Chapter 14
PREVIEW: A LORD TO UNWED
When Hannah Elizabeth Abigner, sister to Duke Southam, wakes up in a Gretna Green smithy, nearly married to a fortune hunter, the last thing she expects is to be saved by her first love, who she hadn’t seen since their unforgettable kiss ten years ago.
Blake Shaw is an ambitious military man on a set course, until the father who denied him all his life dies and names him heir in the will.
Now he is part of Society, and part of Lady Hannah’s sphere, but he has no plans of sticking around…
that is, not until his attempt to rescue his childhood love somehow leads to the drunken anvil priest binding them into marriage.
With their marriage certificate held for blackmail by the fortune hunter, Blake and Hannah must catch up to the miscreant and tear it up before their marriage becomes permanent. Because there is nothing worse than being married to the person they spent the last ten years trying to forget….
Lord Spencer’s ancestral home
1806
Blake struggled to keep up with his mother as she charged through the manor’s imposing corridors lined with dusty portraits, past the opposition of servants, up and up, until they reached a hall big and important enough for Lord Spencer himself to hold court in.
“Mother, we should go.”
Mother rushed forward without acknowledging she’d heard the last in a long streak of pleas to abandon her mission. She collapsed onto her knees before the cause of their journey: the father Blake had never met.
“I’ve brought your heir so you could see your child for yourself before it’s too late. You must take responsibility for him, My Lord!”
Lord Spencer barely looked in his direction. “Drag her away right now. He is no son of mine!”
“I know you regret our marriage, but you cannot deny him—”
“Marriage? What evidence have you to claim that you are my wife? Keep talking of marriage and I’ll send you to the madhouse! Somebody, get her out of my sight!”
Blake had never heard a wild animal roar before, but he imagined one would sound just like Father.
For sixteen years, ever since Blake was in leading strings, all he’d heard from his mother was some version of the speech she was now giving his Lordship.
In secret or not, he married me and that makes you Lord Spencer’s lawful son.
One day, he will acknowledge you, and we will be a family together.
Your father will want to know you, I am certain.
Everything will be set to rights, you hear?
He loved me once… I’m sure he will again.
But where his mother saw a bright future, Blake saw only a mirage.
Grand, glistening decorations obscured drafty rooms and lonely corridors.
He had no wish to remain with a stranger who wouldn’t claim him or care for the suffering he caused.
Lord Spencer might have married Blake’s mother, but the Lord regretted it right away.
Mother was banished from the estate before her belly showed.
No record of their marriage was found, and though Lord Spencer sent enough money to keep her and Blake afloat, his heart remained firmly closed.
It may have taken him sixteen years, but Blake eventually realized what Mother refused to believe all her life: you couldn’t force someone to want you.
As his mother’s tears peppered the room’s carpet, the servants rushed forward to apprehend the one who worked in these halls alongside them all those years ago.
Lord Spencer roared again.
Blake turned and ran out of the room. He ran past grabbing hands and down staircases until his feet brought him out to the garden.
It was largely occupied by a hedge maze: the perfect place for one who had no wish to be found.
He followed its bends and turns until he reached the fountain at its center.
Blake perched on the fountain’s marble lip and let the coolness run over his fingers as he stared.
The cascade of water continuously disturbed the surface, never letting it settle, just like his thoughts.
When yelling rose in the distance, he thought the servants finally made their way down to find him.
He was surprised when a girl in a straw bonnet stumbled into the center, instead.
She was both animated and pretty, with bouncy locks of hair framing her hazel eyes and red-cheeked face. He was still taking her in when she dropped to sit next to him without any concern or preamble.
“I thought my family were the only guests here!” She said cheerfully. “Are you staying for long?”
Blake blinked. “Not long.” They would not be asked to stay.
Why was she talking to him, anyway? The girl before him was dressed in a fine dark lilac dress and a heart-shaped locket holding a strand of delicately braided hair in a glass casing, no doubt belonging to an admirer.
And here he was, his clothes worn and coarse and no delicate manners, either.
Even a fool would know he was not her equal, never mind the fact they were not introduced.
Yet she kept staring at him intently, like she was hanging on his every word.
He wished she would leave. He had no patience for a bored noble girl intent on making him her plaything, not when his chest felt hollow with emotion he didn’t know how to name.
“Would you like to play a game?”
“Aren’t we too old for games?” She looked to be younger than his sixteen years, but by a year or two at most. Too young to be out but old enough to act all womanly. And Blake, well… he’d outgrown games a while ago.
“Not if it has adult stakes.” She frowned. “How about Truth or Dare?”
He looked at her again. Deep eyes that smiled at him. A cute mole on her cheek. Harmless. If it was between her and going back in… “Very well. You pick first.”
“Truth, then.”
“Where are you from?”
“What d’ya mean? I’m a local girl.” Her attempt at a Northern accent only made Blake snort. She clearly never needed to pretend to be something she wasn’t a single day of her life.
“There should be a penalty for lying, London girl, and another for subjecting a Northerner to your attempt at our accent.”
