The Earl of Hearts

  Cover

  The Earl of Hearts

  When Melony Farramond’s betrothed was disfigured in a horrific fire eleven years ago, she succumbed to her fears and terminated the engagement, unable to face the prospect of a long life with a crippled monster. Now a lonely spinster, she’s overcome by regret and wishes only to see him one more time, so that they might both put the past behind them.

  Lord Hartley Kentigern was badly scarred in the fire that took the lives of his father and younger brother, and the tragedy became unbearable when his fiancée broke off their engagement soon after. Sinking deeper and deeper into a morass of cynicism and bitterness and haunted by a rejection he can never excuse, he now lives a solitary life on his estate, resigned to enjoying only fleeting comforts in the arms of an occasional willing woman.

  With the annual Valentine masquerade ball approaching, Hartley’s concerned sister hatches a scheme to bring Melony and her brother together once more, in a final effort to force him to confront his demons. It’s a plan that could backfire and reopen the most painful of wounds, or be the one chance Hartley and Melony have to forgive both each other and themselves and rediscover the love they were meant to share.

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Beyond the Page Books

  are published by

  Beyond the Page Publishing

  www.beyondthepagepub.com

  This novella was originally published as “Valentine Dreams” in the collection From My Only Valentine, published by Kensington/Zebra in 2003, copyright © 2003 by Donna Lea Simpson.

  Beyond the Page edition copyright © 2014 by Donna Lea Simpson.

  Material excerpted from Lord St. Claire’s Angel copyright © 1999 by Donna Lea Simpson.

  Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs

  ISBN: 978-1-940846-08-8

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without the express written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Excerpt from Lord St. Claire’s Angel

  Classic Regency Romances

  Books by Donna Lea Simpson

  About the Author

  One

  “Hart, you’re brooding again. What’s wrong?”

  Lord Hartley Kentigern glanced up at his sister, Lady Charmian St. Edwards, and shook his head. “You’re mistaken, Charm. I’m not brooding. I was just considering, er . . . the crop in the east field this year.”

  His sister, a tidy, slim woman of thirty-one years, two years younger than her brother, sat in a chair opposite him, folded her hands on her lap, and stared into his eyes. He turned his face away. “So that is why you are sitting alone in your library of a winter’s eve, staring into the fireplace. You’re thinking of crops.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “That is not my concern.”

  Charmian expressed her frustration with a clicking noise and a shake of her head. But the earl refused to elaborate, nor would he let her anxiety on his behalf draw him out. His thoughts—and his dreams—were his own.

  His dreams. He buried his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes, wondering when he would sleep again without that dream. A woman’s voice, a woman’s delicate touch, her scent, lilacs in rain: it was driving him to distraction, he would admit to himself if not to his sister. It was just that there was something familiar in her touch, and yet not familiar. He couldn’t even explain it to himself, and he knew if he voiced it, it would sound absurd.

  He had conned over every woman he had been with in the last ten years—the list was not overlong, but there were a few willing widows and even one divorced woman—but not a one smelled just so, or felt just so in his arms, as the woman in his dreams. It was beginning to haunt his waking hours, this obsession with figuring out who she was.

  Because she touched not just his hair and his body, but also his face. His fingers traced his right jaw and up the right cheek, touching, probing . . . wondering. She touched his face. Caressed his scars.

  Why? What did it mean?

  Charmian gazed steadily at her brother, waiting for a response to her last statement, which had just been that it was her concern that he was not eating and likely not sleeping. But he hadn’t even heard her. He was staring into the fire again. As she watched, he raised one hand and lightly touched his face, the scars on his right side a terrible reminder of tragedy, a harrowing night that lived in her own memory as a grim nightmare. She still awoke, sometimes, thinking she smelled smoke, her heart pounding, her ears ringing, and again she was nineteen and in London for the Season, having a wonderful time until the night that changed her and her brother’s life forever, the night of the fire.

  The fire.

  It seemed so long ago now, and yet sometimes it came back to her with such clarity it was as if it had occurred just the day before. Her father, the Earl of Kentigern, had been in London with his whole family: his wife, Lady Kentigern; Hartley, who was his oldest son and heir to the earldom; herself, the only daughter of the house; and . . . Lawrence. Little Lawrence, forever seven, her beloved brother, a sweet, energetic, mischievous boy.

  Had he been playing with a candle or had the candle just tipped over? No one would ever know how it had started, but it had been conjectured that a candle had caught on a curtain in Lawrence’s room on the third floor. Charmian’s mother later said her husband smelled smoke and raced to his younger son’s room, even as he commanded Hartley to get Charmian and their mother out of the house. He could have commanded a servant to go up to the nursery, but he would trust no one with his younger child’s safety.

