Loe raamatut: «Regency High Society Vol 4»
Regency HIGH–SOCIETY AFFAIRS
The Sparhawk Bride Miranda Jarrett
The Rogue’s Seduction Georgina Devon
Sparhawk’s Angel Miranda Jarrett
The Proper Wife Julia Justiss
MILLS & BOON
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The Sparhawk Bride
Miranda Jarrett
For Kathleen,
With affection and regards.
The Perfect Roommate and the Other Blonde.
About the Author
MIRANDA JARRETT considers herself sublimely fortunate to have a career that combines history and happy endings — even if it’s one that’s also made her family far-too-regular patrons of the local pizzeria. Miranda is the author of over thirty historical romances, and her books are enjoyed by readers the world over. She has won numerous awards for her writing, including two Golden Leaf Awards and two Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Awards, and has three times been a Romance Writers of America RITA® Award finalist for best short historical romance.
Miranda is a graduate of Brown University, with a degree in art history. She loves to hear from readers at PO Box 1102, Paoli, PA 19301–1145, USA, or at MJarrett21@aol.com
Prologue
St-Pierre, Martinique 1754
“Look at them, Michel!” whispered Antoinette Géricault urgently. “Look at them and remember all they have stolen from you!”
Her fingers clenched the boy’s shoulders tightly, her nails sharp through the worn linen of his shirt. But Michel did not flinch. He deserved whatever discipline Maman gave him. Hadn’t she proved to him times beyond counting that he was wicked and shiftless, scarcely worth the toil it cost her to feed him? If she didn’t love him so much, she wouldn’t bother to correct him or strive so hard to make him worthy of his heritage.
And of her. He must be worthy of Maman’s love, for she was all he had.
“Look at them, Michel!” Her breath was hot on his ear as she leaned farther over his shoulder and out the single window of the attic room they shared. “Mon Dieu, that they should come here to my very doorstep after so many years! Look at all they have, while you must go wanting!”
The English family was leaving the sloop now, lingering on the gangway for their last farewell with the captain and crew. They were treated more as honored guests instead of passengers, and why shouldn’t they be? They were handsome and prosperous, well dressed and well fed, from the broad-shouldered father to the small, plump mother with a baby in her arms and four more children gathered around her.
The oldest boy, the one who looked to be Michel’s age, tugged on the leash of a rambunctious black puppy, all floppy ears and buggy-whip tail. The boy bent to pat his back, and the puppy licked his face in a wet, sloppy kiss. The mother laughed, her head tipped back so her merriment rang out clear to Michel’s ears, and with her free arm reached out to fondly hug the boy’s shoulders.
“Look at her, the shameless English whore!” whispered Antoinette furiously. “Look at how she can laugh at the suffering she has brought to us!”
Michel looked at the other boy, forcing himself to share her outrage. He would never have a puppy. There was scarcely enough bread for Maman and him, let alone for a dog. He would never have a coat of blue superfine, or a three-cornered beaver hat with a silk cockade, or shoes with brass buckles, or a leather-covered spyglass to tuck nonchalantly beneath his arm. With shame he thought of his single pair of breeches, too short now to tie at the knee, his darned thread stockings, the worn shoes with the mismatched laces that he’d stolen from the feet of a drunken sailor.
He would never have two brothers to jostle and jest with the way this boy was doing. His father would never crouch down to point out something high among the mast-filled skyline of the harbor, something just for the two of them to share. His mother would never embrace him like that, openly, for all the world to see.
And his Maman never laughed….
“I did not know there was a daughter, too,” his mother was muttering. “Evil little creature, born of their sins. May she perish from the same shame that her father brought to me!”
Before this, Michel had not noticed the little girl, hidden from his sight by her mother’s skirts until she skipped forward to throw her arms around the puppy’s neck. Though she was scarcely larger than the dog, she showed no fear of it, shrieking with delight as the puppy tried to lick her face, too. The hood of her cloak slipped back and Michel could see her face, her round, rosy cheeks and her laughing eyes, her black hair charmingly tousled, the promise of her parents’ looks already confirmed in her beautiful little face.
Unconsciously Michel inched forward, drawn by the spell of the small girl’s happiness even from this distance. Beside him his mother smiled with grim approval.