“My mother died. Father brought me and my brother along so that we can make our appearances, I suppose, but now… wherever I go, everyone wants something from me.” The girl toyed with her heart-shaped pendant.
Now that he noticed it, he recognized it for the memento that it was—not a promise of romantic love, but a remnant of her mother to hold onto.
“I’d rather Father would have just let me stay.
No—I’d rather I decided where to go, when to grieve, and whom to marry…
but I’ll settle for a reprieve.” Her voice grew stronger and surer.
“They might find you if you stay here.”
“No, Elias—my brother promised to distract them for the afternoon.”
Blake frowned. The noises on the other end of the garden hadn’t entirely dissipated yet. “Are you sure he’s up to the task?”
“He said he is, and my brother has never let me down. He is my protector,” she said cheerfully. “Anyway, Truth of Dare?”
“Dare.”
“That’s all I get for all that trouble? Very well. Recite me a poem.”
He narrowed his eyebrows at her audacity. Did she think him illiterate?
“When those fair suns shall set, as set they must,
And all those tresses shall be laid in dust,
This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to fame,
And ’midst the stars inscribe Belinda’s name.”
He relished the shocked expression on her face and didn’t bother hiding a grin. “You thought to catch me out?”
“What? No! I just—I am impressed, that is all.”
Blake laughed at the sincerity of her indignation.
“My mother keeps a tome of poems on the nightstand.”
He didn’t mention the book was his father’s.
Funny how these things happened. The only possession he had of his father was that very book by which Blake had learned to read.
Back when Mother was a maid, it was Lord Spencer who read her these poems. It was the only thing she took with her when she left.
A blush crept into the girl’s cheeks. “Your delivery makes Alexander Pope sound much sweeter than the satirist he was.”
Her compliments made his insides uncomfortably warm and wooly. Don’t go daft now. Blake cleared his throat. “Truth or Dare?”
“Hmm… here’s a Truth. You’re Lord Spencer’s son!”
“What?” His mouth fell open. How did she figure it out?
“You look like him, you know.”
“I don’t think he agrees.”
He didn’t like the “I see you” look in her eye. One stray sentence and he’d admitted too much, bared himself in a way he was not prepared to.
His jaw tightened. “Ask me for a truth.”
The mood turned contemplative; the game transformed into something more. Somehow, she knew just what to ask.
“If not Lord Spencer’s son… who might you be?”
He didn’t know he was holding his breath, but the tension that coiled inside him since they’d arrived at the estate gave way at last. Something about the way this girl just let him claim his own identity… it might have been a mere gesture, but somehow it mattered.
“I’m Blake Shaw.”
“I am honored to make your acquaintance, Mr. Shaw. I am Hannah Elisabeth Abigner.”
She was well-born, as he suspected. Blake stood up and bowed in the only way he knew—a servant’s way. “The honor is mine, My Lady.”
She caught him mid-bow, her hand grabbing his wrist to pull him back onto the bench, forcefully bringing him back on equal ground. “Just Hannah. Please.”
It was his turn to stare right into her eyes, angling to decipher the depths within. “Is that what you want? Not to be a lady?”
“It seems as though we might want the same thing, no?” Her laughter was a lovely sound.
“I won’t be a lord. I shall join the army.” Better to build his own life with people like him, who could accept him rather than wait around on his father. He could find his family among strangers and support his mother all on his own.
“How I wish I could do that!”
“Join the army?”
“Make my own decisions, mistakes to regret, but take action anyhow—”
Blake leaned in. Who knew a lady could harbor such thoughts? “So, do it. Do what you want.” If she couldn’t do as she wished, was there any hope for any of them?
“Is that a dare?”
Perhaps unconsciously, but Hannah leaned in closer, too, with a smile stretching wide across her redcurrant lips, and Blake’s body tensed with an unfamiliar feeling.
She is so…
He tried on words that would fit the end of that thought. Pretty? Charming? She was—
“Son! Are you there?”
He rose from the bench at once. His mother called from beyond the maze with a tear-tinged voice that spoke well enough of how the rest of her plea to Lord Spencer went.
“I have to go.”
He was preparing to bow again when Hannah jumped up after him and seized Blake by the shoulders.
The solid ground beneath turned to mush as her lips pressed into his.
Blake’s mind went blissfully empty but his body…
oh. His hand found her waist as he attempted to steady them both.
Then, there was nothing to distract from her gentle mouth.
He kissed her back—he did not know whether he was doing it well—but her lips were soft and full, and she uttered a little sound in his arms, and he knew he was undone.
It was as gentle as a light breeze and as forceful as a deluge on a sunny day: there one moment, then gone the next.
When they broke away from one another, Blake opened his eyes to find Hannah grinning at him like some sort of mad fairy.
“I doubt I’ll regret this. Goodbye, Blake Shaw,” she said, and curtsied, as if he was some kind of emperor to see off.
He stumbled out of that maze on cotton legs, unable to form a single sentence to answer his mother. Hannah was all he could think of, even as they’d made their way back home and Blake laid alone on his cot with nothing but the scurrying of rats to keep him company.
Breathtaking. That’s what Hannah was.
And Blake doubted he’d ever find his breath again.