Read Mastered By Love Online

Authors: Stephanie Laurens

Tags: #Romance, #Fiction, #General, #Historical, #American Light Romantic Fiction, #England - Social Life and Customs - 19th Century, #Regency novels, #Man-Woman Relationships, #England, #Nobility - England - 19th century, #Romance - Historical, #Romance: Historical, #Marriage, #Fiction - Romance, #American Historical Fiction, #Regency Fiction, #Love Stories

Mastered By Love

BOOK: Mastered By Love
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Stephanie Laurens

Mastered By Love

A Bastion Club Novel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contents

 

 

 

 

 

The Bastion Club

 

 

 

One

 

It wasn’t supposed to have been like this.

 

 

 

Two

 

Armor of the sort she needed wasn’t easy to find.

 

 

 

Three

 

At nine the next morning, Royce sat at the head…

 

 

 

Four

 

Royce strode into the breakfast parlor early the next morning,…

 

 

 

Five

 

That evening, Royce walked into the great drawing room in…

 

 

 

Six

 

Royce walked into the drawing room that evening more uncertain…

 

 

 

Seven

 

The next morning, garbed in her riding habit, Minerva sat…

 

 

 

Eight

 

Royce walked into the drawing room that evening, and calmly…

 

 

 

Nine

 

Despite the physical frustrations of the night, Royce was in…

 

 

 

Ten

 

The next morning, she commenced her campaign to protect her…

 

 

 

Eleven

 

By lunchtime the next day, Royce was hot, flushed, sweaty—and…

 

 

 

Twelve

 

A full moon rode the sky; Minerva didn’t need a…

 

 

 

Thirteen

 

He woke her sometime before dawn, time enough to indulge…

 

 

 

Fourteen

 

Royce woke her before dawn in predictable fashion; Minerva reached…

 

 

 

Fifteen

 

Two nights later, Minerva slipped into Royce’s rooms, and gave…

 

 

 

Sixteen

 

Minerva—take off the gown.

 

 

 

Seventeen

 

Hamish O’Loughlin, you mangy Scot, how dare you tell Royce…

 

 

 

Eighteen

 

Minerva paused just inside Royce’s sitting room to drag in…

 

 

 

Nineteen

 

At a smidgen before dawn, Minerva floated back to her…

 

 

 

Twenty

 

The next morning, Minerva stood beside Royce as, with the…

 

 

 

Twenty-One

 

The clamor was deafening.

 

 

 

Twenty-Two

 

Minerva had weathered the prick of the cravat pin—more through…

 

 

 

 

About the Author

 

 

 

Other Books by Stephanie Laurens

 

 

 

Copyright

 

 

 

About the Publisher

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Bastion Club

“a last bastion against the matchmakers of the ton”

MEMBERS

 

Lady Letitia Randall

 

#7
Christian Allardyee,
Marquess of Dearne

 

Alicia “Carrington” Pevensey

 

#2
Anthony Blake,
Viscount Torrington

 

Phoebe Malleson

 

#5
Jocelyn Deverell,
Viscount Paignton

 

 

#1 THE LADY CHOSEN

 

#2 A GENTLEMAN’S HONOR

 

#3 A LADY OF HIS OWN

 

#4 A FINE PASSION

 

Lady Penelope Selborne

 

#3
Charles St. Austell,
Earl of Lostwithiel

 

Madeline Gascoigne

 

#6
Gervase Tregarth,
Earl of Crowhurst

 

Lady Clarice Attwood

 

#4
Jack Warnefleet,
Baron Warnefleet of Minchinbury

 

Leonora Carling

 

#1
Tristan Wemyss,
Earl of Trentham

 

And so it ends. DL

 

 

#5 TO DISTRACTION

 

#6 BEYOND SEDUCTION

 

#7 THE EDGE OF DESIRE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One

 

 

 

 

September 1816

 

Coquetdale, Northumbria

 

I
t wasn’t supposed to have been like this.

 

Wrapped in his greatcoat, alone on the box seat of his excellently sprung curricle, Royce Henry Varisey, tenth Duke of Wolverstone, turned the latest in the succession of post-horses he’d raced up the highway from London onto the minor road leading to Sharperton and Harbottle. The gently rounded foothills of the Cheviot Hills gathered him in like a mother’s arms; Wolverstone Castle, his childhood home and newly inherited principal estate, lay close by the village of Alwinton, beyond Harbottle.