“You will not forget now, will you, Michel?” she whispered, almost crooning. “You will never forget them until justice is done. For that man is Gabriel Sparhawk, and he is the one who murdered your father.”
Chapter One
Newport Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations 1771
He hadn’t meant to come here to the house, not on the night of the wedding. If anyone recognized him, he could be dancing at the end of a rope before he knew it, and then how would justice be served?
Another carriage stopped before the house, and Michel Géricault shrank back into the shadows of the tall hedge. More wedding guests—more red-faced, overdressed Englishmen and their blowsy ladies—braying to one other as they tried and failed to ape their betters in London.
Mon Dieu, how foolish they all were, these Anglais, and how much he hated them!
The front door to the house swung open, candlelight flooding into the streets. Instead of the servant Michel had expected, the unmistakable figure of Captain Sparhawk himself appeared, his broad shoulders silhouetted in the doorway as he welcomed the newcomers to his daughter’s wedding. After a week of watching the man, following him like a shadow from his home to his countinghouse to his ships, Michel could look at Sparhawk now almost impassively, without the white-hot fury he’d felt at first. It was better this way, much better. He’d long ago learned that passion of any kind led to the kind of carelessness he could ill afford tonight.
Farther down the street he heard a woman’s soft laughter and the footsteps of her companion on the brick sidewalk, and swiftly Michel eased deeper into the tall bushes that formed the hedge. He was in an empty, formal garden now, between a parterre of roses and an arbor of clematis and honeysuckle with a lady’s teakwood bench. Beyond that the clipped lawns rolled clear to the very edge of the harbor itself. From inside the house came the laughter of the guests, mingled with the more distant sounds of hired musicians tuning their instruments. Somewhere upstairs a tall clock chimed the hour: eight bells.
He should leave now, before it was too late. Only a fool would stay.
But from here Michel could see through the open windows into the house and the parlor itself, and like the set of a play when the curtain first rises, the scene beckoned him to stay, to watch. On a laden supper table in the center of the room sat the wedding cake, raised high on a silver epergne festooned with white paper lace and chains, and on another table was arranged a display of wedding gifts, a king’s ransom in silver glittering in the candlelight. A score of candles lit in an empty room, the finest white spermaceti, not tallow; that alone was an unimaginable extravagance.
A coarse, vulgar display, a barbarous English show of wealth without taste. They said Captain Sparhawk had spared nothing to celebrate his favorite daughter’s marriage. What price would he offer, then, when the chit vanished without a trace?
A flicker of white in the moonlight at the far end of the house caught Michel’s eye, a pale curtain blown outward through an open window. But why only that window, on a night as still as this one, unless the curtain was being pushed by someone within? Warily Michel touched his belt with the pistols and knife, and swore softly to himself, wishing the street were clear so he could retreat through the hedge.
But to his surprise, a lady’s leg came through the window next, a long, slender leg in a silk stocking with a green fringed garter, followed by its mate as the young woman swung herself over the windowsill and dropped to the grass. Cynically Michel wondered if it was her father or, more likely, her husband that she’d escaped, and he glanced around the garden again to see if he’d somehow overlooked her waiting lover.
The girl paused long enough to shake out her skirts, her dark head bowed as she smoothed the cream-colored sateen with both hands, then hurried across the grass with a soft rustle of silk. As she came closer, the moonlight caught her full in the face, and unconsciously Michel swore again.
She froze at the sound, one hand raised to the pearls around her throat as her startled gaze swept the shadows until she found Michel.
Startled, but not afraid. “You’ve caught me, haven’t you?” she asked wryly. “Fair and square. You must be one of my brothers’ friends, for I don’t believe I’ve met you, have I?”
“But I know you,” he said softly, his voice deep and low, his accent barely discernible. It had been nearly twenty years, yet still he would have recognized her anywhere. “Miss Jerusa Sparhawk.”
“True enough.” She bobbed him a little curtsy. “Then you must be friends with Josh. He’s the only one of my brothers I truly favor. As it should be, considering we’re twins. But then, I expect you knew that already.”
Michel nodded in agreement. Oh, he knew a great many things about the Sparhawks, more than even she did herself.
