There was no real explanation, the old man had said, shrugging and closing his bag. Perhaps a condition that had prevented conception had corrected itself in the interim, or mayhap it was just chance. To herself Emily had giggled and thought maybe it had more to do with three energetic bouts of lovemaking in one night, for that was the night she conceived. The doctor had interrupted her naughty musings, going on to say that he had seen many cases where a couple, longing for a child for years, had finally given up, and then conceived.
In any case it was a miracle and she would cherish this time, even if she was restless and impatient from being confined to bed. She had teased her husband that if they wanted more children he would have to store up his energy to repeat his feat of the night at the inn. With a shiver of desire she remembered his answer. A smoldering look in his coal black eyes, he had said that he didn’t think that was a problem. Maybe they would do that a few times, just to ensure a repeat of this experiment.
She glanced up to find that he stood in the doorway gazing at her, the harsh lines and angry look of past months gone permanently, to be replaced by contentment and a tranquillity she had never known him to have. He had released his anger and found peace. Her heart swelled with love and she felt like she would burst with the joy that had come to them since making a pact to never let doubt or distrust separate them again. She felt equal to the task, because she would always remember the years without him and the time before that, filled with doubt and anger and pain. She never wanted to go back to that and she would fight to hold together a marriage all the more precious for the years wasted.
He came to her and sat up beside her on the bed. He placed one hand on her swollen belly and threaded the fingers of his other hand through her loose hair, down in waves around her shoulders. They sat in silence as Emily drowsed, their union perfect in silence.
The long months since they had reunited had not been without struggle. Baxter, with the new responsibilities of fatherhood impending, had had to extricate himself from his dangerous job with the government. He had reassured her that there was no connection now and no further danger to him; his duty was done and now others could carry on.
Though the full story was hazy at best, it was concluded that Etienne had intended to kill Baxter for the title and the inheritance. It was known that he was aware of his position and had deliberately concealed his identity, so it seemed the only logical answer, even though one puzzling aspect remained unsolved: he had not killed Baxter when he had ample opportunity.
While Baxter was busy in London, tying up loose ends, Emily and Dodo had gone with May in late spring and seen her settled at Lark House near the Dover coast. She was now, from her letters, happily engaged in setting up a school for the village children to start after harvest, and planning new gardens and new vistas for her home. Dodo had volunteered to stay with her a while until she felt secure again. In her last letter, Dodo had said that she thought May would do just fine, that in fact she seemed to have new interests and spent a great deal of every day away from Lark House and that it was time she, Dodo, returned to Brockwith so she could be with Emily during her confinement.
Celestine and Justin had returned from the Continent, as their letter had intimated, and had just welcomed into the world an heir to their estate in Cumbria. Celestine must have become pregnant immediately, almost on their wedding night. If Emily hadn’t been so heavily gravid herself, she would have gone to her niece, but Baxter convinced her that her job right now was to rest and take care of their baby or babies.
She opened her eyes to find Baxter’s steady gaze still on her. She was so lucky and she knew it. She had even made a tentative move toward peace with her mother-in-law. Marie would ever be an interfering, tactless harpy, but now, secure in her husband’s love and with the knowledge that she was first in his heart and mind, Emily disregarded the woman’s waspishness. It had come to her one day that Marie had never learned how to be happy and that was a sad thing.
“I love you,” Emily whispered sleepily.
“You are my life,” he whispered back and bent down and kissed her tenderly.
Excerpt from The Earl of Hearts
Keep reading for an excerpt
from another Classis Regency Romance
by Donna Lea Simpson,
The Earl of Hearts
When Melony Farramond’s betrothed was disfigured in a horrific fire eleven years ago, she succumbed to her fears and terminated the engagement, unable to face the prospect of a long life with a crippled monster. Now a lonely spinster, she’s overcome by regret and wishes only to see him one more time, so that they might both put the past behind them.
Lord Hartley Kentigern was badly scarred in the fire that took the lives of his father and younger brother, and the tragedy became unbearable when his fiancée broke off their engagement soon after. Sinking deeper and deeper into a morass of cynicism and bitterness and haunted by a rejection he can never excuse, he now lives a solitary life on his estate, resigned to enjoying only fleeting comforts in the arms of an occasional willing woman.