  Charmian had huddled with her mother on the pavement outside as the eerie glow of fire in the upper floors and the steady stream of panicking servants had filled the dark night with confusion. Nanny, who had been down in the kitchen getting “Master Lawrence” a drink of milk when the fire started, stood out on the street, milk still in hand, and set up a high keening wail that Charmian could still hear sometimes, ringing in her ears. And she remembered with awful clarity the dark figure moving by the window of Lawrence’s room as the heat shattered the glass with a pop and a tinkle.

  The butler, an older man named Bacon, staggered out of the house; he had tried, he said, to get to the earl and young Lawrence, but thick, acrid smoke had choked him until he was close to unconsciousness. He had barely made it downstairs and out.

 
Hartley had then dashed back into the house after his father and brother even as the butler pleaded with him not to go, saying that the whole third floor was consumed. But Hart was not one to listen.

  He seldom spoke about what happened next, and had never divulged every minute of his sad quest. Charmian had begged to know more but he was unable at first to find words for the horror of it, and then said it was too sad and too awful to speak of, especially to her; she had already suffered so much. But she gleaned enough from his occasional comments to know that he had been unable to get past the flames on the staircase to his father and brother, though he heard them. He had heard their shrieks of pain and it still, she thought, devastated him that he had been able to hear but not save them.

  Their father and little brother had died that day, and she thought that their mother’s heart had been buried with them because she died exactly two years later, broken and devastated by the death of her husband, whom she loved, and the miracle child, the son she had never expect to have after several miscarriages, and upon whom she had doted.

  Hart was left to soldier on, his face horribly disfigured at first, the burns on his right cheek and neck painful evidence of how hard he had tried to save his father and brother even after all hope was gone. His recovery had been slow; there were burns on his right shoulder and arm, too, and there was some fear at first that he would lose the use of his arm, or that the sores would become infected.

  Assiduous care by an excellent nurse—their old nanny, having lost little Lawrence, would let no one else care for Hart—had proved effective and he recovered. Charmian was thankful for his sake that he was still able to use both arms and hands.

  But he had lost something more precious to him than even his limbs; he lost Melony Farramond, his fiancée. Shortly after the fire she had written him a stiff little note that she was sorry, but she felt that they would not suit, and she was breaking off the engagement. She left London that same day, allowing no further contact.

  After that day Charmian despised her with a hatred so vitriolic that it had burned her stomach like acid. Shallow, vapid, selfish; she damned Melony Farramond with all those words and many more, wishing dark and foul fates upon the girl’s head. It was a dark time, and she soon realized it was consuming her. For her own sake she whittled it down to merely despising the young woman.

  Charmian glanced up at Hartley again. He sat back in the chair, his face in the shadows, his usual position. What would have happened if Melony had not deserted him as she did? Would he have healed faster? Would his personality not have taken on the dour cast that shadowed it now?

  Impossible to say.

  Maybe it was time to find out if old wounds could heal, or if reopening them would just bring further heartache. Maybe it truly was time to take a chance at hurting her beloved brother in a last ditch effort to heal him of his spiritual wounds, so much deeper than mere burns.

  Two

  Miss Melony Farramond, spinster, shuffled through her mail. When she found that it held the letter she was waiting for, she stared down at it, trembling.

  Sir Harold Farramond, her father, wandered into the comfortable sitting room and glanced around, his pale eyes glaring into every corner and scanning every surface. “Where the devil are my glasses. Melly, have you seen my glasses?”

  “On the table in the library, Father,” she said, concealing the tremor of her voice and shuffling the letter in among the others.

  “Ever since your mother departed this world I can’t find anything in this blasted household. Your mother would have known where my glasses are.”

  “On the table in the library, Father,” Melony repeated, patiently, clutching the pile of letters to her ample bosom and waiting while he turned and shuffled out. He had not been the same since his wife’s death just before All Saints’ Day of the previous year, three months ago now. As the winter progressed he seemed older and grayer with each passing day. She was encouraging him to go to visit her younger brother and his wife, who lived on another of the Farramond family properties, a farm near Polperro, but he seemed incapable of making his mind up about anything.

  As he exited the room, she found the letter again among the other mail and took it over to the window, which looked out on the dull January scene of withered gray and drab countryside. The Farramond residence was two miles in from the Cornish shore, but the salt wind still blew that far inland, flattening the long grasses left at the end of the last autumn.

