The Scandal Before Christmas (16 page)

She laughed. “He can stay here all winter, and into the spring, if it will make you happy.”

“Then he shall. Because it will not matter if he is here, because you are going to come with me. Come with me upon the seas and be spared.”

They had all, every last one of them, been spared.

It was—as he never could have believed—their very own Christmas miracle.

The miracle of life and love.

Read on for an excerpt from the next book by Elizabeth Essex

AFTER THE SCANDAL

Coming soon from St. Martin’s Paperbacks

Richmond upon Thames

August, 1815

Timothy Evans, ninth Duke of Fenmore, should have known he would never truly be satisfied with a bride he hadn’t stolen fair and square. Despite years and years of careful training in the arcane arts of being a Duke of Fenmore, the more honest and useful art of larceny still ran red and ruddy within his veins.

When the opportunity to make the inestimable Lady Claire Jellicoe his very own dropped into his hand like a pilfered purse full of shining, golden guineas, he palmed it deep into his pocket, and continued onward without ever once breaking his stride.

He stole her from the garden of his grandmother’s magnificent, ancient manor house in Richmond, during a ball, on a moonlit summer night so sweet and warm and comfortable, it should never have needed anything approaching larcenous stealth or guile. But even on such a soft evening, and even after all the years and years of training in the polite proprieties, stealth and guile came to him quite naturally. Like old friends out of the silent night.

Old friends he could trust.

This fortuitous piece of larceny came to his attention directly after the fourth couple of dances. Timothy had been standing along the north wall of the cavernous old greatroom—it was one of the sacrifices he made to preserve the honor of the dukedom, this standing about against walls just to be seen—when he saw
her.

He saw everything, every ferocious little detail that others either didn’t notice, or didn’t want to see. All the things they did not want
him
to see—their nervous glances and telling looks, their nasty bad habits and impulsive, informing foibles. He saw them
think
, just as clearly and easily as if he were reading a broadsheet.

He saw the shift of their eyes and the clutch of their hands when they intended to cheat at cards. He saw their backhanded smiles and snide pleasure when they made plans to cuckold their best friends. He saw them stuff silver salvers into their reticules, and stand idly by while innocent servants were given the sack. He saw them laugh and cry and flatter and flirt and lie and cheat and steal.

He saw it all.

But he had never seen Lady Claire Jellicoe do any of those things, not once, though he had watched her for years, in ballroom after ballroom, from London to Leicestershire. He was helpless not to—an informing foible
he
should have long overcome, but had not. He could not. She was as tiny and staggeringly beautiful as the fragile orchid blooms that filled his grandmother’s conservatory, and just as full of wondrous, vibrant life. She was always smiling, always laughing and chatting, and serenely happy, glowing with luminous vitality—a rare white orchid he fervently admired, but could never touch.

But others did touch. Others danced and twirled and took her hand—the young lordlings who were meant to be his peers, the men who were as different from Timothy as sharp chalk was from soft cheese. Because no matter how hard he tried, or how carefully he had trained himself to become the ninth Duke of Fenmore, Timothy Evans knew he could never wash himself clean of the sulfurous stink of his years on the streets.

And so he had given up trying, and settled for being different, for retreating into the fortress of his mind, and preserving his still savage pride behind a wall of eccentric silence.

His sister had laughed at the change in him. “Never shut up when you were a boy,” Meggs had teased.

But he had learned to hold his tongue now, and refrained from talking, though he watched them still. He watched
her
still—his lovely, luminous orchid of a girl. Because watching her gave him a pleasure so incomprehensible and inexplicable and vast, it was beyond his understanding. And beyond his power to stop.

So when Lady Claire Jellicoe turned her wide, sparkling blue eyes upon her dance partner, and smiled that smile that absolutely slayed Timothy—the smile that was warm and open and entirely without guile—the spurt of some small pain that would be very much like jealousy if he allowed it to be, made him follow the line of her gaze to her partner. Lord Peter Rosing.

God’s balls. God’s bloody, bleeding balls.

Not Rosing. Anybody but Rosing.

