Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

LONDON, 1798

T he library was the only safe place in Westrop House.

Until the girl pursuing him slipped inside.

She was a Ponsonby, he thought. Or was it a Sysonby? Some sprig of a lesser branch, a young daughter yet unmarried, a deplorable situation the family wished desperately to remedy.

On the surface, there was nothing objectionable about her, and nothing Leo, for his own part, objected to.

It was the state of marriage to which he objected—or, more precisely, the state of being shoehorned into marriage, penned like a bull in the pasture by connection-hungry mamas, the worst of which was his own maternal figure. The one person who ought to have had his best interests at heart was, instead, colluding with the enemy.

Leo had no doubt that his doting mama was the traitor who’d told the girl where to find him. If she hadn’t drawn out a map of the house, with Leo in the library as the X marking the buried treasure, no doubt Lady Mary had marched the chit to the door, pushed the wooden portal open, and shoved his pursuer inside.

Could she have found it, Leo had every expectation her ladyship would have pocketed the key and marched away, confident that, in a few moments, she would have a marriage to announce to her assembled guests. Who would she elect to discover him and the girl in supposedly compromising circumstances? The girl’s mother? A doyenne of le bon ton known for being a high stickler and a moral guardian? Would her ladyship herself do the deed?

Gideon Leonidas Paxton Westrop was not a bull, and he refused to be treated as one. He’d put the library key in his pocket when he snuck away from his mother’s soiree and into this room, five minutes ago.

The floor-to-ceiling drapery at the sash window offered refuge, but he’d not made his retreat in time. The girl’s eyes slitted like a red kite spotting an animal it could digest.

“Your lordship,” she said coyly, wafting his way like a spray of apple blossoms. Leo disliked apple blossoms; they made him sneeze.

“No lords here,” he demurred. “I am titleless.”

She halted her forward motion, confusion pulling together her violently plucked brows. “But you will be heir to the marquess.”

Dear God, the dirt hadn’t even dried on Rupert’s grave and Leo’s mother was auctioning him off like a stallion at stud. Her cry had been heard throughout the house when the black-edged letter arrived. Leo still wondered if it had been, in fact, a crow of triumph.

If she hadn’t prayed for his cousin’s death, Leo felt quite certain her ladyship had skimmed over Rupert’s name in the daily list of requests she presented to the Almighty. She was too pious to have consulted a witch, and too conscious of her mortal soul to actively hasten a man’s death. She’d worn mourning for her valiant nephew, but there was no doubt that the Battle of ?le Saint-Marcouf and the death of Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Westrop had pulled the curtain back on Lady Mary’s dreams. Let her son, her worthless eldest child, inherit the marquessate of Waringford, and Mary Bailey Westrop would consider herself requited for all she had suffered in her life.

Now, if only her errant son could be made to wed the girl she’d chosen for him, thus shoring up the fortunes of a persistently impoverished family, her dreams could come to full and luxurious fruition.

Too bad Leo didn’t share that dream.

“As I am not in the direct line of succession, I am not a candidate for a courtesy title,” Leo explained. “And I could perish in advance of my uncle, you know. The men in my family are notoriously short-lived. Almost as if we’re under a curse. A plague upon our house, possibly.”

The girl chafed her lip, which had been pinkened with color. “Are you sickly? Ill?”

Should he lie? It would go better for him if he could simply lie. “Not to my knowledge,” Leo admitted, regretting his scruples.

She started toward him, her skirt drifting about her legs. She was rail thin, and the muslin gown hung like a pillar from the ribbon snugged under her breasts, pushed into display like two plums in a pouch. Her hair clung in shaped curls to her forehead, peaks in pudding. Every part of her followed the lines of the latest fashion.

Leo had little appreciation for fashion.

“Have you a tendre for someone else?” she thought to ask.

Again, he wished he could lie. His father had been a cheerful prevaricator of the first degree. Why had Leo inherited his mother’s moral streak instead of his father’s gift for mendacity? The Fates were indeed capricious.

“My affections are currently unengaged.”

Leo retreated behind the massive oaken desk. At least she couldn’t throw herself into his arms with the furniture between them.

