In the Arms of the Heiress (A LADIES UNLACED NOVEL) Read online

  “Downton Abbey fans will fall in love with Maggie Robinson’s Ladies Unlaced series. Sexy intrigue, sharp wit, tender romance . . . In the Arms of the Heiress delivers them all, and in grand style. A must-read!”

  —Tessa Dare, USA Today bestselling author

  “Maggie Robinson has done it again. Her new Edwardian-set story is an openhearted romance that will sweep readers into the turbulent times at the turn of the century when manners and mores were changing as fast as hemlines. I was utterly charmed by the madcap, motor-driving heroine and the wounded war hero who finds more than he bargained for In the Arms of the Heiress. Full of witty dialogue and scorching romance, In the Arms of the Heiress kept me reading nonstop. I will read anything and everything Maggie Robinson writes—no matter what time period!”

  —Elizabeth Essex, RITA Award–nominated author

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF MAGGIE ROBINSON

  “Robinson turns in an unusual Regency packed with drama. Despite the heavy secrets, the romance is unaffected and pure.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Robinson crafts an intelligent, powerful, emotional, highly sensual love story . . . Readers will become so invested in the characters that the fast pace and heated sexual tension only add to the delight. Fine storytelling.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “A charming, extra-sexy tale.”

  —Eloisa James, New York Times bestselling author

  “Sexy chemistry and the wry humor permeate the story. I really enjoy those books where the characters take real joy in their pleasure, and this is one of them.”

  —Dear Author

  In the Arms of the Heiress

  MAGGIE ROBINSON

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England For more information about the Penguin Group, visit penguin.com.

  IN THE ARMS OF THE HEIRESS

  A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2013 by Maggie Robinson.

  Excerpt from In the Heart of the Highlander by Maggie Robinson

  copyright © 2013 by Maggie Robinson.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Berkley Sensation Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

  BERKLEY SENSATION® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-0-425-26581-9

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-61384-9

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley Sensation mass-market edition / July 2013

  Cover art by Judy York.

  Cover design by George Long.

  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.

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  Special Excerpt from In the Heart of the Highlander

  Chapter

  1

  Nice, France

  Early November 1903

  Dear Aunt Grace,

  It is with the heaviest of hearts I write to tell you my beloved husband Maximillian is dead—

  “You are killing him?”

  Her maid, Kathleen, had the most annoying habit of sneaking up behind her when she least expected it.

  “It’s not as if he even exists,” Louisa Stratton replied, wiping up the splotch of ink.

  Kathleen opened the terrace doors to the Mediterranean, and a chill, damp breeze almost blew Louisa’s letter away. It was supposed to be warmer in the south of France. It was not.

  “How did he die, then?”

  “I don’t know yet. Avalanche? Train wreck?” Maximillian might be a mountaineer when he wasn’t in museums, clad in tight leather, his face burnished by the great outdoors. The tender lines around his cerulean blue eyes from squinting at the sun would fan out like ecru lace. Louisa would trace them with a fingertip as he hovered over her—

  Kathleen slammed the doors shut. “Both would have been all over the newspapers.”

  “Damn it.” She should have thought of that.

  “Indeed. You’ll have to find something less sensational. A heart murmur, perhaps. A septic finger.”

  Louisa brightened. “Yes! He was picking late roses for me and caught a thorn. Such a tiny thing, yet so dangerous. You know how he spoiled me—fresh flowers every day, no matter the season. The man should have been wearing his gloves. His hands were so lovely. Long and smooth, with hardly any hair on his knuckles. He could do anything with them.” She gave Kathleen a naughty smile.

  Kathleen tsked. “None of that talk. It still won’t work. After all, Maximillian Norwich is supposed to be an important man. You’ve made him so. You know your aunt always reads the obituaries, and she’ll wonder why you didn’t put the notice in.”

  “I was simply prostrate with grief. Half out of my mind. She thinks I’m mad anyway.”

  Louisa usually had an answer for everything. If there had really been a Maximillian, she was sure she’d show all the proper feeling for losing the love of her life. She probably wouldn’t rise from her lonely bed for weeks, perhaps months. Years. She’d rival the late queen in her longing for Albert, only she’d be far more attractively dressed.

  There would be an alp of crumpled handkerchiefs and untouched dinner trays. Kathleen would call her a lost cause, and Louisa would simply turn her face to the wall in a melancholy fever. Watch the wallpa
per pattern blur through unceasing tears. Listen to the siren call of the sea outside, which might tempt her to sew rocks into the hem of her nightgown and drown herself.

