Falling for the Scandalous Lady, page 1
“Who are you?” she demanded huskily.
“You took the words right out of my mouth,” he replied brusquely. And why didn’t she have a shrill and squeaky voice instead of that husky contralto, which made him long for her to whisper things a scarred lord and mysterious lady housebreaker could never say to one another?
“Ah, then you are Lord Lathbury?” she said severely.
“Am I?” he said, his old delight in the ridiculous waking up and stretching, but he told it to go back to sleep. “Not a difficult deduction, given my infirmities,” he said with an impatient gesture at his damaged face. “And you have the advantage of me, madam.”
“Oh, that,” she said, as if she hardly thought his marred face worth a second glance. It must be a clever lie, unless she was terribly shortsighted and too vain to wear spectacles. He doubted it as she surveyed him like an empress displeased with a shabby courtier. “I am Melissa Aldercombe,” she admitted stiffly.
Author Note
Of course, my books are always meant for you, but this one is dedicated to you, as well. It is a privilege to share the few precious hours you have to read and escape your busy lives. I hope this is a good enough story to help you forget the difficult times we have all been living through lately. If it helps, I am so glad and, as always, thank you for reading my books. I love what I do, but I certainly can’t do it without you!
Melissa and Adam are hurt and lonely people who think they are done with love, but it certainly isn’t done with them. It is so hard for them to be vulnerable to being hurt again, but they risk it anyway and somehow that made them extra special to me. I do hope you enjoy their love story as much as I enjoyed writing about them, and thank you again for being my lovely readers.
ELIZABETH BEACON
Falling for the Scandalous Lady
Elizabeth Beacon has a passion for history and storytelling and, with the English West Country on her doorstep, never lacks a glorious setting for her books. Elizabeth tried horticulture, higher education as a mature student, briefly taught English and worked in an office before finally turning her daydreams about dashing piratical heroes and their stubborn and independent heroines into her dream job: writing Regency romances for Harlequin Historical.
Books by Elizabeth Beacon
Harlequin Historical
A Rake to the Rescue
The Duchess’s Secret
Falling for the Scandalous Lady
The Yelverton Marriages
Marrying for Love or Money?
Unsuitable Bride for a Viscount
The Governess’s Secret Longing
The Alstone Family
A Less Than Perfect Lady
Rebellious Rake, Innocent Governess
One Final Season
A Most Unladylike Adventure
A Wedding for the Scandalous Heiress
Visit the Author Profile page
at Harlequin.com for more titles.
To all my lovely readers, you are always my inspiration and thank you for letting me do this wonderful job!
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Excerpt from To Catch a Runaway Bride by Helen Dickson
Chapter One
‘What a coxcomb!’ Lady Melissa Aldercombe exclaimed at the breakfast table.
‘Hmm? Oh, your cousin. What’s he done now?’ asked the Duke of Wiston.
Melissa reread her cousin Vernon’s unpleasant letter. ‘Sent me this,’ she said and passed her father a draft drawn on Vernon Granger’s bank.
‘Well, he did put you out of his dower house with indecent haste after your grandmother died; maybe it’s a cockeyed way of saying sorry.’
‘No, he has sold Grandmama Granger’s books and papers at auction.’
‘What? No, he can’t have; they were left to you. I witnessed the will.’
‘Apparently I might have used her notebooks and library to ape her unnatural example and publish a book of my own, so he decided to save me from myself.’
‘Save him feeling a fool next to another clever female relative, more like, but we can always buy more books if that’s what you want to do.’
‘Do?’ Melissa said as fear began to overcome rage and her hand shook so badly she put down the letter and stared unseeingly at her half-eaten breakfast.
‘Write a book.’
‘No, I don’t have Grandmama’s gift for making obscure and complex things crystal clear,’ she said absently.
‘Well, then, it was wrong and illegal, but I can’t see a way to undo what’s been done, and he has sent the proceeds.’
‘You don’t understand, Papa, but why would you?’ Melissa said and felt guilty about keeping him on the outside yet again. Even when her father had persuaded her to make the most painful decision of her life, she knew that he had thought it was the right thing to do. But deep down perhaps she still blamed him for her having to make it. She should be adult enough to have got over his part in that terrible dilemma by now.
‘After she lost her speech from the apoplexy Grandmama Granger struggled so hard to warn me there would be a scandal if those books are not kept safe.’
The Duke paled as the possible nature of that scandal hit like a blow. ‘What did Mrs Granger say?’ he asked with all his attention on his daughter now.
‘In private, Papa,’ she murmured after Carnforth, the butler, glided in with fresh coffee and the news a despatch box had arrived for the Duke.