“Miss Jerusa Sparhawk,” she repeated, musing. “I’ll wager you’ll be the last to call me that. While you and all the others act as witnesses, in a quarter hour I’ll become Mrs. Thomas Carberry.”
Her smile was dazzling, enough to reduce any other man to instant fealty. He’d heard much praise of her beauty, the perfection of her face, the flawlessness of her skin, the vivid contrast between her black hair and green eyes and red mouth, but none of that praise came close to capturing her charm, her radiance. Easy even for him to see why she was considered the reigning belle of the colony.
Not that any of it mattered.
She was still a Sparhawk.
Still his enemy.
“Is this really the great love match they say?” He didn’t miss the irony that she’d mistaken him for a guest, let alone a friend of her brother’s, and trusted him to the point of not even asking his name.
Like a pigeon, he thought with grim amusement, a pretty, plump pigeon that flew cooing into his hands.
The girl tipped her head quizzically, the diamonds in her earrings dancing little fragments of light across her cheeks. “You dare to ask if I love my Tom?”
“Do you?” He was wasting time he didn’t have, but he wanted to know exactly how much suffering he’d bring to her family this night.
“Do I love Tom? How could I not?” Her smile outshone the moonlight as her words came out in a tumbled, breathless rush. “He’s amusing and kind and, oh, so very handsome, and he dances more gracefully than any other gentleman in Newport, and he says clever things to make me laugh and pretty things to make me love him even more. How could I not love my darling Tom?”
“Doubtless it helped his suit that he’s rich.”
“Rich?” Her eyes were innocently blank. “Well, I suppose his father is. So is mine, if you must put so brass a face on it. But that’s certainly not reason enough to marry someone.”
“Certainly not,” agreed Michel dryly. She’d never wanted for anything in her sweet, short life. How could she guess the lengths she’d go to if she were cold enough, hungry enough, desperate enough? “But if you love him as you claim, then why have you run from your own wedding?”
“Is that what you believed I was doing? Oh, my!” She wrinkled her elegant nose with amusement. “It’s Mama, you see. She says that because I’m the bride I must stay in my bedchamber until the very minute that I come down the stairs with Father. If even one person lays eyes upon me before then, it’s bad luck, and I’ll turn straight into salt or some such.”
Another time, another woman, and he might have laughed at the little shrug she gave her shoulders and the sigh that followed. Another time, another woman, and he might have let himself be charmed.
She sighed dramatically. “But I would want a rose from this garden—those bushes there, the pink ones—to put in my hair because Tom favors pink. Banished as I was, there was no one else but myself to fetch it, and so you found me here. Still, that’s hardly running off. I’ve every intention of returning the same way I came, through the window into my father’s office and up the back stairs.”
“Don’t you fear that they’ll miss you?”
“Not with the house full of guests that need tending, they won’t.” Restlessly she rubbed her thumb across the heavy pearl cuff around one wrist, and, to his surprise, Michel realized that much of her bravado was no more than ordinary nervousness. “The ceremony proper won’t begin until half past eight.”
No matter what she said, Michel knew time was fast slipping away. He’d dawdled here too long as it was. His mind raced ahead, changing his plans. Now that she’d seen him, he couldn’t afford to let her go, but perhaps, in a way, this would be even better than what he’d originally intended. His fingers brushed against the little vial of chloroform in the pocket of his coat. Even Maman would appreciate the daring it would take to steal the bride from her own wedding.
The Sparhawk bride. Mordieu, it was almost too perfect.
“You’re not superstitious, then?” he asked softly, easing the cork from the neck of the vial with his thumb. “You don’t believe your mother’s unhappy predictions will come true now that I’ve seen you?”
She turned her head, eyeing him with sidelong doubt. “You’ll tell her?”
“Nay, what reason would I have to do that? You go pick your roses now, ma chère, and then back in the house before they come searching for you.”
Hesitancy flickered through her eyes, and too late he realized he’d unthinkingly slipped into speaking French. But then her doubt vanished as quickly as it had appeared, replaced by the joyful smile he was coming to recognize. With a pang of regret that caught him by surprise, he knew it would be the last smile she’d ever grant him.
“Then thank you,” she said simply. “I don’t care which of my brothers is your friend, because now you’re mine, as well.”
