The Stanhope Challenge - Regency Quartet - Four Regency Romances

by Cerise DeLand

  “You are very welcome,” John said with satisfaction and a raised glass. “To your health, my boy. And your welfare.”

  The two men drank.

  Avoiding Mark’s gaze, the elder played with the hem of his frock coat for a moment, his expression tense . “I cannot leave before I share some final news with you. Sad news. Very sad.”

  Mark, fearing to hear that his father foresaw his own demise soon, balked. “Sir, I do hope that you will take good care of yourself and—”

  “This is not about me, my boy, but Sirena Maxwell.”

  Mark froze. “What about her?”

  “I know you cared for her. This is difficult for me to say.”

  “I enjoyed talking with her when she came for dinners and readings at Adam’s and Felice’s. After I met her at their ball, I could not stop—” wanting her. “What has happened? If de Ros has hurt her--”

  “No. Not that. Much different. You see, a week ago, she packed a reticule and left a note to say she was leaving home.”

  “What?” Mark heard his own voice crack with shock. “Where did she go?”

  “We do not know where she headed. But we do know why. She refused to marry de Ros.”

  “Thank God He’s a prig. An idiot. Not worthy to kiss her slippers.”

  “Yes.” John examined Mark’s expression as though he were carefully dissecting a butterfly. “I agree. So does most of Society. Your siblings included.”

  At his father’s pregnant pause, Mark scowled. “What else are you telling me?”

  The old man stared at Mark with sad eves. “No one can find her. Or could. Until….”

  Mark laid a hand on his father’s arm. “Until what?”

  “Two days ago, a young woman fitting her description was discovered floating along the Thames near Saint Katherine’s Wharf. She was young, lovely with dark brown hair. She had drowned.”

  “No!” Mark rose to his feet, his mind a whirl of horror. “This is a mistake. That woman is someone else.”

  John gazed up at him through distressed eyes. “She was in the river for days, they say, and yet she still bears a resemblance to Sirena. The height. The build. A doctor for the Bow Street Runners dissected the body and he found water in her lungs. She either fell into the river accidentally or she took her own life.”

  “That is not possible! Sirena would never—”

  “Mark, please. The Duke recognized her coat and dress as Sirena’s.”

  Mark stumbled backward, sinking to his chair. His mind awhirl of loss and outrage. “I cannot believe she would do such a thing! She was so full of life and— Are you certain it was Sirena?”

  John had tears in his rheumy eyes. “She could not bear to marry de Ros. Everyone knew it. Just to look at her conversing with you these past few weeks told the tale. De Ros, of course, challenged you to pistols because he saw how she cared for you.”

  “The man’s an idiot. A bully and a coward.” Mark put his head in his hand, incredulous still at the news Sirena was dead. “You must press Bow Street to make certain de Ros is innocent.”

  “Everyone did.”

  A fog of grief fell over Mark, darkening the room and the sky and his world. Sirena had seemed so alive, so competent, and confident. A survivor. How could she have even considered running away and he not know? Not recognize any telltale signs? There had to be another explanation. “I saw him try to manhandle her more than once.”

  “Mark, de Ros is not suspected of hurting her. For the past week, he was at his estate in Norfolk.”

  “He might have hired a ruffian. He is as unprincipled as they come. You know it’s possible.”

  John nodded. “Possible, but with de Ros, do you really think it probable? He is too simple-minded to engineer a murder of his betrothed and get away with it. Besides, he wanted the enter to her father’s social circle and her money. He has not the nerve to kill her.”

  Mark swallowed back tears at her loss. “She did care for me.”

  “No one else could miss it, Mark. Would that you came to us under different circumstances. I can claim you, dear man, but I cannot undo the fact that I introduced you to Society as my bastard. Many accepted you as you were, without censure, on my recommendation. And if I could have helped you woo her and win her, I would have. But that was beyond me. The ton would not permit such a breach. I mourn that deeply. Another loss I cannot repay, I despair to say.” He stood, swaying on his feet. “I can only affirm once more I did remove what barriers I could.”