  Sitting on a hard chair by a polished oak table, she stared down at the letter, wondering if she dared open it. She turned it over and over, tracing the address, noting the texture of the fine linen paper, touching the wax seal. It held an answer, she supposed, but what answer? And even if it held an affirmative, did she dare take the chance and do what she had proposed in a moment of boldness?

  Because she was not bold. Life and her family had made her timid, she supposed, though there was no excuse for some of her past actions. She had long come to regret her behavior in many instances.

  Especially one. The one she would correct if she could, finally confront if she could not. She touched the blue seal on the letter, tracing the heraldic elements, the stag rampant, the crossed swords. The Kentigern seal.

  She laid the letter down on the table, though, unwilling or unable to break that seal yet. She stood and paced away from the table toward the empty fireplace, looking over her shoulder at the letter, wondering if she had done the right thing. The sitting room was cold and gloomy and she shivered, rubbing her wool-clad arms briskly, but the habits of years would not be broken. No fires in the morning in the sitting room or parlors. No beeswax candles unless company was expected.

  Even though her mother had been gone almost three months the servants would not change their ways, and Melony had been unable to persuade them after over thirty years of stringent thrift. It was not that there was no money for commonplace comforts, it was just that things had never been done in such a way, and likely never would, now. Her father was of no use, for he merely said that Margaret had had a reason for doing things the way she had, so they would continue to be done that way.

  Melony was nominally the female head of the household now, but the ghost of Lady Farramond was still the true power in their home. So the fireplace held only ashes, though in her mother’s lifetime a maid would have already disposed of those. The servants did only the minimum of work now, knowing that Melony was not hard-hearted enough to dismiss anyone who slacked and was too indecisive to enforce the rules. The legacy of her youth and the tragedy she had witnessed and been a part of was that she wanted everyone, down to the lowliest scullery maid, to be happy.

  Melony paced back to the window and rubbed her arms again; she should have brought her shawl downstairs with her. Sometimes she wished that she had the decisive nature of her mother. Lady Farramond never had wondered if she had done the right thing, nor had she ever agonized over a decision. She had decisiveness enough for her whole family, which was sometimes the problem.

  Taking a deep breath, Melony sat. This was ridiculous. She would open the letter and read it. She broke the seal and unfolded the sheet. What would Lady Charmian St. Edwards say?

  • • •

  Charmian paused before the door and bit her lip. It was February first. The last couple of weeks had seen her take actions that she was hiding from her brother, and she was not accustomed to such subterfuge. But she felt there was no alternative. Given a choice, he would likely not face what she would have him face. And yet no matter how she justified it, she knew she was interfering in his life. It was for his own good. She repeated that out loud: “It is for his own good.” With a sharp nod, she took a deep breath and pushed open the door. “I’ve written a note to the Stauntons, Hart,” Charmian said, entering Hart’s lair, the library.

  “Mhmm?”

  He was sitting by the crackling fire with his feet up, reading an agricultural paper presented by a friend of his; she knew he had not even heard her. When absorbed
in business, his mind was totally engaged.

  However—

  “Yes,” she said, trailing her hand along the table that held a globe, a stack of newspapers, an inkwell and other writing detritus. Her brother’s library was a comfortable room of dark wood bookshelves, thick old carpets and heavy Jacobean furniture, with a deep chair and a settee placed for comfort near the massive fireplace. It was a truly masculine lair, just as her brother was an overtly masculine man, his rigidity sharpened by tragedy. “I told them that we would both be delighted to attend their Valentine masquerade ball, as always. I have been pondering what you should wear. What do you intend to wear?”

  He looked up and frowned over at her, rattling and folding the paper. “What are you talking about?”

  She repeated what she had been saying as she came to stand on the hearth, warming herself against the chill of the room.

  “I don’t know; that’s almost two weeks away. I’ll decide the day before, like I always do.” His tone was impatient, his manner careless.

  “Won’t you give me a hint what way you are leaning? That way I could get the costume out and see if it needs cleaning or mending.” She spread her hands behind her back, feeling the blaze warm her cold hands. “You could wear that Tudor courtier outfit,” she said, hoping it sounded as if she had just thought of it. “You do look dashing in that.”

  He snorted. “Dashing? Charm, you’re laying it on a bit thick. Save your butter for someone who will believe it.”

  “Hart,” she said lightly, “you may meet the love of your life! You should look your best.”

  “Sentimental claptrap! Love of my life.” He tossed the paper on a table near his elbow and picked up a cigar, bending past his sister and lighting it with a spill of paper lit from the blaze.