Royally Ever After

by Loretta Chase

  All in hopes of this.

  A title.

  And of all the men, all the well-behaved, eager-to-please men, she had to fall in love with him.

  “Very well,” he said, nodding. “No hard feelings. But it’s damned inconvenient, Barbara. You might have told me sooner.”

  “So that you could have courted someone else.”

  “Of course. I had a list.” He drank, then refilled the glass. “My aunts made it. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Gad, I thought I told you everything. So easy to talk to.”

  That’s what she’d thought, too: He was so easy to talk to—though of course nobody in Little Etford would believe that.

  “After we’d learned precisely how my sire had left matters, my aunts compiled a list of suitable females,” he said. He set down the glass, pushed some of the bottles out of his way—leaving one teetering near the table’s edge—and with one long index finger he made as though to write on the stained table. “Here is Miss So and So, the daughter of a Brighton jeweler. Fifty thousand pounds. Here is Miss This and That, the daughter of a physician. Seventy-five thousand. Ah, here is Miss Findley. Two hundred thousand. Let me at her, I said. Let me at Miss Findley. I don’t care if she’s snaggle-toothed, squinty, and flatulent.”

  “I know it wasn’t easy for you,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Men go to war and chance having their heads blown off. All I had to do was find a rich girl to wed. Not a problem. I’ve never been squeamish.”

  “Yet it must have hurt your pride to be obliged to come to a provincial nothing of a place, to a public assembly, no less,” she said. She’d ached for him, for what it must have cost such a man to be forced by circumstances to stoop so low.

  “It hurt my brain,” he said. “I felt as though I’d traveled to Madagascar or Outer Mongolia, to observe the quaint customs of the natives. I was all amazed to hear you speak English . . . of a sort.”

  Was that what she’d seen in his face when he’d been introduced to her? Amazement? Was that what had made his dark eyes warm and had softened the taut set of his mouth into a hint of a smile?

  “But there you were,” he said. “Three and twenty, with such a fortune, and still unwed. Impossible, thought I. The chit must have a wooden leg. Or perhaps she runs mad at odd times, and howls at the full moon. But there you were.”

  He turned away to stare into the fire. “There you were.” He shook his head. “And here you are. Why?”

  It was easier to talk to the back of his head than to look into those midnight eyes. “I owed you an explanation, as you said.”

  “You explained sufficiently,” he said. “I’m destitute, not stupid. I’ve worked it out. I mowed you down, like the Juggernaut. Sorry about that. I was in a panic, you see. Couldn’t let you get away. But you did. You got away.” Still without turning he waved the wine glass, and wine sloshed over the rim. He didn’t seem to notice. His big shoulders slumped. “Go away now, Miss Findley,” he muttered. “I’m growing maudlin, and that’s a mood best enjoyed in solitude.”

  “Yes, I’m going,” she said. Her eyes filled, and she blinked hard. She had to swallow hard, too, to go on. “It’s stupid, I know, but I wanted us to be in love, you see. Like the queen and her prince. Royal marriages are always arranged. It’s politics and money and power and alliances. They never marry for love, do they? But I thought, if she didn’t have to settle for less, why should an ordinary woman, who hadn’t a single drop of blue blood in her veins? That’s what I thought.”

  She waited.

  She heard a sound. It was faint but unmistakable.

  He was snoring.

  She started toward him, and put her hand out, to touch his head, wishing she could make go away all the trouble he carried in there. But she couldn’t. She drew her hand back and went out, closing the door quietly behind her.

  9 February 1840

  Nine o’clock in the morning

  The road was slick and muddy after the rain, but he’d ridden like a madman through yesterday’s storm. Why not ride madly now?

  He rode on, toward the house.

  I wanted us to be in love.

  He didn’t remember stumbling to bed but he must have done, because he’d woken this morning in the bedchamber he’d hired. The first thing he noticed was the silence, the end of the rain’s drumming. And the second thing was his aching head and her voice in it—saying something about the queen and her prince and wanting to be in love.

