One Night of Passion
Read One Night of Passion Online
Authors: Elizabeth Boyle
ELIZABETH
BOYLE
One Night of
Passion
To my good friend and fellow author,
Jaclyn Reding
Always there to lend a sympathetic ear
and to prop me up when all seems lost.
She is what good friends are all about.
Contents
There are not many who are tossed out of the ton amid scandal and
. . .
“Given the evidence and the documentation . . .
“I will not marry you, Lord Danvers. Not now or. . .
Georgie couldn’t believe her terrible luck. Of all the. . .
What had she been thinking, coming to such a place?. . .
True to Aunt Verena’s worries about young ladies. . .
Colin couldn’t believe the utter nerve. Why, she’d. . .
Colin rowed silently ashore with only the vaguest. . .
Hours later, Colin took one last look through his. . .
A guardian, indeed! The very word was the bane of. . .
Colin had successfully avoided Georgie for the bulk of. . .
Georgie found herself immediately placed under arrest. . .
“Take him away. Put him in with the rest of his crew,”. . .
“Brigitte, I must go to her.” Franklin Escott’s rose. . .
Just before dawn, Georgie realized Mandeville’s sloop. . .
By later that evening, Colin stood on the quarterdeck. . .
Georgie’s bliss ended several months later on the. . .
“Georgie! Dammit, where are you?” Colin thundered,. . .
1818
There are not many who are tossed out of the ton amid scandal and ruin and then
return to find themselves feted and rewarded. Such has been my misfortune.
Since my restoration to Society’s good graces, I have received entreaty after
entreaty to recount my perilous adventures.
In fairness, I must confess, I have given my eager audiences a well told tale, full of
duplicity and danger, of great follies and foes overcome. And to every one of them
I have lied.
For my story is, and always was, a love story.
If I were to tell the truth, I would regale them with the heroic deeds of my
impossible, formidable Georgie, my dearest and enchanting Cyprian, and how
in one night of passion she stole my heart, and in the process saved a nation.
Colin, Baron Danvers
London
1799
“G
iven the evidence and the documentation offered to this court, I have no other choice, Captain Danvers, than to see you relieved of all duties and obligations in His Majesty’s Navy.” With those words said, the Lord High Admiral brought his gavel down on the court bar. The responding thump, like the last clap of a hammer on a coffin nail, was followed by stunned silence.
After all, the packed hearing room at the Admiralty had just witnessed the end of one of the navy’s most brilliant careers, some said one that rivaled even Nelson’s.
Few doubted they would ever again see such a precipitous and fatal descent in their lifetime.
There wasn’t a man in the room, officer or jack tar, who wasn’t saying a prayer of thanksgiving that it wasn’t his hide being flayed, his livelihood sinking to the bottom of the icy Atlantic.
But then again, most of the men in the room held their posts as men bound by the honor and code of the sea, the written and unwritten edicts that Captain Colin Danvers had flagrantly violated. No one disputed the damning evidence of his treason and duplicity. Not even Nelson, the captain’s staunch supporter and mentor all these years, had offered to attest to the man’s innocence and character given the irrefutable facts.
So the future that had once shone like the North Star for Captain Danvers now looked as bleak and murky as a Thames fog.
Cashiered out of the navy.
Forfeiture of all his prize money
—a sum that had made him the envy of his peers.
It was a moment worthy of silence.
As for the man himself, Captain Danvers stood before the Admiralty Board, his back ramrod straight, his shoulders squared like a taut reef bar. And despite the fact that he’d just been cast out, he faced his judges with the same indomitable spirit that had been his undoing.
“Is that all, my lords?” he had the audacity to ask.
The Lord High Admiral blustered, his whiskers shaking in anger. “Consider yourself lucky you aren’t hanging from a yardarm, you insolent pup.”
Several heads nodded in agreement. Truly, if it had been any other man, he would have found himself swinging before the day was out. But lofty familial connections had kept that prospect at bay.
Danvers, treasonous bastard that he was, had recently inherited his father’s barony. And if that wasn’t enough, the captain’s maternal grandfather was none other than the Duke of Setchfield, a man few people dared cross.
No, the Admiralty couldn’t hang Captain Danvers, but the punishment they’d enacted was just as effective.
They’d taken the man from the sea. From Society. From a life among his peers. A life about to be spent, some said, landlocked in a hell of disdain and scorn.
In the back of the hearing room, a pipe whistled the end of the session, and the trio of judges rose in unison.
Danvers bowed to them, making an elegant and noble show of it. Then, as if he had just been handed the command of the entire fleet, he turned smoothly on one heel and, with his head held high, began the long march out of the room. The crowd melted apart, leaving him a lonely aisle. He walked past the downcast glances, the whispered observations, and, by many, the cut direct as they turned their backs to him.
Yet as he made his departure, it was as if he didn’t see any of it.
Damned,
it was observed by an old captain hours later at one of the officers’ clubs,
if the bastard didn’t walk out of there smiling like the devil himself.