She turned away toward the flowers before he could answer. Her cream-colored skirts rustled around her as she bent gracefully over the roses, and the sheer lawn cuffs of her gown fluttered back from her wrists in the breeze as she reached to pluck a single, pink rose.
So much grace, thought Michel as he drew the dampened handkerchief from his pocket, so much beauty to mask such poisoned blood. She struggled for only a moment as he pressed the cloth over her mouth and nose, then fell limp in his arms.
He glanced back at the house as he carried the unconscious girl into the shadow of the tall hedges. There he swiftly pulled off her jewelry, the pearl necklace and bracelet and ring, the diamonds from her ears, even the paste buckles from her shoes. Whatever else they called him, he wasn’t a thief, and he had pride enough to leave her jewels behind. He yanked the pins from her hair and mussed the elaborate stiffened curls until they fell in an untidy tangle to her shoulders, shading her face. With his thumb he hurriedly smudged dirt across one of her cheeks and over her hands, trying hard not to think of how soft her skin was beneath his touch.
She was a Sparhawk, not just a woman. Think of how she would revile him if she knew—when she learned—his father’s name!
He used his knife to cut away the bottom silk flounce of her gown, baring the plain linen of her underskirt, which he dragged through the dirt beneath the bushes. Finally he yanked off his own coat and buttoned it around her shoulders. As he’d hoped, the long coat covered what remained of her gown, and in the dark streets, with her grimy face and tousled hair, she’d pass for one more drunken strumpet from the docks, at least long enough for him to retrieve his horse from the stable.
Briefly he sat back on his heels and wiped his sleeve across his forehead as he glanced one last time at the candlelit house. The girl had been right. No alarms, no shouts of panic or pursuit came through the open windows, only the sounds of laughter and excited conversation. It took a moment longer for him to realize that the loud, rapid thumping was the beat of his own heart.
One last task, that was all, and then he’d be done.
Swiftly he retrieved the rose she’d picked from where it had fallen and laid it across the pile of her jewelry. He dug deep into the pocket of his waistcoat until he found the piece of paper. With fingers that shook only a little, he unfolded and stabbed the page onto the rose’s thorns so that the smudged black fleur de lis would be unmistakable.
The symbol of France, the mark of Christian Sainte-Juste Deveaux.
A sign that Gabriel Sparhawk would read as easily as his own name.
And at last Maman would smile.
Chapter Two
It was the rain that woke Jerusa, the rattle of the heavy drops on the shingles overhead. Still too groggy to open her eyes, she rubbed her bare arm against the damp chill and groped for her silk-lined coverlet. She knew she’d left it on the end of the bed last night, there beside her dressing gown. Blast, where was it? Her blind fingers reached farther and touched the sharp prickle of musty straw.
“Whatever you’re seeking, it isn’t there.”
She turned toward the man’s voice, forcing herself to open her eyes. The world began to spin in such dizzying circles that she swiftly squeezed her eyes shut again with a groan. Now she noticed the foul taste in her mouth and how her head ached abominably, as if she’d had too much sherry and sweetmeats the night before. She must be ill; that would explain why she felt so wretched. But why was there straw in her bed and a man in her bedchamber, and where was that infernal coverlet?
“There’s no call for moaning,” continued the man unsympathetically. “No matter how badly you feel now, I do believe you’ll live.”
He wasn’t one of her brothers, he wasn’t Tom, and he certainly wasn’t her father, yet still the man’s voice seemed oddly familiar, and not at all reassuring. Uneasily she opened her eyes again, this time only a fraction. Still the world spun, but if she concentrated hard she found she could slow the circles until they stopped.
What she saw then made even less sense. Instead of her own bed with the tall posts in the house where she’d been born, she lay curled on a heap of last summer’s musty straw in the corner of a barn she didn’t recognize. Gloomy gray daylight filtered halfheartedly through cracks in the barn’s siding. There were none of the familiar sounds of Newport, no church bells, no horses’ hooves and wagon wheels on the paving stones, no sailors calling from the ships in the harbor, nothing beyond the falling rain and the wind and the soft snuffling and stamping of the horses in the last two stalls.
