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Scandal's Virgin
Louise Allen
A LADY WITH A SECRET SORROWReeling from heartbreak, Lady Laura Campion has transformed herself into the infamous Scandal’s Virgin of high society – flirtatious, alluring and utterly shocking – and yet she has always stopped short of absolute ruin. But now she has new hope. The daughter she thought lost is alive, and under the guardianship of the powerful Avery Falconer, Earl of Wykeham.Going into battle against Lord Wykeham might be her only option to win little Alice back, but she doesn’t expect the irresistible attraction that simmers between her and the formidable Earl. Laura finally has a chance at happiness – but can she persuade Avery to forgive her past?
She lifted her hands and pushed down the remaining petticoat, then turned slowly, within his embrace, to stand naked in front of him.
There was colour on her cheeks and her eyes were lowered. It came to him that for all her directness and bravado Laura was shy. ‘It has been a long time,’ she had said. Six years for a sensual, beautiful woman who had known physical passion was indeed a long time. Time to ache—and time to grow reticent.
‘Would you like me to put out the light?’ he asked.
She looked up at that, eyes wide. ‘Oh, no! I want … I want to see you.’ A smile trembled on her lips. ‘I want to be very bold and I fear to shock you.’
‘Shock me?’ Avery tugged his neckcloth free and stripped off his coat and waistcoat. ‘I would love you to shock me, Laura.’
He finished undressing, his arousal stoked by her unwavering gaze. When she ran her tongue along her lower lip he almost lost control like a callow youth.
He dragged a deep, steadying breath down into his lungs. ‘Show me. Let me show you.’
AUTHOR NOTE
I always enjoy a ‘secret baby’ plot, and I began to wonder what would happen if it was the hero with the baby and the heroine with the secret. What would drive a respected diplomat to take on the scandal of raising someone else’s love-child, and what lengths would a woman go to in order to take back her daughter from him? Gradually I got to know Lady Laura Campion, whose unhappiness leaves her uncaring that society calls her Scandal’s Virgin. It took me longer to discover the motives of Avery, the gorgeous, intelligent, haunted Earl of Wykeham—other than that the cause of all the deception and heartbreak, six-year-old Alice, has him firmly twisted round her little finger!
I hope you enjoy getting to know them all too, and discovering how Laura and Avery manage to untangle years of deceit, passion and distrust without bringing scandal down on Alice’s innocent head.
Scandal’s Virgin
Louise Allen
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
LOUISE ALLEN has been immersing herself in history, real and fictional, for as long as she can remember. She finds landscapes and places evoke powerful images of the past—Venice, Burgundy and the Greek islands are favourite atmospheric destinations. Louise lives on the North Norfolk coast, where she shares with her husband the cottage they have renovated. She spends her spare time gardening, researching family history or travelling in the UK and abroad in search of inspiration. Please visit Louise’s website—www.louiseallenregency.co.uk (http://www.louiseallenregency.co.uk)—for the latest news, or find her on Twitter @LouiseRegency and on Facebook.