He shot a glance of desperate longing at the door. How much longer before the sword of Damocles fell upon him? Could he hope for salvation to open the portal, and not a mama kindling with righteous wrath?

“Then there is no reason you shouldn’t engage me ,” the determined damsel said. He understood the rapid movement of her eyelids was meant to be provocative. The effect was rather to the contrary.

“I am not unconscious of the great honor you do me, mademoiselle, but I am not free to offer my hand to anyone at this time,” Leo said with all the dignity he could muster.

Hell’s gate, he was playing the woman’s part. And the kite was swooping, rounding the far corner of the desk.

“I have four thousand pounds,” she said sweetly.

Leo curled his fingers around his favorite quill. He had no intention of stabbing anybody, of course. He was a pacifist. It was why he’d never been able to enter any of the professions his family would have respected. Military. Foreign service. Standing for MP.

“Four thousand pounds of what?”

She blinked in confusion this time. “My dowry, of course.”

“How very fortunate for you.”

“My family has money. You have a title. I think a match between us is written in the stars, milord.”

There was that title business again. Leo frowned. “Do you even know my name?”

More blinking ensued. “Gregory.”

He stroked the feathers of the quill, oddly stung by her ignorance, yet also vindicated. “No.”

“Gabriel?”

“Wrong again.”

“It doesn’t matter if?—”

The nightmare began. The library door inched open. Ponsonby lunged across the desk.

“By all the graces of heaven! My dear Empyrea, what has happened to you? Mr. Westrop, what have you done ?”

Leo, furious, sweating, still clutching his quill, cast a despairing look toward the door and the two mamas framed within it, one the girl’s mother, trembling with outrage, the other his own parent, smirking with triumph.

“I haven’t done anything,” Leo said.

He took a step backward. The girl lay stretched across the desk, crumpling the sketches he’d put there earlier in the day. Her skirts hung from her knees, her shoes dangling in the air, little roses daintily affixed to the satin.

“Ow,” she said, blinking as the hard edge of the top no doubt cut into her midsection.

“She fell,” Leo explained.

“She has fallen indeed!”

He could only presume this was the Ponsonby matriarch. Leo tried to remember if she had a title of any sort; he didn’t have these ranks and orders of precedence imprinted in his head, like his mother did. The matriarch laid a hand to a bosom swelling with indignation.

“Mr. Westrop, I would have thought you, of all people, a gentleman! I presume an offer will be forthcoming immediately?”

A haze descended across Leo’s vision, hot and prickly. His breath came in short pants, a cornered bull in truth. Here came the lead to snap through the ring in his nose, and off he’d go, bellowing and digging in his hooves, but he’d go all the same. He had never brought shame upon the Westrop family, and he never would. His father had done enough of that for three generations.

“An offer for what?” An angelic voice, the sweetest thing Leo had ever heard, broke through the rising tide in his brain. “He really hasn’t done anything.”

She sat in a chair facing the empty fireplace, and with the fire screen beside her, he’d looked past her when he entered. Admittedly, the driving thought in his mind, other than hiding from his mother, had been his new notion that the burial chambers of the barrow might lie to the northeast instead of the southwest, given the size of the mound and the orientation of the surrounding stones.

Leo watched in awe as a young woman rose from the armchair, shutting the book in her hands.

The candle on the table beside her cast a nimbus about her, setting her white gown aglow. The lovely gold embroidery sparkled like stardust. Modest sleeves ended in a little ruffle, and lace along her neckline covered most of her bosom, a pity. Her gown too had that ridiculous high waist, but he detected curves, a proper woman’s curves, beneath it.

Lips a normal lip color, as if she’d been eating the raspberry pastilles laid on as refreshments, and her cheeks were a natural pink, not rouged. Glorious hair, not cut short but caught up in thick round swoops, the color of the first yellow fieldcaps in early spring, circled her head like a crown. She was a goddess come to life.

“Who,” Leo’s mother said shrilly, “are you ?”

“Lady Mary. Mrs. Ponsonby.” The angel performed a small, stately curtsy. Her cheeks showed a dimple. Dimples. “I am Lillian Gower.”

