The Scarred Earl (27 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Beacon
Tags: #Romance, #Historical Romance, #fullybook
‘Be happy yourself, little cousin,’ he whispered into the mellow warmth of the late-summer air. ‘And, if you are, may your Rich be so as well,’ he added, as if prompted by Annabelle that she wouldn’t be so if her chosen rogue wasn’t as well.
‘I never would have thought it,’ Jack Seaborne, Duke of Dettingham, told the Earl of Calvercombe as Alex sat with his arm shamelessly about his wife’s waist the evening after the very public wedding of Miss Persephone Seaborne to the notoriously private Earl.
‘Which particular part do you find so hard to believe?’ Alex asked lazily.
‘All of it,’ Jack replied comprehensively.
‘I knew,’ Jessica said with a smug smile as if she’d foreseen the whole complex business and decided to go off on her honeymoon anyway, so they could get on with working the details out in peace.
‘You’re in danger of becoming as awesomely omnipotent as my grandmother, Duchess Jessica,’ Marcus chided from the sofa where he sat with Antigone and pretended he didn’t mind she had insisted he kept his arm by his side, instead of where he would so much have preferred it to be, until they were married as well.
‘What a dreadful thought,’ Jess said with a shudder and leant back against her own husband’s arm far enough to look up at him with a question in her eyes, as if she truly
believed she would ever be like that formidable old woman.
‘Banish it from your mind, love, I can’t think of anyone less like the Dowager than you are. I should never have married you if I thought otherwise.’
‘You would have when my vast tribe of brothers and brother-in-laws and my father had descended on you and demanded you did so, unless you really did want to be dismembered limb by limb as they no doubt informed you they could still do if you fail to make me blissfully happy,’ she chided her own particular Duke.
‘And how am I doing at that so far?’ he asked.
‘It’s under consideration,’ she told him solemnly.
‘Is it indeed?’ he said, as if considering a whole lot more before the night was over, then he appeared to recall where he was and turned a half-serious frown on Alex.
‘Did I remember to have that particular conversation with you concerning my cousin before you married her, Calvercombe?’ he asked with a return of the furiously protective cousin Alex had almost had to face down this morning.
‘If you didn’t, then I did it for both of us, Jack,’ Marcus intervened with lazy menace in his voice, as he glared at his new brother-in-law as if he thought he might suddenly turn from besotted bridegroom into Bluebeard, now he had his wedding ring safely on Persephone’s finger for all to see.
‘Odd that you needed to, since I seem to recall sharing my feelings about anyone stupid enough to lay a finger on Persephone the day I left here on our honeymoon, Calvercombe,’ Jack informed his new relative by marriage.
‘Idiot man,’ his wife told him sharply, and Persephone contented herself with a bitter glare at her over-protective cousin while she decided to leave punishing him for his interference to Jess, who could do it so much better.
‘Alex behaved with the strictest of propriety as far as I was concerned,’ Persephone rashly came to her lover’s defence all the same.
‘By getting caught out in a shady assignation with you in the middle of the night, then creeping about my house at all hours of the day and night trying to pretend he hadn’t spent most of them in your bed? You
both have a very skewed definition of propriety if you think you’ve been behaving with anything approaching it,’ Jack condemned without the usual leaven of lazy good humour in his eyes.
‘Our so-called shady assignation was to discuss what Alex had managed to discover about Marcus’s whereabouts without being overheard,’ Persephone rushed to defend them both when she knew of old that she might as well stay silent once Jack had made his mind up about something.
‘The rest was an accident,’ Alex excused even more awkwardly and felt surprised when he saw some of the head-of-the-clan fury fade from Jack’s eyes.
‘I know from experience how those will happen,’ he said mysteriously and Jessica blushed. ‘What about your early-morning wanderings of late, then?’ he went on sternly, as if only part one of the inquisition was over.
‘What about them?’ Persephone asked as if it was none of his business what she or Alex did when he was not about, as indeed it wasn’t since they were plighted to each other from the moment they were discovered in the Queen’s Apartments that night.
‘They should never have happened, that’s what about them,’ he insisted.
‘Don’t be more of a fool than you have already revealed yourself to be, love,’ Jessica chided and they were all secretly surprised to see the wolf who headed their particular pack pause and wonder if she might be right.
‘Alex gave me his word he wouldn’t seduce my cousin while my back was turned,’ he insisted.
‘They were married—what else did you expect a new-made husband and wife to do
but
make love to each other as often as their interfering relatives allowed?’ Jessica asked as if she’d been present for their secret dawn nuptials.
‘Married? How?’ Jack bellowed as if discovering a dreadful family scandal.
