The Stanhope Challenge - Regency Quartet - Four Regency Romances

by Cerise DeLand

  She shook her head. “Along the Thames. Near Somerset House and Whitehall.”

  “All day?”

  “Most of it. Yes, I—”

  “I would have much preferred you be here with me on such a day as this.”

  She tipped her head. “Would you?” she asked, a bit in wonder. “You shouldn’t.” She stiffened her backbone once more and sniffed away her tears. Putting her hat on a nearby table, she came to stand before him and clasp her hands together as she declared, “I am responsible for your downfall. I am the one to blame for it all.”

  He owed it to her to hear her out. So he nodded and let her have her say. “Tell me then.”

  “I have lied to you.”

  For a man who had told her he wanted honesty, this opening salvo took his breath away. But he said, “About what?”

  “I am Miss Proper.” She inclined her head toward the broadsheet. “I am the author of those columns. I took money from Drayton Howell, and in return, I was to write libelous pieces about you.”

  Her forthrightness assuaged much of his bitterness. He inhaled.

  She seemed to sway backward as if she thought he meant to strike her for her admission. He was appalled that she would have been so mistreated by others. Or that she would think such punishment suitable to her error in judgment.

  At once, he put on a face of reason and calm as he asked her, “When did you begin this?”

  Confused at his reaction, she went on. “Weeks before we married. Drayton came to me when he heard the rumor that you would come down and propose to me. I, of course, knew nothing of your intentions. But when he came, he did so asserting that my Wallace had owed him money. From losses at dicing and cards.”

  “Did you ask for an accounting?”

  “An accounting? No, no. I had no need. I knew Wallace’s penchant for gambling. We pinched pennies because of his ridiculous addiction to it. Howell’s statement seemed sound.”

  “And did you agree that the stories would be aimed at me, about me and mine?”

  “No, of course not. I simply agreed to write a series for him that would rival the other broadsheets for their scandalous stories. I had no idea he meant to rake you over the coals. But nonetheless, it happened.”

  “How did he do it?”

  “He told his typesetter to change the names of the characters. Once he started, he could continue to become more bold. And he did.”

  “And this typesetter of his agreed to this?”

  “Oh, yes. What’s a man to do when his family depends on his income to eat and pay the lodgings?” She shivered, rubbing her arms.

  “You should stand before the fire. Change your clothes and get warm.”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I am leaving, Adam. I have no excuses to give you for my behavior. I have no means to apologize other than my frail words. No way to ameliorate my sins against you.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about Howell?” he blurted, done with beating about the bush for an answer to this mystery. “Why not just tell me?”

  “I saw no way out. I saw Howell milking me forever!”

  “Could he do that?”

  “Why not? He could say I was willing participant. That I was the gambler, not Wallace. He even threatened to say Wallace had a child by a prostitute in the Seven Dials. That I was with child, and that’s why you married me so quickly. There was no end to what he would print in that rag of his!” She retreated backward to the fire. Shaking with fury and sorrow, she gave in to the tears that racked her. “I wanted to show you that your curse was a myth, a fable, and all I did was show you how real it is!”

  She whirled toward her dressing room.

  He caught her before she made it to the door. “Don’t cry.”

  She turned up a face so ravaged by sorrow that his heart fell to his toes.

  He cupped her cheek and brushed a stream of tears away with his thumb.

  “Adam, I have ruined you. I want to go.”

  “Fee,” he declared, “come sit with me and talk.”

  “No! I can hardly bear to—”

  “Look at me! I did not resign!”

  Her lashes fluttered. She shook her head. “What? Why not?”

  “Ulmsly retracted the request. Most unnecessary, he called it, in light of developments.”

  “I am confused. What developments?”

  “Come sit with me and I will tell you.” He took her hand and led her back to the chair he had left. Though she was reluctant to sit on his lap, he tugged her down. “There. Now. I went to see a few people today.”

  Her brow wrinkled. “I want to hear about Ulmsly.”

  “So you shall.” He pushed a wisp of her hair from her eyes. “Have I told you lately how I adore your eyes? They are brilliant as pure gold, you know.”

