which the mysteries of Man are elucidated.

  Chapter 19 In which universal truths of Society become self-evident.

  Chapter 20 In which a minx lets the cat out of the bag.

  Chapter 21 In which our hero is afflicted with popularity.

  Chapter 22 In which our heroine meets the Fury.

  Chapter 23 In which the Fury disapproves of our heroine, giving our hero at least

  that satisfaction.

  Chapter 24 In which hero and heroine have quite a night at the opera.

  Chapter 25 In which a dancing bear becomes all the rage.

  Chapter 26 In which our hero is not yet jilted.

  Chapter 27 In which the Fury transubstantiates into a loose cannon.

  Chapter 28 In which our heroine seeks blood from a turnip.

  Chapter 29 In which our hero and heroine meet as if by chance.

  Chapter 30 In which doubts assail our heroine while a grub’s prayers are answered.

  Chapter 31 In which all hell breaks loose.

  Chapter 32 In which our heroine has a wary Merry Christmas.

  Chapter 33 In which our hero misses our heroine.

  Chapter 34 In which our heroine hesitates for once in her life.

  Chapter 35 In which our hero tracks his betrothed to the last place on earth he expected to find her.

  Chapter 36 In which the cats play while the mice are away.

  Epilogue: April, 1817

  Next…

  Historical Notes and Corrections for Curious Readers

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  From His Lordship's Last Wager

  Notes

  The Baron’s Betrothal

  An On-Again, Off-Again, On-Again Regency Romance

  Book Two in the Horsemen of the Apocalypse Series

  By

  Miranda Davis

  This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s overactive 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.

  Aspen Street Press, RJP, LLC

  P.O. Box 1321

  Espanola, NM 87532

  Copyright ©2013 M. D. Hansen

  Cover photo ©2012 M. D. Hansen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, shared or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the author’s written permission, except in the case of brief quotations properly referenced and used within the context of critical articles and reviews.

  “If equal affection cannot be,

  let the more loving one be me.”

  -W.H. Auden1

  Chapter 1

  In which an irresistible force meets an immovable object.

  Shropshire, England

  October 1816

  She strode from the shadowy depths of the stable and gave William Tyler de Sayre, Baron Clun, a bold, calculating look. Actually, each sized the other up thoroughly. Lord Clun glared at the young woman before him. She was fetching in a wild-eyed, windblown, lunatic sort of way, the sort of way he found appealing, given his body’s unambiguous approbation. Her own direct green glare crackled over him. She was tall for a woman, though her head reached no higher than his nose. Her figure, stuffed in what appeared to be a tight, long sack with sleeves, was trim but lush, not wispy or liable to break in his embrace. She stood before him, arms akimbo, Diana the Huntress or perhaps Aphrodite.

  Clun purred.

  * * *

  Lady Elizabeth Damogan, only child of George Damogan, the second Earl of Morefield, examined her potential savior. She noted with satisfaction that his enormous size alone would suffice to serve her purpose. He wore expensive boots, well-made clothes and a decent greatcoat. From the neck up, however, he had a wild, berserker-like look about him and an even wilder mane of black hair that badly needed a trim. But he would do. She looked at him again. Better than do. He had a ferocious scowl, which he was employing to no effect. She was determined to regain her valuables and she required his help.

  Perhaps she ought to warn the gentleman what she intended. Then again, Elizabeth concluded, he was just a temporary henchman. He need only stand by while she retrieved what the robbers took earlier that afternoon. Given his intimidating presence, physical violence seemed most unlikely.

  She heard a low rumble from the craggy, hair-strewn summit of the mountain standing before her. She fixed him with a stern look. “Are you a gentleman, sir?”

  His black brows shot up and his fathomless black eyes blinked. “At times.”

  “Would you help a lady in distress?”

  “That would depend.” His eyes glinted in a way that should’ve given the distressed lady pause, if only she’d taken the time to consider.

  “Not very chivalrous of you to quibble, sir,” she said. “It will be nothing for you to help. I require very little. If you’ll accompany me — for moral support — I can sort out a misunderstanding with a few men in the tavern.” She took a step back and to the side to regard him from that angle. “You’re an immense man, aren’t you? You needn’t say a thing to help me. In fact, I must insist you don’t.”

  “I’m not—” he began.

  “Off we go, then,” she said. She hooked her hand through the crook of his thick arm and, when she tried to give it a reassuring squeeze, could not help her little “Ooh!” She chose to ignore his chuckle as she spun him on his feet and remarked, “Magnificent mount.”