‘Aye,’ he agreed with Melissa and dismissed that important red box with an impatient gesture. They got up and left the room.
‘Well?’ he asked her when they were inside his very private study with the door closed on the world. ‘What did she say?’
‘Just a few words: “Melissa, find, letter, mother, and son, with, my, book”. But it was enough to make me memorise them and burn the paper they were written on. I must find that letter before anyone else can read it, Papa.’
‘What possessed her to keep anything you wrote back then?’
‘I truly cannot imagine,’ Melissa said with a sigh for that clever and apparently also foolish woman she had loved so much. ‘But I must find the letter before anyone else does.’
‘Yes, but you had best leave it to me,’ he said with a heavy sigh as the thought of her wild impulses of old caught them both up in a memory of the past that hurt so much she could hardly endure revisiting it, let alone knowing it could be discussed over the teacups of Mayfair as the ton thrilled to the truth of her downfall and the secret that the poor, dear Duke had been forced to keep because his only child was an ungovernable hoyden who had tested every rule in the book until it screamed for mercy.
‘No, you can’t do it, Papa. A minister in His Majesty’s Government can’t do whatever it takes to get those books back. People will wonder why they are so important and ferret through them to find out why you want them.’
‘I don’t see how you can do it without attracting attention either. The polite world is so curious about you, especially now you are living here with me again and still determined not to take your rightful place in society. I sometimes wonder if they will break in to see my elusive daughter now you are home at last and still being elusive.’
‘Ugh! What a horrible notion.’
‘Indeed,’ he said, and it was all the things he didn’t say that made her feel so guilty about putting him through even more trouble than she had already.
‘I will get Grandmama’s things back without anyone knowing how badly I want them somehow,’ Melissa said as lightly as she could manage when her hands were clenched so hard her nails were biting into her flesh.
‘I could resign from the Government.’
‘No, you are needed; only think how narrow-minded and hysterical they would be without you. Let me try to get my letter back before you do anything drastic.’
It took some coaxing and persuading, but eventually the Duke agreed and Melissa knew she must never let him realise the very thought of the scandalmongers ripping her life apart if that letter ever came to light made her blood run cold.
* * *
Nearly a week later Melissa slipped inside Lord Lathbury’s library and closed the door behind her, glad to have got this far undetected. There was so much flurry and fluster behind the scenes at Lathbury House tonight she had managed to slip in through the back door. She had tiptoed past the kitchens while the cook and her minions were busy and everyone else was upstairs laying out the supper room and making sure last-minute disasters were seen and dealt with. Just as well they didn’t know she could be one of them if she was found at Miss Lathbury’s come-out ball without an invitation.
All the old rumours about wild and ungovernable Lady Melissa Aldercombe wo
Never mind her appearance, although it was oddly satisfying to dress in the first stare of fashion for the first time in her adult life. It was peaceful in here and she was reminded of the atmosphere in her grandmother’s humbler book room. Grief for the eccentric, determined and generous-hearted lady hit once again, but she pushed it aside and reminded herself why she was here and that it was time to concentrate on the living.
She frowned at Lord Lathbury’s crammed bookshelves—finding anything here would be like searching for a needle in a haystack. So, where did the man keep any new additions to his fine collection, then? She clicked her tongue impatiently at the poor job a single candle was making of lighting the room. It was meant to say This is private. Stray guests, please recall your manners and go back to the ballroom.
She lit a branch of them and ignored it, hoping His Lordship’s staff would think an intrusive guest had stolen in here for a tryst with a lover when they found them tomorrow. No doubt they would curse the careless ways of the ton and replace them before the master of the house left his bed. Nobody would know she was here and this was her chance to search for her letter while the man was hosting his sister’s debut ball. She headed for the piles of books and papers on the library table and tried not to feel guilty about invading his privacy.
The idea of a stranger reading her own hasty words, written at the most terrible and wonderful time of her life, made her shudder, though, so never mind His Lordship’s privacy—she had to find that letter. Although she had changed drastically after her son was born, she would still dare anything to keep him safe.
She had forced herself to part with him when he was a few weeks old so he would not have to grow up despised and taunted as a bastard, but that harsh name would always have the power to shatter his life and break his heart if she let it. Everything he thought he was would collapse around him and the world would look down its nose at the love child of an unwed girl. Even her father wouldn’t be able to stop scandal spreading like wildfire and questions being asked about her child’s new identity, so she could not let it happen.
