Bewitching the Earl

by Lauren Smith

  “What are you up to, Lachlan?” she asked.

  “Something wonderful.”

  A week later, Daphne sat curled in a library chair, reading by the fire. Beside her, in his own chair, Lachlan pretended to read. His head wound was nearly healed after she’d spent every day looking after him. This was the first day in which he’d insisted she take a few hours to do something she enjoyed and not fuss over him. When she’d suggested reading in the library, he’d agreed. Yet from the moment they’d sat down with their books, his focus remained on her. Every so often, she looked up and he hastily returned his attention to his book.

  “You’re watching me,” she said. “Why?”

  He smiled, set his book aside, and waved her over. She put her own book down, crawled onto his lap, and wrapped her arms around his neck.

  “I’ve been waiting for the right time to give you this.” He reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a small, velvet pouch. He offered it on his palm. She took it, loosened the drawstrings, opened the velvet. She paused and looked at Lachlan in puzzlement before she tilted the bag upside down. Pearls tumbled into her hand. This necklace held two strands of pearls.

  “My pearls… But… they can’t be. Mother’s necklace had only a single strand of pearls.”

  “The others are a gift from my mother. She would have given them to you at some point.”

  “But, I cannot take hers, not when…”

  “Hush, lass. She wanted you to have them. To let you know that you’re as dear to her as you are to me.”

  Daphne peered closely at the double-strand necklace, her lips trembling.

  She pressed the back of her fingers against her mouth. “I thought I’d lost them forever when I left that day. I’d thought I’d lost you too,” she admitted.

  “I’m not that easy to be rid of, you know.” His tone was teasing and mischief lit his eyes.

  “I know. You almost died and…” she choked, the terror of that day still fresh in her mind. She could have lost him forever.

  “But I didn’t, now dry those eyes. I don’t ever want to see you crying on my account.” He wiped at a tear that trailed down her face.

  She sniffled and raised the necklace to her cheek, brushing the smooth round orbs against her skin before she kissed them.

  A piece of her past had been restored through Lachlan’s thoughtfulness. Her heart had shattered violently from Lachlan’s betrayal and she’d run fast and far from the dream world Lachlan had let her glimpse. When she’d broken the strand and the pearls had scattered across the floor, she hadn’t stopped to retrieve them. She’d tried hard to forget the pearls over the last few days, not knowing what had happened when they’d fallen. They’d represented the life she’d had before her mother died, and she’d had to face the truth. That part of her life was over, had been over for years. She was living her new life, with man she loved with all of her heart. Yet he’d given her back this last bit of her mother and Moira had given her a set of pearls too. The unity of those two strands together was beautiful not because the pearls were lovely but because of what they represented. Time was healing old wounds. Willian’s death and her father’s imprisonment were the past. She and Lachlan were the future.

  Lachlan took the pearls from her and fastened the clasp around her neck. Their gentle weight against her collarbones was comforting.

  “I love you lass, never doubt it.” Lachlan’s winter-blue eyes held no frost, only the heat of a winter fire.

  She brushed her fingers through his hair, careful not to touch his barely healed wound. “I love you too.”

  “Prove it,” he said.

  She brushed her nose against his. “You’re quite commanding, aren’t you?”

  “Only when I expect to be kissed.” He wrapped his arms around her waist and she laughed, but her heart was so full that she could scarcely breathe. She very slowly leaned her head into his, biting her lip as she paused an inch from his mouth.

  “Do you know what I keep thinking about?” she asked.

  “What?” His eyes fixed on her mouth.

  “About our wedding, and the moment we entered the church together.”

  Lachlan’s eyes met hers and held. “That is a day I will never forget. I could breathe again when I took you in my arms and pledged myself to you. You gave me my life back.” He brushed a finger over the pearls. “My lady in pearls.”

  “You did the same for me.” She closed the last inch between them. Their lips met and time froze, like an errant beam of sunlight that strikes a chandelier’s crystal and fractures into a rainbow that illuminates the world around it.

  We are two broken hearts made whole, two lost souls made one.

  * * *

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  You’ve just read Bewitching the Earl. If you like what you’ve read, feel free to read the first three chapters in a sexy fun Regency reverse time travel romance called Of Stand and Stone where a Regency lord travels forward to modern time to win the heart of one woman.

  Come on, you know you want to turn that page…

  * * *

  Of Sand and Stone

  Chapter 1

  Rebecca Clark could stare at naked chiseled men all day, which was a good thing considering it was her job. Well, a part of it. As the curator of a small New England art museum, she looked at naked men all the time.

  But they weren’t real men. They were marble, not flesh and blood. For the last three years she’d specialized in marble sculpture collections, and right now she was staring at the perfect specimen.

