Harlequin Historical July 2020 - Box Set 1 of 2

by Virginia Heath

  She felt a bit like that wounded bird now.

  ‘I’m not quite certain I understand the full implications of the situation.’ She looked at her toast and found it was no longer appealing. She set it back down on her plate.

  ‘You are no longer to be married to the Duke of Kendal. There is… It is only that I thought the man dead and I did not imagine I would have to honour any prior agreements.’

  ‘This is the first I’ve heard of any agreements.’ She folded her hands in her lap and affected a bland expression. There was no point or purpose to arguing with her father. At best, protestations fell on deaf ears. At worst, she often caught the edge of his temper.

  Penny had no wish to engage with her father in either state. And so, it was best to remain bland. Her emotions upset him. So much so at her mother’s funeral that he had locked her away for days after.

  And so she had learned to lock her feelings away. She felt them still, echoing inside her chest like a cry in an empty room. But no one could see them. No one could use them against her.

  Later, she had learned this particular method of dealing with him. Rational responses. Forcing him to repeat his statements multiple times. She’d read once about negotiating tactics in war and had internalised the lesson.

  Her father’s one virtue was that he was in possession of a rather good library. More for vanity than his actual use, but she’d made use of it and often.

  Books had been her companions growing up in this house where her father was rarely in residence and staff came and went like spirits in the night.

  She’d long suspected the disappearance of staff was due to lack of payment, for she knew they had joined the ranks of the peerage who had title, reputation and a position in society, but no money to support any of it. Their home was a metaphor for the position. Stately, large and crumbling inside.

  The ornate, tarnished gold that adorned the ceilings and door frames seemed a mockery of what they were now. All gilded with no substance.

  The paper hangings in the drawing room had been a rich blue once, faded now to a mottled navy. What had formerly looked like expensive, damask silk now looked like worn paint. It didn’t much matter, as her father hadn’t entertained here since her mother’s death when Penny was five.

  Her father didn’t have to announce their dire straits for it to be obvious to Penny.

  Penny wasn’t a fool. She spent her hours reading and watching. When there was someone around she talked to them. Servant, chaperon, even the falconer who lived on the estate. She would talk to anyone. She hated silence. Silence created fertile ground for terrible memories and awful feelings to rise up to the surface, and that didn’t accomplish anything. However, asking endless questions was the simplest way to find common ground with a person and she’d discovered that not everyone was like her father. Not everyone told her to be quiet the moment she made a noise. And so, she asked. And asked and asked.

  How the household worked. What London society was like. How long it took for an egg to become a chicken.

  She remembered everything.

  It might not soothe her loneliness, but it helped her put together a clear picture of the world. Of the reality of the situation she and her father were in.

  ‘I did not require your opinion to be given, Penelope, you did not need to be consulted. But you will marry the Scot.’

  She was in disbelief. Her face was hot, as if she’d stuck it in the fire where her toast had just been made. Her hands were cold as ice, as though she had some grave illness.

  It felt a blessing because it was better than the absolute despair that was just beneath it. But there was no point giving in to that, nor the rage she could feel beginning to churn inside her.

  She didn’t know what horrified her more. The fact her hopes were being burned to the ground before her eyes, or the fact that she was having difficulty controlling her response.

  If she spoke out of turn, her father would fly off into a temper and then not only would she be less an engagement to a duke, she would know nothing of her current situation.

  Her father, when challenged, was all bluster and rage and no useful information at all.

  ‘Have you spoken to the Duke of Kendal, Father?’ she asked, choosing her words and tone carefully.

  She wanted to yell. To scream and cry and fling herself on the ground like a child denied a sweet. But being a child, free to release emotion whenever it welled up in her chest, had ended when her mother had died.

  Mourning was supposed to be worn on your body. Signified by the colour. It wasn’t supposed to overtake who you were. To run rampant through your chest leaving jagged, painful wounds that felt as though they would never heal.

  She had learned to keep her feelings hidden away. She had a jewellery box that had been her mother’s and, while she’d inherited no jewellery—all sold to pay the estate’s debts—she’d treasured the heavy wooden box with its gold lock since she was small. She kept stones and feathers inside, little trinkets she’d collected on the grounds. Treasures her father couldn’t sell, but that marked the years of her life, years spent wandering the grounds alone. Things that mattered only to her.

  When her mother had died, she hadn’t understood. One of the boys who worked in the stables had told her it meant her mother was being put in a wooden box under the ground. She’d started to wail. A deep, painful sound that had come from the depths of who she was. And her father…he’d been so angry. He’d screamed at her to stop. Uncaring of all the servants who witnessed it. He’d carried her into the house and set her in the centre of the great hall and yelled at her, but she hadn’t been able to make her tears stop.

  He’d banished her to her room, and roared at the staff she wasn’t to come out until she’d stopped crying.

