The Marquis's Awakening

by Elizabeth Beacon

Overview

A goddess to revive him 

Tom Banburgh, Marquis of Mantaigne, has sworn never to return to Dayspring Castle. But his beloved godmother has other ideas. She sends him back to his unhappy childhood home, only for Tom to find Polly Trethayne camped out under his roof! 

From the beginning, Polly unsettles Tom. A goddess in breeches, she awakens feelings he thought he'd locked deep inside. Can Polly storm the barricades Tom has erected and bring fresh vitality to his lonely world? 

A Year of Scandal 

A gentleman for every season

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781460343791
Publisher:	Harlequin
Publication date:	12/01/2014
Series:	Extreme Ladies , #2
Sold by:	HARLEQUIN
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	310 KB

About the Author

Elizabeth Beacon has a passion for history and storytelling and, with the English West Country on her doorstep, never lacks a glorious setting for her books. Elizabeth tried horticulture, higher education as a mature student, briefly taught English and worked in an office, before finally turning her daydreams about dashing, piratical heroes and their stubborn and independent heroines into her dream job; writing Regency romances for Harlequin, Mills and Boon

Read an Excerpt

Tom Banburgh, Marquis of Mantaigne, thought the polite world was about to be bitterly disappointed. If the wolfish glint in Luke Winterley's eye was anything to go by, he wouldn't be letting the former Lady Chloe Thessaly out of his bed long enough for her to go to town for a very long time, so the ton wouldn't be able to pass judgement on the new Viscountess Farenze until her new husband could spare her—some time in the next decade, if they were lucky.

'Can't this wait until after your wedding journey?' he asked with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as Lady Chloe took a sealed missive from the neat reticule she was carrying. He should have been suspicious of that, since Luke was waiting to whisk her off on their bride trip and she hardly stood in need of whatever ladies carried in them when she had a husband all too eager to provide for her every need, and a few she probably didn't even know she had right now.

Feeling a fool for not remembering his godmother's infamous will, even on this joyous day Virginia had done so much to bring about, he realised he'd stepped into the book room with the happy couple as naively as a débutante at her first grown-up party. As if they would have anything else to say to him before they left for Devon on their honeymoon but here you are; you 're next.

'Here you are; you're next, I'm afraid, Tom,' Chloe said with a rueful smile to admit he wouldn't be pleased to take it and how could a few bits of expensive paper feel so heavy? 'Luke says we won't be back from Devon for weeks, and you must begin whatever you have to do for Lady Virginia before then if you're to get it done in the allotted three months.'

'Dash it all, though, it's the beginning of the Season,' Tom managed to utter after a heavy pause as he fought off a craven urge to throw the letter back at his best friend's new wife and refuse. 'Ah, well, suppose I might as well get it over with,' he said as lightly as he could while turning the letter over again, as if he might conjure it into someone else's hand if he put off reading it long enough.

'Look what my quarter of a year brought me,' Luke told him with a besotted smile Tom did his best to find nauseating.

'And can you see me neatly paired off at the end of whatever wild goose chase Virginia insists I carry out for her?' he demanded past a nasty little suspicion that was exactly what his wily godmother intended to happen, if Luke's adventures were anything to go by.

'One day you'll have to consider the succession,' Luke said half-seriously.

'I have and decided there's nothing very wonderful about the Banburghs, so who cares if there are no more of us?' Tom replied with a cynical smile that felt a lot better than the dread of being the next one on his godmother's list.

He ordered himself not to squirm under the sceptical mother's glance Chloe had perfected on her young niece. She and Luke would no doubt raise repellent quantities of brats in their joint images and be blissfully happy together for the rest of their lives, but he had no wish to follow in their footsteps and had managed without a family all his life.

'True,' Luke agreed with an impatient glance at the door. 'Why not leave him to read it in peace now, love? A very small part of me would like to stay and watch Mantaigne perform like a dancing bear in his turn, but the rest can't wait for us to begin our honeymoon.'

'I doubt your best friend relishes the task in front of him though, Luke,' she told her new husband sternly, then seemed to find it impossible to see anything but him once she'd turned her fascinated gaze his way.

'Have you any clue to what my quest could be, Lady Chloe?' Tom asked to remind the lovers he was still here, before it was he who needed to leave the book room in a hurry instead of them.

'Oh, that quest. No, I only hand out the letters,' Chloe said with a shrug that admitted she was so deep in love with Luke they were very poor company.

She flicked a glance at Tom's name and titles inscribed on his last message from his godmother and he was in danger of being ambushed by grief all over again. It was such a stark absence, having to acknowledge Virginia's wit, warmth and energy had left this world for the next. She and Virgil had lit up his life, and he felt the loneliness of losing both hit him anew.

'I had such plans, very seductive and beautiful ones they were as well,' he grumbled to hide his true feelings on such a joyful day.

