The Stanhope Challenge - Regency Quartet - Four Regency Romances (35 page)

She was not certain her ears worked well. She stared at him and there was no mistaking what she saw.

He dug from his pocket her wedding ring and held it out to her. She had feared, among other things, that he had returned it to the family vaults when she could not find it after she’d returned from Stanley. “I want you to have this. I took it with me to London and had the jeweller cut it down for you. Will you take it, Emma? Be my wife? Not merely for three months but always?”

This was so much more than she had imagined from him.

“You want me?” she whispered.

“I think I did from the first few minutes in my carriage, Emma. For your daring, your fortitude, your generous nature.”

“I can’t believe it,” she said in wonder. “What of the family curse?”

“To hell with it. Convenient excuses for men who do not wish to love completely.”

She laughed.

“I love you, Emma, darling.”

“I do believe, my lord,” she told him with joy spreading throughout her body, “my name is Emma Stanhope.”

He gave some ragged sound. “Will you keep it?”

She rose and strolled toward him. “Keep my name? The ring? And you?’ She reached up on her toes and curled her fingers into the hair at his nape to speak on the firm contours of his lips. “I have never known a gentleman to equal you. I do accept your offer. I love you, Jack. You and no other, my darling man. Now will you please kiss me to seal the deal?”

The End

The Bastard’s Passionate Prize

by

Cerise DeLand

The Stanhope Challenge, Book 4

Mark and Sirena

Note: This tale contains scenes of

erotic practices in 18th century harems.

London, September 1811

The ballroom was too damn stuffy. The dancing too demanding. The company too imperious for Mark Stanhope’s American taste. What appealed to him about escaping to stroll on the terrace of his half-brother’s London townhouse was as much dislike for those of the
ton
asking too many questions about his impressment by the British Navy, as it was the one woman among the hundred or so here who asked none. Yet, from across the crowded ballroom, she gazed at him with open appreciation. And her concentration had the odd effect upon him of luring him to her. As if she were a siren.

He paused, his glass of wine halfway to his lips as he scanned the luscious sight of her dark beauty. She had a mane of rich black hair, a heart-shaped face, large amber eyes with lush lashes and the ripest lips, cherry red.

He laughed at himself.

You are still delirious from your imprisonment, Stanhope!
A sloe-eyed beauty with diamonds dripping from her throat has no interest in a bastard with no money and no ability to add other jewels to her collection.

Besides, you leave this cold and rainy country as soon as your ship is outfitted.
No time for a liaison. No reason to become entangled with an English girl. Even if she were interested, she’s got that skinny dandy fussing over her.

And from the way she kept gazing at Mark, her companion held few charms for her.

Mark deposited his glass on the tray of a passing footman and tried to excuse himself from the company of his half-brother Wes.

“I note you appreciate our native roses,” Wes affirmed with a tilt of his head toward the beauty and her male suitor.

“I know perfection when I see it,” Mark rejoined with humor. “Too bad she has such dubious taste in men.”

“You’ve met de Ros?”

“Briefly earlier. Shall we be polite and say he left me quickly because, perhaps, he does not care for Americans?”
Or other men without titles?

Wes let out a laugh. “He cares for few men other than himself.”

“Too bad. She looks lively. I hope he does not bore her to death.”

His other half-brother Adam joined them. “Oh, that lady has enough wit for two. In a few minutes, she’ll leave him to gather his own wool.”

“Rightly so,” Wes added, adjusting his coat, the dress blues of his cavalry regiment.

“Word is he wishes her dowry,” Adam continued.

“A shame. What man would ask for money if he could have such a beauty as his own?” Mark allowed himself another glimpse of the lady.

“Colin de Ros, Earl of Rerrick, is her fiancé,” Wes told him.

She was taken. Sorrow cut through him. “Well, I hope he has something to commend him besides an estate and money to capture her interest or it will be a sad marriage.”

Wes shook his head, rueful. “My wife says de Ros lacks many qualities.”

Adam sighed. “Mine says the match was made when they were children.”

Mark grimaced. “Barbaric practice.”

