Royally Ever After (7 page)

Snoring.

S
he turned in his arms and smiled up at him.

“You wretched female,” he said.

“You were going on so well, I hated to interrupt,” she said.

He made a harrumphing sound. “Then you're unhurt?”

“I had the wind knocked out of me for a moment,” she said.

“You'd better let me check for injuries,” he said.

“I promise you, I'm no more than a little bruised,” she said.

“I'll be the judge of that.” He proceeded to examine her so thoroughly, his big hands moving over every inch of her body, that she went hot all over.

Then he hauled her to her feet, dragged her up against him, bent his head and kissed her, slowly and with the same single-minded determination he'd applied to courting her. He worked his way from a chaste meeting of lips to something not at all chaste, that had the blood pounding through her veins and stirred up, low in her belly, a hot impatience for something she had no name for.

When at last he drew away, she was limp and nearly sick with wanting.

“Oh, my goodness,” she managed to say, in a strange, hoarse voice she barely recognized as hers. “If you'd done
that
before, I never should have jilted you.”

“I know,” he said. “But it would have been unsporting.”

“I thought my feelings were not returned,” she said. “I couldn't bear the idea of a lifetime of being the only one in the marriage who was in love. But I couldn't sleep last night, and all I could think of was you riding away, and I'd never see you again, and how wretched I should be. And so I came to tell you that I didn't care if I was the one who did all the loving—and—and that I rescinded everything I said in that stupid letter.”

“And I rescind all my heroic self-sacrifice,” he said.

He straightened her bonnet, which had fallen to one side in the course of the shockingly delicious kiss.

She smoothed the front of his coat, though it wasn't wrinkled.

He took her hand away, and clasped it in his big one.

“Shall we get married, then?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

And they did, the very next day after the queen married her prince, with a good deal less pomp, but as much love and more.

Keep reading for a sneak peek from

Coming January 2016 from

New York Times
and
USA Today
bestselling author

Loretta Chase

and Avon Books

Convenient marriages are rarely so . . . exciting. Can society's most adored heiress and London's most difficult bachelor fall victim to their own unruly desires?

Biweekly marriage proposals from men who can't see beyond her (admittedly breathtaking) looks are starting to get on Lady Clara Fairfax's nerves. Desperate to be something more than ornamental, she escapes to her favorite charity. When a child goes missing, she turns to Oliver Radford—a handsome, brilliant, excessively conceited barrister.

Having unexpectedly found himself in line to inherit a dukedom, Radford needs a bride who can navigate the Society he's never been part of. If he can find one without having to set foot in a ballroom, so much the better. Clara—blonde, blue-eyed, and he must admit, not entirely bereft of brains—will do. As long as he can woo her, wed her—and not, like every other sapskull in London, lose his head over her . . .

T
o begin with, he was obnoxious.

Oliver Radford's schoolfellows didn't need more than a day or two after his arrival to discover this.

They didn't need much time, either, to administer the nickname “Raven,” though why they chose it was less obvious. Maybe his thick, black hair and too-piercing gray eyes gave them the idea, or maybe it was his deep, husky voice, better suited to a grown man than a boy of ten.
Or maybe they referred to his nose, although this, while by no means small, wasn't as beaky as many others.

Still, he did always have the nose in question in a book, and some—actually, one of his paternal cousins—said that young Radford reminded him of “a raven poking into the guts of a carcass.”

The cousin failed to mention or forgot or perhaps didn't know—not being observant or clever—how extremely intelligent ravens were, for birds. Oliver Radford was extremely intelligent, for a boy. This was one reason he found the books vastly preferable to his schoolmates.

Especially his unbelievably stupid cousins . . .

At present he leaned against a wall at the edge of the playing fields, well away from the others, who were choosing sides for cricket. Unlikely and unwilling to be chosen, but required to be present at the character-building proceedings, he had his nose in the pages of Homer's
Odyssey
.