  * * *

  During her inquisition, Clun held the reins of his favorite horse, a large gray with sculpted head and well-muscled chest.2 Clun draped the reins over a stall board knowing Algernon would remain there until he returned. He had ridden at a leisurely pace this last leg of his journey. Still, he wanted his horse tended, fed and watered.

  “Where is the ostler, Miss—?”

  “No time for that now, good sir, come along. Just inside the tavern, if you please.” She pulled him, to the degree she could exert influence on his great mass without his whole-hearted coop
eration. “Must you dawdle? Come along.”

  They entered The Sundew, a coaching inn where Clun hoped to have a pint of ale and a hot meal on his way to The Graces, his residence of choice among the de Sayre estates in the Welsh Marches. He ducked through the tavern door behind the harridan and allowed himself to be tugged to a table where four unkempt ruffians sat laughing and drinking.

  “Gentlemen,” she began, “Return my money and jewelry this instant.”

  “Don’t know what you’re jawin’ ‘bout woman.” The weasel-faced spokesman for the group dismissed her until he saw Clun loom up behind her. The baron enjoyed the man’s nervous laughter. They all cast anxious sidelong looks at him.

  Well they should.

  “I refer to my money, my gold locket and a pair of pearl earrings,” she said succinctly. One of those earrings apparently dangled from the closest man’s earlobe. She snatched it from his ear with a swift yank.

  The hapless thief screeched and clapped a hand to the side of his head.

  “That’s one. Where’s the other? My brother,” she flicked a nonchalant hand over her shoulder at Clun, “is not a patient man. Return what’s mine, if you please.” She thrust out a hand and held it palm up in front of the man with the bleeding earlobe. He glanced at Clun again and reluctantly pulled the matching earring from his greasy waistcoat pocket. This she tweaked from his dirty fingers.

  “Now, miss,” Weasel Face wheedled, his eyes shifting as if to calculate their odds, “Your big brother won’t relish a tussle wi’ alla us over a few fripperies.”

  Oh no?

  Clun cleared his throat and crossed his muscular arms over a chest half again as wide as any of the seated thugs. Other patrons left nearby tables to gawk from a safe distance.

  The thieves weren’t local, Clun concluded. Neither they nor the Valkyrie realized what the scampering patrons and nervous innkeeper did: the lord of the manor, the very devil himself, Lord Clun stood before them larger than life — or rather, every bit as large as life.

  Despite Clun’s long absence, everyone in the neighborhood of The Graces recognized him immediately. Moreover, they had long celebrated him as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Newspaper reports of the cavalrymen’s deadly battlefield exploits had penetrated Clun Forest, according to letters he received overseas from his steward, Tyler Rodwell. As a consequence, local men boasted of him as one of their own and mothers threatened naughty children with punishment by his hand when he returned from war. In short, the baron was firmly established in neighborhood lore.

  Suddenly appearing as if in a puff of brimstone to intimidate brigands on a lady’s behalf would only burnish his fearsome reputation once witnesses dispersed to share the news of his homecoming.

  Everyone in the tavern fell silent and awaited the mayhem.

  “My locket, if you please,” the Amazon demanded with her hand beneath Weasel Face’s crooked nose. In a moment of inspiration, she extemporized, “For years, my brother has put Frenchmen to the sword, so I wouldn’t give him an excuse to practice his skills on you lot.”

  Clun admired the female’s commitment to her fictions. Not that she was much mistaken. Shocked patrons whispered to one another the baron had no sister that they knew of, only the one, bastard brother. Clun turned his head slowly. His incendiary glance hushed all discussion.

  Meanwhile, the locket and chain appeared and was dropped into the hellion’s outstretched hand.

  “My purse and money. Now!” She barked and slapped the table, making the thieves jump in their seats. Each pulled coins from his pockets and Weasel Face produced her empty reticule and deposited his cut. She held it out to collect the rest. After weighing it in her hand, she nodded, never taking her gem-hard green eyes off the men. From the diminutive purse she withdrew a few pence and threw them onto the table.

  “Have a round with our compliments, gentlemen,” she said and added pertly, “but remain seated until we’re on our way. Or you’ll regret it. My brother will hunt you down and pull your arms from their sockets one by one.”

  With that, she turned and stalked out of the room. Clun remained a moment longer, staring as if to commit them to memory. He fixed Weasel Face with his special to-the-depths-of-Hades glare. Then he strode after her. Once outside, his stomach growled.

  Just my damned luck.

  Clun had been looking forward to eating there all day. The hoyden capered at his side as they walked to the stable. The baron was hungry, tired and in no mood for her dancing jubilations.

  She patted his back and tugged on his sleeve to claim his attention. “You were magnificent, sir. How may I thank you?”

