To Tempt a Troubled Earl (Regency Rossingley #1)
Chapter One
ROSSINGLEY ESTATE
Summer, 1821
“YOU HAVE VISITORS , my lord.”
Inglis floated across the eleventh Earl of Rossingley’s sleepy eyeline, looking peevish. Lando swore the man had silken castors in place of feet. With white-gloved hands clasped together in front of his vexed frame, his head butler awaited his response.
“And you have chosen to disturb me about this because…” Lando tilted his balloon of brandy this way and that, playing the flickering candlelight against the delicately engraved crystal. That the evening was late was an irrelevance. He and his butler were of the same accord; visitors at any time of day were unusual, unwarranted, and unwelcome.
“A Mr Christopher Angel, my lord. And his sister, Miss Anne. The young man says it’s important.”
One of a pair, the balloon glass had been a gift from dear Charles. “I know of no one named Angel. Begging the question ‘important for whom’?”
“He didn’t make that distinction, my lord,” admitted Inglis. “But he gave the impression the matter is somewhat urgent.”
Lando took a warming sip of brandy. The drink of the damned. He didn’t especially care for it, but he fancied it lent him a louche, philosophic air. “What is urgent is seldom important, Inglis,” he deemed, pleased with his wisdom. Rousseau himself might make a similar pronouncement. “If it’s alms he’s after, toss him a half-crown, some cold meats, and send him on his way.”
The gloved hands wrung together. “I did try that, my lord. But he’s…ah…more insistent than our usual callers, and neither is he a pauper. And…” Inglis paused. Never let it be said the butler couldn’t milk a drama. “He…he mentioned one of his close relations. His uncle. One…ah…a former cavalry officer sadly no longer with us, God rest his soul.”
As Inglis made the sign of the cross, Lando took another, more contemplative sip. So many good men had fallen during the wars in France, and a chap struggled to keep up. “Oh, yes?”
Inglis cleared his throat. “Yes. A…ah…Captain Charles Prosser, my lord.”
Like rancid vinegar, the fine liquor soured on the earl’s tongue. He fought to swallow it down. Perhaps he should have stuck to port after dinner. Maybe it would have better softened the dull ache now swelling behind his rib cage. Captain Prosser . His dearest Charles, his lover. His heart.
Lando didn’t make his older lover’s acquaintance until after the wars, from which Charles returned hale and hearty. But where French bayonets and the battlefields of Waterloo had failed, the insidious wasting disease prevailed. An annoying tickle became a cough, a cough tinged with blood. Slowly, inexorably, his lover faded away, their time together, in all of its perfection, too brief. A life only half lived; a conversation forever unfinished. Lando, not daring to be at Charles’s bedside at the end, heard the news of his passing from a mutual friend some two weeks after his lover had been buried beneath Kentish loamy earth.
Three long years ago. Yet even now, at unprepared moments such as this—and was there ever such a thing as a prepared one?—that name still had a powerful hold upon the eleventh earl. If Inglis hadn’t broken the crushing silence, it might have persisted well into the night.
“I have taken the liberty of passing the young man’s sister over to Mrs Sugden, my lord. The girl is in a state of great distress. And I have shown her brother to the small parlour. He’s…ah…not fit for the library.”
Inglis’s waspish voice sounded as if coming from an awfully long way away. “My lord might wish to be more suitably attired before receiving him?”
Tipping back his fair head, Lando forced another swallow of fiery amber liquid. For a second or two, it threatened to reappear, then he pulled himself together. Ridiculous. Three years gone and one mention of Charles turned him into a limp dishrag. Well, it was high time it didn’t. Time to make a clean breast of things. Time to stop bloody moping. Charles would have hated him squandering his salad days drinking alone and brooding in front of a dying fire.
He cast his gaze down his spare frame. Fussy Inglis might wish him more suitably attired, but Lando gave not a fig. As purportedly one of the richest men in England, Lando could host a ball clad in only his underclothes, and the ton would declare it the latest fashion in Paris. He pinned Inglis to the spot with his pale eyes.
“I’m decent. Uninvited callers find me as I am, or not at all. As you damned well know.”
*
“MR CHRISTOPHER ANGEL , my lord,” announced Inglis before closing the parlour door with a flourish.
If the visitor was flummoxed by the earl’s grey silk banyan, of a thinner fabric than most and leaving very little to the imagination, he hid it well. He held his hands neatly behind his back as if enjoying discourse with a chum over a flagon of ale, not begging his way into a wealthy nobleman’s home at such an ungodly hour.
Skirting the fringes of the gentry, Lando wagered, he’d travelled here from town. Perhaps a secretary or a senior clerk. A man sufficiently versed in the eccentricities of nobility, at any rate. His dark frock, though of decent quality, showed wear, and his bearing was tall, broad, and strong. Added to ebony hair, unfashionably long and messily tied back with a black velvet ribbon, a straight nose and sulky mouth—all in all, the youth cut a striking figure. Even the jaded, lovelorn earl recognised him as tolerably handsome, and he didn’t seem in obvious distress until one’s gaze settled upon his eyes. Strained yet defiant, they were the same rich brown as the cognac warming in the earl’s palm.