  “You did wonders, Father.” Mark jumped up to catch his father’s arm, comforting the man who attempted to make amends for past mistakes before his demise.

  “I leave with the hope you will return to us at any time for any reason. If only to come enjoy our company.” John smiled with a quivering chin.

  Mark knew it was their last moment to erase the past from both their hearts and he opened his arms to embrace his father. “Come, I will help you out. Simpson will hail a carriage for you back to London.”

  ****

  “Stop that pounding!” Mark’s head burst with the banging noise at his cabin door. He pushed up on one arm to his mattress, but the taste of the whiskey he’d downed for hours soured his stomach and tilted his view of the world. “What?” he barked. “What do you want?”

  “Captain, open the door!”

  “Told you to leave me alone!” Mark objected and put one leg to the cold wooden planks. The room reeled. Covering his eyes, he slumped back to the ticking. “Whoa.”

  “Captain!”

  “All right, God’s sakes, stop yelling.” Groping for the beams above his head and catching himself with the pitch of the ship, he stumbled toward the door. “Are we at sea?”

  “Aye, aye, sir. Two nights ago.” His man murmured a hushed warning to someone else, then to him said, “You ordered it. Please, sir, open the door.”

  “Okay, okay. Here I am,” he grumbled and undid the latch, then swung the heavy door wide. He frowned at the sight before him. Simpson had a grip on the bound hands of a young, thin sailor. “What do you want, Simpson? Tol’ you not to disturb me. Who’s this?”

  Simpson pushed his way past Mark, hauled the sailor in behind him and shut the cabin door. “Sir, I found this stowaway in the forward storage.”

  Mark ran one hand over his mouth, another back through his hair. He never held his liquor well. “Stowaway, huh? Brave. Stupid. How’d you get here, boy? Hmm?”

  “Tell him.” Simpson scowled down at the creature who cast his gaze to the floor. “Go on. I don’t ‘ve all day.”

  Even through his drunken haze, Mark noticed the shrug of the youth’s slight shoulders. Rascals trying to steal aboard a ship were not novel. Especially since the American Revolution, many Englishmen wanted a new life in a new land and hid away on ships bound for the New World. But today, tonight—whatever the hell it was—Mark had no time for such aspirations. No energy. He felt drained, emptied him of any desire to face another hour. As if someone had set a thousand-pound weight atop his chest, Sirena’s death had robbed him of the need to even breathe. How could he care for someone else’s trials and tribulations when hers had ended so needlessly, so quickly?

  Reaching out, he caught the lad’s chin. “Look at me!”

  Two golden eyes with shards of green stared back at him.

  He blinked.

  Cruel to think of her here now.

  He bent toward the youth. His own eyes narrowed and examined the visage before him. The nose was straight, elegant. The lips full and pink. The skin pale and smooth. The hair? He ripped off the long cap of white cotton and watched rich sable curls spill out like a dark waterfall. No. He squeezed his eyes shut and shot them open again. Impossible. He would never touch another drop of Scots whiskey as long as he lived. “Simpson?”

  “Aye, Captain?”

  Mark caught up a handful of the waving hair and crushed it in his fingers. “You knew this about our guest?”

  “I did, sir. One look tells the tale.
The hair, the eyes, the…other parts. That’s why we’re here. I cannot leave her in the storage to starve and I cannot put her below to bunk with the crew. They’d never be right in the head for the rest of the journey.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” Mark said with an articulation that surprised him, given his wooly brain. Never taking his gaze from the woman who still seemed like a mirage to him, he flicked his hand toward his steward. “Get us a bowl of whatever was for dinner tonight, Simpson?”

  “Mutton stew, sir.”

  Mark’s stomach flipped at the ugly suggestion of the greasy concoction. “Ugh. Yes, that. Water. Grog.”

  “Now, sir?”

  “Now, Simpson.” He reached toward his guest and flicked the shirt collar of the flowing crude cotton garment she wore. Beneath he caught a glimpse of a delicate collarbone, and he winced. “Soap. Towels. A pot or two of hot water from the kitchen. Set up the hip bath here.”

