If the Earl Only Knew (The Daring Marriages) Read online

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  Also by Amanda Forester

  Medieval Highlanders

  The Highlander’s Sword

  The Highlander’s Heart

  True Highland Spirit

  The Highlander’s Bride

  The Campbell Sisters Novellas

  The Highland Bride’s Choice

  The Wrong Highland Bridegroom

  The Trouble with a Highland Bride

  Marriage Mart Regency

  A Wedding in Springtime

  A Midsummer Bride

  A Winter Wedding

  Copyright © 2016 by Amanda Forester

  Cover and internal design © 2016 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover art by Alan Ayers

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, King James Version, which exists in the public domain.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

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  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  One for sorrow,

  Two for joy,

  Three for a girl,

  Four for a boy,

  Five for silver,

  Six for gold,

  Seven for a secret never to be told.

  —English nursery rhyme

  One

  One for sorrow

  Kate stared at the single magpie perched on the thick wall of Fleet Debtors’ Prison. At twelve years old, she hardly needed the ill omen to know she was in peril.

  Her heart beat hard within her chest and she grasped her twin brother’s hand as they were forced into the stone sarcophagus of the prison. How could this be happening to her?

  “Boys this way, girls that way,” a pale-faced guard intoned, too bored with the plight of human misery even to look up over his desk.

  “You cannot do this. I am the Earl of Darington. There has been a mistake,” repeated her brother. Though tall for his age, the guards only saw him as a child and had long since stopped listening.

  “Only mistake is that yer father didn’t pay his debts afore he died. Now no more o’ yer lies. Ye wouldn’t be in debtors’ prison if ye was quality or had anyone what cared fer ye.” The man nodded to a sharp-faced matron, who grabbed Kate by the wrist and wrenched her away from her brother.

  “No!” Kate cried, but the fierce matron pulled her through a low doorway and down a dark passage, the air growing increasingly stale and acrid with every step. The stench of years of filth and sheer wretchedness filled her lungs, causing her to gag. When they reached the very pit of hell, the woman unlocked a door and flung Kate inside.

  “The girl what lived here died this morning.” The matron gave her a sinister smile. “G’night, dearie.”

  She slammed the door shut, leaving Kate in total darkness.

  “No.” Kate wrapped her arms around herself to protect against the suffocating black nothingness…

  * * *

  “No…no!” Kate awoke in a tangle of bedsheets, gasping for breath.

  Someone rapped on the door of her small, spare bedroom and her twin brother appeared, leaning one shoulder on the door frame. He had grown taller in the thirteen years since their unfortunate sojourn in Fleet prison.

  “Doing battle?” he asked, his face impassive.

  Kate took a long, slow breath as she tried to extricate herself from the twisted bedsheets. “Just enjoying the sweet dreams of our childhood.”

  “That bad, eh?” Robert shook his head.

  “Force of habit when we travel to London. I remember all the amusements we shared.”

  “Of some amusements, one can never have too little,” Robert commented in a dry tone.

  “True, but given today’s itinerary, I fear we shall have a very amusing day, indeed.”

  “Saints preserve us,” grumbled Robert.

  “Saints?” Kate shook her head. “I doubt we shall receive any divine help today. Let us get on with our business and leave this godforsaken town.”

  Robert raised an eyebrow. “Has the good Lord forsaken all of London, do you think?”

  Kate shrugged. “If not the whole of London, us at the very least.”

  Robert gave a slight nod and left the room so Kate could prepare for the day. There was no denying their visits to London had never ended well.

  Lady Katherine Ashton dressed herself quickly, as was her custom. The grim remembrances of her previous visits to London dragged themselves through her mind like a macabre review. Her first visit in 1797 had resulted in being wrongfully forced into Fleet prison. Her second visit at age nineteen had ended in the dreadful accident. Now in the year 1810, at the venerable age of twenty-five, Kate faced London once more. She hoped to avoid some new tragedy, but given her history, the odds were against her.

  After five years of self-imposed banishment in Gibraltar, Kate was more accustomed to helping her brother with the accounts of his business than acting like a lady. Today she would face her greatest fear—the seething pit of depravity known as London society.

  Kate took a bracing breath of the cold, damp London air. It was time to face the demons of her past. Or in this case a wickedly handsome man, which was
essentially the same thing.

  “No, a handsome man is worse. Much worse,” she muttered to herself.