  He’d told himself he dreamed it, and he was a maudlin imbecile for dreaming it, and he’d dressed and set out for London. He’d traveled a few paces along the stretch of the Old North Road past the entrance to the Swan’s stable yard. Then he’d turned his horse in the other direction, like a moonstruck boy, to chase a dream.

  Halfway to the house, reason gained the upper hand.

  Wasn’t that drunken display enough?

  How much more pathetic do you want to look?

  He drew his horse to a halt, and was preparing to turn when he heard approaching hoof beats.

  At first he saw nobody, but the hoof beats grew louder, and a moment later, the horse and rider came round the turning.

  He recognized the cloak streaming out behind her, the handsome green cloak that enhanced her delicate skin tone and deepened the green of her eyes.

  He recognized the ease and grace with which she rode, and her headlong pace—the way she did everything, it seemed: bursting into a room, telling him he was drunk, refusing to tiptoe about his poverty, mocking his high-handed ways.

  But I do love you, he should have said. How could I help it? How could you not see?

  He saw the bird swoop down, aiming, probably, for some tiny creature scurrying in the ditch. Her mare shied and reared, and everything inside him froze. A heartbeat later, he was in motion, racing toward her, but not fast enough. He saw her struggle to control her mount, but something else—a slippery patch of ground, or some other distraction nearby—panicked the creature. He watched helplessly as it reared again, throwing Barbara down. Then he couldn’t breathe.

  An eternity later he was dismounting, then sinking into the muddy road beside her crumpled form. He caught her up in his arms. Her head sagged against his forearm. Her face was white.

  “No,” he said. “No.” He pulled her close, burying her face against his heart, a great lump of fear in his chest.

  She must wake up. The longer she remained unconscious, the greater the danger. Or was it too late? Was she breathing? He put his fingers to her neck, to her wrist, but his hands were shaking. He couldn’t tell if what he felt was a pulse or his own trembling.

  “You must wake up,” he said in the dictatorial tones she would have labeled fee, fie, foe, fum. “I won’t have any of this . . . swooning. I won’t—drat you, Barbara, you must wake up.”

  She lay so still in his arms. “Listen to me,” he said. “I was so drunk last night I could hardly see straight. I wasn’t sure, this morning, whether I’d dreamed you. Were you talking about love, or did I dream it? I must have dreamed it, because you couldn’t be so thick not to have known.”

  He shook her a little, but he daren’t do more, not knowing whether she’d broken anything. “You must wake up. I came to tell you—and if you don’t wake up, you’ll never know, because you’re shockingly obtuse. How could you not see? If I didn’t love you, would I care whether you’d be happy, married to me? Of course not. I’m the Juggernaut. I would have browbeaten you and overwhelmed you and seduced you into changing your mind again, and I’d keep you seduced until I got the ring on your finger. But no. I had to be a hero. I had to want you to be happy, infatuated sapskull that I am, even if it meant losing you.”

  He pulled her closer. “Dammit, Barbara. Say something. Do something.”

  He heard a sound. He eased his grip a little and looked down at her, not sure he’d heard what he thought he heard.

  Snoring.

  She turned in his arms and smiled u
p at him.

  “You wretched female,” he said.

  “You were going on so well, I hated to interrupt,” she said.

  He made a harrumphing sound. “Then you’re unhurt?”

  “I had the wind knocked out of me for a moment,” she said.

  “You’d better let me check for injuries,” he said.

  “I promise you, I’m no more than a little bruised,” she said.

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” He proceeded to examine her so thoroughly, his big hands moving over every inch of her body, that she went hot all over.

  Then he hauled her to her feet, dragged her up against him, bent his head and kissed her, slowly and with the same single-minded determination he’d applied to courting her. He worked his way from a chaste meeting of lips to something not at all chaste, that had the blood pounding through her veins and stirred up, low in her belly, a hot impatience for something she had no name for.