  And there she’d stayed. For nearly three days. She’d felt as though she was in that wooden box the boy had said her mother was in. She’d felt buried in misery. And then she’d taken her mother’s jewellery box down from her vanity and had brought it into bed with her. Held it close against her chest. And when she’d had a feeling that was too big, too bright and sharp to be contained in her chest, she’d imagined locking it away in that box.

  She hadn’t cried since then. Not for years. She simply put her feelings in the jewellery box. With all the stones and feathers and other precious things she could not afford to let her father touch.

  It was what she did now. She imagined locking all of her fear, her anger, her sadness, away. Those feelings wouldn’t help her now.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not yet, but there is nothing—’

  ‘Only,’ she said, cutting him off, trying to disguise the desperation in her voice, ‘I am certain the Duke will know what to do and will have some means of assisting us as our engagement is common knowledge. And I have purchased my trousseau.’

  Paid for by the Duke, of course, as her father could never have provided her with the trappings required by a duchess.

  And the Duke’s family…his sister and his ward, his mother. She was supposed to live with them. She was supposed to have real friends.

  The bit of toast in her stomach was now sitting heavily.

  Penny’s engagement to His Grace, the Duke of Kendal, had been her father’s greatest triumph. It had been evidence to him that perhaps having a daughter had some value.

  For him to dissolve such an arrangement and offer her hand to a soldier, a Scottish soldier at that, spoke of a situation so desperate she could scarcely fathom it.

  She loved the Duke and everything he represented. Everything about him. From his lovely manners to his exquisitely formed face and his perfectly manicured manor. The one good thing her father had ever done was put her in the position to secure the match.

  It had come as a shock to her. She’d never been given a proper debut. It was a match borne from geographical luck and she was not foolish enough t
o think otherwise.

  The Duke’s grand country estate was only an hour’s ride away. One day when she’d been out walking she had discovered the Duke’s sister, lost and covered in mud. She’d brought her back to the house and given her tea and toast.

  It had been a great shock when the Duke himself had appeared to ferry his sister home.

  His mother had sent her thanks and an invitation to tea.

  It had been the beginning of something Penny had never even dreamed of. A fantasy too fine for her to have ever spun for herself. Perhaps, she might have dreamed it, but only if she imagined first that she were someone else and not simply Penelope Hastings.

  She would never know the full circumstances of why exactly the Duke had chosen to marry her rather than a girl who had graced London’s ballrooms for the Season. Though as she had got to know him she had made some guesses as to why.

  Penny knew she was beautiful. Along with that empty jewellery box, beauty was the only thing her mother had left her. She knew, though, that it was not her beauty that appealed to the Duke of Kendal. Rather she imagined he took great pleasure in circumnavigating the rabid mothers of the marriage mart and finding himself a wife who was respectable, free of scandal and entirely his choice.

  Her father’s pleasure in the match was self-serving on his part and she knew it. She also didn’t care. Without a good marriage she would be left with nothing. It was a matter of survival. She had expected to be forced into marriage to a toothless old man whose lack of hair on his head was to be compensated for by the gold in his purse.

  She had expected something like this.

  And to be given the Duke, only to have him replaced, was a blow to her heart, her hope, her pride, that she had not expected.

  Her father had found a way to be worse than her every expectation.

  Because he had given her something sweet, a dream spun from sugar and gold, then burned it to dust before her.

  She’d been sure her father had lost the ability to hurt her. Disappoint her.

  She’d been wrong.

  ‘He has informed me that he will be procuring a special licence. And after that, you will return with him to Scotland.’

  Without thought, Penny pushed herself back from the table and sat for a moment. Then she stood slowly, the room tilting as she did, though her feet remained firmly planted on the ground.

  She was not only losing her future husband, but also the plans for her future. The beautiful jewel box of a withdrawing room at Bybee House was not faded. Rather the paper hangings were a cheerful pink, with gold detail and ornate marble like twisted vines over the walls and ceilings. She’d already imagined sitting there for hours and sewing, reading, petting a cat.

  She had planned on getting a cat. One she would keep in the house and not out in the barn simply to trap mice.

  To say nothing of the Duchess of Kendal, the Duke’s mother, who had become so dear to her. His younger sister and his ward, who had become such good friends to her. Who had made her feel as though she might not have to be lonely any more and she could have friends that existed outside the pages of a book.

  She hadn’t felt like that in a long time. Not since…well, not since Lachlan. A servant who had worked on the estate. He’d been nearly ten years her senior, she was sure of it. But he’d been kind to her. Her first experience of a friend.

  He’d once helped her save a bird. He’d let her trail after him and ask endless questions that would have caused most men to be sharp or short with her. He’d been there. A place for her words to go so she didn’t have to sit in silence.

  Then one day he’d gone. No explanation. No goodbye. It might as well have been death.

  She’d mourned him.

  Only this time she’d done it inside. For she knew better than to ever show her pain.

  She did the same now, her hands folded in her lap, her face betraying nothing as the vision of the life she’d hoped for burned before her. And she had no idea how she might make it right.