A moment passed in which everyone in the room stared at her. She set down the folio-sized, leather-bound book, aligning it neatly with the inlaid wooden edge of the table.

“Of the Leveson-Gowers?” said Ponsonby senior in reverent tones.

The angel shook her head. A small daisy fluttered amid her tresses. “Only distantly related. Very distantly, I’m afraid.”

“Oh.” Lady Mary sniffed. “Then you’re no one.”

“No, milady.”

“You were in the library all this time?” Ponsonby junior hauled herself to her feet and attempted to straighten her dress. She had mussed his papers in her ill-planned attack, but she made no attempt to tidy those.

“I have been present throughout the interview, yes. Your mother will be so relieved to know that Mr. Westrop did not compromise you in any fashion. Not so much as an inappropriate remark.”

Ponsonby junior turned the color of a ripe currant. Senior narrowed her eyes.

“Then why was she sprawled across his desk in, might I say, a most undignified posture?”

“I believe she swooned, madame.”

“My daughter,” said Mrs. Ponsonby with a stabbing glare at both young women, “does not swoon. ”

Ponsonby junior, who looked as if she had been considering that very contingency—and calculating whether her trajectory might bring her anywhere near Leo’s arms—straightened her spine, abandoning the option of collapse.

“Ah,” said Miss Gower, and that dimple danced in her cheek. “Then perhaps she indeed fell.”

Leo’s mother and Madame Ponsonby looked around the room, then at one another. At Miss Gower, who remained steadily composed under the scrutiny, and then, with suspicion on the part of Mrs. Ponsonby and sour disappointment in the aspect of his mother, the women turned toward the door.

“Empyrea, come,” Ponsonby senior commanded, and the junior trotted out the door after her dame, chin held high, sparing nary a glance for the scene of her humiliation.

The library fell quiet. Outside the window, a horse whinnied in the square. The candle bobbed in a sudden draft. The books dozed quietly on their rows of shelves, and Leo, inhaling, smelled geraniums. Rose with a hint of lemon, and an earthy undertone that hinted at some sturdy, leafy vegetable, robust and nourishing. The scent steadied him, though his heart maintained a drumming beat as he regarded the agent of his deliverance.

“I feel I arrived in the cart at the guillotine to find the executioner has abandoned his task. Does this mean I am free?”

“Of Empyrea, at least. Will there be others?” Miss Gower raised a brow that had not been violently plucked, but was rather a lush, dark brown. “Good grief. To have to live up to the expectations of that name.”

Hers was Lillian. He rolled it around in his head, luscious as a fine wine, a name with scope and heft but an alluring softness at the edges.

“Try Gideon.”

Her large eyes were a vivid Delft blue, and Leo had the oddest sensation that the edges of the room were sliding away. They stood within a vast space, an endless firmament holding only the two of them.

“A mighty warrior, wasn’t he? From Judges. God’s hand against the—who was it, the Midianites?”

An angel who knew her biblical history. “A timid farmer who threshed his grain in a winepress and didn’t believe the angel who came to him.” Leo set the quill in its stand. “He tested God several times before he finally accepted his calling.”

“Don’t we all,” Miss Gower murmured. “How many times have you tested your mother?”

“This is the first, but she’s showed her hand. Now I comprehend the depths of her determination.”

“To have you married?”

“To have me titled.” He tidied the papers on his desk.

The corners of Miss Gower’s delectable mouth quirked up. He wondered if she knew how devastating that dimple was. “Isn’t it customarily the wife who acquires a title at marriage?”

“Ah, but you see, my uncle is the marquess, and he has only daughters. My cousin the heir is now gone?—”

Leo paused to swallow the knot in his throat. Miss Gower did not look alarmed at his momentary loss of self-possession. Instead, her eyes glimmered and her mouth turned down at the corners, as if she understood his grief.

“My condolences on your loss,” she said quietly. “I read about the battle. Five hundred British forces fought back a French fleet ten times their size.”

“And five men died.” With Rupert, confound the luck, being one of them. Leo cleared his throat. “My uncle has lost his wife and so hope of another son, and unless he sets his daughters to the business of producing heirs, the title will come to me, God forfend. My mother believes that if I make a speedy match of which he approves, my uncle will formally acknowledge me as the heir presumptive and thus fulfill her lifelong wish of seeing at least one of her sons make something of himself.”

