by Merry Farmer
His parents were the ones to blame for the whole mess. His father was a washed-up old man whose best days had been during the Crimean War, as he was quick to tell anyone unfortunate enough to be stuck beside him at supper. The man was so caught up in the past that he’d let their family lands fall into disrepair. Henry’s older brother Maurice—known as Reese to the family—had been begging their father to update the farming and management methods ever since graduating from university. But Reese’s logic and good sense had fallen on deaf ears. Father was determined to fix the problems he’d created himself the old-fashioned way—through rich marriages. He’d managed to dig up a German princess for Reese, and for Henry, well, he was stuck with an American heiress whose father had been born a clerk’s son and whose fortune was barely as old as he was.
“Watch yerself, guv’ner,” an adolescent dockhand shouted at Henry as he barreled toward the warehouse, a sack of something over his shoulder.
“Sorry,” Henry said, stepping aside. Most men of his rank would turn up their nose at a working youngster like that. His father certainly would. But in spite of his rank and pedigree, Henry admired anyone who worked for a living.
“Thanks, guv’ner.” Another young worker touched the brim of his cap as he rushed past carrying a barrel over one shoulder.
The strength of the young men impressed Henry. In another life, he might have been a simple, hard-working man too. Some might scoff at the dirty hands and gnarled backs of the men who kept London’s docks working, but there were times, many times, when Henry would have switched places with any one of them.
“Whoops! Careful there.”
An even younger lad, not much more than a boy, slipped on a damp spot on the dock as he hurried past. Henry reached out and plucked the boy’s load from his back. He held it up until the boy had his feet under him, then handed it back.
“Much obliged, sir,” the boy said.
“Not at all.” Henry smiled at him, fishing in his pocket for a spare coin and coming up with a crown. He placed it in the boy’s free hand.
The boy’s eyes went wide. “Begging your pardon, sir,” the lad said, trying to hand the coin back, “but Captain Tennant pays us well and all.”
“Do you have a sister?” Henry asked. “A mother who works hard?”
“A mother and four sisters,” the boy reported.
Henry smiled. “Then consider this a gift for them.” He leaned in closer. “Buy them each a bit of ribbon or something pretty on the way home tonight.”
The lad’s face lit up. “I will, sir. Many thanks.”
Henry smiled and watched the boy scurry off. His smile grew wistful as he took in the hum of activity all around the wharf. In every direction, men worked. They had a purpose and a direction. Their sweat accomplished something. What did he do? He rode horses. He shot grouse. He occasionally gambled and whored out of sheer boredom. All because he was cursed enough to be born the second son of a marquis—a man with too much blue in his blood and not enough purpose to keep him satisfied. Some days it was torture.
Of course, now that his father had him leg-shackled to a woman who, by her letters, had no more brains in her head than the geese on Albany Court’s tenant farms, torture would be an improvement in his life. Damn the man for selling him to the highest bidder, for thinking of him as no more than a chess piece in his dynastic game. There were times that Henry resented his father so much that he—
“Lord Henry?”
Henry turned away from the industrious dock workers and spun back to the ship as someone called his name. He was met by the sight of Captain Tennant striding toward him, a young woman at his side.
A beautiful young woman with a perfect oval face, kissable lips, and cheeks as pink as roses. She wore a blue dress in the latest style that accented her narrow waist and ample bosom while still being modest. But what struck him the most was the way her spun-gold hair hung down her back in a simple, unstyled curtain. He was seized by the sudden desire to run his fingers through that hair, to see it spilling over her naked shoulders and onto his chest as she rode him in the most deliciously inappropriate way.
He snapped himself out of his carnal thoughts, pushing them aside like a gentleman should. “Captain Tennant,” he said, stepping to meet the man with an outstretched hand.
Captain Tennant reached him and shook his hand. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“Not too long,” Henry answered, his eyes moving from the captain to the beautiful young woman. “Hello, Miss—?” He smiled and offered the woman his hand.
“Lord Henry Howsden, may I introduce you to—” Captain Tennant cleared his throat with an inexplicable scowl. “—your fiancée.”
“How do you do?” the woman said in a pleasing, American accent.
Henry blinked. He stared at the woman, at her hair. He thought of the lock of dark brown hair Miss Mortimer had sent him. He blinked again. There was no way on earth the woman in front of him was his intended.
CHAPTER 2
Henry took the supposed Miss Mortimer’s gloved hand, bending to kiss her knuckles in the genteel way he’d been taught. His eyes never left hers, though. Something wasn’t right.
“I’m quite well,” he said, then straightened. “And you?”
Captain Tennant hadn’t lost his strange, disapproving scowl. The woman who wasn’t Miss Mortimer shot him an anxious, sideways look before answering, “I’m not sure. It’s been an…eventful journey.”
The prickling sensation that things weren’t right spread down Henry’s back. He could blurt out that he knew the blond woman in front of him wasn’t Helena Mortimer, or he could play his cards close to the chest and see how things unfolded.
“I hope the weather held out,” he said, suggesting that storms might have been the problem. “In your last letter to me, you hinted that you were anxious about storms and whether they would cause you to be ill.”
