Taming Beauty

Once upon a time, a beautiful maiden and a handsome young gentleman fell in love. If not at first sight, then certainly sometime during the London Season of 1792. Theirs was the sort of deep, ardent, all-consuming love most people only dream of finding, the sort of love that inspired poets and playwrights to put quill to parchment.

Miss Gwendolyn Aberdeen was the cherished only daughter of Viscount Aberdeen, while Morris Horatio Spencer was the newly minted Earl of Dunaway. Together, Gwendolyn and Dunaway were the prettiest, wittiest and happiest of couples. Their company was much sought-after, their good opinion coveted and their tendency to color-coordinate their garments mimicked in certain circles during the Season of 1793.

Midway through the Season of 1794, Gwendolyn and Dunaway welcomed a daughter into the world with all the joy and fanfare due a child born of their abiding devotion. Their contentment was complete, their delight too great to contain.

Quite simply put, their love was the stuff of fairy tales.

Alas, their story did not end as a fairy tale ought to end.

For, while Gwendolyn’s father was a viscount, her mother was a renowned courtesan known across the width and breadth of England and Scotland as
The Infamous Alabaster Sinclair
. Not only was Alabaster a courtesan, she was half of a matched set of courtesans, her twin sister being
The Scandalous Bathsheba Sinclair
. And if that weren’t enough to foreshadow a less than happy ending for our lovers, Gwendolyn’s grandmother was
The Outrageous Eve Marie Sinclair
, longtime mistress to Lord Fitzroy, a direct descendent of the by-blow of one of England’s most profligate kings.

Oh, yes, this writer very nearly forgot to mention – what with all the infamous, scandalous and outrageous courtesans populating this prologue – the Earl of Dunaway was a married man. And had been since the Season of 1791.

Gwendolyn and Dunaway refused to allow anything so trifling as his marriage or her familial connections to mar their blissful union. Instead, they happily settled into a stately townhouse in Hanover Square and showered each other and their daughter with love and affection.

Over time, Gwendolyn proved herself to be a rather tempestuous woman, willful and jealous and prone to passionate displays of melodrama. And Dunaway proved himself to be a woefully self-indulgent man, careless and irresponsible and prone to drink, wager and flirt with anything in skirts. It mattered not at all, for they loved one another despite, perhaps even because of, their foibles.

Their happiness together continued undiminished when the Countess of Dunaway bore his lordship a child, though all parties were rather disappointed when said child was another daughter rather than the much anticipated son and heir.

Life went on much as it had, Gwendolyn and Dunaway continuing their reign as London’s most contented, most beautiful and most popular paramours.

Until Lord Dunaway fathered a third daughter. The child was not conceived of his lordship’s love for his mistress. Nor was she the product of his sporadic attempts to get an heir on his countess. The babe was born of Dunaway’s natural inclination toward unscrupulous, dishonorable and downright reprehensible behavior of the lascivious, licentious, lecherous sort.

In short, the Earl of Dunaway was a handsome, charming scoundrel and always had been.

And so, the love story that began with all the makings of a fairy tale came to a truly spectacular end.

Complete with tearful recriminations on Gwendolyn’s part and drunken displays of remorse on Dunaway’s. The entire spectacle was enacted on the public stage that was the London Season of 1798.

Gwendolyn Aberdeen went on to follow in the footsteps of her female relations, earning for herself the sobriquet
The Notorious Gwendolyn Aberdeen
.

The Earl of Dunaway went on to father three more daughters in short order, two by his countess and one by a sheepherder’s daughter.

He remained forevermore a handsome, charming scoundrel.

Chapter 1

Between London and Cornwall, 1816

“It isn’t fair.”

“Yes, so you’ve said. Repeatedly.” Lilith Aberdeen didn’t so much as glance up from the open book resting on her lap. She’d found the small, leather-bound volume of poetry in her father’s library, wedged between an old racing form and a pamphlet on the mining of ore in Devonshire.

“You must admit it bears repeating,” Sissy replied with a dramatic sigh.

“Perhaps you might change it up a bit,” Lilith suggested, tracing the inscription penned on the inside cover with the tip of her finger. “I know, why don’t you switch to French for a time? A lovely language for lamentation, French.”

“Ce n’est pas juste.”

“Beautiful.” Truly, the girl’s French was abominable, but it was hardly her fault.

Lilith laid the blame squarely on Lady Dunaway’s shoulders. If Sissy’s mother had paid half as much attention to her daughter’s education as she had to her wardrobe and complexion, the girl would not be offering up lamentations in any language.

Lady Priscilla Josephine Worcester, known affectionately and otherwise as Sissy, was barely eight and ten. Far too young to lament the unexpected path her life had taken, especially as she’d been given no choice in the matter. There would be plenty of time later for lamentation. For regrets rightfully earned, for mistakes honestly made, roads left untraveled, love tossed away and happiness stolen from those who justly deserved it.

“Non e giusto.”

