The Stanhope Challenge - Regency Quartet - Four Regency Romances (12 page)

“Bill Bundy is most grateful for you securing the job for him at Collins’s. He starts tomorrow. He could not see you suffer any longer under Howell’s yoke. Just as you could not see him suffer any longer with Howell.”

“My heavens! I meant to cripple Howell, put him out of business if I could by taking Bill from him. I knew Bill yearned for his freedom from the blackguard. He could not bear what he was forced to print. By contrast, my father was such an honorable man.”

“So is his daughter,” Adam whispered and lifted her chin to kiss her lips.

“But Ulmsly urged you to resign! How did you refuse him?”

“I showed him this issue of the
TellTale
and told him the story. I took Bill Bundy with me, too. Afterward, Ulmsly and I called upon Paul Crammer who told us of his proof that Howell was holding goods in his storehouses to drive up the price of goods for the Army in the Peninsula. With all that, there was no reason to ask me to resign. My reputation was restored. Or it will be, when Ulmsly himself addresses the Commons tomorrow and puts the doings on the record.”

She recovered herself after few minutes. “I think this is an ending fit for a good novelist.”

He drew her close. The urge to comfort her and keep her was a steady wave of desire in his blood. “I want our happy ending.”

“You could want me?” she asked him, her eyes wide with wonder.

“Want you always,” he told her as he kissed his way down her throat.

“You could forgive me?”

“Forgive you this and more,” he affirmed as he began to undo the buttons at her bodice. “Is that not what good marriages are made of?”

“And the curse?” she asked him as her gown dropped to the floor and Adam lifted her chemise over her head.

“That old fable?” he asked her as he cupped her breasts and kissed each gossamer nipple. “What power can it have over commitment and true love?”

The End

Lady Featherstone’s Fervent Affair

by

Cerise DeLand

The Stanhope Challenge, Book 2

Wes and Lacy

Lancashire, September 1809

Wes galloped in the rain, the night thick and the air moist. He slumped over the saddle, his horse lathered and laboring. He dug his spurs into the hide of the animal. Mad to get his men up to the French line, Wes yelled at them. His voice cracked, hoarse. His throat raw. The din clamored around him. Like a vise.

The damned French came on like banshees from hell.

Why at night?

The dead of it.

Why in the rain?

He circled his troops. Blinking. Disbelieving. His men lay like broken toy soldiers, littering the earth. Ghouls, dark and bony, they lay strewn about, their blackened arms up-stretched to him, grasping, calling for help, survival. Others, still mounted, cried out to him as they lost their seats and tumbled to the hard dark earth. Their horses whinnied and shrieked, rising up and pawing the sky. Men fell, hacked to pieces before they hit the ground. His lieutenant, mouth open, bellowed at Wes to go back.
Go back.

He would not. Could not. He wheeled about.
How to ensure my rear line turns to meet the French assault?

But still the enemy came on. Gold and silver epaulettes shone brilliant in the rain. French shakos fluttered over their skeletal faces.

They whacked at Wes’s youngest recruits. Not men. But boys. Just boys. One cried in the mud. His horse was wild eyed and thrashing, hooves beating a retreat where there was none. The sounds of the clashing steel, the agonies of men, the gunpowder clogging the air with smoke so thick, so dry men coughed and hacked, choked and drowned on it.

Then at once, a jolt to his own horse. His animal trembled, buckling, bowing down into the mud like a child at prayer. His mount, which he’d trained himself, had bought himself in Lisbon from the peasants’ auction. The animal screamed, throwing Wes into the mud.

The foul grit sank between his teeth and down his throat. He clawed at it. A searing pain crossed his eyes. Burning, he tried to push up, push out, lift his head from the muck of earth and stones, ashes and blood.

He turned his head, spit out a mouthful, called for his servant.
Where are you? Charles?

No one came.

He couldn’t see. He pushed the mud from his eyes and screamed. “Get me out of here! Up!”

In a flash of lightning, reality hit him. He was wounded.
Cut? Where?

He lifted his head. Around him, two of his men lay, crawling toward him in the mire.

Am I crawling?

Back to the line, man. Back to the line…

And he stopped.