“Agreed,” said Wes. “It is the way of society here.”

Mark eyed his brothers. “But none of you endured such an arrangement for your matches.”

“Never,” Wes rejoined, adjusting his black leather eye–patch over his war wound from the Battle of Talavera. “We three brothers vowed at an early age to avoid wedlock. No arranged partnerships for us.”

“Why is that?” Mark asked, fully interested in the subject, but watchful of how the Earl of Rerrick argued with his betrothed, then grabbed her elbow. “You two and Jack seem happily married.”

“We are,” Adam replied. “But we never expected to be.”

“No? Why not?”

Both of his brothers peered at him over the rims of their wine glasses, as their oldest brother Jack joined them. When Wes told him the subject of their conversation, Jack who was the Viscount Durham, wed a little more than a year now, drew himself up and laughed.

“Our father left us in much the same way as he left you, Mark. In our case, he left us in the care of nurses and nannies while he gallivanted about in pursuit of ever newer love affairs.”

Wes nodded toward the silver-haired gentleman paces away who was their father. “We saw how one man could move from one woman to another faster than the wind. We resented him for it because our each of our mothers died soon after our births.”

“We three agreed,” Adam finished, “to never repeat the mistake he made.”

“Besides,” Jack added, “there was an old curse on any Stanhope marriages that none would be happy.”

“Especially those that began as love affairs,” added dark-haired Felice, Adam’s wife, who came now to loop her arm through her husband’s and join the conversation.

Jack took a glass of wine from a passing footman. “But we each learned that marriages work best when the interest to preserve the union is stronger than the forces damning it.” He raised his glass. “To happy marriages.”

The four other Stanhopes agreed with a merry laugh.

Mark’s gaze traveled back to his siren. Her fiancé bent over her, chattering at her non-stop. And she stared up at him with glazed eyes.

Mark snorted.
She’s bored.

“She is lovely, isn’t she?” Felice asked Mark.

“Forgive me.” He smiled at the woman who had been so kind to take him as a houseguest since his release from a filthy jail weeks ago. “I am being rude.”

“No woman would think so.” Felice winked at him. “I know she would be complimented.”

“Not to receive the attentions of the family bastard,” he declared with an itch to be away from the strictures of a formality that reminded him moment to moment of his illegitimacy. “No matter how well accepted by his family. Forgive me, Felice. I do not wish to be crude.”

“You are not. And you must not disparage yourself so, Mark. We accept you. Love you. So does your father. After the way he quickly ransomed you from the impressment jail in Portsmouth—”

“I know. I am grateful. Though I sound otherwise, I do value his help.”

Jack pursed his lips, his countenance grim. “He has his reasons. No, he will not tell you, and he only recently told us, but he is ill. Very ill. He suffers from dropsy, which often lays him low, though he walks about as if he were the picture of good health. Nonetheless, he fears his end is near.”

Mark startled. “So you think that he ransomed me and my ship because—?”

“He wishes to make amends.” Jack confirmed with a nod. “Never doubt it.”

Mark swallowed back some of his resentment against his father. Still, old habits died hard and he had carried the anger around with him like an albatross since age twelve. “Purchasing forgiveness is a unique method.”

“He has more than enough money,” Wes stated.

“Where’s the harm to let him try?” Adam put forth.

The intriguing question had Mark choking on sudden compassion for a man to whom he’d vowed only hatred. Excusing himself hastily from his family’s company, Mark took the path to the terrace.

Pausing at the bottom of the steps, he fought his turmoil. To forgive a man who had seduced a young woman of good breeding, gotten her with child and then left her to bear the scurrilous jibes of her family and society would be an outrage. A betrayal of the woman who had left her family and brought him up by herself. Could he forgive John Stanhope such a crime?

Buying me out of that stinking rat hole and paying a king’s ransom to get me, my crew and my own clipper ship out of British Navy hands is a fine gesture.
But hatred for the man who never claimed him for twenty-nine years had lived like an animal in Mark Stanhope’s heart.

How to change that? Forgiveness was the answer, of course.