  She indulged herself with a quick glance in the mirror to ensure everything about her person was neat and orderly. Her brown hair was pulled back in a strict bun with not a strand out of place. Her black cotton gown was pressed sharp. Everything about her appearance was in good regulation except her eyes. She wished they were a sensible brown, but instead, they were a strange light color. She called them gray but feared they bordered on silver. Kate turned from the image without a second look and tugged on a wool coat and bonnet to protect against the December freeze.

  She entered the main room, giving a nod to her brother who was dressed and waiting. She gathered her ledgers, logs, and documents. It was time to get to business.

  “Our goals for the day are to free the offspring of the unfortunate masses from imprisonment and throw off the fetters of our financial bondage by facing our investors.” Kate double-checked her list. It was shorter than usual, but the items were of a significant nature so she granted herself some leniency.

  “Are you ready for this?” asked Robert, pulling on his worn wool greatcoat.

  “Quite.” Kate chose to misinterpret his meaning. “I have prepared an accounting for each one of our investors, providing details of their original investment and return.”

  Robert took the large ledgers from her hands. “Not what I meant.”

  “I shall never be ready. But let us do it anyway,” she replied crisply.

  They walked out of their small lodging in a working-class part of Town. Robert stopped short and stared at the modest conveyance before them with a mixture of shock and resignation. Though to the casual observer his face was not altered, Kate was well able to read the slightest change in her twin brother’s expression.

  “This carriage was the least expensive,” Kate said, giving him an unnecessary explanation.

  “Carriage?” Robert Ashton, the Earl of Darington, was doubtful.

  “That’s what the man called it,” defended Kate. “The other options were shockingly dear.” She surveyed the questionable equipage with a critical eye. What might once have been a barouche carriage was in such disrepair it more resembled a delivery wagon, and the swaybacked gray horse who contrived to pull it appeared to be on his last legs. Even if the barouche had been in good condition, the open nature of the carriage made it entirely unsuitable for the freezing weather.

  “Indeed.” The stern expression on her brother’s face gave him the appearance of being older than his twenty-five years. He was a tall, thin man, with dark brown hair and a life of hard toil etched into the lines on his face. His eyes were as black as hers were light. Spending much of his life at sea and the last five years as the captain of the notorious Lady Kate, he could intimidate a hardened crew with a single raised eyebrow.

  “According to my calculations”—Kate broke open one of the several large accounting ledgers—“the price of this carriage, which I obtained quite inexpensively, will cost less over our planned two-week stay in London than hiring a hack, based on an estimation of our routes and—”

  “Yes, of course.” Robert surrendered to her superior knowledge of sums. When it came to financial management, she was the undisputed master. She had taken them from the terrifying poverty of their youth to their current comfortable position. Through her careful management, every coin her brother earned had been kept, saved, invested, and increased.

  He handed her up into the conveyance without further complaint and jumped up beside her, encouraging the poor beast of a horse to walk as best it could through the city streets. Kate breathed deep, but instead of the fresh scent of clean sea air she was accustomed to from living in Gibraltar for the past five years, her nostrils were assailed by a strong smell of damp and coal smoke that shrouded London in a permanent haze.

  Robert snapped the reins, and they ambled along toward the Bank of England on Threadneedle Street where their meeting with the investors into Robert’s “shipping” business would be held. She would never have agreed to return to London were it not for the terms of the contract, which stated the investors would be paid back in full at the end of five years, plus a percentage of any profits.

  Kate had developed a keen accounting for each one of their investors, but such a meeting brought the prospect of seeing one particular investor. A man she never wanted to see again. Ever.

  Would he be there? Would he dare come?

  Lady Katherine has no beauty, no fashion, no conversation, and no accomplishments save being the sister to an earl, and an impoverished one at that. Years later, his voice still rang in her head.

  It had begun innocently enough. While at university, Robert had become acquainted with Tristan Arlington, the second son of the Earl of Wynbrook, who had invited them to spend the Christmas holidays with his family. Tristan’s mother had been particularly kind, and for a brief moment Kate had thought she had finally been accepted. But it was not to last.

  Kate closed her eyes and remembered her fateful visit. She had heard voices coming from the open library door and stopped. She knew she ought not to eavesdrop, but she could not help pausing outside the door and listening to the conversation between Tristan and his elder brother.