  It was carved from a single slab of exquisite Italian marble by some obscure sculptor in London more than two hundred years ago. The only clues as to the sculptor’s identity were two words carved into the statue’s base: “Oath” and “Pride.” The Adonis—it had to be Adonis, as perfect as he was—stood proudly at six feet tall, though the statue was actually seven, given its foot-high pedestal.

  As the lights of the room illuminated the statue’s broad shoulders and smooth abs, she let herself wonder how long he had been hidden away in the large packing crate he’d arrived in, now lying discarded behind him, straw from the wooden crate littering the floor.

  “Well, he looks ready to me,” a man in gray coveralls announced as he brushed straw off his hands. He and his partner had spent the last hour carefully moving the statue through the warehouse and into the temporary exhibit that had come from London.

  “Thank you, Stan. See you tomorrow.” Although Rebecca planned to stay another couple of hours to finish the paperwork on the exhibits, she didn’t want her staff t
o work late. She genuinely liked working with everyone at the museum, except for her boss.

  “Thanks, Ms. Clark. Have a good night.” The pair picked up the crate and carried it out of the exhibit room, leaving a trail of packing material behind them. Rebecca smiled and shook her head. It could be cleaned up tomorrow.

  She checked her watch and sighed when she realized it was almost ten. This wasn’t unusual. She was used to burning the midnight oil, and this was an exciting new exhibition. Besides, it wasn’t as if she had a social life or anything—anyone—to go home to. A flicker of embarrassment made her cheeks flame.

  I shouldn’t be ashamed of working hard and still being single.

  But no matter how much she told herself that it didn’t seem to change how she felt. It seemed like the world judged a woman’s value by whether she could catch and marry a decent man. Rebecca wanted to be in a relationship, not because society expected it of her, but because she wanted to be loved. But after all the men she’d dated in the last several years she’d given up on finding a good one.

  Her gaze was drawn to the marble man and his lean, exquisite body with slightly sloped muscles and bulging cords of sinew. Everything was carved so perfectly into the stone that she almost thought she could see them move in the right light.

  He was bigger too—down there—than other male statues she’d seen, and far more masculine with his broad shoulders and slim hips. She couldn’t help but walk a full circle around the statue to admire him…er…it from every angle.

  Full sensual mouth, soft bedroom eyes, and literally a chiseled jaw. But the hair—tousled rock-hard waves—that was the hair of a man who’d stumbled from the bed of his lover before posing for the artist. He was gorgeous.

  Real men didn’t look like this. Men were petty and selfish. They clung to women, used them or cheated on them, especially the good-looking guys.

  She shook her head, banishing the dark thoughts. It wasn’t true. There were good men in the world—fathers, brothers, husbands, friends. But aside from her own father, she’d never encountered a good man in her life. If there was a lazy, spoiled, or rotten man out there, she’d found him and dated him. Not by choice, of course. People were clever about hiding their faults, and she always found new ways of being fooled.

  The pattern was always the same. First she’d be smitten with a man, and she would date him casually. They’d enjoy each other’s company, the sex would curl her toes, and she’d hope it would lead to something more. Three to six months later she’d find herself exhausted and fed up with the cooking and the cleaning up after a man only to have lackluster sex—if she was lucky enough to snag his attention before he passed out on the couch to the news. Even when she was lucky, she’d be so tired that all she could do was lie there and let him get his, without ever getting hers.

  It meant that she was still single at thirty-two, but she’d almost come to accept that fate. Better to be alone than to be totally unhappy. Rebecca stared up at the beautiful statue, and with a bashful smile, she reached up to touch his hip. The marble was cool beneath her fingers, but she jumped and pulled her hand back when she felt a little electric spark. She studied the statue, trying to figure out how she could get a static zap from marble. Then she returned her hand to the stone again, laughing at her foolishness.

  “Why couldn’t a man like you be real?” Her soft voice echoed in the darkened gallery. “Someone tall, handsome, strong, yet caring when I need him to be, and sexy as hell.”

  But it was a dream and nothing more. Men like this didn’t exist, couldn’t exist.

  A sudden chill stole through the room, and Rebecca curled her arms around her shoulders, hugging herself as she gazed at the man’s stone face.

  “See you tomorrow, handsome.” She bit her lip, and with a shy smile at the statue, she turned and walked back to her office. There was a mountain of paperwork waiting for her, though all she wanted was to go home with a man like the one on the pedestal in the gallery.