She had been little more than a child herself when she had tumbled so headlong in love with her baby’s father that nothing else had mattered, but that would only add to the gossips’ delicious outrage. Back then she had thought she was the most grown-up and cynical sixteen-year-old ever until she and Joe had remade the world so that he was all she had cared about. She had adored youthful Joseph Briggs with every fibre of her being and the wondrous things they did together—to hell with the petty rules of the haut ton or anyone else.
Now she knew their relationship had taken a new turn after her mother died and Joe had been the only one to offer any real comfort. One moment Melissa had been a much-loved only child, enjoying too much freedom and as many tomboyish adventures as she could pack into her busy days, the next her mother’s death had ripped through her life with the shock of a ship driven on sharp rocks. She had been lost and desperate for solace, but her father had been so wrapped up in his own grief he had hardly noticed he still had a daughter so, of course, she had turned to the other significant male in her life.
Joe Briggs had been her best secret from the time she was old enough to keep one. He had been her best friend and companion in mischief behind their parents’ backs. She had wondered what either set would have made of a farmer’s son and the Duke’s daughter tumbling from one adventure into the next when they were supposed to be running around their own fields or safely tucked up in bed. They would have been scandalised and furious; she and Joe had known that even as children and had been so careful to keep their friendship a secret.
She was superior and distant with him if they met when she was out riding with her parents or a groom. In secret they had coaxed ponies out at grass or somehow persuaded the least wild of the hill ponies to accept the bridles they had smuggled out of the stables in exchange for sugar or a wrinkled apple and rode them bareback and astride for as long as that day’s adventure could last without being found out.
She could almost feel the warm summer breeze heavy with the scents of heather and honey on her face, or the foggy richness of autumn as she thought of them dashing over the moors as fast as their sturdy mounts would take them, laughing or arguing as they went—the thrill of the forbidden adding more spice to the adventure than if their families had approved of their unlikely friendship.
Melissa had turned to Joe for comfort after her father shut himself in his study when his wife had died and refused to see or speak to her because she was so painfully like his dead wife it had unmanned him. Joe had given her sympathy and as much understanding as such a young man had in him with all the generosity in his great heart. He had even tried to curb her angry attempts to shock her father out of isolation and love her again.
The less it worked, the more reckless and openly defiant of the rules of polite society she had become, she remembered with a rueful smile for that confused girl balanced on the edge of womanhood. She had stolen her father’s most prized stallion and galloped through the countryside astride and dressed in breeches with her hair flying out loose behind her like a banner, and of course nobody could catch her on that prime piece of horseflesh and uncertain male temper.
Somehow she had survived it and rid herself of two governesses in quick succession amid shocked reports that she was rude and ungovernable and reckless to a fault. Her rebellion had reached its zenith when she had stormed out of church during the vicar’s sermon on the divinely allotted roles of man and woman and the essential wickedness of the latter, before and after Eve got poor, innocent Adam evicted from the Garden of Eden with her witchy wiles.
Furious at the pompous littleness of the man’s world view and grief for her clever and compassionate mother, who would have been so angry at that veiled rebuke to the Duke’s wild daughter, Melissa had run blindly for the familiar shelter of the windblown, weather-torn tangle of woods and caves where she and Joe had played and argued as children. There was no point her running home to a father who had given up caring what she thought or did.
Unwilling to attract even more attention to her, Joe had waited until the service was over and ran after her to try to understand her despair at losing both her parents, even if one was still alive. She had been so angry at the vicar, who had thought he could teach sweet feminine compliance by telling women they were inferior and guilty creatures with no right to a will of their own. As she had alternately sobbed and raged, Joe watched her with manly embarrassment, then had bravely overcome it to hold her awkwardly in his arms and try to hug her better.
That was the moment something powerful and a bit frightening had flared into vivid life between them, one hot summer day when the world had suddenly become such a different place that the true wonder of it made her gasp even now. Both of them had been too young to control the suddenly very adult passion that had burned like a firestorm between them, as if it had always been waiting for them to wake up to who and what they were fated to be to one another. Friendship and familiarity had exploded into love and passion, so that first time when they had made love had been more or less by instinct.
Even when it was over and they had opened their eyes on a world so changed by what they could do together, they had felt right in one another’s arms and Melissa had refused to be ashamed of herself or him. Joseph Briggs had been her generous, passionate and youthful lover for such a heartbreakingly short space of time, even if her father had dismissed it as sheer stubborn folly and calf love when he had found out what his daughter had been up to while he wasn’t paying attention.
Eleven years on from that heady, wondrous, impossible time Melissa knew her young lover would hold her heart until her dying day. She could never settle for anyone less and all she could ever be was alone without him.
