A Seductive Lady Rescued From Flames (Historical Regency Romance)

by Emily Honeyfield

  Ernest smashed his bare feet on the wooden floor. “Come in.”

  His sister appeared in the doorway, sweet-faced, her eyes glossy with drink. With view of Ernest’s strange, shaggy, wet hair, his naked body covered only with a blanket, her smile faltered.

  “Goodness, Ernest,” she muttered. She rushed toward him, drawing her hand across his forehead like a worried mother. “What has gotten into you?”

  “It started to rain, is all,” Ernest whispered. “It was nothing.”

  “You left the ball without telling me,” she scolded. Her voice was coaxing, pure, although it was clear she was agitated. He could sense it burning beneath her heart. “Grace, of course, hardly noticed until I mentioned it to her.”

  “Oh?”

  “You couldn’t care less, could you?” Rose asked. She let out a dry laugh. “Brother, if you’re really going to destroy yourself like this, then please. Leave me out of it. Send me somewhere far away. I don’t have the heart to watch my father die, and then my brother die, all in the same year. It’ll make me mad, you know. I’ll be one of those women they have to keep in towers, so that they don’t do something wildly unpredictable.”

  Ernest continued to gaze into the fire. His eyes felt like they might pop from his skull with exhaustion.

  Rose swept across the rug near his feet, warming her palms a few inches from the flames. “You can’t have thought it would go differently.”

  “I didn’t know I would meet her,” Ernest confessed.

  “And isn’t it a terribly good thing you met her?” Rose demanded. She seemed to be growing impatient, now. “My idiot brother, know this: if Diana hadn’t shown you what it meant to fall in love, then you would have been void of this knowledge for your entire life. You would have married Grace without question, not knowing that there was another possibility. Now, at least, it’s your choice to—to void this beauty from your life…”

  The way she spoke seemed oddly horrific to Ernest. He wanted to tell her to leave his study immediately. But the thought of being alone with his thoughts seemed all the more gruesome.

  “Did she come along with you?” he asked, his voice soft.

  Rose tilted her head. “You mean Grace?”

  He nodded.

  “Of course. She couldn’t have forgotten her station so greatly. It isn’t like her,” she said. “Although, you know she didn’t wish to come along with me. You saw that glint in her eye as she spoke with the duke. She was entirely in her element. She nearly lost herself a few times—falling into him, giggling a bit too loudly. Of course, these balls are for those sorts of things. Flirtation, even amongst different couples. We’re all human, after all.”

  “I would never flirt with another creature other than Diana,” Ernest muttered, mostly to himself.

  “Oh, my dear brother,” said Rose, allowing her shoulders to droop.

  He could feel her own mix of emotions—equal parts disgust, perhaps, at his unwillingness to follow his heart, along with sadness, as this affected her, as well.

  “Anyway, I’m sure Grace will never have the strength to leave her current situation, no matter how much she might have liked that marvellously handsome duke,” Rose said.

  “Handsome? Not you, too,” Ernest groaned.

  Rose laughed lightly, though it wasn’t an entirely happy laugh. Ernest hadn’t a clue what time it was. It seemed like they could soon turn their heads to the window and catch the first light of dawn. He stretched his mouth into a yawn, willing himself to move. Yet again, his limbs felt like lead.

  Neither of them spoke for several minutes. The minutes stretched on to an hour, then another. Rose crumbled into a ball and soon fell to slumber, a blanket wrapped over her. It felt as though they were children, choosing to have a sleepover, hidden from their father’s eyes.

  Of course, now, there was no father to yell at them, to reprimand their actions. It was only them in a big, achy house, living with their big, achy memories. He felt he might crackle with the weight of it all. But there was nothing left to do but keep going.

  Chapter 19

  When Lady Grace Bragg awoke in her glittering bedroom the morning after the ball of the marquess, she did so with a half-smirk on her face, lipstick smeared across her cheeks and her rouge pressed across her white pillow. Still, she blinked up at the ceiling, her heart all fluttery in her throat.

  She’d never felt such promise before.

  When she sprung from her mattress, her head felt sloshy from her deep-dive into drink. Of course, each time the sharp eyes of the duke had turned to her as he’d said, “Shall we have another drink?” she hadn’t been able to refuse. She couldn’t imagine refusing anything he said.

  At the window, Grace peered out across the moors. It had been raining when they’d left the ball. She’d forced the duke’s hand away from the arch of her back, sensing ominous eyes, lurking, watching her every move.

  “Don’t be crazy, Duke,” Grace had whispered. “I’m the guest of honour, for goodness sake.”

  At this, the duke had cut her a winning smile. “The guest of honour indeed. And where on Earth, pray tell, is that handsome fiancé of yours?”