‘It’s easy when you know how,’ Alex said with mock-modesty. ‘First you invest in a special licence, then you find a sympathetic clergyman who believes you when you say you cannot live without the love of your life much longer and desperately need to marry her out of hand. Since you are both fully of age and not bound to seek the approval of a barbarian who thinks it perfectly fair to condemn his cousin and friend to a purgatory of
frustrated need for each other that makes a hypocrite of him, saving your blushes, Jessica, the rest is easy enough.’
‘Why did you tell my wife and not me?’
‘They didn’t. The good reverend did it for them, as you would have seen yourself if you had not been so busy glaring at Alex as if you intended to tear him limb from limb if he didn’t keep every single vow he made Persephone for the second time today. When he pronounced them man and wife, he mouthed “again” at them, as I suppose his conscience dictated he must, since their first set of vows were undertaken in the sight of God and already spoken as far as he was concerned.’
‘Oh,’ said Jack rather lamely, and Marcus and Antigone looked smug until Mr Warrender gave them a very stern look that told them two more weeks wasn’t so very long to wait and he wasn’t rising with the dawn again so they could jump the gun, too.
‘I think it’s very romantic,’ Penelope said with a sigh that made her closest relatives eye her with disbelief. ‘Even I can change my mind about the idea of love and marriage,’ she said, as if excusing herself from all the times she had sworn not to fall in love
and make a cake of herself like Jack and Jessica had over each other.
‘One day I hope you find a man who will make you change it for good, my love, but for now you are a little too young to search for a husband and should very likely be in bed,’ her mother said with implacable maternal authority and whisked her younger daughters off to bed before more unsuitable revelations could fall into their eagerly listening ears when the rest forgot they were there.
‘It’s true,’ Jessica said even as two sets of newlyweds were wondering how soon they could follow without appearing ridiculously eager.
‘What is?’ her husband demanded a little grumpily, since he’d clearly decided not yet.
‘It’s been a very romantic summer for the Seaborne family, don’t you think?’
‘I will think so when you categorise yourself as one of us,’ he replied, but Persephone thought he was using gruffness to disguise his true feelings.
‘And it’s not over yet,’ she added, with a significant look at Marcus and Antigone that made them both blush and the rest of them think how young they were.
‘But today is,’ Alex declared and maybe
part of his motive
was
to save the younger couple any more embarrassment, rather than only get Persephone to himself again. ‘Since it’s our official wedding night, you really will have to excuse us, because my wife and I have better things to do than sitting about gossiping.’
‘Far better ones,’ Persephone claimed without even a blush and could hardly catch her breath for laughing as Alexander Forthin scurried his bride of two weeks up the ducal staircase for the official start of their honeymoon. ‘I love you quite immoderately, my lord,’ she informed him as they ran towards the old ducal suite, leant them for the night now its noble owner was downstairs making love to his wife in the splendour of what had once been the Queen’s and was now the latest Duchess of Dettingham’s Apartments.
‘As you should, my darling, now we are an old married couple and you know for certain what a catch you made when you wed the Earl of Calvercombe one fine September morning.’
‘That I do, my love, that I do indeed,’ she murmured as he finally got them both naked in record time and fell on his bride with a ravenous ardour that seemed to build every
time they made love, rather than diminish, as they came to know each other and what mutually pleasured them the most.
‘I hope you don’t expect such splendour at Penbryn, love? It’s comfortable enough now, but it’s no Ashburton, I’m afraid,’ he told her as if she might mind not making love every night on the finest of velvet, lace and lawn when a rough blanket on a makeshift bed would do every bit as well as far as she was concerned, as long as he was sharing it with her.
‘Having seen one of your properties, I shall be grateful if our bed could just have been clean and aired some time this century, Alex,’ she said half-seriously.
‘I think I can safely promise that, even at Calver, which is far more run down that Penbryn managed to become during the years my father and Farrant mismanaged it,’ he gritted out somehow as she let her hands wander over his tautly muscled body and did her best to distract him from worrying about her future comfort.
‘It’s too late to have second thoughts now, my lord. We’re married twice over and don’t even think of leaving me here while you get your various houses in order.’
‘If I lived in a pigsty, I doubt I could leave you long enough to make it less pig-like, my lady,’ he responded and kissed her until they were both breathless.
‘Love me,’ she demanded blissfully as he finally admitted he couldn’t bear to be parted from the wife he’d once promised himself he’d never have, and so he did.
All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises II BV/S.à.r.l. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
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First published in Great Britain 2013
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of Harlequin (UK) Limited.
Harlequin (UK) Limited, Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road,
Richmond, Surrey TW9 1SR
© Elizabeth Beacon 2013
eISBN: 978-1-472-00381-2
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