This scene was as it always had been. Dreaded, shrouded in the mists.

The woman in black would stride toward him now.

He cursed.

A fearful hag, she was. Petite, skin and bones, in her voluminous rags of death, she came to peer down at him, wrench his head up by a handful of his hair. Then she’d kick him in the ribs and in the left arm to make him howl like a beast. She sneered at his pain, laughing at his writhing.

“Take him,” she would order in her devil’s voice. “Take him to die!”

“No! No!” he would yell as her rat-like minions scurried round him, rolling him to his back, while he screamed in the torment as they took his body up, up, up, his left arm hanging useless as the pain careened through his body and tore his mind to shreds.

“Let me be!” he would plead and yell and moan to no avail. “Let me die!”

Wes bolted upright.

His heartbeat pounded in an erratic tattoo.

Perspiration dripped down his temples.

“Oh, Christ!” he muttered, wiping his brow. He glanced around, put a hand to his arm in the sling.
Safe. Yes, safely on the armrest.
“The nightmare.”

“Sir?” his sergeant and servant, Charles, stared into his eyes, the man’s hands on Wes’s shoulders. “Tis the dream again, sir. Are you recovered?”

“Yes,” Wes grumbled, hating how his voice quavered. “Yes, yes! Brandy.”

“Here, sir. A hefty draught.”

Wes grabbed the glass as if it were ambrosia. Shameless, needful, he gulped at it.

He coughed, the damn strong stuff burning all the way down his gullet but inspiring strong affirmation that he was indeed alive.

He sank backward in his old wingchair, the one he had inhabited now for nigh onto thirty days. Ever since they had brought him home from the Peninsula in a hospital bay, he’d sat in a goddamn chair. At Jack’s house in Grosvenor Square. At Adam’s in Berkeley Square. Here. Like an old man. A cripple.

He cursed. He’d left both brothers’ homes, knowing, seeing and seething at their understanding—aye, their pity—for his infirmity. Riled, he had come north to this old hunting lodge and sat in this chair.

His sergeant had come with him. Charles Brighton was a loyal sort. From childhood, Charles had been a servant at their father’s Stanhope estate in the Cotswolds. Charles had been Wes’ body servant since Wes was five, and he had followed Wes into the Hussars. Promoted by Wes four years ago, the older man probably had never thought he would need to play nursemaid to the illustrious cavalryman, Wesley Stanhope. More like, Charles would have thought to care for his horse and his kit until Wes pensioned him off at sixty.

Instead of any such banality, Wes found himself here, in this drafty old place his father had given him on his twentieth birthday. He sat here day after day in this big ugly chair, recovering from a broken left arm, a broken left ankle and the loss of his left eye. A scar long and ragged as sin ran across his left cheek.

No thanks to a French corsair and the muck of the Spanish plain outside Talavera, Wesley Hamill Curruthers Stanhope had fallen in battle during a charge of his own cavalry brigade. Days later, in a medic tent, his commander had informed him that his maneuver had won the day for the British, but Wes rued the praise. What good was a man fallen in the pursuit of his duty? What joy in that? What recompense were words of praise when his body was broken and ripped? He could only ponder his own mortality, which now he expected would have a sad and lonely ending.

A man without his profession. Without his faculties. Without an income, save what he got as a handout from his roué of a sire. Without hope of the comfort of a woman.

He growled in frustration at the memory of desire. The memory of how he’d made love to many a woman. The recollection of how virile he’d once been, fucking as he wished. When. Whom. Never loving. Until two months before he’d left for Portugal, Spain and the terror of Talavera. Then had found a sprite of a woman. Never before had that been his type. But once he’d seen her, talked with her, been amused and enchanted by her, he’d known he was fully caught. Captured. Enraptured. Only that one time in his life had he thought he might brave the family curse on all loving marriages and find more than the temporary slaking of his desires.

But Lady Lacy Featherstone would never want a weak and broken man. His gut wrenched at the memory of her in all her angelic glory. She was a beauty, an accomplished horsewoman, an heiress freshly debuted last Season with family connections and willful as sin. If he had ever considered himself a proper match for that lady, now he was less than suitable. He was a cripple. Deformed. An oddity for any drawing room, let alone a bedroom.