Timothy controlled himself enough to stop his face from contorting into a sneer, and immediately scanned the crowd. He tried to place Lady Claire’s parents, the Earl and Countess Sanderson, where he had seen them last, chatting with his grandmother near one of the greatroom’s arching doorways. Or her brother James, Viscount Jeffrey. One of them had to be near enough to hand. One of them had to see and know and understand just how vile Rosing truly was beneath his charming veneer. One of them had to stop him.

One of them had to
save
her.

Because Rosing was as slick and plausible and cunning as he was opportunistic. And he was nothing if not opportunistic, the amoral bastard. Rosing took Lady Claire Jellicoe’s elbow in his filthy grip, and escorted her out the tall, open doors at the foot of the room so smoothly and quickly, no one seemed to notice they were gone.

No one but Timothy.

Timothy knew that out in the shadowed dark, where the garden plummeted into the river, Lady Claire would soon stop smiling her open, honest, guileless smile. Because people were terrible, awful, cruel creatures of habit. And Rosing was the most terrible, awful, habitually cruel creature of them all.

Rosing indulged himself with lethal impunity.

And so Timothy decided to employ lethal habits of his own—his old friends stealth and guile. Stealth and guile, and single-minded devotion. Because he was devoted to Lady Claire Jellicoe, this exquisite orchid of a young woman he had never met, never danced with, and never so much as spoken one single word to in all his years of propping up ballroom walls.

He had never dared.

Timothy Evans, ninth Duke of Fenmore was madly, deeply, irrationally, and altogether secretly in love.

Chapter One

Lady Claire Jellicoe had been spoiled.

All her life, she had been pampered and cosseted and buffered and protected from all the truly ugly unpleasantness of the world. And she had never known it until that exact moment.

The moment when Lord Peter Rosing, charming, handsome, fair-haired heir of the Marquess of Hadleigh, pushed her into the dark seclusion of the boathouse at the Dowager Duchess of Fenmore’s lovely, riverside villa in Richmond, grabbed her by the neck, and shoved her face-first against the rough brick wall.

The brick was hard, and hurt. Sharp grit clawed and scratched against her skin and tasted like dust. But the chalky bitter taste in her mouth was really fear. Fear that for the first time in her life, she was powerless.

Because she hadn’t thought to protest. She hadn’t though Lord Peter would do anything untoward. She hadn’t thought someone she’d just met on a ballroom dance floor could ever wish her irreparable harm.

She simply hadn’t thought.

She had smiled. She had smiled because she was Lady Claire Jellicoe, pretty, privileged daughter of the Earl Sanderson. She had smiled because she was polite and considerate and did as she was asked. And he had asked her to dance. And she had been taught to smile and say yes.

“No,” was what she said now. “No. No. No.”

But her voice was small and shadowed with the fear that spread like poison from her tongue deep into her chest, filling her with panic.

She was being ruined. She was being hurt. She was being
raped
.

And then there was no room for thought, only reaction.

She bit the gloved hand that he choked across her mouth as instinctively as a wild animal caught in a trap. Her teeth tore through the thick fabric of his glove, and the taste of blood—the metallic tang of hatred and shame—suffused her mouth. But all she got for her desperate trouble was a low profanity spewed hot into her ear, the shifting of his grip to grind her face into the brick, and then the bloody glove shoved into her mouth as a gag.

He was everywhere around her, standing on the train of her gown, pinning her against the wall with his weight. Closing out everything else, every hope of help, every thought of action. There was nothing but his body and his breath and his smell and his power.

And she had none.

She couldn’t scream, and she couldn’t move, and she couldn’t stop Lord Peter.

All she could feel was the bloody hand clamped across her mouth, the wall cutting into her skin, and the grabbing and pushing and rending of her clothes as he tried to expose her body. And all she could think in the tiny, screaming part of her mind that was still capable of thought, was no, no, no.

No, this could not be happening to her. No, he had to stop. No, someone had to stop him.

And then someone did.

Rosing fell away from her for one suspended moment. Then his head cracked hard against the bricks two inches from her wide open eyes. He stared back at her, his own eyes open and blank and uncomprehending for one agonizingly sick moment before they rolled back in his head. He slid slowly down the wall, collapsing in an untidy, half-clothed heap at her feet.