With the annual Valentine masquerade ball approaching, Hartley’s concerned sister hatches a scheme to bring Melony and her brother together once more, in a final effort to force him to confront his demons. It’s a plan that could backfire and reopen the most painful of wounds, or be the one chance Hartley and Melony have to forgive both each other and themselves and rediscover the love they were meant to share.
Chapter One
“Hart, you’re brooding again. What’s wrong?”
Lord Hartley Kentigern glanced up at his sister, Lady Charmian St. Edwards, and shook his head. “You’re mistaken, Charm. I’m not brooding. I was just considering, er . . . the crop in the east field this year.”
His sister, a tidy, slim woman of thirty-one years, two years younger than her brother, sat in a chair opposite him, folded her hands on her lap, and stared into his eyes. He turned his face away. “So that is why you are sitting alone in your library of a winter’s eve, staring into the fireplace. You’re thinking of crops.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“That is not my concern.”
Charmian expressed her frustration with a clicking noise and a shake of her head. But the earl refused to elaborate, nor would he let her anxiety on his behalf draw him out. His thoughts—and his dreams—were his own.
His dreams. He buried his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes, wondering when he would sleep again without that dream. A woman’s voice, a woman’s delicate touch, her scent, lilacs in rain: it was driving him to distraction, he would admit to himself if not to his sister. It was just that there was something familiar in her touch, and yet not familiar. He couldn’t even explain it to himself, and he knew if he voiced it, it would sound absurd.
He had conned over every woman he had been with in the last ten years—the list was not overlong, but there were a few willing widows and even one divorced woman—but not a one smelled just so, or felt just so in his arms, as the woman in his dreams. It was beginning to haunt his waking hours, this obsession with figuring out who she was.
Because she touched not just his hair and his body, but also his face. His fingers traced his right jaw and up the right cheek, touching, probing . . . wondering. She touched his face. Caressed his scars.
Why? What did it mean?
Charmian gazed steadily at her brother, waiting for a response to her last statement, which had just been that it was her concern that he was not eating and likely not sleeping. But he hadn’t even heard her. He was staring into the fire again. As she watched, he raised one hand and lightly touched his face, the scars on his right side a terrible reminder of tragedy, a harrowing night that lived in her own memory as a grim nightmare. She still awoke, sometimes, thinking she smelled smoke, her heart pounding, her ears ringing, and again she was nineteen and in London for the Season, having a wonderful time until the night that changed her and her brother’s life forever,
the night of the fire.
The fire.
It seemed so long ago now, and yet sometimes it came back to her with such clarity it was as if it had occurred just the day before. Her father, the Earl of Kentigern, had been in London with his whole family: his wife, Lady Kentigern; Hartley, who was his oldest son and heir to the earldom; herself, the only daughter of the house; and . . . Lawrence. Little Lawrence, forever seven, her beloved brother, a sweet, energetic, mischievous boy.
Had he been playing with a candle or had the candle just tipped over? No one would ever know how it had started, but it had been conjectured that a candle had caught on a curtain in Lawrence’s room on the third floor. Charmian’s mother later said her husband smelled smoke and raced to his younger son’s room, even as he commanded Hartley to get Charmian and their mother out of the house. He could have commanded a servant to go up to the nursery, but he would trust no one with his younger child’s safety.
Charmian had huddled with her mother on the pavement outside as the eerie glow of fire in the upper floors and the steady stream of panicking servants had filled the dark night with confusion. Nanny, who had been down in the kitchen getting “Master Lawrence” a drink of milk when the fire started, stood out on the street, milk still in hand, and set up a high keening wail that Charmian could still hear sometimes, ringing in her ears. And she remembered with awful clarity the dark figure moving by the window of Lawrence’s room as the heat shattered the glass with a pop and a tinkle.
The butler, an older man named Bacon, staggered out of the house; he had tried, he said, to get to the earl and young Lawrence, but thick, acrid smoke had choked him until he was close to unconsciousness. He had barely made it downstairs and out.