  Of course, Kathleen would catch her at it before she pricked her fingers too bloody—Louisa had little experience sewing despite Aunt Grace’s attempts to turn her into a lady. Doctors would be consulted—perhaps Kathleen would even send all the way to Vienna for Dr. Freud.

  “You’ll have to go to Rosemont in full mourning if you kill him. You know how black washes you out, if I may be so bold as to remind you.”

  “As if I could stop you.” Bold didn’t begin to describe Kathleen’s tongue. After five years of service, she was more friend than maid to Louisa. Over the past year of freedom they had shared several hair– and skirt-raising adventures that had cemented their bond even further.

  But lately, Kathleen had become very cranky. Louisa suspected the cause was some useless man. Before they’d run off to the Continent, the new Scottish chauffeur, Robertson, had been making sheep’s eyes at Kathleen. True, he was a braw lad, but Kathleen should not give up her independence for a few minutes of clumsy coupling. Intercourse, in Louisa’s opinion, was much overrated.

  “And your aunt would see to it that your social life be curtailed completely, just like she used to,” Kathleen continued in her usual role as the voice of reason. “A full two years of mourning. No visits. No concerts or lectures. I doubt she’d even let you go to London for the day to get a tooth pulled. You’d be bored to tears in no time. And wearing black to boot.”

  “Too true.” Louisa nibbled at the end of her gold-plated Conklin Crescent Filler fountain pen, which was already cratered from previous unhappy letter writing. What a bloody nuisance it was that she’d had to invent Maximillian in the first place. But Aunt Grace had been beyond horrified when Louisa left for a motor trip across the Continent with only Kathleen for company, inundating the travelers with telegrams and letters at every poste restante, outlining in gruesome detail what might happen to two innocent young women alone in Evil Europe.

  Well, Louisa was hardly innocent, as Grace well knew. But she was absent, and out of Grace’s reach. The letters had ceased abruptly once Louisa informed her family that she’d met the magnetic Maximillian Norwich beneath an especially dim and muddy Rembrandt in the Louvre, then married him after a whirlwind courtship.

  But then the letters resumed with tepid congratulations. Louisa must come home and bring her husband.

  Rosemont had not felt like home for some time, but after a blissful year of adventure and non-marriage, Louisa acknowledged it was probably time to return. Kathleen was sulking. Driving about in an open motorcar all winter might give them both chilblains. There had also been some difficulty with Louisa’s bank lately that had to be straightened out. And according to letters from her wretched cousin Hugh and even Dr. Fentress, it was Aunt Grace who might be really dead soon—not that Louisa believed it.

  Grace was much too spiteful to die. The woman had never even had a head cold the twenty-one years Louisa had lived with her after Louisa’s parents died. From the age of four, Louisa had been relentlessly upbraided by her guardian for every small infraction. Her inevitable big infraction had hellish consequences.

  Well, perhaps the devil wanted Grace after all.

  “What do you suggest, Kathleen? Should I tell the truth?”

  Her maid raised one gingery eyebrow. “You? Tell the truth? I might faint.”

  “You never faint. You are the only female I know who can keep her head in a crisis. Besides me, of course.”

  If Kathleen disagreed with the compliment, she had the good sense to say nothing. When pressed, Louisa would have to acknowledge she had gotten into more than her fair share of scrapes the past few months. It would have been handy to have a husband or two to help her out of them—not that she had plans to ever marry. Why should she? She was an heiress, independent, unfettered. Louisa didn’t need a man to boss her around. She’d had enough rules at Rosemont growing up, spending over twenty years of her life like a nun walled in a convent.

  Of course, Rosemont was far more luxurious than any convent Louisa had ever seen in her travels, with its thousand-acre park flush with fauna, its fifty rooms glittering with gilt. For an untitled gentleman—just like Mr. Darcy!—Louisa’s father had been hideously rich, and he’d married well, too. Her American mother had a fortune even greater than his. Unfortunately both her parents had died in a boating accident when she was very young. If their portraits had not hung in the Long Gallery, she might have forgotten what they looked like.

  “We have to go home sometime,” Kathleen said. “Don’t you ever miss Rosemont?”

  No, she did not. Grace and Hugh were there, as well as a few other dependent relatives, and somehow Louisa could not seem to get rid of them. Grace had returned to her ancestral home to serve as guardian when Louisa’s parents died, and the others had just hunkered in. It was easier to run away when she came into her funds last year than to butt heads with Aunt Grace and try to throw them all out of the house.

