The Rake of Hollowhurst Castle. Elizabeth Beacon
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‘How nice for us,’ she replied stubbornly.
‘It must be,’ he replied, and she glared at him before embarking on a discussion about babies with Caro designed to exclude sane gentlemen, except that his friend Rob seemed to find it as fascinating as they did.
He’d never be that much of a fool about his wife and children, Charles assured himself. He’d be an interested and even a fond father, especially as his own sire had consigned him to his formidable grandmother’s care without a backward look at an early age. Charles’s lips twisted in a sardonic smile as he recalled a day when the father he had yearned for came home at last. Louis Afforde had fainted at the sight of him, coming round to murmur artistically, ‘The boy is too like her—my one, my only, my dear departed love. He offends my eyes and grieves my suffering heart.’
Louis, an aspiring poet, promptly went straight back to London and his current ‘only’ love and left his son with an aversion to romantic love and a gap in his young life where his remaining parent should have been. Packed off to live with his grandparents at the age of six, Charles swore he’d never fall in love, whatever love might be. Eyeing Rob now doting over the wife he’d once professed to hate, he decided he still didn’t know what it was and was quite content with his ignorance. He’d respect and admire his wife—if he desired her as well that was a handsome bonus—but he’d never love her.
Nor would he make a cake of himself over being a husband and father as Rob appeared happy to. His children would have fond but sensible parents, which was just as well considering his grandmother was too old to take on a pack of brats now. He thought the Dowager Countess of Samphire would like Miss Courland as a granddaughter-in-law and he doubted Roxanne would quail at meeting such a brusque and ruthless old lady, and then caught himself out in a dreamy smile with horrified shock.
Roxanne would make a good wife and mother and he’d be faithful and respect her, but he’d not live in her pocket. Something told him it wouldn’t be that simple, but he ignored it because he’d promised her brother he’d marry her if she’d have him, and he wanted her. Having his child would settle her into her new role as his wife, and the thought of it made him march to the window and gaze out at the view while he got himself back under control. The idea of seeing Roxanne sensually awake and fully aware of herself as a woman for the first time sent him into such a stew of urgency that he was unfit for company. It boded ill for his detachment, he admitted to himself as he fought primitive passions, but very well for begetting his brats!
‘Fascinating view, is it?’ Rob asked with a satirical smile as he came to stand by his old friend, too much understanding of Charles’s response to Roxanne Courland in his steady green gaze for comfort.
‘All the more so for being mine,’ he replied softly.
‘Possessiveness, it’s the curse of our sex,’ Rob taunted, and Charles wondered if he wasn’t yet truly forgiven for trying to win Rob’s lady off him, although he’d been as blithely ignorant of who she really was as her husband had been at the time.
He had admired Caro’s refusal to sit back and meekly accept that their arranged marriage was an abomination to her husband, and her ingenious campaign to win him to her bed by foul means when fair ones must fail, since Rob had vowed never to share any room with his wife after their wedding. Rob had danced to the seductive and scandalous new courtesan Cleo Tournier’s tune without a clue that she was his unwanted and despised wife, and Charles decided vengefully that he was glad he’d helped her tame the one-time rake now watching him as if he was a specimen on a pin.
‘You could be right,’ he replied calmly enough.
‘Be careful what you’re at,’ Rob warned him silkily. ‘Miss Courland isn’t up to the games you play and she’s far from unprotected.’
‘She needs no protection from me,’ Charles replied shortly.
‘Have you undergone a sea change then, Charles?’
‘A permanent one,’ he replied, gaze steady on Rob’s challenging one.
‘Good God, I think you really mean it.’
‘I do.’
‘It’ll provide me with an interesting diversion to watch you try to achieve that aim then,’ Rob said with a grin that almost made Charles wish them both twenty years younger, so he could treat him to the appropriate punch on the nose. ‘I don’t think Miss Courland will be easily persuaded you’re not a wild sea-rover any more,’ he warned with unholy delight.
‘I’m beginning to agree with you,’ Charles muttered darkly and stared broodingly at the quirky old garden he’d acquired with his new property.
‘Sometimes the chase is all the more worth winning when it seems nigh impossible,’ Rob said, softening his challenge as he sent a significant glance at his lady, who’d led him a fine dance before letting her husband catch her just as she’d planned all along.
‘I’m planning a change of lifestyle, not abject surrender,’ Charles protested uneasily.
‘And sometimes there’s victory in defeat, although that’s not a concept I expect a grizzled old sea dog to understand.’
‘Since you talk in riddles, no wonder I can’t make head or tail of them.’
‘You’ll see,’ Rob said with an irritatingly superior smile and turned back to the fascinating spectacle of his wife like a compass to the north.
Chapter Five
Taking tea and cake in a lady’s sitting room like some tame cicisbeo, Charles fought an unaccustomed urge to snap and snarl at all and sundry and reminded himself he had a reputation as a dangerous charmer to uphold. He didn’t feel very charming when Roxanne Courland refused to look at him and made certain their fingers didn’t touch when she passed him his teacup. If his one-time crew could see him now, they’d laugh themselves into a collective apoplexy and save the hangman a job, he reflected bitterly.
Instead of dwelling on his current woes, he decided to set about solving one or two of them. First he must find a suitable lady to chaperone his prospective bride. Not easy when only he and Davy Courland knew he was to wed. He sipped his tea with a creditable attempt at looking as if he enjoyed it and took a mental inventory. His formidable grandmother would put in an appearance when Caro’s whelp was due since she doted on her, so he must have someone in place before she decided to take the role herself.
There was Great-Aunt Laetetia Varleigh, his grandmother’s spinster sister. Yet Aunt Letty lacked the inner core of loving softness Lady Samphire hid behind a formidable manner. No, she wouldn’t do, even if she’d leave Varleigh village to lapse into the hotbed of scandal it might become without her constant vigilance. He was reluctantly contemplating advertising when his latest conversation with Tom Varleigh slotted into his mind and made the solution seem so obvious he felt a fool for missing it.
‘Stella refuses to come and live with myself and Joanna now poor Marcus Lavender’s dead,’ Tom had told him. ‘She claims Joanna doesn’t need another female cluttering up Varleigh Manor, so she’s living at the Dower House with Mama and Great-Aunt Letty. She’s stubborn and headstrong, but even my big sister doesn’t deserve that, Charles. Before six months are up, she’ll murder one of them or be fit for Bedlam herself.’
It would be ideal, he told himself, wondering fleetingly if he was as interfering and arrogant as Miss Courland believed him to be. Cousin Stella was in her early thirties and the respectable widow of a fine man who’d died at the ill-starred Battle of Toulouse when, if only they’d known it, the Great War was over and a peace treaty already signed. Stella would be glad of an alternative to living at Varleigh Dower House even if she was too stubborn to admit it, and her chaperonage would be more theory than fact if he knew Stella. Yes, that would suit all three of them very well. Now all he need do was get Stella here without Roxanne realising it was his doing.
A carefully worded plea to Roxanne’s sister to send her word of any suitable