  “Who are you? Who were they? And what in blazes was that— ” he stomped to a stop and flung out a hand toward the inn, “that farce about?”

  She dismissed his question with a shrug and said, “It’s a long story. Very tiresome.”

  “Well, I will know the whole of it,” Clun roared at her.

  She stilled and frowned at him.

  “You are altogether too curious to be a proper henchman,” she sniffed.

  “Recall, I didn’t volunteer,” he growled, “I was conscripted. And I have every right to know where we’re going next as I’m now persona non grata at The Sundew. I was hoping to tuck into their steak and kidney pie tonight.”

  “Oh, I can feed you a decent venison stew,” she said and looked him over again, “though I may not have enough. Come, bring—”

  “Algernon.” Clun took up the horse’s reins and followed her out of the stable. She led him along a path through a hedge into a field he recognized in the fading light. They walked single file toward his Shropshire estate’s southern border.

  “Algernon. That’s an old name. Derives from Norman French,” she said, “Aux Gernons, I believe means ‘with mustache.’”

  He examined her at his leisure. She wore an odd homespun shift of some sort that fit quite snugly, with sleeves well above her wrists and a hem exposing a begrimed petticoat, trim ankles and incongruously fine, silk stockings with clocks. Her imperious manner and cultivated speech trumped her jumbled costume. She was a lady, albeit a passing strange one.

  “Where are we going?” He asked her back. The view of her derrière swaying with each step improved somewhat his foul mood.

  “To a cottage on the estate just over there,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Which estate?”

  “Baron Clun’s estate, I live there.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, I just said I did,” she replied and muttered, “Must large men be so mutton-headed?”

  He let her jibe pass.

  “You’re not one of his tenants, are you?”

  With his luck, she’d be prancing and swaying in the neighborhood while he was obligated to wed an earl’s bracket-faced, ham hock-ankled daughter. For the first time in more than a year since his betrothal, the baron felt a twinge of regret for having arranged to marry a female he’d never laid eyes on.

  “Do you work on the estate?” He assumed she was his half-brother Tyler Rodwell’s current ladylove. Women always made fools of themselves over the man’s buccaneer smile and blue eyes.

  “No, I don’t work on the estate.”

  “Why do you live there, if I may ask?”

  She turned to walk backward and explained, “It’s a long story.”

  He arched an eyebrow. She swept a thick lock of hair from her face and turned to give him her back.

  “Well, in a nutshell, I’m in seclusion for a while. That’s all,” she said over her shoulder while hiking away from him.

  “Why?”

  “That is none of your business, sir,” she replied with regal asperity.

  Minx.

  “For how long?”

  “Until I reach my majority, I suppose.”

  “And that will be—”

  “When I’m one-and-twenty, of course!” She muttered to herself about the obtuseness of great, lumbering lummoxes, much to the baron’s amuse
ment.

  “And when will that be?”

  “Not long. I’m twenty years old.”

  “You’ll live here on your own for almost a twelve-month?”

  * * *

  The man’s smirk irked Elizabeth.

  “I’ll manage. Hunt game. Barter at the market.” She was shocked how easily the lies tripped off her tongue. Still, if she did have to stay that long, she would find a way. She was nothing if not resourceful.

  “You’re hiding in one of Lord Clun’s cottages and poaching his game for pin money?”

  “It’s not poaching, really.”

  “Oh no?”

  “Surely, it’s not poaching if I’m betrothed to Lord Clun.”

  “Betrothed to—,” he said, stumbling to a standstill as his horse bumped his back, “Clun?”

  Elizabeth kept walking even though her temporary henchman no longer followed at her heels.

  “My father, the Earl of Morefield, arranged it with him. I’ve never met the baron, mind you. The marriage settlement’s been finalized for ages. Well, since last year or so. We’d just received word Lord Clun planned to carry me off next month. Disgusting, isn’t it?”

  She finally looked over her shoulder to find empty space where a lumbering lummox should have been. She spun to find him gaping at her, dumbfounded.

  “It’s shocking, I agree,” she cried. “I’ve been bartered away like a prize heifer with no regard for my wishes. None. I had to run away and hide until I’m safely one-and-twenty or I’m released from this ludicrous arrangement.”

  “And then?” the dark-eyed giant asked as he walked slowly to join her.

  “I shall do as I wish. When I reach my majority, I inherit an independence from my mother. Nothing so lavish as my dowry but then my dowry would’ve never been mine, would it? The inheritance will afford me self-sufficiency.”

  “And what of Clun?”

  “He’ll have to find himself another prize heifer if he wants an heir and a spare. It needn’t be me.”