  “Adam,” she beseeched him as her lips quivered. “Do not praise me, please.”

  “But you are my wife,” he affirmed.

  “Not for long. You cannot want me now, not after today and this.” She put a hand to the TellTale, while the other swiped at a stream of tears on her cheek.

  “And if I do?” he ran his hand up her throat to cup her nape.

  “I’ll say you’re mad.”

  He put his mouth to the hollow behind her ear and whispered, “Such madness is proof of a man who adores his wife.”

  “You mustn’t,” she rasped, her eyes closing as he wrapped her closer and kissed her cheek and her luscious, trembling lips.

  “But I do love you, Fee.” He blessed her mouth with fierce possession. “I think I have loved you for years, darling, and only just have come to my senses.”

  She struggled up from his grasp. “You cannot! The curse!” She waved her arms about. “Dear god, the damn thing has worked its will, and I have been its instrument!”

  He sprang to his feet. She retreated, and he stalked her. “I would rather love you than not. Live with you than without you. To hell with the curse!”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because I forgive you.”

  She dashed tears away. “Oh, you are mad.”

  “For you, yes. Don’t you see,” he said as he proceeded to follow her as she backed into her dressing room, “none of this was really your fault?”

  She blinked. “I take responsibility.”

  “And for that, my darling, I am proud of you. But you must not take more than your due.”

  She stood now within the voluminous froth of her many gowns. Enfolded as she was in the colors of the rainbow, he had to grin at her.

  “You are a rare jewel, Felice Stanhope. Stunning and inventive, wise and dear. I am a very fortunate man to be your husband.”

  “I think you are foxed. Or someone has hit you on the head.”

  “You do not know what is in that issue of the TellTale, do you?”

  She gritted her teeth. “I do. I certainly do. I saw Howell order his man to set the type.”

  “All of it?”

  She rolled a shoulder. “What does it matter? All, some, none?”

  “No matter. I know the answer to that question.”

  “You do?”

  He took her hand. “Come with me, and I will show you.”

  “How do you know the answer?” she asked, scepticism written on her features as he led her back toward his bedroom.

  When he sat her on the edge of their bed, he handed her the broadsheet. “Jack picked up this copy of the TellTale on the street this afternoon soon after he and I left Aunt Amaryllis. She had a few revealing facts to tell me. All of which you might have told me. Should have. But I am to blame here. I scared you half to death, being so damned focused on warding off the curse. Christ. I asked you to be honest with me then acted like a child afraid of ghosts.”

  Felice stared at him.

  “I know. Hard to imagine I am a man of reason, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “Read your column.”

  Her eyes took in
the words with growing surprise and increasing haste.

  “The episodes here printed have been lies, fabrications…”

  “…Outlined by Miss Proper, true. But edited by the publisher of this paper…”

  “The malicious intent of the publisher to ruin the life and reputation of the Honorable Lord Adam Stanhope, M.P., is one I shall attest to here and in a court of law. Affirmed this twentieth day of June, 1809. William Bundy, typesetter. Formerly of Howell Publishing.”

  She let the paper drop to her lap. “I cannot believe it.” She skimmed the piece once more. “How did this happen?”

  “That Howell allowed that to be printed?”

  “Yes! My god, Adam, yes, how?” She gaped at him, her eyes dancing over his features with delight, alarm and curiosity.

  “Your man Bill Bundy tells me he is very grateful to you for freeing him of the yoke of Drayton Howell.”

  “You spoke with Bill?”

  “I did. Jack and I found him at work, cleaning his type and his presses right after we bought this. Howell had left for the evening after reading of Ulmsly’s demand for my resignation. Bill told Jack and me how Howell abused your words, changed them, forced Bill to edit them and made Miss Proper into a waspish witch out to destroy me.”

  “And Bill composed this himself?”

  “He did.” Adam thrilled to the look of excitement on her face.

  “Wrote it and typeset it to expose Howell in his own broadsheet?” she blurted. “I can hardly believe it.”

