Surrender To Ruin

by Carolyn Jewel

  Surrender to Ruin

  Sinclair Sisters Series

  Book 3

  Carolyn Jewel

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Carolyn Jewel

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Cover Design by Damonza.

  Cover image Copyright © Jenn LeBlanc/Illustrated Romance.

  ISBN: 978-1-937823-54-2

  All rights reserved. Where such permission is sufficient, the author grants the right to strip any DRM which may be applied to this work.

  About Surrender to Ruin

  Her beauty is divine. His heart yearns for another. Will attempted revenge result in true love?

  Emily is the last unmarried Sinclair sister. For all her spellbinding beauty, she’s never been able to clear a certain man from her head and her heart. He’s made it clear there’s no hope, and now he’s about to marry her best friend.

  The Earl of Bracebridge knows how to hold a grudge. The former prizefighter turned disreputable nobleman hoped to marry Emily’s sister until she was forced to wed another. After his hopes for a suitable marriage are dashed once again, he seizes the chance to settle the score with Thomas Sinclair—by eloping with Emily and consigning them both to a union without love.

  Emily knows Bracebridge loves another, but every time they’re alone, sparks fly. Can the Earl get past his heartbreak to realize the perfect woman didn’t get away—she’s already his wife?

  Surrender to Ruin is the long-anticipated third book in the Sinclair Sisters historical romance series. If you like unmistakable chemistry, sizzling romance, and potent regency drama, then you’ll love the next chapter in Carolyn Jewel’s heart-pounding series.

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  Dedication

  To Miranda Neville.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About Surrender to Ruin

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Epilogue

  The Sinclair Sisters Series

  About Carolyn Jewel

  Books by Carolyn Jewel

  Excerpts

  Acknowledgments

  To all the readers who have written to me over the years asking about this book, your emails meant the world to me. Thank you. And thank you for your patience.

  Thank you Gopal Rachagorla for giving me permission to use your name for one of the characters in this story. I’m so glad we had the opportunity to work together, even if it was on separate continents and different time zones. Ah, those late night (in the US)/early morning (in India) deployments. In fact, a big shout out to the whole database team, including everyone who was on-loan from time to time: Venkat, Nachiket, Arathy, Sai Kiran, Surendra. All of you are awesome, and I am glad to have worked with you.

  To Carolyn Crane, thank you for reading drafts more than once. I know there were times when it hurt. You are awesome. To editor Bev Katz Rosenbaum, thank you for your insights times three.

  As ever, thanks to my sister and my son for being wonderful people. Thank you, Bella for not eating my shoes . . . recently. Smudge, Fudge, and Caesar, you are missed. To the Frieda who was such a wonderful friend to my uncle Marion, and then to all of us, thank you. Welcome to the family, Maybelle.

  Chapter One

  Rosefeld, near Bartley Green, England, 1821

  Emily stood by the door with her breath caught in her throat, and her heart shattered all over again. Momentarily paralyzed, she watched her dog gallop across the entry. The leash bounced and curved like some demented snake as Frieda headed for the stairs and the man who stood there.

  “Frieda. No!” But her ungainly adolescent dog, intent on making a new friend, did not stop. Frieda was also, perhaps fortuitously, unable to safely negotiate the marble floor. Her front legs splayed and propelled her into a four-footed spin that ended with a crash into the bottom step. She scrambled to her feet and shook herself off, panting and wagging her tail hard enough to move her entire body.

  The Earl of Bracebridge remained on the stairs, his attention on Frieda, as was wise when a large dog whose bark was a cross between a bay and a bone-chilling snarl was heading straight for one. Thank God for Frieda, for Emily needed time to master her feelings and the brutal realization that her heart was as yet unhealed. Oh, heavens above, how could she still ache like this?

  Emily leaped for the trailing leash, but Frieda bounded up the stairs. For all her size and bloodcurdling noise, the dog wasn’t snarling or threatening in any way. She wriggled with joy.

  Emily had last seen Bracebridge over a year ago. They had met—her fault, all her fault, that meeting—inappropriately alone. Their usual escalation toward unrecoverable disaster had ended with harsh and brutally honest words from him. Devastating words. He’d kissed her yet again, then the embrace had spun completely out of control. His hands had been underneath her skirts, on her bare skin. She, to her everlasting shame, would have allowed him anything. Anything at all. But he’d stopped. Pulled away and told her, in no uncertain terms, that he would never love her, that she must not have any expectations of him.

  Without exaggeration, the encounter had crushed her heart to nothing. She recognized her responsibility for that outcome. She did. He loved her eldest sister, not her. He would never love anyone but Anne. How could his heart not be broken beyond anyone’s ability to repair it?