  It was true that this was the first time she’d given Ernest much thought in several hours. She blinked around, finding only Rose surging from the ballroom. She, too, was drunken and stumbling. Her smile fell when she spotted Grace, although she knew that it was up to her to take Grace home in the Bannerman carriage.

  “I dare say I don’t know,” Grace mumbled. “Perhaps he’s in back having some sort of boring, political discussion or another.”

  “Quite an upstanding man he is,” the duke said, his tone mocking. “I know you’ll have the most prosperous, most delightful marriage…”

  “Save your breath,” Grace blurted. Her chest heaved with a sudden wave of desire.

  The duke pressed his finger against her lips—an act that was far too sexual for such a public setting. However, the hour was late; the many members of London society that swirled around them were in their own states of gossip and drunkenness, edging toward their own affairs and whiles. No one paid any attention to them. Perhaps they hadn’t even noticed that Ernest hadn’t been near her in hours.

  “Good night, my lady,” the duke had whispered, his eyes targeting her like she was the only woman he’d ever seen in his life—that he had to claim her. “I dare say we’ll be seeing one another again.”

  Grace had yearned to protest this. After all, it wasn’t altogether appropriate for her to ever see the duke again. Her wedding was in just a few short weeks. And beyond that, she’d already gone to such lengths to ensure that Diana had been yanked from the home of Ernest Bannerman.

  It had all been for the purpose of her beautiful new, prosperous, and powerful life alongside Ernest Bannerman.

  Yet now—the duke had expressed interest.

  And it was terribly true that the duke had far more wealth than Ernest Bannerman.

  Certainly, he had more personality. He had more drive to seduce. He was sensual and eager and—he made her afraid.

  This was the most provocative feeling of all.

  Grace scrubbed her cheeks, her thoughts stirring with lust for the duke. Yet, she hadn’t a reason to believe what he’d said. Yes, he’d stated that he would see her again, no matter what. And he was the sort of man to get what he wanted. But with such wealth, such beauty, such grandeur—why would he stop at Grace Bragg, a woman who was technically on the brink of getting everything she’d ever wanted?

  She stretched out on the rug. Her father grumbled as he passed her room, his thick boots stomping across the wooden floorboards. God, she couldn’t wait to yank herself out of her childhood bedroom. She felt so stifled. The air was oddly thick, like melted ice cream. Difficult to breathe.

  “God, please. Give me the strength to do what I want to do,” Grace whispered into her palms, drawing her nails into her skin. “I cannot possibly live with a man like Ernest the rest of my life. The boredom wo
uld destroy me.”

  Downstairs, there was the clacking of breakfast plates, the steamy howl of a teakettle. Grace sighed and forced herself upright. Her face landed into its nearly-perpetual frown. When she heard the maid cry out her name—“Lady Grace! Breakfast time!”—Grace nearly snarled back, “You think I don’t know that?”

  She hadn’t the patience for such idiocy. If she really had the life she deserved, she’d be far, far away—in Coventry, lost in the beauty of the duke’s eternal love, his riches, his power.

  And if she didn’t get what she wanted, she felt sure she would be miserable for the rest of her life.

  “Ha,” she muttered to herself, drawing a new dress over her shoulders. Now, perhaps, she felt fully what Ernest had been going through, throughout his brief affair with Diana Harrington. Of course, poor Diana hadn’t the looks or the power or the wealth of the duke—and was thus an ill-advised option for nearly anyone. Yet the glittering emotion in Ernest’s eyes seemed to have some sort of relation to what Grace now felt, stirring in her own gut.

  They were two parts of a very different puzzle, being pushed together by the force of time and generational requirement.

  And, for the first time ever, Grace felt something far different than spite.

  Perhaps it was sadness—at the situation. At Ernest, staring down a reality in which he could never love Grace. To Grace, love had always been secondary—or third, or fourth, or fifth, even. Heck, perhaps it didn’t even qualify as a factor. But she knew Ernest was weak in this department. His heart beat with something far bigger, far more emotional than she could possibly understand.

  At the door, her eyes flashed back toward her starch-white bedspread, glistening in the light of the morning. For reasons she couldn’t fully name, she felt that everything she’d ever known was about to change. She snapped her head back toward the hallway, making her blonde curls quake. Just as she’d always assumed, the world would always turn in her favour.

  It was simply how everything worked.

  Chapter 20

  Diana hadn’t been able to sleep since her family’s arrival to Grace’s uncle’s estate. The moment her eyelashes descended toward her cheeks, they erupted back up—as though the idea of being unconscious was so terrifying, so wretched, that she couldn’t face it.

  But, of course, her conscious mind was just as raucous. And all she really needed to do was sleep.