  When at last he drew away, she was limp and nearly sick with wanting.

  “Oh, my goodness,” she managed to say, in a strange, hoarse voice she barely recognized as hers. “If you’d done that before, I never should have jilted you.”

  “I know,” he said. “But it would have been unsporting.”

  “I thought my feelings were not returned,” she said. “I couldn’t bear the idea of a lifetime of being the only one in the marriage who was in love. But I couldn’t sleep last night, and all I could think of was you riding away, and I’d never see you again, and how wretched I should be. And so I came to tell you that I didn’t care if I was the one who did all the loving—and—and that I rescinded everything I said in that stupid letter.”

  “And I rescind all my heroic self-sacrifice,” he said.

  He straightened her bonnet, which had fallen to one side in the course of the shockingly delicious kiss.

  She smoothed the front of his coat, though it wasn’t wrinkled.

  He took her hand away, and clasped it in his big one.

  “Shall we get married, then?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  And they did, the very next day after the queen married her prince, with a good deal less pomp, but as much love and more.

  Keep reading for a sneak peek from

  DUKES PREFER BLONDES

  Coming January 2016 from

  New York Times and USA Today bestselling author

  Loretta Chase

  and Avon Books

  Convenient marriages are rarely so . . . exciting. Can society’s most adored heiress and London’s most difficult bachelor fall victim to their own unruly desires?

  Biweekly marriage proposals from men who can’t see beyond her (admittedly breathtaking) looks are starting to get on Lady Clara Fairfax’s nerves. Desperate to be something more than ornamental, she escapes to her favorite charity. When a child goes missing, she turns to Oliver Radford—a handsome, brilliant, excessively conceited barrister.

  Having unexpectedly found himself in line to inherit a dukedom, Radford needs a bride who can navigate the Society he’s never been part of. If he can find one without having to set foot in a ballroom, so much the better. Clara—blonde, blue-eyed, and he must admit, not entirely bereft of brains—will do. As long as he can woo her, wed her—and not, like every other sapskull in London, lose his head over her . . .

  Eton College

  Autumn 1817

  To begin with, he was obnoxious.

  Oliver Radford’s schoolfellows didn’t need more than a day or two after his arrival to discover this.

  They didn’t need much time, either, to administer the nickname “Raven,” though why they chose it was less obvious. Maybe his thick, black hair and too-piercing gray eyes gave them the idea, or maybe it was his deep, husky voice, better suited to a grown man than a boy of ten. Or maybe they referred to his nose, although this, while by no means small, wasn’t as beaky as many others.

  Still, he did always have the nose in question in a book, and some—actually, one of his paternal cousins—said that young Radford reminded him of “a raven poking into the guts of a carcass.”

  The cousin failed to mention or forgot or perhaps didn’t know—not being observant or clever—how extremely intelligent ravens were, for birds. Oliver Radford was extremely intelligent, for a boy. This was one reason he found the books vastly preferable to his schoolmates.

  Especially his unbelievably stupid cousins . . .

  At present he leaned against a wall at the edge of the playing fields, well away from the others, who were choosing sides for cricket. Unlikely and unwilling to be chosen, but required to be present at the character-building proceedings, he had his nose in the pages of Homer’s Odyssey.

  A fat hand with grimy fingernails covered the page of Greek script and a shadow fell over Oliver. He did not look up. He was, like his father, more-than-average observant. He recognized the hand. He had good reason to.

  “Here he is, gentlemen,” said Cousin Bernard. “Spawn of the family’s laboring branch: our Raven.”

  Laboring was meant to disparage Oliver’s father. Since the eldest son inherited everything, the others and their offspring had to find rich wives and/or places in “gentlemanly” professions like the military, the church, or the law. George Radford, son of a duke’s younger son, had elected to become a barrister. He was successful as well as happily married.

  All that Oliver had observed told him the other Radfords had extremely small brains and marriages the antithesis of his parents’.

  That a boy of ten knew what antithesis meant was another reason to hate him.

