Synopsis
In the third in Katharine Ashe's Prince Catchers series, the eldest of three very different sisters must fulfill a prophecy to discover their birthright. But if Eleanor is destined to marry a prince, why can't she resist the scoundrel who seduced her?
She can pour tea, manage a household, and sew a modest gown. In short, Eleanor Caulfield is the perfect vicar's daughter. Yet there was a time when she'd risked everything for a black-eyed gypsy who left her brokenhearted. Now he stands before her—dark, virile, and ready to escort her on a journey to find the truth about her heritage.
Leaving eleven years ago should have given Taliesin freedom. Instead he's returned to Eleanor, determined to have her all to himself, tempting her with kisses and promising her a passion she's so long denied herself. But if he was infatuated before, he's utterly unprepared for what will happen when Eleanor decides to abandon convention—and truly live . . .
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Chapter 1
The Prodigal Son
Combe
Park
Home
of the Duke and Duchess of Lycombe
February
1819
“You’re
a ghost.”
This comment came
at Eleanor Caulfield’s shoulder, quietly. Eleanor ignored it and tried to
concentrate on the echoing glory of the pipe organ, whose music filled the
chapel.
“A living human’s cheeks cannot be so pale,”
her youngest sister insisted below the hymn. Not whispered. Ravenna didn’t know
how to whisper. “Yours are chalk.”
“They aren’t.” Eleanor did whisper. She’d nearly
perfected the art. “Now, hush.” But she lifted a hand to her face. Clad in
silk-lined kidskin fastened with tiny buttons fashioned from oyster shells—gloves
borrowed from her other sister, Arabella, the Duchess of Lycombe—her fingertips
pressed at her cheeks.
Cold. Like death.
The death of life as she knew it.
“Really, Ellie. You look like a princess,”
Ravenna stripped off her shawl and covered Eleanor’s shoulders. “But you’ll
catch a chill in this frigid sepulcher.”
The ducal chapel was hardly a sepulcher,
rather, a lovely little space of honey-colored limestone and clear windows that
allowed the winter sunlight to warm the assembled wedding guests one pale ray at
a time. Still, she pulled Ravenna’s shawl over her bosom. With her hair cascading
about her shoulders, Ravenna didn’t need it, and everyone always assumed Eleanor
did. Thirteen years had not yet erased from her family’s memory the time when
every wisp of air stealing through an open door had tipped her closer to death.
The inflammation of the lungs she’d taken in her fourteenth year had lingered
so long that no one ever thought she would fully recover.
No one, except one.
Today her bloodless cheeks had nothing to do
with ill health or the February chill. At the foot of the chancel her beloved
papa appeared sublimely happy as he wed a woman ideally suited to him.
Neat and subdued in a modest gown of dove
gray cotton, the Reverend Martin Caulfield’s bride lifted a serene face to her
groom. Intelligent, interested in theology, moved by his sermons, and honestly
pious, the widowed Mrs. Agnes Coyne was the perfect wife for the long-widowed
vicar of St. Petroc. The moment she had moved into the village everybody
agreed.
Eleanor rejoiced that her papa would find
happiness in marriage again; his first wife had perished even before he
discovered her and her sisters in the foundling home. But Agnes’s willingness
to assist him with his work and her experience running a gentleman’s household
pointed to one damning certainty: Eleanor was now superfluous.
Her heart beat at too quick a tempo, and so
hard it seemed to drown out the hymn rolling from the pipes. Her papa’s
newfound happiness did not cause this. That her life was upon the verge of
changing dramatically did.
After years of silence on the issue, Papa
had spoken: his eldest daughter should marry. Joy! Happiness! He was to find
contentment in wedded bliss, and he wished for her the same blessing.
Agnes had concurred, compassionately, so
that Eleanor could not but love her for it. No woman grown wished to live in
another woman’s house, she’d said. “My son admires you quite sincerely,” she
added, then with a smile: “How could he not?”
Now Mr. Frederick Coyne stood behind Papa on
the opposite side of the chancel steps, ogling her without subtlety. Subtle
ogling wouldn’t have impressed her either. His coat buttons as large as tea
plates made her giggle. But his brilliantly orange spotted waistcoat and
matching stockings actually turned her stomach. How sensible Agnes had spawned
this specimen of ostentatious exuberance, Eleanor couldn’t fathom.
Frederick waggled his brows, then shifted
his eyes to the exit, suggesting . . . what? That she steal off
with him for a quick assignation in the middle of their parents’ wedding? Or
perhaps he intended for them to elope entirely.
He’d said as much that morning when he found
her alone at breakfast. “ ’Spect you’re at wit’s end now that Mum’s taking over
the roost, m’dear. Nothing to do for it but get leg shackled right away. Now,
there’s an idea!
Why don’t we skip
this dull hash, El, and show the parents how to do it right? Border’s only
three or four days’ ride, if the weather holds. What say you?” Perusing her
bodice, he’d waggled his brows then too.
