Formidable Lord Quentin (35 page)
Read Formidable Lord Quentin Online
Authors: Patricia Rice
Tags: #Regency, #humor, #romance, #aristocrats, #horses, #family
“As long as you admit it now, I am happy. Kiss me, wife, and
let us try harder for green-eyed babes in our future.”
If the yacht rocked harder than the tide that evening and
the cries of the gulls found human accompaniment, there was none to notice.
Formidable Lord Quentin
Rebellious Sons 4
Patricia Rice
Book View Café 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-444-4
Copyright © 2015 Patricia Rice
Production Team:
Cover Design: Killion Group
Copy Editor: Jennifer Stevenson
Proofreader: Phyllis Irene Radford
Formatter: Vonda N. McIntyre
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Digital edition: 20150305
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Formidable Lord Quentin
Wicked Wyckerly (April 2015
About the AuthorWith several million books in print and New York Times and USA Today’s lists under her belt, former CPA Patricia Rice is one of romance’s hottest authors. Her emotionally-charged romances have won numerous awards and been honored as RITA® finalists in the historical, regency and contemporary categories. She is thrilled to be expanding into mystery and urban fantasy.
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Wicked Wyckerly: Sample ChapterA Rebellious Sons Novel
The daughter of
middle-class gentry, her parents recently deceased, Abigail Merriweather gave
up her fiancé to take charge of her four young half-siblings, only to have the
executor of her father’s will relieve her of parental duties because she’s female.
Assuming no man in his right mind would want to marry a spinster with only a farm
for dowry, much less take on a ready-made family, she has applied to her
father’s distant relation, a marquess, for aid in having the children returned.
***
“I need a man,” she declared so decisively that a squirrel
leaped from the fence and hid under the hedge. “I need to marry a rich
solicitor,” she amended, applying her hoe to the rhubarb bed. “A responsible
gentleman who loves children and would take my case to the highest courts. An
upright, respectable man with enough wealth not to worry about the expense!”
Rather than cry more useless tears, she was stubbornly contemplating
solicitors and selling her pony cart for fare to London when the mail coach
rattled to a halt on the tree-lined road. The mail wasn’t delivered personally
to Abbey Lane, but Abigail couldn’t prevent her heartbeat from skipping in
hope. Perhaps a letter of response from a marquess required hand delivery. She
wouldn’t know. She’d never received one.
Please, let him say he would help her fetch the children
back. If she couldn’t find a rich solicitor to marry, she needed a respectable,
wealthy London gentleman like her father’s distant, titled, cousin willing to
fight for her cause.
The coach lingered, and she hurried toward the gate, hoe
still in hand. Perhaps their guardian had relented and sent the children home
for a visit. The coach might stop out here for young children—
“Keep the demon hellion off my coach until you’ve tamed or
caged her!” a cranky male shouted.
“I hate you, you bloody damned cawker!” a child screamed.
Despite the appalling curse, Abigail hurried faster. She did
not recognize the voice, but she recognized hopeless desperation on the verge
of tears. She would not let harm come to any child under her notice.
“Your generosity will not be forgotten,” a wry, plummy
baritone called over the thump of baggage hitting the ground.
Abigail almost halted. Sophisticated aristocrats with
rounded vowels and haughty accents were not a common commodity in these rural
environs. She wasn’t young or foolish enough to believe the heavens had thrown
a wealthy noble onto her front lawn in answer to her plea.
Her innate social insecurity kicked in, and she froze, until
a small figure darted through the hedgerow dragging a ragged doll and shouting,
“Beetle-brained catch-farts can’t catch me!”
“Penelope!” the gentleman shouted. “Penelope, come back here
this instant.”
Oh, that would turn the imp right around. With a sniff of
disdain at such parental incompetence, Abigail intercepted the foul-mouthed
termagant’s path, crouching down to the child’s level and murmuring, “If you
run around behind the house, he won’t find you, and Cook will give you
shortbread.”
Tear-stained cheeks belied the fury of huge, long-lashed
green eyes as the child gazed upon her warily. With her heart-shaped face
framed by golden-brown hair that was caught loosely in a long braid, she could
have been a miniature princess, were it not for her threadbare and too-short
gown. And the outrageous expletives that had just polluted her rosy lips.
“Hurry along now. I will talk to the rather perturbed
gentleman opening the gate.”
The child glanced toward the gate, and setting her jaw in
mulish determination, raced across the lawn to the three-story brick cottage
Abigail called home.
“Penelope!” A fashionably garbed Corinthian caught sight of
the child and gave chase.
Abigail almost gaped at the intruder’s manly physique,
accentuated by an impeccably tailored, long-tailed frock coat, knitted pantaloons,
and Hessians polished to a fare-thee-well. She thought her heart actually
stumbled in awe—until alarm startled her mind into ticking again.
She might be inclined to be generous and reserve judgment on
a man who made a child cry. But the gentleman’s expensive frock coat and
Hessians in the face of the child’s pitiful attire raised distressing
questions.
She was even less inclined to be reasonable when he seemed
prepared to run right past her as if she did not exist. She was painfully aware
that she was small and unprepossessing. And she supposed her gardening bonnet
and hoe added to her invisibility in the eyes of an arrogant aristocrat, but
she wasn’t of a mind to be treated like a garden gnome.
She stepped into the drive and held the hoe so it would trip
the elegant stranger if he didn’t pay attention. He might be large and fearsome,
but no man would intimidate her into abandoning a hurt child. He halted in
startlement at her action.
She scarcely had time to admire his disheveled
whiskey-colored hair and impressive square chin before he ripped the hoe handle
from her grip and flung it into the boxwoods. He was formidably male from his
whiskered jaw to his muscled calves and smelled so deliciously of rich male
musk that she trembled at the audacity of her impulse.
“The little heathen first, introductions later.” He broke
into a ground-eating gallop that would have done a Thoroughbred proud.
Discarding her disquiet, she hastened up the drive in the
intruder’s wake. Dignity and her corset prevented galloping. And her short
legs.
She arrived at the kitchen door to a scene of chaos.
Plump and perplexed, Cook stood with a tray of shortbread in
her hand while the threadbare princess darted under the ancient trestle table,
apparently shoving the sweet in her mouth while dodging chairs and the
gentleman.
Miss Kitty yowled and leapt from her napping place on the
sill, knocking over a geranium.
And the gentleman—
Abigail thought her eyes might be bulging as she regarded
the captivating view of a gentleman’s posterior upended under her kitchen
table. She had never particularly noticed that part of a man’s anatomy, but
garbed in knitted pantaloons, his was extraordinarily . . .
muscled. And neither her insight or his action were pertinent.