Angel executed a low bow, his words fighting one another in their haste to escape his lips. “My lord, please accept my humblest apologies for this intrusion into your home. I beg your forgiveness for the imposition on your time, but I fear I have been left with nowhere else to turn.”
“Then you must be in exceedingly dire straits indeed,” Lando drawled. Not known for his effusive welcome, even his friends described him as chilly. “If you hadn’t claimed Captain Prosser as your uncle, my footmen would have shown you the door.” Taking his time, Lando arranged himself on the chaise, wrapping his banyan tightly about him.
“Are you?” he enquired, fixing his cool gaze on the man. A single gold hoop glinted in his left ear, an affectation Lando found oddly distracting. “In dire straits?”
The man shook his head. “My lord, I am not, and I do not beseech for myself. I come on behalf of my dearest sister, Anne, whom my uncle, Captain Prosser, cared for most deeply. Indeed, he treated her like the daughter he was never gifted.”
‘Never gifted’ for intimate reasons Lando thoroughly understood. He wasn’t a medical man, was vaguely squeamish, in fact, but even he was aware a man could never beget a daughter if he had never bedded a woman.
He granted Mr Angel a small nod of concession. “I heard him speak of his niece in favourable terms.”
In his infinite kindness, his beloved Charles had, indeed, told of the girl many times. If Lando’s memory served correct, he’d found her a position as a lady’s companion, and by all accounts, she was sweet and harmless. With no interest in the doings of the fairer sex, Lando might not have paid the topic much notice. He had, however, given the topic of the brother his full attention and had a clear recollection of his lover describing his nephew as a person of good morals and determination. Though, Lando found it rarely served to reveal one’s hand to a stranger.
“He did not mention she had a brother,” he lied.
As the young man girded his loins for what would undoubtedly be a convoluted petition for funds, Lando regretted not having taken up a pose against the mantel if only to prevent Mr Angel from dizzily pacing to and fro in front of it.
“Being older when our father perished, I was never Captain Prosser’s ward, though we were on excellent terms. Since his passing, I have lived and worked in London and sent money to Anne so that her circumstances were less straitened. Three days ago, however, I learned that my sister’s situation had become rather…compromised. Naively, may I add, and through no fault of her own.” He clenched his jaw, unable to hide his anger. “In a word, my lord, her hitherto good name and the good name of Captain Prosser, by association, has been besmirched.”
If the man would stand still, Lando would be able to get a jolly good look at him. Instead, he persisted in wearing out the earl’s favourite Aubusson rug. And he continued to toss his beloved Charles’s name high into the ether with scant regard for how perilously close each mention chipped away at the facade of disinterest Lando was working so hard to preserve.
“Your concern for your sister’s position is a credit to you, Mr…Angel,” Lando observed. “But whilst you have my sympathies, I’m at a loss as to how her misfortune is a matter of mine.” He adjusted the delicate lace trim at the cuffs of his banyan. “Is there anything else?”
For most, simply being granted an audience with the indifferent earl in his opulent surroundings sufficed to cow them. Indeed, Lando frequently used this to his advantage, never more than when the dull spinsters from the church came calling. He had already surmised his visitor was nothing but a variation on that, albeit a more visually pleasing one. Add in the earl’s daring state of déshabiller , and Captain Prosser’s nephew should have been blushing like a new bride and shuffling from the room.
Alas, he showed no sign. If anything, the man was but launching into his impassioned stride. “As he weakened, my uncle assured me that if ever Anne had a pressing need, I should present myself to you without haste. And appeal to your better nature.”
Lando’s lips curled into the smallest of smiles. “Do let me know when you’ve located it, Mr Angel.”
His guest bowed his head. “Forgive me, my lord, but he also advised that might be your response.”
The earl’s heart seized. Of course he had; his Charles had known him as well as he’d known his own self. My darling Lando, why must you insist on cloaking your true nature? Everyone thinks you’re a beast when I and your bedpost both know you’re nothing but a pussycat.
Gadzooks, Lando needed to remove this youth from his house.
“He spoke of you often, my lord,” Mr Angel pressed.
“We had a friendship,” Lando acknowledged.
“He inferred that…” Angel gave a tiny cough. “…the two of you were very…close.”
Close . The word hung heavy in the air. Like pipe smoke puffed out on a sultry, late summer afternoon. One of those lazy afternoons, all too rare, both stretching forever yet ending too soon. The kind of afternoon upon which one laid down cherished, joyful memories of one’s illicit, passionate lover. The hazy sort of afternoon one hadn’t recognised as the very last, precious gasp of summer until it was far too late.
“Were you, my lord?” Angel’s knowing dark eyes dragged over the earl’s banyan as Lando’s grief fought to betray him. The man’s low voice was soft as silk. “ Close ?”
Close . As if that brief, disposable word could ever encompass the depth of the earl’s and Charles’s love. Three years on, and still, the taste of his lover lingered on his tongue. His sweet scent still engulfed him; his tender, murmurings of love still whispered in his head.
And this damned vagabond youth had come to sully it.
With all traces of lazy-limbed languor gone, Henry Orlando Fitzwilliam Albert Duchamps-Avery, Eleventh Earl of Rossingley, rose from the chaise and stalked to the door.
“Get out,” he barked, flinging it open. “At once. Before I have you thrown out. Inglis!”