  Louisa did not like to think she was a coward. She would go home, would confront them. Some of them, anyway. She had no objection to her mother’s cousin Isobel hovering in the hallways. They had come to England husband-hunting together in the late seventies, but only Louisa’s mother had been successful.

  If one could call drowning after less than five years of marriage successful.

  Louisa needed some success of her own. She would bribe Grace and Hugh with whatever inducements she needed to once her banking problems were solved.

  She’d have someone at her side when she did it. A helpmeet. A handsome, sophisticated man of the world who had swept her off her feet in the Louvre and who had been making sweet, sinful love to her with finesse and flourishes ever since with his long, smooth hands—at least in her fervid dreams. Maximillian Norwich would come to Rosemont with her, even if she had to bribe him, too.

  Louisa tore up the letter to her aunt. “Kathleen, what is the name of that agency your brother used last year to get his new job? Evening something?”

  “Evensong, Miss Louisa. The Evensong Agency. On Mount Street. Works wonders, Mrs. Evensong does. That’s where Rosemont’s new chauffeur came from, too. Why do you ask? You’re not planning to fire me, are you?”

  “Certainly not.” Louisa did not know what she’d do without Kathleen, even if she’d been a bit prune-faced lately.

  “Well, that’s a great relief. Do you want me to bind your breasts for our jaunt this afternoon and brush off your trousers, or are you wearing your corset and carriage dress?”

  “Trousers, I think. It’s damned cold out,” Louisa replied, reaching for another piece of hotel stationery.

  Chapter

  2

  Tuesday, December 1, 1903

  Mrs. Mary Evensong really wished she could hold her nose indefinitely, but alas, one had to breathe. Instead she fished a perfumed handkerchief from her needlepoint purse and held it to her face. One could not surpass the scent of Blenheim Bouquet—lemon, lime, and lavender. Three delightful things. Penhaligon’s new fragrance had quickly become her favorite, even if it was intended for gentlemen, and once she was done with this distasteful task she would stop by the Jermyn Street shop just to inhale more of it.

  The bundle of rags on the sprung sofa shifted, and Mary narrowed her eyes behind her smoke-gray spectacles. Captain Charles Cooper was a long man lying on a short couch. It appeared he had not bathed or changed his clothes in some days, and the patch he wore over one eye had now migrated and partially covered a somewhat blunt nose. His dark hair was shorn, and his face would have been clean-shaven if he’d bothered to run a razor over it the day before yesterday.

  Mary approved. London was positively teeming with fur-faced fellows. The fashion for beards had always eluded her. In fact, she believed most men sported them to hide their weak or dou
ble chins. And it was ever so unpleasant to get a mouthful of moustache when one kissed a gentleman—not that she had occasion to know lately.

  There was a distinct aroma of cheap gin and male sweat in the room, and once again she was forced to gulp into her handkerchief.

  “Captain Cooper,” she said in a rallying voice when she had tricked herself into thinking of citrus fruit and Spanish sunshine, “wake up.”

  “Don’t want to.”

  Well, that was much easier than she thought. She would hate to have prodded him with her umbrella.

  “I am Mrs. Evensong, proprietress of the Evensong Agency, and I have a proposition for you, sir. Mr. George Alexander has brought it to my attention that you have recently resigned your commission and are in need of work.”

  “No.” Captain Cooper still reclined on the couch, his eyes closed.

  “I assure you I spoke with him myself.” The employment of Captain Cooper was not the only thing they had discussed. Mr. Alexander was a businessman of many interests, and he had piqued Mrs. Evensong’s interest with a possible investment opportunity. She would look into it with her usual thoroughness.

  Cooper sighed. “I don’t care who you are or who you’ve talked to. I don’t need any charity job from George. He’s done enough.”

  “This is not charity, Captain, but a paid position. Mr. Alexander has very little to do with it apart from mentioning your name.” Mary Evensong was not going to tell the captain that if he signed his employment contract, she would be paid by both the industrialist and Miss Louisa Stratton. There was no reason to explain the ins and outs of her business, for they frequently changed with each individual case. She was nothing if not flexible, both in her professional and personal life.

  “There is a young lady who wishes to engage your services and will make it very worth your while to rise from that vile sofa and find the nearest bathtub.”

  Charles Cooper struggled up on one elbow, pushing his patch over one sightless blue eye with a shaking hand. Mary had read the reports and seen the commendations, talked to enough of his superiors and schoolmasters to have formed an opinion of the man who looked extremely unheroic and unintelligent at the moment despite their effusive praise. Heavens, he looked as if he’d like another drink soon to begin his day, and she did not want to be present to watch him throw his life away.