Nothing, that is, beyond the man who sprawled in his stocking feet on the bench beneath the barn’s single window, watching her intently over a copy of last week’s Newport Mercury, his boots placed neatly before him. She guessed he was not so much older than herself, still in his twenties, but though his features were regular, even handsome, there was a grim wariness to the set of his wide mouth that aged him far beyond his years. The gray light brought gold to his hair, the only warmth to be found in his face. Certainly not in his eyes; how could eyes as blue as the sky be so cold?
“Who are you?” she asked, her confusion shifting to uneasiness.
He cocked one skeptical brow. “You don’t remember, my fair little bride?”
“Bride?” She pushed herself up on shaky arms and stared at him, mystified. Surely she wasn’t married to a man like this one. “When was I—”
And then abruptly she broke off as everything came rushing back to her in a single, horrible instant. Her wedding to Tom, the tears of joy in her mother’s eyes and the pride in her father’s as they’d left her alone in her bedchamber, how she’d climbed from the window to find a rose for her hair and instead found herself in this man’s company. She had been fooled by his plain but well-cut clothing and his ready smile, and she had believed him to be a guest at her wedding. She had trusted him, for then he had seemed trustworthy, even charming. Now he seemed neither.
Frantically she threw back the rough blanket that had covered her and saw the soiled, tattered remnants of her wedding gown. Gone was the pearl cuff that Mama had given her as she’d dressed, and her hands flew to her throat, bare now of the necklace that had come from Tom.
“You’ve not only kidnapped me but robbed me, as well!” she gasped, struggling to rise to her feet. “I demand, sir, that you take me back home at once!”
“So that your father can see me hung?” His smile was humorless as he refolded the newspaper and tossed it onto the bench beside him. “I’m afraid that won’t do, Miss Jerusa. And try not to be so imperious, ma chère. You’re scarcely in a position to make demands.”
The sheer lawn fichu that had been tied across her neckline had vanished, as well, and Jerusa was shamefully conscious of how his gaze had shifted from her face to where her stays raised and displayed her half-bare breasts in fashionable décolletage.
Swiftly she snatched up the blanket and flung it over her shoulders. “My father will see a rogue like you hung, you can be mightily sure of that! If you know who I am, then you know who he is, and he won’t stand for what you’ve done to me, not for a moment!”
He clucked softly. “Such wasteful, idle threats, ma chère!”
“You’re French, aren’t you?” Her green eyes narrowed. “You speak English almost as well as a gentleman, but you’re French.”
He shrugged carelessly. “Perhaps I am. Perhaps I merely prefer the French manner for endearments. Does it matter?”
“It will to my father,” she said warmly. “Father hates the French, and with good reason, too, considering all they’ve tried to do to him. Why, he’s probably already on his way here, along with Tom and my brothers, and I don’t want to even consider what they shall do to you when they arrive and Father learns you’re French!”
“‘When they arrive.’ That, ma belle, is the real question, isn’t it?” He reached into the pocket of his waistcoat to pull out his watch and held it up for her to see. “It’s half past six. Nearly a full night and day have passed since we departed Newport together, and still no sign of any of your gallant knights. So how does it matter if I am French or English or dropped to earth from the moon itself?”
She clutched the blanket more tightly, trying to fight her rising panic. She’d no idea so much time had passed, and she thought of how worried her parents must be. And Tom. Lord, how he must be suffering, to have her vanish on the night of their wedding!
“Have you at least had the decency to send some sort of note to tell them that I am unhurt?” There were so many perils that could befall a woman in a harbor town like Newport, and she hated to think of her poor mother imagining every one. Without thinking, she touched her bare wrist where Mama’s bracelet had been before she remembered bitterly that this man had stolen it. The pearl cuff had been special, a gift to Mama on her own wedding day, which she had given, in turn, to Jerusa. “You can’t possibly know the pain you’ve caused my family!”
“Ah, but I do.” His expression was oddly, chillingly triumphant. “But you can be sure I left behind a message that your father will understand.”
“Then they will come,” she said, as much to convince herself as him. “They won’t abandon me. They’ll find us, wherever you’ve taken me.”
“I’m sure they will,” he said easily, stretching his arms before him. Though he wasn’t much taller than Jerusa herself, there was no mistaking the strength in his lean, muscled body. “In fact I’d be disappointed if they didn’t. But not here, and not so soon.”