  “Bill Bundy is most grateful for you securing the job for him at Collins’s. He starts tomorrow. He could not see you suffer any longer under Howell’s yoke. Just as you could not see him suffer any longer with Howell.”

  “My heavens! I meant to cripple Howell, put him out of business if I could by taking Bill from him. I knew Bill yearned for his freedom from the blackguard. He could not bear what he was forced to print. By contrast, my father was such an honorable man.”

  “So is his daughter,” Adam whispered and lifted her chin to kiss her lips.

  “But Ulmsly urged you to resign! How did you refuse him?”

  “I showed him this issue of the TellTale and told him the story. I took Bill Bundy with me, too. Afterward, Ulmsly and I called upon Paul Crammer who told us of his proof that Howell was holding goods in his storehouses to drive up the price of goods for the Army in the Peninsula. With all that, there was no reason to ask me to resign. My reputation was restored. Or it will be, when Ulmsly himself addresses the Commons tomorrow and puts the doings on the record.”

  She recovered herself after few minutes. “I think this is an ending fit for a good novelist.”

  He drew her close. The urge to comfort her and keep her was a steady wave of desire in his blood. “I want our happy ending.”

  “You could want me?” she asked him, her eyes wide with wonder.

  “Want you always,” he told her as he kissed his way down her throat.

  “You could forgive me?”

  “Forgive you this and more,” he affirmed as he began to undo the buttons at her bodice. “Is that not what good marriages are made of?”

  “And the curse?” she asked him as her gown dropped to the floor and Adam lifted her chemise over her head.

  “That old fable?” he asked her as he cupped her breasts and kissed each gossamer nipple. “What power can it have over commitment and true love?”

  The End

  Lady Featherstone’s Fervent Affair

  by

  Cerise DeLand

  The Stanhope Challenge, Book 2

  Wes and Lacy

  Chapter One

  Lancashire, September 1809

  Wes galloped in the rain, the night thick and the air moist. He slumped over the saddle, his horse lathered and laboring. He dug his spurs into the hide of the animal. Mad to get his men up to the French line, Wes yelled at them. His voice cracked, hoarse. His throat raw. The din clamored around him. Like a vise.

  The damned French came on like banshees from hell.

  Why at night?

  The dead of it.

  Why in the rain?

  He circled his troops. Blinking. Disbelieving. His men lay like broken toy soldiers, littering the earth. Ghouls, dark and bony, they lay strewn about, their blackened arms up-stretched to him, grasping, calling for help, survival. Others, still mounted, cried out to him as they lost their seats and tumbled to the hard dark earth. Their horses whinnied and shrieked, rising up and pawing the sky. Men fell, hacked to pieces before they hit the ground. His lieutenant, mouth open, bellowed at Wes to go back. Go back.

  He would not. Could not. He wheeled about. How to ensure my rear line turns to meet the French assault?

  But still the enemy came on. Gold and silver epaulettes shone brilliant in the rain. French shakos fluttered over their skeletal faces.

  They whacked at Wes’s youngest recruits. Not men. But boys. Just boys. One cried in the mud. His horse was wild eyed and thrashing, hooves beating a retreat where there was none. The sounds of the clashing steel, the agonies of men, the gunpowder clogging the air with smoke so thick, so dry men coughed and hacked, choked and drowned on it.

  Then at once, a jolt to his own horse. His animal trembled, buckling, bowing down into the mud like a child at prayer. His mount, which he’d trained himself, had bought himself in Lisbon from the peasants’ auction. The animal screamed, throwing Wes into the mud.

  The foul grit sank between his teeth and down his throat. He clawed at it. A searing pain crossed his eyes. Burning, he tried to push up, push out, lift his head from the muck of earth and stones, ashes and blood.

  He turned his head, spit out a mouthful, called for his servant. Where are you? Charles?

  No one came.

  He couldn’t see. He pushed the mud from his eyes and screamed. “Get me out of here! Up!”

  In a flash of lightning, reality hit him. He was wounded. Cut? Where?