A fat hand with grimy fingernails covered the page of Greek script and a shadow fell over Oliver. He did not look up. He was, like his father, more-than-average observant. He recognized the hand. He had good reason to.

“Here he is, gentlemen,” said Cousin Bernard. “Spawn of the family's laboring branch: our Raven.”

Laboring
was meant to disparage Oliver's father. Since the eldest son inherited everything, the others and their offspring had to find rich wives and/or places in “gentlemanly” professions like the military, the church, or the law. George Radford, son of a duke's younger son, had elected to become a barrister. He was successful as well as happily married.

All that Oliver had observed told him the other Radfords had extremely small brains and marriages the antithesis of his parents'.

That a boy of ten knew what
antithesis
meant was another reason to hate him.

He didn't help matters.

“Naturally you find the law laborious,” Oliver said. “Firstly, it wants a mastery of Latin, and you barely comprehend English. Secondly—”

Bernard cuffed him lightly. “I'd hold my tongue if I was you, little Raven. Unless there's tales you want told.”

“Firstly, if you
were
me,” Oliver corrected. “Since you are patently not, you require the subjunctive. Secondly,
tales
is plural. Therefore you want the third person plural of the infinitive
to be
. The correct verb form is
are
.”

Bernard cuffed him less lightly. “Best not to mind him too much,” he told the others—a small crowd of his disciples, some of them cousins. “No manners. Can't help himself. Mother not quite the thing, you know. Bit of a tart. But we don't talk about it much.”

George Radford's family had made a fuss of some kind when he married, at age fifty, a divorced lady. But Oliver didn't care what they thought. His father had prepared him for the vicissitudes of Eton and the less-than-likable relatives he could expect to encounter there.

“You're contradicting yourself,” Oliver said. “Again.”

“No, I'm not, you little fart.”

“You said
we
don't talk about her but you did.”

“Do you mind, little Raven?”

“Not a bit,” Oliver said. “At least when my mother pushed me into the world, she contrived to keep my brain intact. The evidence shows the opposite result in your case.”

Bernard yanked him from the wall and threw him down. The book fell from Oliver's hands and his head rang, increasing his heart rate and sending him into a wild panic. He flung these sensations to the very back of his mind and pretended the feelings were miles away. He pretended that what was happening to him happened to someone quite separate.

The panic vanished, the world came back into balance, and he could think.

He rose onto his elbows. “I'm so sorry,” he said.

“You ought to be,” Bernard said. “And I hope it's a lesson—”

“I should have read it as ‘in an agony to redeem himself,' rather than ‘anxious to save himself.'”

Bernard looked blank, not an unusual expression for him.

“Odysseus,” Oliver said patiently. He rose, picked up the book, and brushed away the dirt. “ ‘He strove in vain for his fellows, whose own witlessness destroyed them. The witless destroy what they don't understand.'”

Bernard's face got very red. “Witless? I'll teach you witless, you insolent little turd.”

He leapt on Oliver, knocked him down, and started punching.

The fight ended for Oliver with a black eye, bloody nose, and ringing ears.

This wasn't the first time. It wasn't the last. But more of that anon.

O
liver's experience with women was limited. Mothers didn't count. His stepsisters were somebody else's mothers already.

The Honorable Harry Fairfax's sister Lady Clara was, she had announced, eight and
eleven-twelfths years old.

At present, Oliver was baffled, an unusual condition for him.

Though nursemaids abounded to look after the dizzying numbers of young Fairfax cousins, Clara, according to Harry, was usually left to tag after the boys. Her brothers treated her like a pet, perhaps because she was the first girl after three boys, and something of a curiosity. Then, too, the young Duke of Clevedon, whose guardian Harry's father was, doted on her.

But tonight's planned activity was not for girls. Clevedon was moving away, gesturing to Harry to follow. Harry gave him a nod and told his little sister, “You're not allowed to go in the boat with us.”

She kicked him in the ankle. This only made Harry chuckle, but she must have hurt her toe, because her lower lip trembled.