  “Right you are, sir.” The man turned on his heel, but not before giving the creature he’d found a look that could boil water all by itself.

  “And Simpson?” Mark crossed his arms, examining his new guest with an interest in her figure. A head shorter than he, more finely boned, with slender fingers and a curving derriere in the loose seamans’ trousers, she was more starkly revealed to him than in the silks and damasks she’d worn in London. In her current state, her femininity shining through the rough cotton, she could never survive among a crew of men. Not even his well-disciplined sailors would endure the temptation of her exquisite face and form for three weeks journey to Baltimore. “You told no one?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No one knows we have a woman aboard.” Mark strolled around his guest, wondering if he was hallucinating at the perfection of this gorgeous body before him. “Well done, Simpson.”

  His steward muttered a string of curses, headed for the door and slammed it shut.

  Mark winced.

  His guest jumped.

  Mark ambled to the edge of his bunk, sat and stared at her. “You astonish me.”

  She lifted her nose in the air. “I hoped no one would find me.”

  His anger vied with his concern for her. “Did you think you could survive for three weeks in my hold without food or water?”

  “I thought I could eat what was there. I had no idea how small a clipper ship was.” She clutched her arms, suppressing shivers. “I miscalculated much. Including how cold the North Atlantic could be in November.”

  He cursed and rose to dig a blanket from his trunk. Handing it over, he fought the urge to wrap her in it. Instead, he tried to think logically, but a few flagons of scotch worked against his better intentions. “You’re foolish.”

  Hurt darkened her gaze, but she graced him with an imperious look. “I had no other choices. A father who would not listen. A fiancé who was intolerable. No money to buy passage.”

  “I find that last hard to believe.”

  “Well, it’s true! These last few weeks, I was much restricted. I was watched night and day.”

  “Women have few freedoms in this society.”

  She snorted. “An understatement. Attracted to a man I should not even speak to, I was shunned by my own father. Under suspicion, given only enough money to pay my dressmaker. And that was for my trousseau. Garments to marry I man I could never respect, let alone love.”

  Mark rejoiced in her admission, He curled his lip at the thought of her married to de Ros. In a transparent clinging gown. In de Ros’s bed.

  Sniffing, she tipped her nose higher. “I had to pay the modiste, lest my father learn and suspect how I planned to escape.”

  His gaze ran over her. She was disheveled , dirty and she smelled as badly of neglect as he did of alcohol. No matter her state, she stood proud, regal and heart-breakingly lovely. Alive. He sat taller, fought to become sober and logical. “Why not come to me and ask for help?”

  She drew herself up to a greater hauteur. Even so deeply in his cups, he praised her for her fortitude—and her luscious beauty as she did so. “Because you would have refused me. You chose not to respond to me fully those weeks in London. You did not wish to show others that you cared for me.”

  His hands flexed. His heart lurched. His desire swelled. “Nothing could come of that.”

  Her eyes beseeched him for more succor. “Attraction knows no rules.”

  He nodded, distraught at the remembrance of how he had yearned to be kinder to her and show her his desire for her. “Your truth is hard to bear.”

  Her brilliant eyes flooded with tears. “Your honor was harder to bear.”

  “Do not assume I would have stopped touching you if once I did.”

  Her lips thinned. “The day you left, I could assume nothing else.”

  Her despair flayed him, coward that he had been, noble that he wished to be. “How do you think this can save you?” He waved a hand about the cabin to illustrate her escape from her fate in London.

  She stiffened her spine. “They will never know where I am, how I am.”

  His head ached, splitting with her logic and the folly of her hope. “They will learn.”

  “No. We are too far out to sea.” She took two steps toward him, her jewel-like eyes pleading with him for mercy, her face pale with fear. “You will not turn back. Please, do not.”

  Weary with the scotch and the surprise and the joy of her here and very much alive, he cupped her face. Her skin was soft as eider down, cool from her days and nights in his hold. “Darling Sirena, your father must know you are alive and well. He fears you are dead.”