  * * *

  Lachlan Bain was a patient man. The years had hardened him, changed him. Battle had scarred him. Destroyed what had once been good inside him.

  But it had also sanded away the edges of youth. Impatience, hot-headedness. Like a broadsword made in fire all that remained was sharp, cold steel.

  For years he had carried his rage inside him, a reckless heat that had driven him in battle. Had driven him beyond. The years had dimmed the motivation for that rage. Somewhere on the muddy battlefields he had forgotten where his anger had come from. It had spilled over into all the things around him, the atrocities of war.

  The innocent lives he’d failed to save.

  But he’d learned to harness it. Honed it into a sharpened blade he’d used to cut down the enemy.

  He’d let the memory of the enemy who had ignited the rage in the first place fade.

  But when news of his father’s death reached him, he was reminded. It had taken him six months to ready his business to function without him. Six months to begin putting his plans for revenge in order.

  And his blood burned with all the red-hot rage that had existed inside him these long years. It had not truly gone away. The fire had only been banked. And now it glowed red.

  Before he returned to Scotland, before he returned to the Highlands to restore his clan to their former glory, he would collect the debt owed him.

  He had heard whispers among London’s high society, happy enough to share the tables in the gaming hell with him though he knew he would never be invited to any ballrooms, that the Earl of Avondale had made himself a prestigious match for his daughter.

  A match that was far above what an impoverished man with his reputation should have been able to manage.

  A duke.

  The man was puffed up in his pride over his triumph.

  Lachlan knew the Earl had nothing else of value. Nothing but his daughter.

  He remembered the girl. She had been pretty in that way a doll might be, but had looked terribly fragile with her blonde hair, so light it was nearly white, and her wide, blue eyes the colour of a robin’s egg. He had felt pity for her. As much of a hardship as it had been to work for the Earl as a lad, he imagined being a child in that mausoleum that passed for a manor house was worse.

  Lachlan knew all about useless fathers. And he had deemed the Earl worse than useless.

  He had felt pity for the girl then and he might have felt guilt for using her now if he were a different man.

  But he was not.

  He was a man of battle. A man who had the courage to be all his father could not. A man who refused to sit back and fill his pockets while his people went without.

  He had gone into battle to fight. He had gone into battle to die.

  But over the near decade he’d spent fighting, he’d gone from being a boy who’d been beneath the contempt of the Englishmen around him to a brother in arms.

  The necessities of war, and his own skill, had found him advancing through the ranks until he was a captain. He’d been in command of a group of men, most Scottish like himself, and they had fought hard, in kilts, for their oppressors. And through those acts had earned respect none of them had even wanted.

  But in war, they’d all become the same. He could not stomach the death of a young man any easier if he was English. Covered in mud and blood, they were the same.

  And when he’d saved a young peer who’d been injured in a battle, had stayed with him in a ditch all night while gunfire exploded around them…

  He had found himself a decorated war hero and a very rich man. Which made his options when it came to revenge that much richer. It also presented the possibility of being able to restore that which his father had nearly destroyed.

  He had a plan. He could not afford guilt.

  Guilt was a luxury afforded to men who were both rich
and titled. Of course, men less likely to feel guilt did not exist, as far as Lachlan could see.

  The girl’s father was only lucky he’d decided on this action, rather than separating the man’s head from his shoulders.

  When he had ensured that his horses were secured in the stable—a stable that was all too familiar to him from his time spent on the Avondale estate—he made his way to the house.

  It stood as grim and imposing as it ever had. An English manor house was a far cry from the impassable stone keeps in the Highlands, where he had been the son of a chieftain. Disgraced though he was in Lachlan’s eyes, his father had been a man who retained an air of power. And in his homeland, no door was ever closed to Lachlan.

  In England, it was another matter.

  Though the years had shifted English sentiments on the Scots, after seeing how bloody well they fought, it was still clear he wasn’t a member of the upper echelons of society here. War hero or not.

  For three years he’d been building his shipping empire and he could buy access into any London club he chose, but like many merchants…he would never be considered on equal ground with smart society. He’d no mind to try. He enjoyed frequenting the gaming hells and putting more coin on the table than the peerage could.

  Enjoyed forcing them to interact with—and lose to—a man so beneath them.

  A rebellion against his father and his fascination with the English.

  But the time for games was over.

  It was time for him to leave. Time for him to go back home.

  Though, perhaps the memory he had of his homeland was one that wouldn’t stand all these years on. If he were greeted by swords and pitchforks, he wouldn’t be terribly shocked.

  If the clan imagined he were anything like his dead father, he wouldn’t blame them at all.

  His father had squandered his money, the money of the clan, the money of his people, trying to live life like the English peerage, drinking it away in pubs in Edinburgh while those they were sworn to protect starved, their ancestral homes falling down around them in disrepair.

  It might be too late and there might be too little left for him to bring salvation now.