Again, My Lord: A Twist Series Novel

Again, My Lord

A
Twist
Series Novel

Katharine Ashe

www.katharineashe.com

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The one that got away…

Six years ago, Tacitus Everard, the Marquess of Dare, made the worst mistake of his life: courting vibrant, sparklingly beautiful Lady Calista Chance—until she broke his heart.

Is the only one she wants.

Six years ago, Calista Holland made the biggest misstep of her life: begging handsome, wealthy Lord Dare to help her run away from home—then marrying someone else.

Now, trapped by disaster in a country inn, Calista has one day to convince the marquess she’s worth a second chance, and Dare has one goal, to steer clear of déjà vu. But when the day takes an unimaginable twist, what will it take to end up in each other’s arms?

Click here for the Table of Contents

To Nyra

with profound gratitude

Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half.

Plato,
Symposium
(ca. 385–370 BC)

The Ancients were rarely wrong about Love. I have tried to teach him this, and hope that someday the lesson will serve him well.

Lady Mariana Dare,

private correspondence to her sister (1805)

Lady Calista Chance
had excellent teeth.

Tacitus Caesar Everard, the ninth Marquess of Dare, knew that a man should consider a lady’s manifold assets before deciding upon her as his life’s companion. But only one asset really mattered to him. All others had been rendered inconsequential on account of his parents.

Tacitus’s mother had had horrible teeth. During her childhood in the West Indies she had chewed on the stalks of sugarcane as a distraction from the violent pain of a constitutional bend in her spine. By the age of seventeen, her teeth were a disaster. Nevertheless she’d had speaking eyes and a dry, clever wit that slayed the eighth Marquess of Dare. They had twenty-five years of bliss and one child—this, despite the marquess’s insistence that they must have no children. Nothing, he declared, would jeopardize his wife’s health.

Happily, Tacitus did not. A strapping, healthy infant, he grew into a strapping, healthy boy, with a fine mind to match his fine musculature. His spine, it should be noted, was ideally formed to support square shoulders and give direction to long, strong legs.

Therefore, his father lavished upon him all the attention an heir deserved and all the love he could spare from the enormous lot he gave to his wife. Together Tacitus and his parents were a most happy trio.

Then everything went to hell. Unable to eat much with the sorry stumps of her teeth, and unable to move from her bed due to the spine that had finally had enough after all, Lady Dare gave up trying. A woman of spirit and intelligence, she said, did not go along well in confinement. At the age of forty-two, she departed this mortal coil.

A month later, Lord Dare followed her to the grave, in his case perishing of a failed heart.

At twenty-four, Tacitus watched it all in tangled horror, helplessness, and grief. And on the day he buried his father he made two promises to himself: he would marry a lady with excellent teeth and he would never fall in love. He realized that this was insane idiocy. But a battered heart easily encourages even the best of minds to foolishness.

Ladies’ teeth became the new marquess’s preoccupation.

Calista Chance had exceptional teeth. Straight, neat, and improbably white, they appeared whenever her lips split into a wide smile, competing with candles and sunshine for brilliance and, frankly, winning. That those lips were delectably pink and maddeningly kissable was a trifling incidental. That the smile occurred in the vicinity of a pair of long-lashed and crystalline blue eyes meant little to Tacitus. That it occurred with remarkable frequency as he watched her across ballrooms and drawing rooms for three weeks during a London season was only significant in that he was able to study the teeth well enough to know she suited one of his requirements for a wife.

The other requirement—that he would not be in danger of falling in love with her—seemed even easier to meet. Dazzlingly gay where he was somewhat subdued, compulsively social where he was fond of his library, and as vapid as a seagull where he was rather prone to deep contemplation, Lady Calista did not have “Tacitus Everard’s Soul Mate” imprinted upon her brow. He was not in danger of falling in love with such a woman.

She would be the ideal wife.

He set about courting her, to discover that the Earl of Chance had left town with his family and was not expected to return, perhaps ever. Something about a scandal at a card table. But Tacitus didn’t care about gossip. He had chosen his wife. He would acquire her, fill his nursery, and that would take care of that. Then he could return to his life of running his estates and occasional politics when the Whig platform inspired him. And the corridors of Dare Castle would no longer echo with unbearable silence.

In pursuit of his plan, he traveled to Dashbourne, the Chance estate, where the earl had sequestered his womenfolk in the middle of the season. Tacitus stood in the drawing room that was nearly empty of furniture as rain echoed throughout the house as though the rest of it were empty too, and he awaited his intended bride.