  Anne had been forced to marry the Duke of Cynssyr, one of Bracebridge’s closest friends, when everyone, Emily included, had expected a match between Anne and Bracebridge. The fault for that lay squarely with the duke. On that infamous night when Anne had been dosed with laudanum, the duke had been found in her bed. His claims of mistake changed nothing. Anne and Cynssyr had married the next day.

  Frieda woofed again.

  Emily just missed regaining the trailing end of the leash, allowing the dog to reach Bracebridge and rear up on her hind legs. Her front paws landed on his chest. Frieda was heavy, strong, and intent on licking his face.

  “Good day to you, too, milady.” Bracebridge rubbed the dog’s ears, then gently pushed her back to all four paws and down the last of the stairs. At least he wasn’t angry; Emily was grateful for that.

  Emily tried for the leash again, but the moment Brace
bridge was off the stairs, Frieda reared up to attempt another face-lick. “Honestly, Frieda! Down!” Emily missed the leash yet another time. He had yet to fully register her presence and truly see her. In the instant when he did, she watched with dismay as his smile vanished and his eyes turned hard.

  How utterly humiliating that her stomach was full of butterflies. She would absolutely not let him see that nothing had changed for her. “Oh, drat, Frieda. Behave!”

  “Down,” he said in that dark, unyielding voice that never failed to send a shiver down Emily’s spine. The dog did not precisely obey, but she did return to four legs. He grabbed the leash near where it fastened to her collar and pulled the loose end until he had the strap firmly in hand.

  Emily was relieved, not to her credit, by this excuse to delay or defuse what was plainly going to be an uncomfortable and awkward encounter. She’d never intended to fall in love with anyone, but one day, not long after Anne was married, she’d seen him walk into a room, and all these feelings had simply appeared and refused to be dislodged from her heart. “I beg your pardon, my lord,” she said.

  He didn’t immediately respond to the first words spoken between them in over a year. Yes. Thank goodness for Frieda.

  “She hasn’t ruined your coat or shirt, has she?” Besides being monstrously large, Frieda had the worst traits of several breeds; a deerhound’s wiry coat, but greyish-brindle instead of a solid color, the floppy ears and jowls of a bloodhound, a mastiff’s girth, and the tendency to slobber of all those breeds.

  “Not at all.” He crouched and rubbed Frieda’s ears. She pressed the top of her head to the center of his chest and wagged her tail hard enough to move half her body. He glanced up, and Emily caught the fading edge of his frustrated look. If she told anyone just how bad things had got with Papa lately, she’d be forced to leave the Cooperage to live with one of her sisters. If that happened, Bracebridge would have to give up his friendship with her brothers-in-law.

  “I came to see Mary and the children,” she said abruptly, the heat in her cheeks a further reminder that she was not anything like sanguine. Mary, Lady Aldreth, was wife to Baron Aldreth of Rosefeld and the second of Emily’s three sisters. The four women had endured a great deal when they were growing up. Their mother died when Emily was quite young, and Anne, still a girl herself, had stepped in to run the household in the face of their father’s utter inability to manage anything himself.

  “Did you?” Bracebridge said with understandable skepticism. He didn’t know—no one did—that Papa was drunk most days or that if she forgot to lock her door, he’d come in looking for something to convert to ready cash. She’d quickly learned the only safe hiding place for money to pay the taxes and put toward the most pressing bills was in a tin box she kept buried at the southern edge of the property.

  “I did not know you were here,” she said. Unfortunately, for the past three days, Papa had been in one of his states. She’d spent her time taking Frieda on long walks or hiding in her room with the door locked. “I’d have stayed away otherwise.”

  Given that her sisters were married to men Bracebridge called friends, the best and most obvious way to avoid him had been to remain at the Cooperage with her father. She was not deluded enough to believe he had not himself declined invitations likely to bring him into contact with her. She’d done the same.

  Her persistent and unreciprocated love was a hopeless case. Some people refused to overlook his disreputable past, most notably and painfully her own father, who had banned Bracebridge from the Cooperage shortly after Bracebridge first offered for her sister. Of course, he had not been Bracebridge at the time. No one had expected he, as the youngest of seven boys, would inherit.

  She was not privy to the details, but Bracebridge’s late father had all but disinherited him when, as a boy, he refused to join the navy or the army. Thereafter Bracebridge had supported himself as a prizefighter and, soon after, as the owner and operator of several enterprises, the nature of which were the subject of scandalized whispers.

  “I suppose meeting again was inevitable,” he said carefully. He maintained his prizefighter’s physique to this day, and though his style of dress was always austere, she liked that about him nearly as much she liked his size, his sense of humor, and that air about him that suggested he was about to do something wicked and did not care what anyone thought.