Then, for some reason, Oliver heard himself saying, “Lady Clara, have you ever seen the Heptaplasiesoptron?”

He was aware of Harry throwing him a puzzled glance but more aware of the sister, who turned a sulky blue gaze upward to meet his. “What is it?”

“It's a sort of kaleidoscope room,” Oliver said. “It's filled with looking glasses, and these reflect twining serpents and a fountain and palm trees and lamps of different colors and other things. It's over there.” He pointed to the building containing the Rotunda and the Pillared Saloon. “Shall I take you to see it?”

While Oliver was talking, Harry slipped away.

“I want to go in the boat,” she said.

“I don't,” Oliver said.

She looked about and noticed Harry's back retreating from view as he hurried to catch up
with Clevedon. Her gaze came back to Oliver, eyes narrowed accusingly now.

“Your brother doesn't want you along,” he said. “He doesn't want to worry about your being sick or falling out of the boat and drowning.”

“I won't,” she said. “I'm never sick.”

“You will be if Harry's rowing,” he said. “Why do you think I'm not going?”

She said, “That rhymes.”

“So it does,” he said. “Shall I show you the Heptaplasiesoptron? I'll wager anything you can't say it. You're only a girl and girls aren't very clever.”

Her blue eyes flashed. “I can too say it!”

“Go ahead, then.”

She screwed up her eyes and mouth, concentrating, and the expression was so comical that he had all he could do not to laugh.

Harry Fairfax and Clevedon had come to Eton the year after Oliver arrived. Very much to his surprise, they made a friend of him. This was more or less in the way they made a pet of Lady Clara. They'd dubbed him Professor Raven, which they soon whittled down to Professor.

He'd come to Vauxhall's Second Annual Juvenile Fête because Harry's father had sent an invitation to join the Fairfax family excursion, and Oliver's father said he must accept. Oliver had expected to be very bored and irritated but Vauxhall turned out to be fascinating. It offered acrobats and rope dancers and trained monkeys and dogs, and all sorts of interesting optical illusions and devices, as well as music and fireworks. He didn't mind at all not joining the other boys in the boat.

He hadn't planned on playing nursemaid to a little girl, certainly. But Lady Clara had
turned out to be something out of the ordinary, rather like other Vauxhall wonders. She wasn't nearly as stupid as one would expect, considering she was, firstly, a girl and, secondly, related to Harry Fairfax. No one had ever accused Harry of intellectual prowess.

She'd pronounced Heptaplasiesoptron correctly by the time they got to it. Equally important, she was perfectly willing to be taught about reflections and optical tricks.

After exhausting the marvels of the Pillared Saloon, they walked on to the Submarine Cave. After Clara had her fill of that, they were moving on to the Hermitage when a disagreeably familiar voice called out, “That the best you can do, Raven? She hasn't even got bubbies yet.”

He was distantly aware of his temperature rising and his heart beating fast and of seeing the world through a red veil. He heard himself speak as though from a great distance to Lady Clara. “Stay,” he said.

He marched to his cousin Bernard and punched him in his fat gut.

The fat must have been more solid than it looked, because Bernard only gave a baffled, “Huh,” before punching back.

Unprepared for the quick reaction, Oliver was an instant too slow to dodge, and the blow made him stumble. Bernard took advantage, hurling his great carcass at Oliver and knocking him down.

The next he knew, Bernard was sitting on him.

Oliver was aware of Clara shouting something, but mainly he was aware of his ears ringing and trouble catching his breath.

Bernard laughed.

Oliver was trying to dislodge him when he heard a wild cry. Clara launched herself at Bernard in a flurry of punching and kicking. That was so funny that for a moment Oliver forgot
he couldn't breathe.

Then he saw her lunge at Bernard, and he saw Bernard throw his arm up to shield his face. Oliver wasn't sure what happened next, but he deduced she'd run into his cousin's knuckles or elbow, because she fell back, her hand over her mouth.