The Countess of Chance entered the room, followed by her two daughters. All three had inquisitive eyes. And all three peered at him as if he were a ravisher intent upon … ravishment, he supposed.

Lady Chance was quietly graceful and golden blond. The other sister was younger than Lady Calista, not yet out of the schoolroom, with black hair and an astute eye. They were both attractive females.

But at close range Lady Calista practically glittered. Her beauty seized his breath and stored it somewhere in the region of his boots.

He offered the usual pleasantries while they stared at him. That none of the three of them seemed to understand the purpose of his call proved disconcerting. His tongue stiffened and the interview swiftly descended into uncomfortable silence. Finally, he found the presence of mind to make his intentions clear.

“I would like to speak with his lordship,” he said.

The countess’s face appeared abruptly strained.

“I beg your pardon, my lord. My husband is not entertaining offers for my daughter’s hand at this time.”

Apparently she did understand his intentions.

Tacitus blinked. “But,” he said, nonplussed, “I am Dare.”

Lady Calista laughed.

Just like that.

She laughed at him.

And for the first time he saw a spark of defiant intelligence in her eyes that had nothing of frivolity in it.

“My lord.” Her voice rippled over him. “It would not signify if you were York or Hanover. In this house the only tonic of marriage we drink is true love. Can’t you see it?” She gestured about her at the wallpaper that showed darker squares where paintings had once hung, to the empty mantelpiece and the single sofa and two plain wooden chairs arranged around a small side table. “My mother is so enamored of my father, and he of her, that they make a deliriously happy home even in the midst of our shame and penury.”

“That is enough, Calista,” Lady Chance said in a hush.

With a smile that lit the rainy day like a torch, Lady Calista beamed at him, curtsied, and pulled her gaping sister from the room.

“As you can see, my lord, my daughter is not yet aware of the honor a gentleman’s notice brings her. I hope you will forgive—” Her voice broke, but she recovered swiftly. “I hope you will forgive me for her impertinence, and for my mistake in bringing her into your company.”

His throat was full of moths, it seemed. He cleared it.

“On the contrary, madam. She is merely high-spirited.”
High-spirited?
Where had he heard that term applied to a woman? And hadn’t he scowled at the time? “May I have permission to return tomorrow? In the hopes of finer weather I would be delighted to take your daughters driving.”

It was Lady Chance’s turn to blink. “You wish to take Calista and Evelina for a drive?”

“I do,” he said. “Lord Chance’s refusal to see me notwithstanding, I intend to court Lady Calista.”

“Here?” She was still staring at him rather blankly.

“Where else?”

“But Dare Castle must be a hundred miles away.”

“I have taken a room at the inn in the village.”

Various thoughts seemed to cross her eyes rapidly. Then, with the ghost of a smile, she curtsied.

“My daughters will be honored to drive with you tomorrow, my lord.”

~o0o~

They were.

And they weren’t.

Delighted to drive, yes. With him,
not precisely
.

In only one manner did he seem to please Lady Calista: he provided her with infinite fodder with which to whisper behind the rim of her bonnet to her sister outrageous comments about his horses, his carriage, his coat, his hat, his hair, his eyes, the breadth of his shoulders, and even his legs. He pretended not to hear her, and didn’t know what to say in response anyway.

Aside from two satisfying and instructive affairs with discreet widows during his university years, he had little experience with women. And he’d had no extended commerce whatsoever with girls of eighteen, only occasional holiday visits to his school friends’ houses where he briefly encountered their sisters and such. This sort of raillery was foreign to him. How was a man to respond? With like teasing or with sternness? His father had never been stern with his mother, but his mother had never teased his father in this manner.

And yet … Tacitus
liked
it. It stirred him.

He wasn’t certain this was a good thing.

Lady Calista’s smile and brilliant eyes arrested his tongue each time he sought to speak. He could not believe that a girl hopeful of attaching herself to a gentleman would treat him with such blithe disregard for propriety. It seemed eminently clear that she was playing with him.

By the end of the drive his hands were sore from clutching the reins and his jaw was tight. One part consternation, one part anger, and a final part crashing disappointment, he bade them good-bye upon the drive.

Dashing toward the house, she halted abruptly and whirled around to face him.

“Will you call again tomorrow, Lord Dare?”

