A Lady of His Own Chapter One Restormel Abbey Lostwithiel, Cornwall April 1816 Crack! A log shattered in the grate; sparks sizzled and flew. Flames leapt, sending fingers of light playing over the leather spines lining the library walls. Charles St. Austell, Earl of Lostwithiel, lifted his head from the padded depths of his armchair and checked that no embers had reached the shaggy pelts of his wolfhounds, Cassius and Brutus. Slumped in hairy mounds at his booted feet, neither hound twitched; neither was smoldering. Lips easing, Charles let his head loll back on the well-worn leather; raising the glass in his hand, he sipped, and returned to his cogitations. On life and its vicissitudes, and its sometimes unexpected evolution. Outside the wind whistled, faint and shrill about the high stone walls; the night tonight was relatively calm, alive but not turbulent, not always the case along Cornwall's southern coast. Within the Abbey, all was slumberingly still; it was after midnight--other than he, no human remained awake. It was a good time to take stock. He was there on a mission, but that was largely incidental; learning whether there was any truth in tales of Foreign Office secrets being run through the local smuggling channels wasn't likely to tax him, certainly not on a personal level. His principal objective in seizing the excuse his erstwhile commander Dalziel had created, and thus returning to the Abbey, his ancestral home, now his, was to gain sufficient perspective to examine and, he prayed, resolve the increasingly fraught clash between his desperate need for a wife and his deepening pessimism over finding a lady suitable to fill the position. In London, he'd found himself hip deep in candidates, not one of whom was anything like the lady he needed. Being mobbed by giddy young misses with more hair than wit who viewed him only as a handsome and wealthy nobleman, with the added cachet of being a mysterious war hero, had proved something of a personal purgatory. He wasn't going back into society until he had a firm and definite vision of the lady he wanted for his own. Truth to tell, the depth of his need of a wife--the right wife--unnerved him. When he'd first returned after Waterloo, he'd been able to assure himself that that need was only natural; his association with six others so very like himself, all equally in need of wives, and the camaraderie that had flowed through their formation of the Bastion Club--their last bastion against the matchmaking mamas of the ton-- had reassured and soothed his impatience and blunted the spur for some months. But now Tristan Wemyss and Tony Blake had both found and secured their wives, while he, with his more edgy, restless, desperate need, was still waiting for his lady to appear. It had taken the last few weeks in London, being sucked into the whirl as society prepared for the intense months of the Season, to comprehend fully what fed that increasingly edgy need. For thirteen years, he'd been dislocated, cut off from the society to which he'd been born and to which he'd now returned. He'd spent thirteen tense years buried in enemy territory, never relaxing, never less than alert and aware. Now, even though he knew he was home and the war was over, he still found himself, at parties, balls, any large gathering, mentally apart. Still the disguised outsider watching, observing, never able to let down his guard and freely merge. He needed a wife to connect him again, to be a bridge between him and all around him, especially in the social sense. He was an earl with numerous sisters, relatives, connections, and obligations; he couldn't hide himself away. He didn't want to hide himself away--he was constitutionally unsuited to being a recluse. He liked parties, balls, dancing-- liked people and jokes and having fun--yet at present, even though he might be standing in the middle of a ballroom surrounded by laughing hordes, he still felt he was outside, looking in. Not a part of it. Connection. That was the one vital ability he needed in a wife, that she should be able to connect him to his life again. But to do so, she needed to connect with him, and that was where all the bright young things failed. They couldn't even see him clearly, let alone understand him--and he wasn't at all sure they had any real interest in that latter. Their notion of marriage, of the relationship underlying that state, seemed determinedly and unalterably fixed in the superficial. Which, to his mind, came perilously close to deception, to pretense. After thirteen years of lying, both living a lie and constantly dealing in fabrication, the last thing he would permit to touch his life--his real life, the one he was determined to reclaim--was any element of deceit. Fixing his gaze on the flames leaping in the hearth, he focused his mind on his objective--on finding the right lady. He'd had no difficulty rejecting all those he'd met thus far; accustomed to gauging character swiftly, it usually took him no more than a minute. Yet identifying what characteristics his right lady possessed, let alone her whereabouts, had thus far defeated him. If she wasn't in London, where else should he look? The sound of footsteps, faint but definite, reached him. He blinked, listened. He'd dismissed his staff for the night; they'd gone to their beds long ago. Boots, not shoes; the boot steps marched nearer, and nearer, from the rear of the house. By the time the steps reached the back of the hall, not far from the library, he knew that whoever was strolling through his house after midnight wasn't any servant; no servant walked with that relaxed, assured tread. He glanced at the hounds. As aware as he, they remained slumped, stationary but alert, their amber eyes fixed on the door. He knew that stance . . . A Lady of His Own . Copyright © by Stephanie Laurens. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from A Lady of His Own by Stephanie Laurens All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