  Moonbeams cut through the wide windows, playing with shadows in the art gallery. The figures in the paintings were silent but watchful, as if waiting for something to happen. There wasn’t a sound to be heard throughout the gallery. Everything was still and silent…

  A woman in a white gown appeared, as if the moonlight itself had coalesced into human form. She smiled as she made her way to the statue in the middle of the room, her eyes both playful and hard. Its white stone gleamed like solid moonlight in the darkness.

  “Hello, Devon,” she said as she brushed a fingertip along its marble thigh. “Are you ready to be a good boy and please your goddess?”

  An electric pulse shot through the stone, and she chuckled. So the mortal still had some fight in him, even after two hundred years.

  She studied the stone figure’s face, and her eyes sharpened. “Hear me, Devon Blake. You were punished for failing to please your goddess and seeking only your own pleasure in my arms. It was my right and duty to punish you. Now I am feeling lenient and merciful. Do not make me regret such soft emotions.” She studied the words “Oath” and “Pride” inscribed in the stone. She’d made an oath to herself to punish Devon for his pride. A smile twitched the corners of her lips. The words oath and pride also spelled her name: Aphrodite. A little goddess humor she couldn’t resist indulging in.

  She paused, brushing a hand down the diaphanous white gown that hung from her shoulders and clung to her full curves. “You must prove to a mortal woman that you are able to please her without sating your own lust for an entire week. If you cannot do this, and fail to win that woman’s love because of your selfishness, then you will return to stone. And it will be far more than two hundred years before I grant you another chance.”

  The gallery vibrated with the goddess’s words. The spell—or rather the curse—settled into the stones and the frames of the paintings and, most importantly, into the marble statue of the man once known as Devon Blake.

  The goddess glanced about the room, eyeing the silent witnesses to her curse before she faced the frozen man.

  “She who has woken you with her touch shall be the woman who will set you free—if you have the strength to put her desires before your own.”

  And with that, the goddess vanished. The gallery seemed to sigh its own quiet relief that a goddess had come and gone without leaving a path of destruction in her wake. Instead, she’d left a lingering sense of dark enchantment that could only be broken by the power of love.

  Such was a fitting curse from the goddess Aphrodite.

  Chapter 2

  Devon Blake, the fifth Earl of Richmond, heard every word Aphrodite had spoken. For two centuries, he had been able to hear everything and yet see nothing of what was in front of his marble eyes. He had been trapped in a nightmare, unable to speak or cry out. He had spent the last two hundred years traveling from museum to museum around the world, and he could hear Aphrodite’s mocking laugh each time he reached a new city. In his frozen stone state, he’d been able to hear bits of conversations of people around him but could not see, could not truly grasp how different the world must be around him now.

  How much life have I missed while trapped in stone?

  He had been reduced to a creature put on display, to be marveled at and gawked at like a common street performer—and a naked one at that—as opposed to the aristocrat he’d once been, with power, good looks, and wealth.

  And it was all Aphrodite’s fault.

  Had he not come across her in a quiet corner of Covent Garden one night while the fireworks burst over his head and whispered laughter slithered through the hedges and blooms, he might never have made the mistake of bedding her. His mind howled at the memory of that night, how he’d slaked his lust upon the goddess’s beauty and had not one care for her pleasure before he’d abandoned her.

  It was my downfall, to care only about myself.

  He’d walked not twenty steps before he’d heard the booming shout from behind him.

  “How dare you walk awa
y from me, mortal!” And in seconds, his heart had stopped, his world had crumbled into darkness, and he’d been imprisoned in this marble nightmare where he could experience no sight or touch, but hear only what happened around him.

  Now he had a chance to undo his mistake and earn Aphrodite’s forgiveness. He had to last seven days with one woman and not seek his own pleasure, only hers. He could do it. He had to.

  But who would be the woman to free him of this curse? He thought of the woman who’d been in the gallery a few moments before Aphrodite. He’d had no eyes to see her, yet he’d felt her hand on his cold stone skin, and his body had responded with desire at her sultry whisper, longing for a perfect man. How could her touch have made him feel something when nothing else had since he’d been transformed into stone?

  There was something in her plea that had called to him, and he had cried out inside his mind for her to keep touching him. It had been too long since he’d been a living, breathing man with a body to touch and hands to touch with. Too long…

  He listened to the sounds of the quiet gallery now, the distant chime of a clock, the creak of a wall settling into place, and he wondered where he was. Somewhere in America, if he had heard the movers correctly. He’d lost track of how many times he’d been moved and had long since ceased to care. It hadn’t mattered—until now.

  The woman’s words echoed in his mind, taunting him. “Why couldn’t a man like you be real?”

  And then it happened. His skin began to burn, and his insides churned as though he was going to be sick. Though he couldn’t see or move, his head was spinning and he wished he could stand the dizzying feeling that…