If he looked at her breasts now, in church,
she might laugh aloud.
And there was the trouble of it. Her palms
were sticky-cold with nerves but she wanted to laugh.
She wanted to sing.
Not as she sang on Sundays in church, but as loud as the lark that woke her
each morning through her bedchamber window with its abandoned song.
She wanted to dance.
Not decorously like she had danced at her sisters’ weddings attended by ladies
and lords, but freely, wildly, gloriously, like the Gypsies who camped each
winter in St. Petroc danced at the May Day festival.
She wanted to tear off her bonnet and feel
the dangerous joy of wind in her hair and blazing sunshine upon her face while
she galloped her horse along the edge of the cliffs. To suck the cold, salty
air into her nostrils and fill her hungry lungs.
Quite simply, she wanted an adventure.
She had always wanted
an adventure. Ever since as a girl she’d first read the books in her papa’s
library, curled up in a window seat as the Cornwall winters blustered and
batted the windowpanes, she’d made herself the heroine in the tales of knights
and dragons and demons. Dreaming, always dreaming, while the world beyond the
cozy safety of the vicarage—a world of workhouses and blisters and cruelties
and starvation—no longer touched her.
Now she could have it.
Finally, nothing held her back. Not the vicarage, or the needs of the parish,
or her papa. Agnes would care for those.
Nothing stood in her way. Accustomed as she
was to quiet, studious restraint, this abrupt freedom to abandon herself to the
unknown both terrified and excited Eleanor.
Frederick adjusted his wide lapels and
smiled invasively.
She should be flattered. Poor vicars’
spinster daughters weren’t often ogled by fashionable young gentlemen, or
proposed to, even offhandedly, she suspected. Frederick wasn’t a trial to look
at, with that thick swipe of hair over his forehead and hooded eyes. She’d even
seen him reading a few of times. She could bear a husband’s fashion excesses if
he read good books.
It was tempting . . .
His gaze slithered down her bodice.
Not tempting enough.
Then again, she’d never been tempted by any
man. Not by any man. Only a boy. Young
and naïve at the time, she would have left the comfort and safety of the
vicarage for him. She would have gone anywhere for him.
But that was ages ago and didn’t bear
recalling, except that he had helped her to learn the inconstancy of the male
heart.
Not her papa’s, though. Papa would never
demand that she leave the vicarage. Neither would Agnes. If she remained in St.
Petroc, she would settle into a life of their endless kindnesses, and her own
pathetic superfluity would choke her to death. She had lived modestly for
years. But she had never been a milksop. The one moment in her life when she
had been on the cusp of becoming so, a wild Gypsy boy had shown her a much
better alternative. An adventure.
Then he’d broken her heart.
The medieval tales she loved were full of
unexpected pitfalls and disasters, of course. That was to be expected. She
could have an adventure now, only different in one crucial detail. An adventure
that did not involve a man could be ideal.
Drawing a slow breath to bank the fledgling
excitement that curled through her now, fire licking at kindling, Eleanor
turned her eyes away from the happy couple to the chill winter day beyond the
chapel window.
And ceased to breathe entirely.
A horseman rode up the drive from the house
toward the chapel. The great black beast, powerful in neck and legs, thundered
forward, its hooves marking the earth upon impact. The rider controlled the
animal with ease, his greatcoat flaring out over the horse’s haunches. Eleanor
could not see his entire face; his hat brim masked it. But she knew him from
the confident grasp of his gloved hands upon the reins and from the manner in
which he rode, as though he might command the world from that horse, and could.
She knew him because every day from
September through April for seven years of her young life she had watched him
ride. She had memorized him.
That boy.
The co-author of the single real adventure
of her life.
Taliesin Wolfe.
Long ago she had trained her heart to take
no notice of anything concerning him, not the infrequent letters he sent to
Papa, nor her sisters’ accounts of seeing him in London occasionally. Now that
heart betrayed her: it leaped into a gallop faster than his horse’s.
Beside the chapel he dismounted. A groomsman
appeared and took the reins, but the beast swung its head around and bared its
teeth, and the groom stumbled back. Taliesin placed his hand upon the thick
ebony neck and the animal swiveled its face to him. With horses he had always
had a rare magic; a natural wisdom and potent touch, like the wizard of
Arthurian legend after whom he had been named: Taliesin the Merlin. This magic
still seemed to be his. Lowering its head, the mighty beast went docilely with
the groom.
Alone on the drive, Taliesin stood still for
a moment as he removed his gloves, his black hat and dark overcoat making him a
roguish shadow against the pale gray day. He seemed entirely out of place and
yet perfectly at ease. As always.
Any moment he would look to the window and
see her gaping. She must look away. As he’d always done as a boy, he would
sense her attention upon him and he would—
He didn’t. With the loping grace that had
characterized his movements as a youth, he went forward and out of her sight.
She’d barely time to register the raucous thud of her heartbeats before the
door to the chapel opened and he entered.
In the building.
Mere yards away.
After eleven years.