  Her room was on the third floor, a floor above her aunt’s and father’s, which made her feel oddly isolated. When she laid awake late at night, her ears filled with the imaginary sound of fires—brimming up from the ground floor. Each time, she snapped up, breathing heavily. Any light that flickered beneath the door made her think immediately of flames, creeping up, ready to burn her alive and fill her lungs with smoke. She would be taken from this world immediately, the darkness falling over her.

  She would finally know what it was like, wherever it was her mother and sister had gone.

  Inevitably, though, it was just candlelight from a passing maid, carrying out duties or heading to bed. It was a good thing that they’d been allowed, yet again, to bring their entire staff to Lord Bragg’s estate. They’d kept their larger family intact, at least.

  A few days after they’d moved in, late at night, with the rain pummelling outside, Diana dropped her toes to the chilly wooden floor at the side of her bed. She’d been told that the room in which she was staying hadn’t been used in several decades, back when Grace’s uncle had been a boy and his sister had held the room. For this reason, there was a definite aura of staleness, as though no one had stirred the air for centuries—not even ghosts. Perhaps nothing joyous, nothing horrific, nothing at all had inhabited the room.

  This made her feel oddly desolate. For if rooms were meant for anything, they were for a kind of promise for stories. Empty air between walls? What was that?

  Now, Diana was a part of the story—yet she had little to give but her own bludgeoned, sadly beating heart. She tapped toward the window and gazed out at the rain, which was coming on so thick, she could hardly see through it. The night was terribly black, like ink, and the stars had been captured behind the clouds, tucked away for better days.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to recall the memory of that evening with Ernest, when the stars had crested at the horizon, stirring along with the last dredges of pinks and yellows and oranges. Her own body had crested, an almost echo of the beauty in the skies. Her eyes had scanned the juncture between her legs as he’d found her and he’d filled her, pressing his thickness into the dark wetness.

  She hadn’t asked for him to follow her into the woods that day. But since he had, she was forced with a bounty of beautiful memories. Every single time they rang through her, she was yet again reminded that she could never have those memories again. They were lost to the seas of time.

  The following morning, Diana walked bleary-eyed to the breakfast table. She had hardly eaten since their arrival, and she could feel her bones beginning to jut out from her skin. She’d chosen to dress properly, hoping to disguise her torment from her father and aunt with a bright pink frock. Just as she’d suspected, when she appeared in the doorway, both her aunt and her father gaped and grinned.

  Aunt Renata hobbled out of her seat, stretching out her hand. “Look at her. You’re a stunning portrait, darling. You look almost precisely like your mother did at this age. Doesn’t she, Brother?”

  Diana hadn’t envisioned this sort of compliment. It caused her to stumble into her seat, feeling as though she’d been run over by a carriage. She gazed at the tea, steaming before her, and prayed for the will to eat anything at all.

  Her father swept a napkin out over his lap. “How are you finding the new home, Diana?”

  Diana’s eyes fluttered toward her father. “It’s quite lovely, isn’t it?” But her words felt flat on her tongue. She hadn’t offered a single dredge of emotion.

  “I’ve heard word from the Bannermans,” her father continued.

  Diana arched her back, drawing up higher in her chair. She’d known better than to expect any sort of letter from Ernest. Such a thing would cast them in impossible danger. But of course, Ernest would have contacted her father to ensure all was well. It was simply the way of things.

  “Yes. He expresses happiness that we’ve had such success settling in here,” Lord Harrington continued. “And he also said that he and Grace Bragg recently attended a ball at the home of the marquess. They were guests of honour. Isn’t that marvellous?”

  “Quite marvellous,” Aunt Renata echoed. Her eyes glittered in a manner that Diana found difficult to read. “They really are quite a couple.”

  Her words seemed oddly laced with sarcasm. Diana arched her brow and reached for a slice of toast, which she began to scrape with butter.

  “Can you imagine what hope they must feel?” her father continued. “Preparing for their wedding. Of course, Ernest states that we’re invited to the upcoming wedding, along with the party at the Bannerman estate. We’ll have to arrange a proper gift. Diana, I expect you can think of something appropriate. You and Ernest seemed like quite close friends.”

  “Perhaps. I was close with Rose, rather,” Diana tried, although she sensed that her words weren’t believed in the slightest.

  “Rose is such a remarkable girl,” Aunt Renata clucked. “I know it pleased me, seeing you spending so much time with her. Reminded me of you having a sister, a bit.”

  This had been precisely the issue, Diana thought. But she kept her lips pressed tightly shut. Just now, she couldn’t imagine how she would ever draw her teeth over her toast and crunch down. Her bones pushed out of her dress. She inhaled sharply, trying to fill her bodice with oxygen.

  “Have you explored the gardens, Diana?” Lord Harrington asked. He seemed ready to flip over this subject, as though it didn’t matter in the slightest.