He grabbed a cheroot from his inner coat pocket and struck a match on the bottom of his new shoes. The autumn night was unusually warm and thick with moisture. He adjusted his new, stiff and very uncomfortable cravat. He shut his eyes and inhaled, hungry for the salty oceans that had been his home since his mother died and he climbed aboard a clipper in Baltimore harbor. This house, this city, this land was not his. He did not belong here. Welcomed though he was by his brothers, their wives and his half sister and her husband, Mark was used to making his way in the world. He had a strong independent streak brought on by his father’s abandonment nearly three decades ago. His sire’s disappearance still galled him, not so easily forgotten by the man’s ransom last month. Redemption for the sum of one hundred pounds silver seemed cheap by any measure.

Snorting, Mark ambled down the stone path and into the boxwood maze. One month and his life had changed for the second time in less than a year.
Was it for the better?

Walking into the tall greenery, he strode around, looking for serenity.
Count your blessings, Mark.

The memory of his mother’s dictum made him stop and sadly smile. He took a drag on his cigar. He had a family now. A huge one. A father. In fact and in deed. Three brothers. One sister. Four in-laws. Four nephews. Dear god, the Stanhopes were a veritable army of legitimate English society.
And here you are, an American privateer, a former prisoner of the British and one of two bastards of the family, the one no one even knew existed until a month ago.

Mark ground his teeth. His own impressment by His Majesty’s Royal Navy was an issue he intended to take up with his own government in Washington.
When I return home.

“Good evening, Mister Stanhope.”

The sound of a woman’s dulcet voice had Mark spinning around.

“Might I join you?” asked the lovely woman he had admired in the ballroom. Her golden eyes danced in the moonlight. Her hair, a swirl of sable curls, ruffled in the breeze.

His body acknowledged her rich beauty with swelling interest. “Is it permitted in proper English Society for an unmarried lady to speak with a man alone in the gardens?”

“No, but I do as I wish, sir. Have you another cheroot?” She arched one long dark brow and grinned at him.

He barked in laughter and reached inside his coat. “Do you smoke often?”

“I do.”

We shall see about that.
He opened his silver case and extended it toward her. As she leaned close, he caught a whiff of the camellias in her hair and knew if he kissed her, on her cheek, on her throat, she would smell of flowers there…
and everywhere
.

Her long fingers extracted a thin brown smoker. “You will strike a match?”

“I can.” He did just that, his mind afire with her audacity and charm. “Shall we walk toward the entrance to the maze?”

She inhaled on the cheroot, seeming uncaring of their position alone in the maze. “You have a care for your reputation, do you, good sir?”

“My own is solid as a rock.” He extended his arm and she took it with a nonchalance that had him chuckling. “Tarnished since birth.”

“Surely a man is what he makes of himself.” Her golden eyes twinkled from the distant lamplights. “Is that not what you Americans believe?”

“We do. But I stand here tonight and everyone in that house knows I am the son of John Stanhope, born on the wrong side of his blanket.”

She took a long inhalation from the cheroot and damn, if she didn’t fully enjoy the thing, delicately exhaling. “Are you intimidated by us?”

Her forthrightness tickled him. “Never. All men are equal and subject to vices.”

“Ah.” She inclined her head in agreement. “Some more than others.”

“And you?” He had to learn more about a young woman with such a need to do as she wished that she would brave society’s dictum at a large ball to approach him, walk with him in a secluded garden…and smoke. “Are you subject to more vices than other women?”

“You seek my confession?”

“I seek to know how much trouble I will be in when those people in there learn I have taken a turn with you in the garden and I do not even know your name.”

“Sirena.”

Siren.
The coincidence did not surprise him but in an oddly gratifying way amused him. Fate was an intriguing master, his friend Ch’iang Ling had told him years ago in Shanghai. ‘Best not to fight Her,’ the tiny merchant had warned. But with this young woman, Mark knew he had better not encourage her, either. Beholden to his father for his release from a British press gang last month, Mark was not the sort to repay kindness with insult. He knew he had to maneuver her back inside. Quickly.