Claire scrambled back—away from him, but there was no room to go anywhere with the corner of wall at her back—to find another threat.

A tall, imposing shadow loomed over Rosings.

The long shadow took a careful step toward Rosing’s inert form. And then, without saying a word or making a sound, the shadow reared back and stomped viciously on Rosing’s splayed leg.

A dull, sickening crack bounced up from the stone-paved floor, and lapped upward into the vaulted silence of the boathouse.

Claire’s stomach, and everything else inside her, cramped into a single, tight ball of misery—so tight she could feel nothing but her pulse throttling against her throat, and the scaly clutches of dread itching their way across the surface of her skin. She shrank back into the corner, away from the specter that loomed nearer.

And then he spoke. “Are you all right?” The voice was a deep rumble she had never heard before.

“No.” Her own voice was nothing but a fracture of a whisper.

“Yes,” was all he said, and Claire couldn’t tell if he was agreeing with, or contradicting her.

She couldn’t tell anything. “What have you done?” She looked from her rescuing specter to the heap of man and tailoring at her feet that had only moments ago been the duplicitous Lord Peter.

“Broken his leg, I should think. It’ll be a bloody long time before he can even walk—if he is lucky enough to heal and not die—before he rapes another girl.”

There it was. Spoken plainly and ruthlessly.
Rape
. She had almost been
raped
.

And
another girl
. She understood exactly what those words must mean—she was just another girl to Lord Peter, not Lady Claire Jellicoe whom he had asked to walk with in the moonlight because he found her enchanting. No matter her name, or her rank, or her fortune, or her parents, she was just another girl for him to do with as he wished. Like a maid or a shopgirl, or anyone else who was as powerless to stop him. Anyone.

The twisted knot in her stomach lurched violently, and her throat closed down around the beginnings of an unbecoming sound very much like a moan. She tried to turn away. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Try not to.” He leaned nearer—across Rosing’s prone form—as if he were trying to see her more clearly, and the dark shadow resolved itself into the tall, lean outline of a man she recognized instantly, though she did not really know him. “You haven’t got time. Breathe deeply through your nose. Can you move on your own? Or would you like me to help you? I’m Timothy Evans, by the way. We have not been introduced.”

It was a ridiculously enormous understatement. He spoke as if they were still within the ballroom, or in a shop, or at a musicale, or anywhere else upon the earth but standing across the unmoving form of her would-be rapist. “I know who you are.”

But he wasn’t some mere Timothy Evans. He was his grace, the Duke of Fenmore. The same impassive, impenetrable man she had seen at such events for years, hanging aloofly at the edges of ballrooms, and never being introduced so he might dance. She had thought him a strange, different sort of man, with a haunted, far-away look, like the men who had come back from the wars last summer with death stalking behind their eyes. Except that she knew the Duke of Fenmore hadn’t gone to the war. He had never done anything that she knew of, except stand around ballrooms looking chilly and off-putting.

And he was still rather more than off-putting now, breaking people’s legs with such violent efficiency, though he also shook out an immaculate white handkerchief and held it carefully toward her. “You’ve blood,” he said quietly, “on your face. Scratches from the coarseness of the mortar between the bricks, I should think. You might also want to put a cut of beefsteak, or a potato on them, when you get home. You are so fair you’re likely to bruise.”

Beefsteak? Was he mad? Or perhaps it was she who was mad. Perhaps being assaulted by a bastard of the first rank did that to a person—drove them toward Bedlam—judging by the way she flinched from the gloved hand his grace had extended toward her.

But he wasn’t looking at her as if she were a loon. He was nodding, as if he were reassuring and calming her, the way her father might act with a trembling gundog. “It’s all right,” he said. “I won’t hurt you.”

No, he didn’t look like he would, though he did look rather inscrutable, with those narrowed eyes she could not read staring at her so intently. But Lord Peter Rosing’s warm brown eyes had seemed charming not five minutes ago. Clearly, she knew next to nothing about assessing the character of a man.