Georgiana Escott stood before the door to her uncle’s private dining room, girding herself for the confrontation that was about to take place. The letter clenched in her hand, outlining the latest indignity to be heaped upon her by her uncaring relation, was the final straw in a lifetime of enduring her uncle’s disinterest and parsimony.
If only Mrs. Taft hadn’t died,
she thought. Then Georgie and her sister, Kit, would still be safely ensconced in the lady’s Penzance home where their uncle had deposited them for fostering eleven years earlier after their parents’ deaths.
Uncle Phineas had wanted nothing to do with his orphaned nieces then, so why should he go to all this fuss now?
Really, Georgie decided, if there was blame to place for this debacle, it was entirely the vicar’s fault.
If the righteous man hadn’t been so scandalized at the idea of Georgie and Kit remaining in Mrs. Taft’s small cottage after the lady’s untimely death and taken it upon himself to write to their uncle, she would not be in this position.
Then again, if the vicar had known the truth about Mrs. Taft’s past, he and his wife probably wouldn’t have called on the lady at all and counted her as one of his “finest” parishioners.
Oh, bother the interference of men.
Georgie paced in front of the dining room doors.
They just go about arranging women’s lives without so much as a by your leave.
Well, she wasn’t going to stand for it.
And certainly not this, she thought, clenching the letter in her hand even tighter. Marriage to a man four times her age! A man reputed to be the worst reprobate in all of England!
Luckily for Georgie, Lady Finch, an old family friend, had written her detailing the wild rumors circulating the gossipy
ton
regarding her impending betrothal to Lord Harris. Knowing Uncle Phineas, Georgie had little doubt that he probably would have informed her of her nuptials with just enough time to dress for the ceremony.
Especially considering that her intended bridegroom had already buried nine wives.
Georgie had no intention of being the tenth. Why, even that horrid old sot Henry the Eighth had had the good sense to go and die after six.
She straightened her shoulders and her resolve, and proceeded into the dining room without knocking.
Better to beard the lion in his den, Mrs. Taft had always said. But then she’d also added that surprise and cunning were essential tools in any lady’s repertoire when dealing with the deadliest of all beasts—men.
And beastly was a perfect description of Uncle Phineas.
“Uncle, I must speak to you,” she said, leaving him sputtering over his soup at her untimely interruption.
“What the devil do you want?” Phineas Escott, Viscount Brockett, demanded once he’d finally regained his composure.
Georgie stood her ground. “What is this news that I am to be wed?”
Her uncle shot an angry glance in his wife’s direction.
Lady Brockett shook her head, her fat sausage curls bounding this way and that in alarm and denial. “I said nothing to the girl, Phineas. Not one word.”
“Aunt Verena had nothing to do with this, Uncle,” Georgie wasn’t overly fond of her all-too-selfish aunt, but she wasn’t going to let the woman bear the brunt of her husband’s displeasure. “I received this letter not an hour ago from Lady Finch. She states she has it on good authority that I am to be wed.”
“How did you get your hands on that?” he demanded. “I gave orders for her letters to be—” He stopped short of admitting that he had been intercepting the girls’ private correspondence, so instead he turned the blame back to her. “A thief, that’s what I’ve got for a niece. A Seven Dials pickpocket under my roof.”
“Uncle, never mind Lady Finch,” Georgie said, not wanting to admit how she had obtained the letter. “I will have an answer. Am I to be wed?”
Lord Brockett huffed and sputtered, and then wiping his chin in a great display of impatience said, “Yes. And I’ll brook none of your saucy tongue on the matter. The papers were signed this afternoon, and the only thing left is for the banns to be read.”
Georgie’s entire body shook with anger and the desire to give her uncle a lashing the likes of which he had probably never heard, though most likely deserved. However, she clung to her resolve and held herself steady with every ounce of mettle she possessed. “Is Lady Finch correct that my intended is Lord Harris?”
Again Uncle Phineas’s accusing glare spun toward his wife.
The curls bobbed and danced in denial once again. “I haven’t breathed a word of it to anyone, my dear,” Aunt Verena said. “I swear it.”
He looked anything but convinced as he took a sip of his wine, his hard gaze swinging back to Georgie. “You should consider yourself a lucky girl,” he told her. “You’ll be a countess. Which is far above what the likes of you deserves, if you ask me.”
“I don’t give a fig about becoming a countess,” she replied. “Not if it means marrying some infirm rotter, old enough to be my great-grandfather.”
“Bah!” Uncle Phineas shot her a glance that said he considered her the stupidest girl alive. “Don’t you see that this is to your advantage? Harris is old, I’ll grant you that, but he has no children and several fine estates that are not entailed. It will all be yours once he turns up his toes. And he’ll as likely die before the year is out, either from some ailment or another, or go aloft to get away from that scold’s tongue of yours.”
He laughed, a rude guffaw of a noise that only made Georgie clench her teeth tighter to restrain herself from knocking him over the head with the nearest silver salver.