Previous novels by the same author:
THE DANGEROUS MR RYDER* (#ulink_03782597-cb2e-52c9-980b-2c2e847f4a5b)
THE OUTRAGEOUS LADY FELSHAM* (#ulink_03782597-cb2e-52c9-980b-2c2e847f4a5b)
THE SHOCKING LORD STANDON* (#ulink_03782597-cb2e-52c9-980b-2c2e847f4a5b)
THE DISGRACEFUL MR RAVENHURST* (#ulink_03782597-cb2e-52c9-980b-2c2e847f4a5b)
THE NOTORIOUS MR HURST* (#ulink_03782597-cb2e-52c9-980b-2c2e847f4a5b)
THE PIRATICAL MISS RAVENHURST* (#ulink_03782597-cb2e-52c9-980b-2c2e847f4a5b)
PRACTICAL WIDOW TO PASSIONATE MISTRESS** (#ulink_03782597-cb2e-52c9-980b-2c2e847f4a5b)
VICAR’S DAUGHTER TO VISCOUNT’S LADY** (#ulink_03782597-cb2e-52c9-980b-2c2e847f4a5b)
INNOCENT COURTESAN TO ADVENTURER’S BRIDE** (#ulink_03782597-cb2e-52c9-980b-2c2e847f4a5b)
RAVISHED BY THE RAKE† (#ulink_8826ca54-8c43-5bff-9ff5-973e9d8356ee)
SEDUCED BY THE SCOUNDREL† (#ulink_8826ca54-8c43-5bff-9ff5-973e9d8356ee)
MARRIED TO A STRANGER† (#ulink_8826ca54-8c43-5bff-9ff5-973e9d8356ee)
FORBIDDEN JEWEL OF INDIA†† (#ulink_8826ca54-8c43-5bff-9ff5-973e9d8356ee)
TARNISHED AMONGST THE TON†† (#ulink_8826ca54-8c43-5bff-9ff5-973e9d8356ee)
FROM RUIN TO RICHES
UNLACING LADY THEA
* (#ulink_596354d5-daf9-576a-b3ec-f0b8b3fc92ac)Those Scandalous Ravenhursts
** (#ulink_596354d5-daf9-576a-b3ec-f0b8b3fc92ac)The Transformation of the Shelley Sisters
† (#ulink_afdb3d07-076e-59c3-95ff-e68a94238931)Danger & Desire
†† (#ulink_afdb3d07-076e-59c3-95ff-e68a94238931)Linked by character
and as a Mills & Boon
special release:
REGENCY RUMOURS
and in theSilk & Scandalmini-series:
THE LORD AND THE WAYWARD LADY
THE OFFICER AND THE PROPER LADY
and in Mills & Boon® HistoricalUndone!eBooks:
DISROBED AND DISHONOURED
AUCTIONED VIRGIN TO SEDUCED BRIDE** (#ulink_03782597-cb2e-52c9-980b-2c2e847f4a5b)
Did you know that some of these novels are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To all my friends in the Romantic Novelists’ Association.
Contents
Chapter One (#u1588d6c5-ceeb-527c-b977-0ab9790ffabd)
Chapter Two (#udf2756fd-f669-5f3e-8406-3ee1f134e883)
Chapter Three (#ucaa2e3d6-6e4d-5a1b-bd01-257f82d45c65)
Chapter Four (#u94ee7d0e-a66c-5cf5-89ba-1ddbd634542f)
Chapter Five (#u05506693-260a-542b-9a72-a60869664d70)
Chapter Six (#u61cfe8a2-75e6-5346-8ecc-357fe2590988)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
April 1816—the park of Westerwood Manor,
Hertfordshire
Keep still! The circular image shook, swooped over immaculately scythed grass, across flower beds fresh with young growth, over a flash of bright blue cotton... There.
The watcher’s hand jammed so hard against the branch that the rough bark scored the skin from the knuckles. Yes. Glossy ringlets the colour of autumn leaves, determined little chin, flyaway brows over eyes that must surely be clear green. Beautiful. She is so beautiful.
And then the girl smiled and turned, laughing as she ran. The telescope jerked up and a man’s face filled the circle. Hair the colour of autumn leaves, stubborn chin, angled brows, sensual mouth turned up into a smile of delight.
‘Papa! Papa!’ The child’s voice floated back through the still, warm air. The man stooped to scoop her up and turned towards the house as she buried her face in the angle between neck and broad shoulder and clung like a happy monkey. Her laughter drifted on the breeze towards the woodland edge.
The telescope fell with a dull thud onto the golden drift of fallen beech leaves and the woman who had held it slid down the tree trunk until she huddled at its base, racked with the sobs that she had stifled for six long years.
* * *
‘You saw her then.’
‘How did you guess?’ Laura Campion let the door slam shut behind her.
‘Look at the state of you. All blubbered up. You never could get away with tears, my la—ma’am.’
Trust Mab to exhibit the delicate sensibility of a brick. The scratch of wicker on wood as the maid pushed aside the mending basket, the sharp tap of her heels on the brick floor, the creak of the chain as she swung the kettle over the fire, all scraped like nails on a slate. But the words steadied her as gushing sympathy never would have done. Mab knew her all too well.