'Rakehell.' Luke dismissed that objection with the wolfish good humour of a man about to have his own wildest fantasies come true. 'And where would be the fun in my great-aunt being predictable in death as she never was in life?'

'Fun for you, I suppose, Romeo, now your task is safely over.'

'True, watching you squirm is a pleasant side effect of standing at my own Lady Farenze's side while I watch three more idiots run about in their turn. If Virginia can see us from her place in heaven, I bet she's enjoying the view even more than I am right now.'

'Knowing her, it won't be some simple task easily got through and back to town before anyone misses me either.'

'Oh, I suspect those seductively beautiful plans of yours will, but we have to leave, and you need to discover whatever it is Virginia wants you to do in private,' the new Lady Farenze intervened.

'The fun's just starting—do we really have to go when it's getting interesting?' her lord said with the easy humour of a man whose task had come to a deeply satisfying conclusion.

''We do, Luke Winterley,' Chloe said with a severe look that only made him laugh.

Tom hadn't seen his friend and honorary brother this carefree since he was a dashing and hopeful youth, always game for a lark. The marriage his father arranged when Luke was barely twenty certainly knocked the youthful high spirits out of him far too young and he'd turned into a virtual hermit when the silly chit left him. After that Luke had locked himself away in his northern stronghold to raise their baby daughter and Tom blessed Virginia for managing to chip Luke out of frozen isolation, but he didn't want to be next the next victim on her list all the same.

'Well, we'll leave you to it then, Mantaigne. Try not to miss us too much, won't you?' Luke said with a mocking grin at Tom and a hot look at his lady that made her blush, then stride ahead of him, clearly in nearly as much of a hurry to begin married life as he was.

The door shut after them with a soft snick and Tom was left with the last letter he'd ever receive from his godmother, wishing she was here to tell him what maggot had got into her head this time herself. He'd spent the best years of his boyhood in this house and sometimes wondered if he had imagined his stark early childhood as the true lord of an ancient castle and vast estates, but master of nothing.

'Bonaparte's Imperial Guard could be marching about on the cliffs tonight and we wouldn't be any the wiser.'

Polly Trethayne shook her head, then remembered her companion couldn't see her in the heavy darkness. 'I really think we would,' she whispered, wishing her friend and ally had stayed inside. 'If it is smugglers, we really need to be quiet.'

'Better for us not to know when they're out and about, if you ask me,' Lady Wakebourne grumbled a little more softly.

'I didn't and we can't simply sit back and let them use Castle Cove to land cargo whenever they fancy. The riding officers are sure to find out and report it, and the last thing we want is for the Marquis of Mantaigne to take an interest in Dayspring Castle for once in his life. He'll turn us out to tramp the roads again without a second thought and leave the poor old place to go to rack and ruin.'

'Even if he wants Dayspring to tumble down as the locals say, I'm sure he'd rather we stay than leave it empty for any passing rogue who wants a hiding place.'

'One or two may already be doing that and we are the rogues as far as the rest of the world is concerned. No, long may he stop away,' Polly argued.

Meeting Lady Wakebourne and finding this place abandoned on his lordship's orders was a small miracle and Polly had prayed every night for the last six and a half years for the man to stop away. Even the memory of how it felt to wander the world with a babe in her arms and two small boys at her heels for six long and terrifying months made her shudder.

'I doubt if anything would wrench him away from the delights of a London Season at this time of year, so I don't suppose we rogues need worry,' Lady Wakebourne whispered with an unlikely trace of regret.

Polly shook her head at the idea her practical and forthright friend secretly dreamed of playing loo and gossiping with the tabbies and dowagers of the ton, whilst the glitter and scandal of soirées and balls played out round them. Deciding she must be a freak to think the whole extravagant business sounded appalling, she wondered fleetingly how she'd have fared in that world if she had been obliged to make her come out in polite society. The idea was so far removed from her real life it made her want to laugh, but she bit it back and reminded herself this was serious.

'Surely you heard that?' she whispered urgently, listening to the night with the uneasy feeling it was listening back. 'I'd swear that was a window opening or closing on the landward side of the house.'

'The wind, perhaps?'

'There is no wind; nothing ought to be out here but foxes or owls.'

'Some poor creature could have got in and not been able to get back out, then,' Lady Wakebourne murmured.

'I refuse to believe bats and birds can unbar shutters or open windows,' Polly said as lightly as she could when this black darkness made her want to shout a challenge at whoever was out there.

'Tomorrow we'll go in and see for ourselves, but if you take another step in that direction now I'll scream at the top of my voice.'

'They will be long gone by then,' Polly argued, although she knew Lady Wakebourne was right and she couldn't afford to encounter an unknown foe in the unused parts of the castle.