She smoothed a wrinkle on her evening glove, which drew Leo’s attention to her rounded arms and the satin skin showing between glove and sleeve.

“There’s something so macabre about planning the succession, isn’t there?” she remarked. “It’s all predicated on the death of someone you are likely disposed to care about. The king is dead. Long live the king.”

He smiled. “Grand men have always cared a great deal about the disposal of their inheritance. Didn’t the ancient Mesopotamian kings start planning their tombs from the time of their coronation? So did the Egyptian emperors, they say.”

“You seem to know something about tombs.” She bent, and the motion gave him a splendid view of the breasts nestled into the scoop of her gown. Not plums. More cantaloupe sized. He was still staring when she rose, holding out a piece of parchment.

“They are tombs, aren’t they? These barrows in your drawings.”

“I’ll know if I’m ever allowed to excavate one. I’m waiting on permission.”

He wasn’t about to bore an enchanting young lady with news of his stalled plans. Instead, he looked past her to the book she’d placed on the table. “And you seem to know something about—” He caught his jaw before it dropped. “The botanical discoveries made by the Forsters as they traveled with Cook to the South Seas.” That book was in Latin.

Her eyes twinkled. “They made some quite extraordinary finds. Plants that exist nowhere else, as far as we know.”

The twinkle recalled him, her eyes glimmering as if the candlelight danced within their blue depths. Was he addled in the upstairs? They were in the library of his house. They were alone. She was a young unmarried woman.

“Good Lord. Have I compromised you?”

Her brows lifted. “Not to my knowledge.”

“Yes, but we’re alone. Exactly what Ponsonby hoped to achieve.”

“Then I will remedy that oversight directly and betake myself back to the soiree. I suppose I ought to look for my cousin, since I am ostensibly her companion.”

This time the dimple and the twinkling. He narrowed his eyes at her. She had to know what she was doing. It was like coming at him with whip and blade. How was a man supposed to stand strong against such weapons? The bosom, the eyes, her mouth, her bosom, and the scent of geraniums tugging the lid off his brain?—

Was his mother that clever, to stage a dramatic siege as a decoy and plant the real danger in the corner, like a drink of poppy ready to lull him into submission? If Miss Gower held the chains, Leo might very well put his own leg in the shackle.

He shook his head to clear the fancies. “ You are a chaperone? Where are your parents?”

“Away, excavating with Mr. William Cunnington at Stonehenge.”

He gaped at her, well and truly stunned. “You’re one of those Gowers?”

“Yes, but I would be the one not allowed to go with, because of my cousin.” She pouted, and the noose settled around his neck. Leo didn’t even flinch.

“I must speak with you, though not here, more’s the pity.” He cast a look about the softly glowing library, the perfect setting for a tête-à-tête with a delicious, dimpled angel. “Return to the drawing room and I shall find you, and hope my mother will not force me into dancing before we might converse.” He bowed, gesturing toward the door. “You lead the way, Miss Gower, and I will reappear after a suitable interval.”

“Or remain hidden in the library, and I will not be here to protect you next time.”

“God forbid I shall need further protection, but if I so require, I shall seek you out all the sooner. Run along now and pretend we are respectable.”

She pursed her lips, pink as a sweet pea blossom. But a few steps forward would put him in a position to drop a kiss upon those lips. She might have detected the flash of hunger on his face, for a blush the color of a wild rose climbed her cheeks. She was nothing but a collection of wildflowers, and if he ever had the opportunity to bury his nose in her silken surfaces he could browse there for hours, growing drunk as a bee on pollen.

He stepped back, struggling for control over the thrum of blood in his body. Did Miss Gower launch herself at him, she would meet with a far different reception than the one he had granted Ponsonby. Better if she didn’t know the power she held.

She could depend on him to follow her. He was holding his own damn nose out with its ring, and, whether she knew it or not, she held the lead. Her parents, known and respected antiquarians, could be the key Leo needed to finally pull his own expedition together. He would not let Miss Gower out of his sight for long.