Lacy.
He shut his eye now, recalling how she had looked the night he’d met her for the very first time at his brother Adam’s house party in April. In jade green bombazine, she had followed him into the library after the supper.

“You are ignoring me, Wes,” she had accused him as she’d shut the door behind her. She winked at him, so coy, so forward as to address him by his first name when they’d just been introduced.

He’d chuckled ruefully. His need to stop eating her up with his eyes was a monstrous thing so gigantic, he’d had to retreat to the seclusion of the dusty old room. Alone. If only just to get his cock down. “Ignore you? Evidently not entirely.”

She drifted forward, her startling robin’s egg blue eyes searching his. “I want a kiss.”

He raised a brow and chuckled. “We have met only two hours ago.”

She came to stand within inches of him, her pale moonbeam hair a stunning accent to her ivory skin and the pink roses of her cheeks. “Minutes, hours. What do they matter when you know in your soul what is to be?”

He silently adored her audacity to counter him but for the sake of propriety he had had to show some resilience. “Ha! And what is that, Lady Featherstone?”

She tossed him a smile. “We are to be one. Forever.”

“You are so certain.”

“Doubt me? Kiss me and see.”

He could not take his eyes off her as she pressed her breasts against his chest. His fingers itched to draw her closer, feel her delicate curves flush to his quickening body. “You are all of what? Eighteen?”

“Nineteen,” she whispered, rising on her toes to put her lush lips to the corner of his mouth. “I have debuted. I am of age. Open to a proposal.”

He hooted. But he had to hold the boldness and the beauty that breathed before him. No other gentlewoman had ever been so brazen. He had to touch her, make certain she was real. His hands went round her small waist. “We are not suited.”

She slid her lips to rest fully atop his. “You are a cavalryman. I am a horsewoman. We are strong, independent and know what we want.”

He wrapped his arm around her back, and against his chest, he absorbed the warmth of her breasts. “You need a man of wealth and position. I have neither.”

“I have a large dowry and you have position. You are a colonel in the King’s Hussars.”

“We are at war, my sweet.”

“Ah. I see.” She kissed him once, quickly, the fragrance of her perfume fogging his brain. “You fear you will return an invalid.”

“Or not at all,” he corrected her, giving her a small shake.

She nestled closer to him. Her breasts, large and supple, bored into his chest. Her thighs, strong and insistent, pressed against his. Her voice, soft as a cat’s purr, enveloped him. She ran her fingers through the curls at his nape. “Darling, I care not how I have you. I simply want you.”

He snatched her hand away. “That is wrong.”

She placed his palm over one breast. “Kiss me and tell me then.”

How could he refuse?

She was courageous and wise and had foresight. Yet he had left his own wits somewhere in the drawing room. From the moment he had watched her greeting his sister-in-law, he had admired her beauty, her manners, her laugh. And he wished she were his.

So there in the library, she stood on tiptoes and brushed her lips over his.

“Darling Wes.” She took his hand from her breast and pushed it down to press against her mound. Beneath her gown, she was hot. “I need you. As you do me.” She demonstrated by pushing his fingers hard against her skirts. He could detect the plush lips of her intimate folds. “Feel how I need you.” She had gathered up her gown and she was so sweet, so torrid, so determined to enchant him that he could not resist helping her.

“Oh, god,” he’d groaned, his fingers wet and deep within her, sluicing her sweet flesh. “You are a jewel.” He’d stroked, listening to her succulent desire, feeling her heat and his own outrageous lust to get inside her. “But we will not do this.”

He’d pushed down her skirts, removed his hand. He had stopped his outlandish affront to her maidenly charms. He was, after all, an officer. A gentleman. From a well-known family whose only scourge was their curse.

Yet in the next two months, every time he’d seen her at house parties or balls, he had kissed her, caressed her and had been sorely tempted to take her wherever they stood. But reason had prevailed. He’d never been so bold. So foolish. Instead, he’d done the most ridiculous thing. The most outrageous act a Stanhope man ever did do. He’d gone to her father to ask for her hand. The man had readily accepted.