Her three brothers had to grow up and be independent before she was free to have adventures, but it was so hard to fight her wild Trethayne urges to act now and think later. At least memory of her father's recklessness reminded her to leash her own though; she was all that stood between her brothers and life on the parish, if they were lucky, and she had no plans to leave any of them in the dire situation Papa's death had left her in as a very naive and unprepared seventeen-year-old.

'At least we'll find out if these felons of yours exist outside the pages of a Gothic novel. If they do we'll have to get them to believe there really are ghosts at Day-spring Castle and leave us in peace with them.'

'Perhaps I should cut my hair and borrow a fine coat, then ride up the drive and announce myself as the Marquis of Mantaigne come back to claim his own,' Polly suggested as the most absurd way of scaring anyone out of the old place she could think of.

'And perhaps you should stop reading those ridiculous Gothic novels the vicar's sister passes on to us when she knows them by heart.'

'Aye, they're about as likely to come true as the idea Lord Mantaigne will ever come here without being kidnapped and dragged up the drive bound and gagged first. So ghosts it will have to be then,' Polly agreed, reluctantly admitting there was nothing to be done tonight, and followed her fellow adventuress back to the castle keep and the closest thing she had to a home nowadays.

* * *

'I should have sent the butler and housekeeper from Tayne on ahead of us, Peters. At least they might have found a few rooms at Dayspring undamaged after all these years of neglect and managed to make them habitable for us by now.'

Tom halted his matched team of Welsh greys at the gatehouse and wished himself a hundred miles away. Dayspring Castle was puffed up as his most splendid country seat in the peerages and guides to the county, but he felt a clutch of sick dread in his belly at the mere sight of it ahead, wrapped round the clifftop like a beast of prey from his worst nightmares.

'They would have given notice,' his companion argued. 'It would need an army of servants to get such a place in any sort of order after lying empty so long.'

'True, but wouldn't that army need to be directed by my man of business?' Tom retaliated against a not very-well-disguised rebuke for neglecting the wretched place until it became the ruin he'd once sworn to make it.

'I like a challenge, my lord,' Peters said, and wasn't he a mystery of a lawyer now Tom came to think about it?

Nothing about this business was simple, though, and he supposed he'd have to admit the man had been useful to Luke in the part of the quest Virginia set him. According to James Winterley, who had a way of knowing things you didn't expect him to, Peters had helped a variety of aristocratic clients sort out the skeletons in their rosewood cupboards, including the Seaborne clan, whose shrewdness Tom would back against a corps of wily diplomats. So Tom had no choice but to trust this man to watch his back, even if the fellow saw too much of what lay below the surface of life for comfort.

'You're only here for three months, and heaven knows why Virginia thought I needed you by my side the entire time. Perhaps she expected you to force me up the drive at pistol-point if I lose my nerve.'

'The late Lady Farenze merely instructed me to meet you in Dorchester and accompany you here. I couldn't say what your godmother had in mind, my lord,' Peters said primly, but there was a world of disapproval in his gaze.

Perhaps the man was a Jacobin? Tom decided he didn't care if he was hell-bent on revolution, so long as they got on with this wretched business and left as soon as they found out what was wrong. 'I believe I mentioned my dislike of being "my lorded" at every turn when we first met,' he replied with a preoccupied frown at the neatly kept castle gatehouse.

'I'm supposed to be your temporary secretary here, not your equal, my lord.'

Tom found himself doubting that and how unlike him to look deeper into another man's life than he wanted him to. Lord Mantaigne had spent most of his adult life skimming over the surface of life like a pond-skater, and Tom shook his head at the picture of himself not caring about anything very much. He'd loved his godmother and Virgil, but they were both dead now, and at least he'd managed to keep the rest of the world at arm's length, except a voice whispered he'd let in Luke and his daughter and James. Now Lady Chloe and her spirited niece seemed to have chipped their way into a corner of what he'd thought was his cold heart, and how could he have been so careless as to let himself care about so many people without noticing?

He glared at a certain window high up in the ancient keep and stark memories rose up to whisper he was right not to come back until he had to. Virginia's last letter had told him one of her legion of friends had written to tell her something was amiss at Dayspring and he must go and find out what was so wrong with the place, but all he could see wrong with it right now was that it was still standing. Only for the woman who had taken in the feral little beast who had once existed in that keep and loved him anyway would he revisit the place despite all his resolutions not to.

'Whoever you intend to be, you'll have a poor time of it here,' he warned Peters as he slowed his greys to a walk.

'I expect I'll survive; I'm not faint-hearted.'

'Just as well. My last guardian only kept a few servants here once he took control of the estate for me, and I paid them off when I came of age,' Tom warned.

Peters shrugged as if he wanted to get on with his mission and leave, before he violated some lawyerly code and told a client exactly what he thought of his criminal neglect of such an historic property.