The brisk chill of the day seemed to cling
to him in the high color upon his cheeks and the tousle of his satiny black
hair.
And the kindling within Eleanor burst into
flame. Eleven years of modesty. Eleven years of careful reserve. Eleven years
of regretting the only adventure she’d ever had. Now he stood before her again,
dark and lean and staggeringly virile. And like a sleeping princess in a fairy
tale brought back to life by magic, every morsel of her maidenly body awoke.
“Tali!” Ravenna exclaimed below the swell of
the organ.
“I told you he would come,” Arabella
murmured from her other side.
She had?
“Good heavens, Ellie,” Ravenna said in her
ear. “Now you look positively fevered. Are you sure you’re well?”
The music ended on a single, dramatic chord.
In the sudden silence the prodigal Gypsy’s boots clunked on the church floor.
Eleanor’s papa turned his head around, and his face opened in happiness.
“In the name of God above,” the priest
began, and everybody looked at him. But to Eleanor, even the impact of her papa
entering into marital bliss could not now compare to the sudden appearance
after so many years of Taliesin Wolfe.
In the last of several rows of empty pews,
he stood imposingly erect, still, and dark, his presence making shadows where
none had been before. With a lift of lashes, dark and thick like a starless
night, he met her gaze directly. Slowly, the corner of his mouth tilted up.
Confusion. Indignation. Anger.
Heat.
All tangling together in the pit of her
stomach and down to her fingertips. He had always done this to her—turned her
insides out and her outsides quivering. Now after years of absence he was doing
it again with no more than a mocking semi-smile.
She refused to succumb. The years had taught
her. They had changed her.
Clearly they had changed him too. All sharp
jaw, long limbs, sunken cheeks, and deep eyes as a boy, when he began to grow
into his bones he had become an impossibly handsome youth. Watching him at a
distance or walking beside him, she had found it difficult not to look too long
at him, like a hunger that refused to be satisfied.
In appearance he was no longer that boy. His
taut jaw and too-long hair and the silver rings in his ears were the same, but
all else had changed. Fine clothing, broader shoulders, and the hardness in his
black eyes marked him as a stranger now. And yet still she could not look away.
He bowed.
To her.
He bowed.
When had he learned how to bow? When had he
thrown off the urchin who teased her and competed with her and made her crazy?
When had he become this gentleman? And when had God decided that after a life
of maidenly quietude she had sinned so greatly that she deserved to again meet
the single person who could make her sin again?
Her cheeks flowered with
pink and fire lit her eyes as she returned his stare as though he’d no business
in this place.
Taliesin had not expected this. He should
have. Just as he should have expected the grinding ache in his gut now. Her
pull on him.
Golden, like a summer morning, with a quick
glimmer in her eyes. That’s what he had remembered about her, the contrast
between her fragile body and strong mind. As a boy, it had enthralled him.
Often he’d goaded her only to see her ivory cheeks turn rosy and her golden
green eyes flash. Always he’d sought to draw her gaze, to command her attention
even if only to scold him for impertinence or arrogance or any of the other
sins of which she believed him guilty. He would have done anything then to
secure her notice. Anything.
Now he had merely walked through a door and
she gave it to him. Voluntarily, thoroughly. She hadn’t ceased staring since he
crossed the threshold. He hadn’t craved the touch of her gaze in years. But,
God’s blood, he liked having it now.
A cool mist of displeasure slipped over her
features, rain shrouding a spring garden. She turned her attention to the vicar
and his new wife.
Satisfaction. Already
he’d gotten under her skin. She hadn’t changed in that manner. Nor in
loveliness. As a girl Eleanor had never been a blatant beauty like Arabella nor
naturally vibrant like Ravenna. But she had been graceful and quick-witted and
so lovely that for years she had commanded his waking thoughts, and sleeping.
Not only his thoughts.
“Before God I declare you husband and wife,”
the churchman pronounced to the pair before him. “Go and make fruit of your
union.”
A muffled chuckle from Ravenna—the vicar
taking his bride upon his arm but his gaze coming swiftly to the back of the
chapel again—applause from everyone—organ pipes exploding into sound—Arabella
smiling at him, diamonds around her neck. And Eleanor’s averted profile, pure
and perfect, with cheeks abloom like roses.
Author Bio
Katharine Ashe is the award-winning author of historical romances that reviewers call “intensely lush” and “sensationally intelligent,” including How to Be a Proper Lady, an Amazon Editors’ Choice for the 10 Best Romances of the Year, and How to Marry a Highlander, a 2014 RITA® Award finalist. She lives in the wonderfully warm southeast with her beloved husband, son, dog and a garden she likes to call romantic rather than unkempt. A professor of History, she writes romance because she thinks modern readers deserve grand adventures and breathtaking sensuality too. Please write to her at PO Box 51702, Durham, NC 27717-1702 or visit www.katharineashe.com
https://www.facebook.com/KatharineAsheAuthor
Katharine is givng away two signed sets of I Married A Duke and I Married A Lord
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