‘Yes, I saw her. She is perfect.’ Laura pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. Her boots were tracking leaf mould across the floor and she tugged them off and tossed them onto the kitchen doormat without a glance. ‘She looks like Piers. She looks like him.’
‘You just said.’ Mab slopped hot water into the teapot and swirled it round.
‘No, I mean she looks like the Earl of Wykeham. Piers’s cousin Avery.’ Laura tightened her lips, stared round the kitchen of the little house that had been home for just two days and fought for enough control to continue. ‘She calls him Papa.’
‘Aye, well, that’s what he says he is.’ Mab Douglas dug a spoon into the tea canister. ‘I only had to ask at the shop who lives in the big house and they were all of a clack about it. How his lordship came here just a month ago from foreign parts with a love child and no wife and doesn’t even have the grace to be shamefaced about it.’
‘Foreign parts!’ Laura tugged at her bonnet strings. They’d do nicely to strangle his lordship with. ‘He stole her from Derbyshire, though I expect that’s foreign enough for them around here.’
‘They won’t know nothing about that, it was six years ago and he must have taken her abroad with him right away. He’s been at that Congress in Vienna, and then he stayed on to help sort out some political nonsense in the Low Countries, so they say.
‘Besides, Mr Piers is dead and Lord Wykeham is head of the family, after all. In the village they say he’s spending money on the estate.’ The boiling water splashed onto the tea leaves. ‘Perhaps he thinks he should be responsible for Mr Piers’s child as well as his old home.’ Mab, at her most infuriatingly reasonable, being devil’s advocate.
‘That might be the case, if the child did not have a mother.’ The bonnet ribbon tore between Laura’s twisting fingers. ‘But she does.’ Me.
‘Aye, and there’s the rub.’ Mab poured two cups of tea and brought them to the table. ‘You drink that up, now.’ She sat down, five foot nothing of plump, middle-aged, bossy femininity, and shook her head at Laura with the licence of a woman who had looked after her since she was ten years old. ‘He knows you’re the child’s mother, but he thinks you don’t want her. He doesn’t know you thought she was dead. The question is, where do you go from here now you’ve found her?’
‘He has never met me.’ It was time for calm thinking now the first shock of emotion was past. Laura smoothed her palms over the dull fabric of her skirts. She was so tired of the black she had worn since her parents died of influenza fifteen months ago. She had been about to put her mourning aside and return to society, but that had been before the bombshell that had rocked her world. Now the solemn garments made the perfect disguise.
‘There is no reason he would suspect I am not who I say I am—the widowed Mrs Caroline Jordan, retired to the country to regain my strength and spirits before I re-enter society.’
‘And how are you going to meet an aristocratic bachelor who lives in the big house in the middle of a park?’ Mab was still being logical. Laura didn’t want logic. She wanted a miracle or, failing that, to sob and rant and... ‘And what are you going to do if you do get in there? Snatch the child?’
‘I do not know!’ Laura closed her eyes and dragged in a steadying breath. ‘I am sorry, Mab, I didn’t mean to bite your head off. All I knew, right from when I discovered those letters, was that I had to find my daughter. I did not dare plan beyond that. Now I have found her and I have no idea what happens next.’
‘He called her Alice,’ Mab said and laid her hand over Laura’s. ‘They told me in the village. Miss Alice Falconer. That would have been her proper name if you’d married Mr Piers, wouldn’t it?’
It was hard to speak around the thickness in her throat, to find the words in the confusion of her mind. When they did spill out they seemed unstoppable. ‘She is six years old. I heard her cry, just once, before they took her away and then they told me she was dead. I heard her say one word today and you tell me her name, the name strangers told you. I should be so happy because she is alive and healthy and yet I feel as though I have lost her all over again. How could they do that?’
How could her parents—the respected Lord and Lady Hartland—have told her the baby had died? How could they have secretly given the child—their granddaughter—away? Admittedly, their chosen recipients, the Brownes, were respectable tenant farmers on one of the earl’s distant estates, but even so...
