Sincerely, Your Rake (Roses and Rakes #3)

Chapter 1

November 1838

Brookevale Park

Dorset, England

A funeral was arguably the worst place or time to fall in love, but Fitz excelled exclusively at Doing Things One Shouldn’t.

The last time he’d stepped foot in a church had been his father’s funeral two years ago, his first appearance as Fitzwilliam Pomfrey, 13th Viscount Ludlowe; the title that his father had assured him he’d never live up to.

Of course, it would be snowing, on this day, another funeral.

This occasion, most unfortunately, marked the passing of someone who’d treated Fitz like he meant something.

Fitz winced as the bulky church door thudded a little too loudly behind him.

He ran a hand through his blond hair and shook the snow off his wool great coat and hat.

The conversation and soft, airy music emanating from the church were a balm against the winter doldrums raging outside the chapel’s stone walls.

The woman they’d assembled to honor today would have appreciated such an atmosphere for a send-off, he thought.

A glance at his timepiece confirmed he was ten minutes early, but the church was already filling up.

His oldest friend reached him in short strides.

Fitz pulled him in for a solemn embrace.

“You look like hell, old friend,” Lawrence Pembrooke said as he pulled away to glance over Fitz's rumpled coat, muddy boots, and windblown hair. Fitz had ridden straight from London and hadn’t had time to right his appearance.

“No more compliments, please; they will only go to my head,” Fitz replied.

His ill-timed use of humor hit its mark: a small slash of a smile lit Lawrence’s face.

Lawrence clapped a hand on his shoulder.

Fitz wasn’t sure if he was supposed to follow, and then Lawrence waved him toward a set of pews marked for the family of the deceased.

Fitz wasn’t family. He didn’t have family; he had “relations.”

Although Lady Rosamunde Pembrooke, Lawrence’s mother, had given him the closest thing to one he’d ever known.

She had taken it upon herself to pull a sensitive, insecure little boy who made up for his father’s disappointment with pranks and dimples into her family’s bubble many years ago.

He reminded himself it was for her and for them he’d come all this way.

He stopped a few paces short of his destination with an unintended scrape of his boots on the uneven stone floor.

One of Lawrence’s younger sisters turned to peer at him over her shoulder.

Even as one dark brow querked in his direction from behind her spectacles, he marveled at her.

The honey shades in her eyes, the rising color in her pale cheeks, the single curl dangling at her nape in the most kissable portion of unconcealed decolletage.

“I didn’t know princesses wrote stories.” He’d said to her months ago, to taunt her just like he always did. He felt like such a cad now that he hadn’t just told her the truth. He wasn’t good at the truth.

“Here it is, then. Read it.”

She’d called his bluff when she had shoved her manuscript in his direction. Of course, he’d fled like a coward; unable to explain why even as he knew he was untethering whatever lingered between them.

Currently, her honeypot eyes narrowed at him before she turned around to whisper something to her sister on her left.

All 6 Pembrooke siblings and their extended family shuffled closer together to make room for Fitz, leaving an open space at the end of the pew.

Next to Lady Noelle. Of course it would be.

Fitz wanted to say that he’d happily find a place at the back of the chapel, a seat more befitting a besmirched sinner like himself.

Just as he opened his mouth, Lady Noelle scooped her small niece onto the lap of her black skirts and motioned pointedly for him to sit.

Her cold civility was so at odds with the fiery woman he knew. He deserved it.

The service began with a hymn and progressed with a scripture reading and the vicar’s litany about Lady Pembrooke’s service to the community.

Beside him, he heard Lady Noelle clench her jaw tight like she could lock any tears in place.

He’d always hated the sight of a woman’s tears, especially his mother’s.

But Lady Noelle’s? She was fire and she was ice, but the single tear rolling down Lady Noelle’s pale cheek felt like a punch to his gut.

He sucked in a breath, locking his knuckles.

Fitz moved closer to her. He was prepared to offer his handkerchief, a solid shoulder, a long overdue apology, his fortune.

He’d sacrifice anything to staunch her tears.

He’d never dare to drape an arm about her shoulders so publicly, to offer his own shoulders as a protective refuge from the solitary indignity of having others watch her cry. But did it damn him for wanting to?