  “Darington might not be so bad—one can forgive lack of conversation in a gentleman—but you must admit the sister is poor company indeed,” drawled Tristan’s elder brother.

  “Dash it, John! What a gudgeon you are,” exclaimed Tristan. “Kate’s not had the advantages of feminine company is all. Their mother died bringing them into the world.”

  “Perhaps, but is that any reason for Mother to sponsor her coming out with Jane this spring?”

  “Why should Mother not bring out Kate with our sister?” cried Tristan. “Quite kind of her.”

  “Because it may prove an embarrassment to Mother. I do not mean to offend, but your friend’s earldom was only recently created. Darington’s father must have done something quite heroic in his naval career to rise from a baronet to an earl. You know how society disdains social climbers.”

  Social climbers!

  Six years later, the words still ground like grit in her teeth. How she had hated him!

  They came to a stop with a jolt and Kate opened her eyes to the intimidating sight of rising colonnades of the Bank of London. She needed to push aside the past and focus on their business. Robert handed the reins to one of the stable lads hired by the bank and received dubious looks from both the lad and passersby alike. Kate was too preoccupied with who might be waiting for them within to give their startled looks a second thought.

  Her pulse pounded in her temples as they were led to a sitting room designed for meetings of the rich and the even richer. Dark mahogany paneling lined the hall, and all the furnishings from the curtains to the chairs were resplendent in rich jewel tones. Everything around her spoke of wealth and power.

  Surely he would not be here. He would send his solicitor, not come in person. There was no need. She had almost convinced herself of his certain absence when they entered the room.

  He was there.

  The bastion of society stood warming himself by the fire, dressed impeccably in a dark blue, double-breasted suit that was tailored to perfection. She could not help but drink in his form. His broad, square shoulders revealed a powerful build, yet he had a trim waist and muscular thighs that were on the edge of indecent in his skintight buckskin breeches. With his chestnut hair, green eyes, and square jaw, he was the very definition of a handsome man.

  It was him.

  John Arlington, the Earl of Wynbrook.

  The only man she had ever kissed.

  Two

  Two for joy

  John Arlington, Earl of Wynbrook, warmed his hands against winter’s chill in the well-appointed sitting room of the Bank of England. The return of Darington and his sist
er was a complication in his otherwise orderly life. And for that he blamed Lady Kate.

  Trouble was, he was not sure how to behave around her, which was terribly unusual. He prided himself on always knowing the correct manner of address for anyone in or out of society, but Lady Kate defied classification. She was a lady, the daughter of an earl, but hardly acted like one. Yet she was so reserved and refined, she did not not act like one either. It was all very confusing.

  Given his conduct with Lady Kate several years ago, he had assumed an offer from him would have been expected. But then she’d disappeared and left him wondering what he was supposed to do. In truth, he had been relieved when Darington and Lady Kate had taken themselves to Gibraltar, and though it was uncharitable in the extreme, it would have been easier had they never returned.

  His younger brother, Tristan, stood by the fire next to him, oblivious to any concern. “Haven’t seen Dare since we graduated from Cambridge. Be good to see him again.” Tristan gave him an easy smile, his eyes merry.

  “I have not seen them both since…” Wynbrook’s voice trailed off.

  Tristan’s face paled and the usual humor drained from his expression.

  “Forgive me. I should not have mentioned it,” said Wynbrook. No one had taken the loss from the accident harder than Tristan.

  “No, we should not avoid the subject. Besides, Darington’s service to us should not be forgot.”

  “It never will be,” said Wynbrook firmly. It was one of the reasons he had invested a large sum into Darington’s shipping enterprise—a shaky venture at best.

  They lapsed into uncomfortable silence and Wynbrook struggled to turn the conversation, if only to put a smile back on Tristan’s unusually pensive face. “I suppose Lady Kate has married by now?” He sincerely hoped so, though he did not wish to reveal his concern to Tristan. His brother was not smart, but he was clever.

  “No, she is very much still available,” said Tristan, the smile sneaking back to his face. “Though I should warn you, I do not believe she holds you in high esteem.”

  Wynbrook frowned. Lady Kate did not like him? Ladies liked him as a general rule. Come to think of it, ladies liked him as an absolute rule. And why not? He was exceedingly good company. So why her dislike? Wynbrook could think of only one reason. It was that night. That one dreadful, glorious night.