 

One of the horses broke stride; Royce checked it, held the pair back until they were in step, then urged them on. They were flagging. His own high-bred blacks had carried him as far as St. Neots on Monday; thereafter he’d had a fresh pair put to every fifty or so miles.

 

It was now Wednesday morning, and he was a long way from London, once again—after sixteen long years—entering home territory. Ancestral territory. Rothbury and the dark glades of its forest lay behind him; ahead
the rolling, largely treeless skirts of the Cheviots, dotted here and there with the inevitable sheep, spread around the even more barren hills themselves, their backbone the border with Scotland beyond.

 

The hills, and that border, had played a vital role in the evolution of the dukedom. Wolverstone had been created after the Conquest as a marcher lordship to protect England from the depredations of marauding Scots. Successive dukes, popularly known as the Wolves of the North, had for centuries enjoyed the privileges of royalty within their domains.

 

Many would argue they still did.

 

Certainly they’d remained a supremely powerful clan, their wealth augmented by their battlefield prowess, and protected by their success in convincing successive sovereigns that such wily, politically powerful ex-kingmakers were best left alone, left to hold the Middle March as they had since first setting their elegantly shod Norman feet on English soil.

 

Royce studied the terrain with an eye honed by absence. Reminded of his ancestry, he wondered anew if their traditional marcher independence—originally fought for and won, recognized by custom and granted by royal charter, then legally rescinded but never truly taken away, and even less truly given up—hadn’t underpinned the rift between his father and him.

 

His father had belonged to the old school of lordship, one that had included the majority of his peers. According to their creed, loyalty to either country or sovereign was a commodity to be traded and bought, something both Crown and country had to place a suitable price upon before it was granted. More, to dukes and earls of his father’s ilk, “country” had an ambiguous meaning; as kings in their own domains, those domains were their primary concern while the realm possessed a more nebulous and distant existence, certainly a lesser claim on their honor.

 

While Royce would allow that swearing fealty to the pres
ent monarchy—mad King George and his dissolute son, the Prince Regent—wasn’t an attractive proposition, he held no equivocation over swearing allegiance, and service, to his country—to England.

 

As the only son of a powerful ducal family and thus barred by long custom from serving in the field, when, at the tender age of twenty-two, he’d been approached to create a network of English spies on foreign soil, he’d leapt at the chance. Not only had it offered the prospect of contributing to Napoleon’s defeat, but with his extensive personal and family contacts combined with his inherent ability to inspire and command, the position was tailor-made; from the first it had fitted him like a glove.

 

But to his father the position had been a disgrace to the name and title, a blot on the family escutcheon; his old-fashioned views had labeled spying as without question dishonorable, even if one were spying on active military enemies. It was a view shared by many senior peers at the time.

 

Bad enough, but when Royce had refused to decline the commission, his father had organized an ambush. A public one, in White’s, at a time of the evening when the club was always crowded. With his cronies at his back, his father had passed public judgment on Royce in strident and excoriating terms.

 

As his peroration, his father had triumphantly declared that if Royce refused to bow to his edict and instead served in the capacity for which he’d been recruited, then it would be as if he, the ninth duke, had no son.

 

Even in the white rage his father’s attack had provoked, Royce had noted that “as if.” He was his father’s only legitimate son; no matter how furious, his father would not formally disinherit him. The interdict would, however, banish him from all family lands.

 

Facing his apoplectic sire over the crimson carpet of the exclusive club, surrounded by an army of fascinated aristocracy, he’d waited, unresponsive, until his father had finished his well-rehearsed speech. He’d waited until the expectant
silence surrounding them had grown thick, then he’d uttered three words:
As you wish.

 

Then he’d turned and walked from the club, and from that day forth had ceased to be his father’s son. From that day he’d been known as Dalziel, a name taken from an obscure branch of his mother’s family tree, fitting enough given it was his maternal grandfather—by then dead—who had taught him the creed by which he’d chosen to live. While the Variseys were marcher lords, the Debraighs were no less powerful, but their lands lay in the heart of England and they’d served king and country—principally country—selflessly for centuries. Debraighs had stood as both warriors and statesmen at the right hand of countless monarchs; duty to their people was bred deeply in them.

 

While deploring the rift with his father, the Debraighs had approved Royce’s stance, yet, sensitive even then to the dynamics of power, he’d discouraged their active support. His uncle, the Earl of Catersham, had written, asking if there was anything he could do. Royce had replied in the negative, as he had to his mother’s similar query; his fight was with his father and should involve no one else.
BOOK: Mastered By Love
2.36Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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