The woman lost some of the color from her face. She peeked at Captain Tennant again. If Henry didn’t know any better, he would have said she was a reluctant pawn in someone else’s game. She certainly didn’t have an air of deceit about her. In fact, in spite of her pinched look and the uncertainty that rippled off her, she seemed quite intelligent. And most certainly beautiful.
“There was a brief storm the day after we left New York,” the woman said.
“Your father must have been worried about you,” Henry said, then looked closely at her reaction.
“I…I’m sure he was.” She didn’t meet his eyes.
Definitely not his fiancée. In her letters, Miss Mortimer had gone on and on about how wonderful her father was, how much money he’d made, how influential he was, and how he didn’t understand what she wanted out of life. He would have expected the real Miss Mortimer to take any mention of her father as an excuse to launch into a speech on the subject.
Meanwhile, Captain Tennant continued to simply stand by, frowning at the conversation. And yet, he had a protective air about him. It was clear that he liked the blond woman, whoever she was. From everything Henry had been told, Captain Tennant was an excellent judge of character. There was nothing for it but to push forward.
Henry cleared his throat. “Well, if the porters have your things ready, my carriage is waiting just past the end of the wharf there.” He turned and pointed beyond the block of warehouses with their bustling crowd of honest, working men.
Captain Tennant glanced to the woman, arching an eyebrow. The woman seemed to hesitate for a moment. She peeked sideways at him. Henry’s heart did an odd lurch in his chest at the sight of her bright, blue eyes. Then she glanced back to Captain Tennant and nodded.
Captain Tennant let out a breath. “I’ll see to it.” He turned and gestured to a man several yards behind him who had a load of trunks—and a single, small, dull suitcase—ready on a cart.
“Right this way, Miss—” Henry couldn’t bring himself to call the mystery woman “Miss Mortimer”, even as he offered her his arm.
More proof that the woman on his arm wasn’t Helena Mortimer came as she kept her fine, rosy lips shut during the entire walk across the dock to the far side of the wharf. A woman who wrote such chatty, frivolous letters would not walk modestly by his side, taking in the activity of simple dock workers the way she did. In fact, her blue eyes flashed with curiosity at the sight of men hoisting a load of goods from the ship to a door on the second-floor of one of the warehouses. She finally broke a smile as they passed a cluster of filthy, dockworker’s children playing with crude wooden tops in the shade of one of the warehouses. He was certain the real Miss Mortimer would have turned up her nose.
By the time they reached the carriage, Henry had decided that he liked the blonde woman…whoever she was. His driver hopped down from the carriage to hold the door open for him. Henry handed the woman up into the carriage’s velvet and silk-lined interior. She used more of her own power to climb into the seat, then to look around in awe. As soon as Henry was seated beside her, the driver closed the door and went to help the ship’s porter load all of the trunks and baggage on the back of the carriage.
“Now,” Henry said, turning to the woman and drawing her attention away from the embroidery on the seat across from them. “Tell me who you are.”
The woman’s face went so red so fast that Henry was worried she would faint. It’s what any of the well-bred ladies he knew would have done when faced with such a pointed and direct question. But to this woman’s credit, after her initial shock, she let out a breath and relaxed, as though finally able to put down a great weight.
“How did you know?” she asked, shifting so that she simultaneously backed away from him to the far side of the seat and faced him more fully.
“My intended, Miss Mortimer, sent me a lock of her hair as a token,” he said, although that was only part of it. “Dark brown hair.” He reached out and took a strand of the woman’s blond hair in his fingers.
The woman cringed, but it wasn’t a flinch at his touch, which she seemed not to mind at all. “I knew I should have made time to put my hair up in a fancy style,” she said. “But things moved so fast once Miss Mortimer made her decision.”
“What decision?” Henry’s curiosity was well beyond piqued.
The woman looked directly at him, her gaze shrewd and calculating, as if deciding whether she could trust him. “I’m very sorry to inform you,” she began, “but Miss Mortimer refuses to marry you. She—” The woman swallowed, glancing down at her gloved hands, which were twined together on her lap. “She says she fell in love with one of the porters, John, on the voyage, and is determined to marry him instead.”
“A porter?” Henry didn’t know whether to be more outraged or amused by the turn of events.
“John,” the woman informed him. “Captain Tennant fired him right away when the plot was unveiled, but it was too late. The two of them took their things and ran about an hour ago, maybe less.”
Henry fixed his expression into a frown, although what he really wanted to do was laugh. He wondered if Miss Mortimer and her porter had walked right past him while he was waiting on the dock. “I see.” He cleared his throat.
“I hope you’re not too angry,” the woman said, reaching out and resting her hand on his thigh. “Or…or heartbroken.”
A jolt of energy shot from her touch straight to his groin. He huffed a laugh. “I am anything but heartbroken,” he assured her. “This whole marriage was my father’s idea. To tell you the truth, I wanted nothing to do with it. And I resent being sold to the highest bidder simply because he has mismanaged the family funds.”