  He didn’t help matters.

  “Naturally you find the law laborious,” Oliver said. “Firstly, it wants a mastery of Latin, and you barely comprehend English. Secondly—”

  Bernard cuffed him lightly. “I’d hold my tongue if I was you, little Raven. Unless there’s tales you want told.”

  “Firstly, if you were me,” Oliver corrected. “Since you are patently not, you require the subjunctive. Secondly, tales is plural. Therefore you want the third person plural of the infinitive to be. The correct verb form is are.”

  Bernard cuffed him less lightly. “Best not to mind him too much,” he told the others—a small crowd of his disciples, some of them cousins. “No manners. Can’t help himself. Mother not quite the thing, you know. Bit of a tart. But we don’t talk about it much.”

  George Radford’s family had made a fuss of some kind when he married, at age fifty, a divorced lady. But Oliver didn’t care what they thought. His father had prepared him for the vicissitudes of Eton and the less-than-likable relatives he could expect to encounter there.

  “You’re contradicting yourself,” Oliver said. “Again.”

  “No, I’m not, you little fart.”

  “You said we don’t talk about her but you did.”

  “Do you mind, little Raven?”

  “Not a bit,” Oliver said. “At least when my mother pushed me into the world, she contrived to keep my brain intact. The evidence shows the opposite result in your case.”

  Bernard yanked him from the wall and threw him down. The book fell from Oliver’s hands and his head rang, increasing his heart rate and sending him into a wild panic. He flung these sensations to the very back of his mind and pretended the feelings were miles away. He pretended that what was happening to him happened to someone quite separate.

  The panic vanished, the world came back into balance, and he could think.

  He rose onto his elbows. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “You ought to be,” Bernard said. “And I hope it’s a lesson—”

  “I should have read it as ‘in an agony to redeem himself,’ rather than ‘anxious to save himself.’”

  Bernard looked blank, not an unusual expression for him.

  “Odysseus,” Oliver said patiently. He rose, picked up the book, and brushed away the dirt. “ ‘He strove in vain for his fellows, whose own witlessness destroyed them. The witless destroy
what they don’t understand.’”

  Bernard’s face got very red. “Witless? I’ll teach you witless, you insolent little turd.”

  He leapt on Oliver, knocked him down, and started punching.

  The fight ended for Oliver with a black eye, bloody nose, and ringing ears.

  This wasn’t the first time. It wasn’t the last. But more of that anon.

  Royal Gardens, Vauxhall

  July 1822

  Oliver’s experience with women was limited. Mothers didn’t count. His stepsisters were somebody else’s mothers already.

  The Honorable Harry Fairfax’s sister Lady Clara was, she had announced, eight and eleven-twelfths years old.

  At present, Oliver was baffled, an unusual condition for him.

  Though nursemaids abounded to look after the dizzying numbers of young Fairfax cousins, Clara, according to Harry, was usually left to tag after the boys. Her brothers treated her like a pet, perhaps because she was the first girl after three boys, and something of a curiosity. Then, too, the young Duke of Clevedon, whose guardian Harry’s father was, doted on her.

  But tonight’s planned activity was not for girls. Clevedon was moving away, gesturing to Harry to follow. Harry gave him a nod and told his little sister, “You’re not allowed to go in the boat with us.”

  She kicked him in the ankle. This only made Harry chuckle, but she must have hurt her toe, because her lower lip trembled.

  Then, for some reason, Oliver heard himself saying, “Lady Clara, have you ever seen the Heptaplasiesoptron?”

  He was aware of Harry throwing him a puzzled glance but more aware of the sister, who turned a sulky blue gaze upward to meet his. “What is it?”

  “It’s a sort of kaleidoscope room,” Oliver said. “It’s filled with looking glasses, and these reflect twining serpents and a fountain and palm trees and lamps of different colors and other things. It’s over there.” He pointed to the building containing the Rotunda and the Pillared Saloon. “Shall I take you to see it?”