  He gave Frieda another pat, then stood. He smiled—not warm, but not unfriendly—and she ignored the spark of attraction that shot through her. His eyes were inky black, his hair the same color, all unruly curls, and his nose was slightly crooked. He wasn’t a handsome man, but when he walked into a room, everyone stared. He took effortless command by presence alone.

  “I suppose so.” She stayed where she was and prayed she looked composed, even though she wasn’t. She would not have blamed him if he’d refused to speak to her. Through no fault of his, her feelings had become engaged, and he had not returned them. She had reacted strongly to him from the very day they met, when she was a girl scarcely old enough to guess there might be something more behind her admiration of him.

  “Good afternoon then, Em.” He flinched, and she ignored his use of the too-familiar diminutive.

  “My lord.” She curtseyed with the formality due an acquaintance of his status, rather than someone she had known since she was a girl. She had no choice but to be done with him. “Have a pleasant outing.”

  A year ago, the tension between them would have destroyed any possibility of either of them walking away unscathed from the encounter. She was, she wanted to believe, now better able to moderate her behavior with him.

  “Thank you.”

  The coldness of his reply stirred up old hurts, but she had vast experience suppressing emotions she did not wish to display. He had no way of knowing she was determined to overcome her feelings for him. He surely and understandably believed he was still in danger of unwanted emotion from her. She ignored the tiny, resentful voice in her head that said he bore some responsibility for what had happened.

  “Forgive me, Miss Sinclair. I did not mean to speak so curtly to you.”

  Miss Sinclair. Emily understood the need for distance between them. All the same, his formality was a blow. Which did she prefer? A too intimate address or one that was too formal? She hated both.

  “I have an engagement this afternoon,” he said.

  She steeled herself. True, she had meticulously avoided him for more than a year, but she wasn’t a fool. He’d been to Bartley Green several times in the past months, and she’d long ago guessed the reason. She summoned a smile of the sort she had perfected with dozens of men who needed to be discouraged. How ironic that she must use that skill now, when she was dying inside. “With Miss Glynn?”

  Clara Glynn was Emily’s dearest friend. She hated herself for wishing she was wrong about them. Clara deserved to be happy, and so did Bracebridge.

  “Yes.” His relief was a knife across her heart. “I’m to meet Miss Glynn and her brother.”

  “Please give them my regards.” She was astonished by her poise. What an actress she was.

  “I shall,” he said.

  “Frieda. Dear dog, do come here.” She clicked her tongue several times, to no avail. Frieda sat on his feet. She looked at the dog, her heart aching with affection. “Be so kind as to hand me her leash, would you, my lord? I’ll hold her so you may escape in safety.”

  “That seems an odd name for a dog.”

  She did not want this cool, remote acquaintance. She wanted the heat of his touch, the shiver of his eyes on her, looking at her as if she were the only woman in existence. Except that had never been true for him. She’d misinterpreted everything. “I think the name suits her.”

  “Frieda.” He shook his head. “Was it Aldreth or your sister who chose that name? Or one of the children?”

  “I chose the name.” More proof that he held her in low regard. He considered her frivolous, vain, and spoiled, and most of that was true.
She would trade her beauty in an instant if doing so would grant her but half the character of any of her sisters.

  “Indeed?”

  “Frieda is my dog.” She held out her hand for the leash, but he didn’t give it over.

  She was twenty-two compared to his thirty-four, but that wasn’t an insurmountable difference to her. It had been for him. The whole trouble was, she’d never been attracted to men her own age. She’d only ever wanted him.

  He continued to hold the leash. She had the awful feeling he was debating whether to invite her to accompany them on their walk. God, no. She’d never survive watching him court her best friend. He settled his weight onto one hip and slightly hunched his shoulders to make himself shorter, as he so often did with women who were not tall. Clara was a more comfortable height for him.

  “She’s a splendid dog,” he said.

  “She certainly fancies you.”

  A quick smile appeared on his mouth, froze in place, then vanished. The distance between them took on a weight she did not entirely understand. “Mystifying, isn’t it?” he said.

  Oh, another mistake. Resolutely, she ignored the past that lived in that statement and prayed he would, too. She wasn’t the same person she’d been a year ago. She was wiser now.

  “To be sure, my lord.” The sooner she extricated herself from this conversation, the better. She held out her hand for the leash, but infuriatingly, he did not give it to her. “As you see, Frieda is as beautiful as she is well behaved.”

  He patted Frieda’s head. “She’s good natured.”

  “And loyal and brave.”

  “Admirable qualities, all.”

  The front door opened as he was extending the leash to her.

  Harry Glynn entered, followed by his sister, and Emily’s heart fell to the very end of the earth. Clara stopped a few steps from the door and looked between Bracebridge and Emily. Bracebridge smiled at Clara with a fondness Emily had never seen from him except where Anne was concerned. He deserved to be happy.