“Where, then?” she asked, her desperation growing by the minute. “When?”
“Where I please, and when I say.” Those cold blue eyes never left her face as he tucked the watch back into its pocket, and he spoke slowly, carefully, as if she were a child he wished to impress. “Remember, sweet Jerusa, that it’s my word that matters now, not yours. I know that will be a difficult lesson for a Sparhawk, but you seem a clever enough girl, and in time you’ll learn. You’ll learn.”
But she didn’t want to learn, especially not from him. Jerusa shivered. How much longer could he intend to keep her his prisoner? It was bad enough that she had passed a night alone with him when she’d been drugged into unconsciousness, but what would he expect tonight, when she was all too aware of him both as her captor and as a man?
“If it’s money you want,” she said softly, “you know my father will pay it. You already have my jewelry to keep for surety. Let me go free now, and I’ll see you’re sent whatever else you wish.”
“Let you go free?” He looked at her with genuine amusement. “Not a quarter of an hour ago you were ready to lead me to the gallows yourself, and now you ask me to trust you?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I meant—”
“It doesn’t matter what you mean, because I don’t want your money. I didn’t want your baubles, either, which is why I left them behind.” His voice slipped suggestively lower. “It’s you I want, Miss Jerusa Sparhawk. You, and nothing else.”
She didn’t ask why. She didn’t want to know. All she wanted now was to go home to her family and to Tom and forget that she’d ever set eyes on this horrible Frenchman. How had the most glorious day of her life disintegrated into this?
She should have known he wouldn’t bargain with her, just as she shouldn’t have trusted him in the garden in the first place. She wasn’t sure if she believed him about the jewelry, either, though it would be her luck to have stumbled into a man too honorable for theft but not for kidnapping.
Luck. She remembered Mama’s half-serious warning as she’d helped Jerusa dress: bad luck to the bride who let the world see her in her wedding finery before she was made a wife. Jerusa had scoffed at the time, but look what had happened. Was there ever a more unfortunate bride?
Unfortunate, homesick and more frightened than she’d ever been in her life.
She stared out the little square window, struggling to keep back the tears. A man like this one would only mock her if she wept, and no matter how bleak her situation was, she’d no wish to give him that pleasure. She’d given away too much already.
Far better to remember that no matter what else happened she was still a Sparhawk, and Sparhawks were never cowards. Hadn’t Mama herself fought off a score of French pirates to save Father long ago, before they were married? Mama wouldn’t have stood about wringing her hands until she was rescued. Mama would have found a way to help free herself, and so, decided Jerusa with shaky resolution, must she.
The rain had stopped, and a milky-pale sun was sliding slowly through the clouds toward the horizon. One night, one day. How far from Newport could they be? The land through the window was a fallow, anonymous pasture that could have been anywhere on the island. The key would be to find the water, Narragansett Bay or the Sakonnet River, for either would take her back to Newport. Even though she wasn’t a sailor like her brothers, she’d grown up on Aquidneck Island, and she was sure she’d be able to recognize nearly every beach on it. Certainly she’d have better bearings than some cocksure bully of a Frenchman.
Now all she had to do was get away from him.
“I don’t feel quite well,” she announced, praying she sounded convincing. “Whatever smelling stuffs you used to force me to sleep—I fear they’ve made me ill.”
He sighed with exasperation. “If you’re going to be sick, then use that bucket by the stall. Don’t foul the straw if you can help it.”
“It’s not that,” she said quickly. She felt herself blushing furiously from excitement, fear and embarrassment. “It’s that I must use the privy.”
He muttered to himself in French, and though she didn’t understand the words, Jerusa knew well enough that he was swearing.
She bent over from the waist, rubbing her stomach. “Truly. If you please, I must go.”
“You’re not going alone.” With another sigh he leaned forward to pull on his boots.
Jerusa saw her chance and seized it. She raced to the barn door, shoved it open just enough to slip through and raced outside. Swiftly she pushed the door shut and threw the long swinging bolt into the latches, barricading the Frenchman inside. With a little laugh of giddy exhilaration she turned and ran, away from the barn, the privy and the burned-out ruin of a house. She didn’t recognize the farm, or what was left of it, but that didn’t matter. Before her, to the east, lay the pewter gray of the water, and her salvation.