Hartley had then dashed back into the house after his father and brother even as the butler pleaded with him not to go, saying that the whole third floor was consumed. But Hart was not one to listen.
He seldom spoke about what happened next, and had never divulged every minute of his sad quest. Charmian had begged to know more but he was unable at first to find words for the horror of it, and then said it was too sad and too awful to speak of, especially to her; she had already suffered so much. But she gleaned enough from his occasional comments to know that he had been unable to get past the flames on the staircase to his father and brother, though he heard them. He had heard their shrieks of pain and it still, she thought, devastated him that he had been able to hear but not save them.
Their father and little brother had died that day, and she thought that their mother’s heart had been buried with them because she died exactly two years later, broken and devastated by the death of her husband, whom she loved, and the miracle child, the son she had never expect to have after several miscarriages, and upon whom she had doted.
Hart was left to soldier on, his face horribly disfigured at first, the burns on his right cheek and neck painful evidence of how hard he had tried to save his father and brother even after all hope was gone. His recovery had been slow; there were burns on his right shoulder and arm, too, and there was some fear at first that he would lose the use of his arm, or that the sores would become infected.
Assiduous care by an excellent nurse—their old nanny, having lost little Lawrence, would let no one else care for Hart—had proved effective and he recovered. Charmian was thankful for his sake that he was still able to use both arms and hands.
But he had lost something more precious to him than even his limbs; he lost Melony Farramond, his fiancée. Shortly after the fire she had written him a stiff little note that she was sorry, but she felt that they would not suit, and she was breaking off the engagement. She left London that same day, allowing no further contact.
After that day Charmian despised her with a hatred so vitriolic that it had burned her stomach like acid. Shallow, vapid, selfish; she damned Melony Farramond with all those words and many more, wishing dark and foul fates upon the girl’s head. It was a dark time, and she soon realized it was consuming her. For her own sake she whittled it down to merely despising the young woman.
Charmian glanced up at Hartley again. He sat back in the chair, his face in the shadows, his usual position. What would have happened if Melony had not deserted him as she did? Would he have healed faster? Would his personality not have taken on the dour cast that shadowed it now?
Impossible to say.
Maybe it was time to find out if old wounds could heal, or if reopening them would just bring further heartache. Maybe it truly was time to take a chance at hurting her beloved brother in a last ditch effort to heal him of his spiritual wounds, so much deeper than mere burns.
Classic Regency Romances
The Viscount’s Valentine
A Rogue’s Rescue
A Scandalous Plan
Reforming the Rogue
Lord St. Claire’s Angel
Noël’s Wish
The Earl of Hearts
The Mad Herringtons
Romancing the Rogue
Married to a Rogue
Books by Donna Lea Simpson
Lady Anne and the Howl in the Dark
Revenge of the Barbary Ghost
Curse of the Gypsy
The Viscount’s Valentine
A Rogue’s Rescue
A Scandalous Plan
Reforming the Rogue
Lord St. Claire’s Angel
Noël’s Wish
The Earl of Hearts
Romancing the Rogue
Married to a Rogue
About the Author
Donna Lea Simpson is a nationally bestselling romance and mystery novelist with over twenty titles published in the last eleven years. An early love for the novels of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie was a portent of things to come; Donna believes that a dash of mystery adds piquancy to a romantic tale, and a hint of romance adds humanity to a mystery story. Besides writing romance and mystery novels and reading the same, Donna has a long list of passions: cats and tea, cooking and vintage cookware, cross-stitching and watercolor painting among them. Karaoke offers her the chance to warble Dionne Warwick tunes, and nature is a constant source of comfort and inspiration. A long walk is her favorite exercise, and a fruity merlot is her drink of choice when the tea is all gone. Donna lives in Canada.
The best writing advice, Donna believes, comes from the letters of Jane Austen. That author wrote, in an October 26, 1813, letter to her sister, Cassandra, “I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on till I am.” So true! But Donna is usually in a good humor for writing!
Married to a Rogue Page 23