He blinked as he finished, surprised that he’d been so candid with a woman he didn’t know.
“I thought that was just the way things were done by the rich,” the woman said. An endearing half-smile pulled at the corner of her mouth. “I only dressed up like this and pretended to be Miss Mortimer because I thought it might ease the blow. And really, it was Miss Mortimer’s idea.”
“To have you impersonate her?” Henry blinked.
The woman nodded, then tilted her head to the side. “I wonder if she suggested this scheme as a way to buy herself time to get away before you went looking for her.”
Henry wouldn’t have put it past the woman. Her letters had suggested just that kind of shifty streak in her personality. But before he could reply, or even laugh about it, the driver knocked on the door.
“We’re loaded and ready to go, sir.”
“Thank you, Collison.” Henry nodded to the man through the carriage’s window.
A moment later, the carriage bounced as Collison climbed onto the driver’s seat. A few seconds after that, they lurched into motion. The woman who was not Miss Mortimer slipped sideways. Henry caught her and steadied her, suddenly wishing he had an excuse to hold her tight through their journey across the city.
“So, who are you?” he asked, still brimming with curiosity.
She met his eyes warily, licked her tempting lips, then answered, “My name is Ellie Braun.”
Henry smiled and extended his hand. “I’m pleased to meet you, Miss Braun.”
She took his hand with a gentle laugh that was as potent as the way she’d touched his leg. “You can call me Ellie. Nobody calls me Miss Braun.”
“And why not?” he asked, increasingly charmed by the conversation.
“I’m not that fancy.” She hesitated, her cheeks growing even rosier. “I’m not really fancy enough to be a lady’s maid.”
“You traveled with Miss Mortimer as her maid?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Were you her maid back in New York?”
Ellie laughed again. “Only for a very short time.” She paused, tilted her head to the side, then said, “I suppose I should just be honest with you.”
“Yes, please do,” Henry said, feeling as though something vital inside of him were reaching toward her.
Ellie grinned, looking intriguingly guilty. “I was born in Missouri, but for the last five years, I’ve been living and working in a little town out West called Haskell, in Wyoming.”
“Wyoming.” Henry’s brow shot up. “The Wild West.”
“You could call it that.” Her cheeks went even redder. “I’ve worked at the hotel there, but mostly at an establishment called Bonnie’s Place.” When Henry didn’t react to the statement, she went on to add, “Entertaining.”
“You were an—” He had been about to say “actress”, but the truth hit him before he could get the word out. He blinked and looked at her again, taking in as much of her as he could in the closed carriage. Beautiful with soft, kissable lips, a shape that made him want to peel off her clothes and touch her everywhere, and a manner that was relaxed and familiar, even alone with a strange man.
“I was a whore,” she confirmed what he’d been thinking. “But not anymore,” she rushed to add, as if he were about to hold the truth against her. “Bonnie and Mr. Theophilus Gunn, and Mrs. Elspeth Strong too, back home have been finding positions in England for those of us girls who want out of that life. Lots of us have started with a clean slate over here.”
“And you were hoping to do the same?” he asked, still flabbergasted. “As a lady’s maid for Miss Mortimer?”
“Mmm hmm.” Ellie smiled and nodded. “Although now I don’t know what I’ll do.” She seemed to realize the gravity of her situation and lost a bit of her smile. “I suppose I could get a job, like my friend Noelle did. She and her new husband, Ram Singh, are just about to open a huge new store. I bet they would hire me if I asked nicely and proved my worth.”
Henry was seized with the overwhelming need t
o help Ellie in every way he could. He was seized with a few other needs too, though he wasn’t necessarily proud to admit it. It’d been a while since he’d visited one of the establishments that catered toward men of his class, or since some bored young widow had coaxed him into a clandestine rendezvous. He was only human, after all.
But it was another, slightly more sinister thought that crept up through the others, like a poisoned vine in the garden. Ellie had done an impressive enough job of imitating Miss Mortimer that if it weren’t for the lock of hair sitting in the back of one of his drawers at home, he might have been convinced. And if he could be fooled, then his father could too. His petty, mercenary father who thought nothing of promising his sons in marriage for money, whether they wanted it or not. If Ellie played the part well enough, assuming his father hadn’t seen a lock of hair or anything of that sort having to do with Miss Mortimer—which Henry was certain he hadn’t—she could convince his father she was his intended choice of bride. And when the time came to reveal that Ellie was, in fact, not a wealthy heiress, but rather a whore from the Wild West, the look on his father’s face would be priceless. The man would be so embarrassed that he would likely never pester Henry with anything as offensive as an arranged marriage again. He could be free from the odious man’s machinations and humiliate him at the same time.
“I have another idea,” he said, turning to Ellie with a smile that he knew full well was wicked. “I think you should stay with me and continue your ruse, continue to be Helena Mortimer.”
ELLIE WAS SO SHOCKED by Lord Henry’s suggestion that at first her mind couldn’t take it in. She thought that maybe she’d heard him wrong. “Continue to pretend to be Miss Mortimer?” she asked, voice rising half an octave. “Whatever for?”