The various Pembrookes and their guests listened to the rest of the eulogy in mostly silent, stoic attention. Fitz stole glances at Lady Noelle’s thin shoulders curled inward, her cheeks hollow and ashen against the backdrop of mourning black, her lips pressed into a thin line.

Still, he wasn’t sure why he cared. They’d been sparring partners since childhood. The verbal volleys they always sent back and forth had become one of his favorite country pastimes.

But that day at the funeral, his hand lingered over hers where it lay on the wooden seat between them.

He couldn’t hear anything around him as her gloved fingertips brushed over his knuckles.

She looked up at him without any of her usual frost and gave him a frail smile.

It was barely there, but the color returned to her cheeks.

Her hand alighted on his arm, and she mouthed her thanks.

Like his presence there meant some small comfort.

He’d thought perhaps his presence paled in comparison when Her Majesty Queen Victoria showed up for the graveside service at the churchyard outside Brookevale’s small, stony chapel.

Fitz observed the way Lady Noelle barely blinked when Her Majesty spoke to the mourners of Lady Rosamunde Pembrooke.

Unsurprisingly, Noelle’s mother had been a bastion of warm guidance amongst the royal court when Her Majesty was first crowned.

Afterward, the diminutive queen took Lady Noelle’s hand.

Lady Noelle was taller (it wasn’t hard to be taller than Her Majesty though, God save the Queen and all that), but they were of an age.

Fitz hadn’t heard a single word the two noblewomen exchanged outside the chapel, but he observed enough to use his imagination.

He had a seed of an idea, an insane idea.

He shook his mind as if to shoo it away.

He’d been invited to the funeral feast at Brookevale Park afterward, an overly formal luncheon with extended family and close friends. He tried baiting Lady Noelle from his seat at her left at the long table, realizing overused cliches would only fall flat.

She placed her linen napkin in her lap and said, “What are you even doing here, Fitz?”

Fitz coaxed gentleness into his voice. “Lady Rosamunde was like a second mother to me. She’d feel it a lapse in my obligations to her if I weren’t here to rile you.”

She sighed, and it wasn’t frustrated or bored or beleaguered, it was tired.

“If you insist,” Lady Noelle said, pushing the food around on her plate with her fork.

There were dark smudges under her eyes he’d never seen before. Maybe he’d never looked at her this closely before; but God help him, he was looking now. The table around them was submerged in subdued conversation. His world had narrowed down to her.

He placed a hand on her elbow. “You should eat something. You look…about as well-nourished as the average London ragamuffin.”

Her green-gold-brown eyes met his with an air of insolence. “If only I cared for your opinion, my lord.”

There she was. A glimmer of the girl who’d taunted and mocked him from behind her spectacles or a book when everyone else lauded his good looks and charm. Fitz bit his lip to stifle a small laugh. It was one of relief, not of derision; but still out of place at a funeral feast.

“Oh, I’d never deign to make such a misinformed assumption. Only… you’ll need your strength.”

Noelle’s eyes narrowed behind her spectacles. “For enduring the unsolicited observations of my childhood adversary, you mean?”

Fitz set down his water goblet. “I know from the long and dull affair after my father’s passing…these events, just before the mourning period, really drag on.”

He couldn’t tear his eyes away from her as she stared down dully at her plate.

One of his fingers distractedly traced the outline of her bombazine-covered elbow in silent encouragement.

“Nothing…nothing really appeals to me at the moment.” The raw honesty pricked him.

“Not bon bons?” He whispered, leaning in her direction, “Or hazelnut truffles? Perhaps the apple tarts you were always so fond of? How about…sugared pears?”

For the briefest moment, she closed her eyes with delight; as though she could picture a table laden with desserts. Her smile did that familiar thing where it tugged at one corner of her lips.

“You’re a lunatic,” she said, finally meeting his eyes.

He belatedly registered that she hadn’t shrugged his hand from her elbow.

From across the table, her older brother Lawrence loudly cleared his throat.

Fitz kicked him under the table in response.

Fitz was tempted to call him an overprotective oaf, but he felt protective of her in a pointedly different way.