  Shocked, she jerked from his reach. “Let him.”

  “That would be needlessly cruel.” He told her quickly about the drowned girl. “They assume it is you, Sirena. She wears your clothes. Your father identified them as yours.”

  Her brilliant eyes fired with sorrow even as she dug her nails into his forearms. “Oh, no. The dead girl looks like me?”

  “She does.”

  “Dear god.” Tears filled her eyes. “Jean is dead?”

  “Jean?”

  “She is a scullery maid who helped me escape the house. I gave her a gown and coat of mine to wear to lead them to think she was me. For her service, I also gave her a pearl brooch to pawn as payment. Oh, Mark, this is truly awful.” She ran her hands through her hair. “How could she die?”

  He could think of only one conclusion. “Perhaps she was set upon by thieves.”

  Sirena clamped a hand to her mouth and caught back sobs. “She died because of me.”

  He took her in his arms, and the world suddenly felt warm, welcoming and right. His fingers sank into her hair. His lips buried in the silken wealth. His arm around her waist drew her sweet, lush body closer. “Darling, we do not know that.”

  She pulled back, her eyes filled with horror. “I gave her a bit of money but I left her alone in the city.”

  His finger traced the rise of her cheek, the curve of her jaw. “You can make amends to her family.”

  “She has none.” Sirena squeezed here eyes shut and yanked away. “There is no reason to go home.”

  “Sirena—”

  “No!” She fisted her hands at her sides. “If you turn around, if you take me to London, I shall only run away again.”

  “You cannot live without your family, darling.”

  “You can! Why can’t I? Because I am a woman?”

  “That’s not what I mean.” He hated arguing with her. She rattled his senses. “I want you safe!”

  “Can you honestly say you think I am safe with de Ros?” she taunted him.

  She had him there.

  “Make no mistake, Mark Stanhope. You can tie me up and drag me back, deliver me, but one day I will escape them. My father. De Ros. I will be free. Even if you do not want me.”

  He considered her, sweet woman that she was. He could want her. But such desire led to pain. He might be politely greeted in London by his father’s set. He might be accepted by his half brothers and
their wives. But such acceptance did not buy him into Sirena’s world. Nor did he want that life. The two of them were not made for each other. And yet, he could applaud her courage…and be infatuated by her. “Who says I don’t want you?”

  “You do! You’d take me back!”

  He shook her, her thighs molded to his through the thin trousers, chafing his willpower, rubbing him raw with his passion to taste her, take her, make her his own. Yes, he could be a right fool to return her to a father who locked her up. Where would his sense of justice be then? Had he not lived his life proud of his independence and self-sufficiency? How could he deny her the one chance to claim her own? “Hush. I won’t take you back.” I’ll keep you. “I’ll take you wherever you wish to go.”

  “Baltimore?”

  He stepped back, defeated by her determination and by his own craving to show her how he admired her. She had not declared she came here to be with him. She was here because she knew he was leaving England, she knew his ship was here in Dover and she bet odds he’d not find her aboard. His heart was sore, but his mind was clear on her purpose. “I’ll give you the freedom you seek. Every man and woman deserves that. It will be up to you to make the most of it.”

  She clutched his shirt, twisting it as she moved against him in an assault on his reason. “What if I want simpler things?”

  This close, though she was dressed in plain colorless cloth and lacked the fragrance of camellias to adorn her, she was the most desirable creature he’d ever seen. “Such as?”

  “You. Now. Here.”

  Chapter Two

  He gripped her arms, crushed her close, her luscious body strong, svelte and dear. His own body was too damn primed to take her, here now and prove to her how he valued her. What could he do to stop this madness and keep her safe, even from himself?

  The loud banging at the door saved him from answering.

  “Simpson?”

  “Aye, Captain! Your bath and dinner.”

  “Come in, man.” Mark tamped down his urge to kiss her. From the corner of his eye, he saw his steward place the hip bath, then lug in the copper kettles and finally, place on the table a silver pot, two tin cups, spoons and two bowls of steaming stew.