“I will not.” This had been a very bad idea. Girls aplenty peopled London’s drawing rooms. He would return to town and find a bride with good, if not excellent, teeth and a suitably even temper and offer his name and future nursery to her instead. Lady Calista and her twinkling masticators could go hang.

Her pretty lips closed. A crease in her brow marred the loveliness of her features—for the better, oddly. He felt something very tight in his chest
loosen
.

“I should like you to return, you know. We are frightfully bored here with nothing to do, and you are ever so fun to tease.”

“As I did not enter this world to be your object of ridicule, ma’am, that logic does not particularly recommend itself to me.”

Her crystal eyes popped wide. “Ridicule?”

He had nothing to respond.

She walked directly to him and stood before him. The light fabric of her gown ruffled about her legs and a wisp of hair the color of the dark, loamy soil at Dare and shining like satin crossed her lips that now parted. Her teeth peeked out and he could not seem to look away.

“If you will not come here for me,” she said, “then come because Evelina is going mad, locked away like a princess in a tower. I don’t suppose you’ve brought any books with you? She is eager for something new to read. And our younger brother is wretched too. He would adore your horses. Our father has had to sell ours to pay debts,” she said simply, making him wonder if Lord Chance had sold the contents of his library as well. “Gregory is pining to ride. He is pining for male company, really, male company that is not our father.”

Tacitus regarded her for a long moment and she regarded him in turn, directly, and without shame. Raised by a strong, intelligent woman, now he recognized that Lady Calista Chance was not the featherbrain he had believed her to be from studying her in the midst of society. Which meant she was worse. She was false, a woman who hid a good mind behind a pretty face in order to twist the world around her little finger.

“If your brother wishes,” he said, “he may call at the inn in the village tomorrow and I will give him the loan of my saddle horse. Your sister too, if she cares to accompany him.”

“Oh!” Her smile returned full force. “You have a mount suitable for a sixteen-year-old girl at the inn too? Do you ride a lady’s saddle horse on alternate days then, my lord?” she said, her brows perking high as she scanned his shoulders. He had wide shoulders. He knew this. He was tall, too. A lady’s saddle horse was entirely unsuited to a man of his size.

Impertinent minx.

“No,” he said. “But I keep a magic wand about me that allows me to transform my horse into a lady’s mount.” He opened his overcoat and pretended to search inside it.

“Do you?” Surprise chimed in her voice.

Aha
. The minx thought she had invented teasing.

“Usually, but I must have mislaid it,” he added with a frown and gave up his searching. “Perhaps you should not invite your sister to call at the inn after all.” The words came easily now that he had dismissed his foolish notion of courting her. Without waiting for her response, he turned to his carriage and climbed onto the box.

“If I call at the inn with my brother and sister,” she said, “will you turn me away, my lord?”

“Should I?”

“Only if I beg you to.” Her eyes danced above cheeks the color of rosy peaches.

He snapped the leathers and left, feeling peculiar, out of sorts yet pleased. An eighteen-year-old girl with less decorum than a milkmaid and less honesty than a priest held no appeal for him. He should not have pursued a beautiful bride. His mother had not been a beauty, but a truly wonderful person. His father had been wise.

But when Lady Calista appeared at the village inn the following morning with her younger siblings, Tacitus did not turn her away. He could not. Her smile made his stomach tighten and the movement of her hands, always in action like birds alighting, captivated him. She teased him again, and again he did not always know what to say in return.

She drove him a little mad.

A lot.

The following day was much the same.

And the following.

And for many days after that.

His manservant told him that the local gossips had got ahold of the news of his presence in the neighborhood.

“The young ladies for miles about have caught sight of you, my lord. They hope you will cast the net wider.”

“That is a disgusting metaphor, Claude.”

“Eh,” he shrugged with Gallic insouciance. “It is always so with the most eligible of the bachelors. But with the ladies,” he said with a sidelong glance, “the competition inspires them to fight for the prize. You should accept the invitations you have received from the others.”

But he did not wish to waste time courting every maiden in the county. He had interest in only one.

He took her and her brother and sister riding about the countryside in his carriage and they told him stories of all the adventures they’d had here and there—in the woods, the lake, the ruins of the old abbey, the stables. And they regaled him with shocking anecdotes in which Lady Calista had been the instigator of the trouble on most occasions. He laughed, and he felt a burning in his chest from something he could not name. Envy, perhaps.