Did he care to puzzle over why he had been unable to sit so close to her and see the pain written in her countenance without touching her? Or why she hadn’t pushed him away?

Lady Noelle’s eyes alighted upon Fitz’s hand. He pulled away, feeling like he’d overstepped. But when a servant took her untouched plate away, and the desserts were laid before them, she smiled at him. Her top teeth nipped her bottom lip as though they shared some private joke.

He tried to put his interactions with Lady Noelle from his mind when he returned to the opulent London townhouse that his father had left him, but she lingered in his thoughts like a phantom.

When he closed his eyelids, he still felt her hand on his, still felt the same urge to protect her and to uplift her both at once.

He had an insane idea how to accomplish just that.

He’d enlisted the help of a secretary months before, anticipating he’d need her aid with the looming milestone of his twenty-fifth birthday when he’d finally receive the full scope of his inheritance and all its responsibilities.

They’d been acquaintances of a sort and he liked her easy way with words and direct manners.

The slight woman angled her head at him upon hearing his request, which sounded insane even to his own ears. “You want my help composing letters…to your childhood foe?”

“Foe is…a strong word. But yes. I do want your help, Letitia.”

Letitia Blackshear folded her arms and surveyed him. “She’s pretty, then.”

Fitz searched for the right answer, rubbing the back of his neck. “I suppose some would say so, yes.”

The South Bank seamstress sitting across from him raised an eyebrow. “Viscount Ludlowe, I’m afraid I’m no good at love letters.”

Fitz pulled a face of unrestrained disgust, pausing as he pushed up his shirt sleeves.

“God. Viscount Ludlowe was my father. I’ve told you many times, my friends just call me Fitz. And they’re not…love letters. I want you-” he pointed with the end of a quill in her direction, “to help me write her letters under a guise. I saw her and The Queen getting chummy at her mother’s funeral.

Talk about books, things that get her out of that boring, stuffy house and take her someplace else. Until she can return to London.”

He scoffed. “I’d never actually address the letters myself. God, that would be-” He trailed off.

Either the thought was too preposterous to name, or he didn’t have the right word to affix to it.

Not to mention, Lawrence had always been a damn-near-unbeatable pugilist in their school days.

Letitia laid her head on her folded arms. “You want to write to her….under the guise of The Queen? Our Queen? You’re mad, you and your whole upper class. You’re all mad.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d been told as much recently.

You’re a lunatic.

Maybe he was. Surely, many in London- and at the boys’ schools he’d been kicked out of- would whole-heartedly agree with this assessment. He couldn’t really find the gall to care.

Fitz leaned back in his chair, leaning his head against his hands. “I’ll pay you handsomely, of course.”

“She worth all this trouble? You are aware that if she figures it out, she’ll piece together that you tricked her.”

He had all manner of diversions at his disposal, no small fortune, and private matters of his own to settle.

Maybe she was right: what was one curly-haired, silver-tongued minx probably ensconced in a book in the countryside of Dorset?

Fitzwilliam Pomfrey leaned back in the leather chair in his study, scrubbing a hand over his face.

He handed Letitia the quill he’d been turning over in his fingers.

He dictated to her the words that had been rattling around in his head, she added a few and deleted more.

The letter now in front of him wasn’t boast-worthy; but the thought of Lady Noelle enduring the isolation of mourning ate at him. She was the sister of his oldest friend, and they’d made no promises to each other; and yet… there was some small part of him that wanted to make promises to her.

They were wholly opposite, London’s Libertine and a wallflower permanently entrenched in a library.

He’d taken this risk because writing was her medium, the way to enter her orbit.

He’d had to do it in a way that she- and the ridiculous dictates of only occasionally polite society- would sanction.

Fitzwilliam Pomfrey sealed the envelope and placed it in the hands of a discreet messenger before he could think better of it.

Lady Noelle,

I write to you as one dealt the loss of a parent too soon.

Few in my court had the innate ability to charm and console like Lady Rosamunde.

Her absence is felt, though your loss overshadows mine.

I’ll keep you company in the shadows until you’re ready for the light.

Write back to me with all those witty turns of phrase you surely keep to yourself, news from Brookevale, or perhaps all the books you are reading.

Ever your friend,

Victoria Regina