  He lifted his head. Around him, two of his men lay, crawling toward him in the mire.

  Am I crawling?

  Back to the line, man. Back to the line…

  And he stopped.

  This scene was as it always had been. Dreaded, shrouded in the mists.

  The woman in black would stride toward him now.

  He cursed.

  A fearful hag, she was. Petite, skin and bones, in her voluminous rags of death, she came to peer down at him, wrench his head up by a handful of his hair. Then she’d kick him in the ribs and in the left arm to make him howl like a beast. She sneered at his pain, laughing at his writhing.

  “Take him,” she would order in her devil’s voice. “Take him to die!”

  “No! No!” he would yell as her rat-like minions scurried round him, rolling him to his back, while he screamed in the torment as they took his body up, up, up, his left arm hanging useless as the pain careened through his body and tore his mind to shreds.

  “Let me be!” he would plead and yell and moan to no avail. “Let me die!”

  Wes bolted upright.

  His heartbeat pounded in an erratic tattoo.

  Perspiration dripped down his temples.

  “Oh, Christ!” he muttered, wiping his brow. He glanced around, put a hand to his arm in the sling. Safe. Yes, safely on the armrest. “The nightmare.”

  “Sir?” his sergeant and servant, Charles, stared into his eyes, the man’s hands on Wes’s shoulders. “Tis the dream again, sir. Are you recovered?”

  “Yes,” Wes grumbled, hating how his voice quavered. “Yes, yes! Brandy.”

  “Here, sir. A hefty draught.”

  Wes grabbed the glass as if it were ambrosia. Shameless, needful, he gulped at it.

  He coughed, the damn strong stuff burning all the way down his gullet but inspiring strong affirmation that he was indeed alive.

  He sank backward in his old wingchair, the one he had inhabited now for nigh onto thirty days. Ever since they had brought him home from the Peninsula in a hospital ba
y, he’d sat in a goddamn chair. At Jack’s house in Grosvenor Square. At Adam’s in Berkeley Square. Here. Like an old man. A cripple.

  He cursed. He’d left both brothers’ homes, knowing, seeing and seething at their understanding—aye, their pity—for his infirmity. Riled, he had come north to this old hunting lodge and sat in this chair.

  His sergeant had come with him. Charles Brighton was a loyal sort. From childhood, Charles had been a servant at their father’s Stanhope estate in the Cotswolds. Charles had been Wes’ body servant since Wes was five, and he had followed Wes into the Hussars. Promoted by Wes four years ago, the older man probably had never thought he would need to play nursemaid to the illustrious cavalryman, Wesley Stanhope. More like, Charles would have thought to care for his horse and his kit until Wes pensioned him off at sixty.

  Instead of any such banality, Wes found himself here, in this drafty old place his father had given him on his twentieth birthday. He sat here day after day in this big ugly chair, recovering from a broken left arm, a broken left ankle and the loss of his left eye. A scar long and ragged as sin ran across his left cheek.

  No thanks to a French corsair and the muck of the Spanish plain outside Talavera, Wesley Hamill Curruthers Stanhope had fallen in battle during a charge of his own cavalry brigade. Days later, in a medic tent, his commander had informed him that his maneuver had won the day for the British, but Wes rued the praise. What good was a man fallen in the pursuit of his duty? What joy in that? What recompense were words of praise when his body was broken and ripped? He could only ponder his own mortality, which now he expected would have a sad and lonely ending.

  A man without his profession. Without his faculties. Without an income, save what he got as a handout from his roué of a sire. Without hope of the comfort of a woman.

  He growled in frustration at the memory of desire. The memory of how he’d made love to many a woman. The recollection of how virile he’d once been, fucking as he wished. When. Whom. Never loving. Until two months before he’d left for Portugal, Spain and the terror of Talavera. Then had found a sprite of a woman. Never before had that been his type. But once he’d seen her, talked with her, been amused and enchanted by her, he’d known he was fully caught. Captured. Enraptured. Only that one time in his life had he thought he might brave the family curse on all loving marriages and find more than the temporary slaking of his desires.