“When did you take up Italian?” Lilith looked up in surprise to find Sissy studying her reflection in the carriage window, her perfect cupid’s bow lips twisted into what she supposed was meant to be a pretty pout but more closely resembled a rather nasty sneer. It was quite fetching, if entirely unintentional, and Lilith considered suggesting the girl practice the expression until she could call it up as readily as she did the various smiles in her middling arsenal.

Alas, Lilith suspected such an expression would ill suit the future awaiting her at the end of their long, monotonous and truly lamentable journey.

“Signor Bartoni taught me a few phrases,” Sissy replied, tittering behind her hand.

“Your handsome young dance master?” Yet another example of Lady Dunaway’s poor judgement in all matters pertaining to her daughter’s education.

“He is handsome,” Sissy gushed. “And ever so charming and kind.”

“Kissed you, did he?”

Sissy turned from the window to flash a superior smile Lilith’s way. As if she were the first young lady to sample a few kisses from a handsome Italian man.

“Tell me you didn’t allow him to dicker his way into your drawers.” Good Lord, if the girl proved to be less than the innocent virgin her groom expected, there would be the devil to pay.

“Antonio Bartoni is a gentleman.” The girl blushed becomingly, all pretty pink cheeks and dimples.

“It’s the gentlemen a lady must watch out for,” Lilith replied, suddenly feeling far older than her two and twenty years warranted.

“Truly, he only ever kissed me the one time.”

“Did his tongue come into play?”

“Ew, of course not,” Sissy cried, her brow wrinkling. “Why on earth would he use his tongue? Do men do that? Truly? Do they lick a lady’s lips?”

“Holy Mother and all the devil’s minions,” Lilith muttered, shocked by yet one more example of Lady Dunaway’s dereliction of duty. “Did your lady mother tell you nothing of what to expect?”

“On my wedding night, you mean?”

“On your wedding night and all the other nights of your marriage.”

“Mother said I was not to put up a fuss.”

“That’s it?” Lilith was going to strangle the woman when next she encountered her. Of course, seeing as she could count on one hand the number of times she’d been in the countess’s rarified presence, she wasn’t likely to be presented the opportunity to wrap her hands around the lady’s spindly neck.

“She said my husband would tell me what I needed to know.”

“But you do understand the basics of lovemaking?”

“Lovemaking?” Sissy repeated.

“Intimacy.”

Sissy only blinked her wide blue eyes.

“Coupling? Bedding? Procreation?” Lilith was fast running out of polite phrases for what was, in truth, a wholly impolite act.

“Oh, you mean marital congress,” Sissy said with a breathless giggle.

“Please tell me you understand the basics.” It occurred to Lilith, rather belatedly, that Dunaway’s uncharacteristically wheedling insistence upon her making the journey to Cornwall had more to do with preparing his daughter for her wedding night than keeping him amused and entertained during what was certain to be an otherwise dull two weeks in the country.

Lilith could not imagine explaining the intricacies of lovemaking to this girl who was little more than a stranger and who ought not even to be traveling in the same carriage with her.

Sissy should be in London, embarking upon her first Season, putting to good use those skills she’d been taught from the cradle to land a handsome young husband. She should be dancing and flirting for all she was worth. And above all else, discovering who she was beneath the trappings and trimmings of an earl’s pampered daughter.

Instead, thanks to her father’s inability to turn away from temptation—be it an innocent woman, a charlatan peddling an investment scheme, or a wager of any category or denomination—the silly chit was miles from London. En route to Cornwall, of all the godforsaken places.

“Well, of course I understand the basics,” Sissy said with a roll of her eyes that, had her mother been present, would not have gone unrebuked. “A man lies between a woman’s legs until his essence flows into her womb. And voila, nine months later a baby is born. A boy, if the lady is very lucky.”

“Ah, that explains it then,” Lilith replied. “Lord Dunaway has never possessed an overabundance of luck.”

“Perhaps Mother will give Papa a boy this time.”

“Hope springs eternal.”

Hope, that fickle, greedy creature, had much to account for as far as Lilith was concerned.

Lilith, who’d never considered herself terribly compassionate, was tempted to take pity on the girl and explain the mechanics of marital congress. Knowledge was power, after all. But as she watched the earl’s daughter practice her repertoire of smiles, it occurred to her it might be kinder, more compassionate even, to leave her blissfully ignorant for a few more precious, halcyon days.

“Es ist nicht gerecht.”

“Not Prussian, darling, I beg of you. Such an ugly language, all jagged stops and starts.”

“It isn’t fair.”

“Life rarely is.”

As the girl continued her litany in four alternating languages, Lilith dropped her gaze back to the slim book in her hands.

My Darling,

I miss you so dreadfully I am tempted to toss pebbles at your window in hopes you will join me in the gardens for a midnight stroll among the roses and hydrangea. In my absence (are you as monstrously miserable as I?) I hope you will enjoy this little token of my adoration and affection and think of me as you peruse the pages.

All my love,

Your Dearest Heart

The penmanship was typical of her mother, elegantly slanted loops and florid swirls spanning one edge of the yellowing parchment to the next, like ivy left to run rampant, clinging to smooth stone by sheer force of will.

That her father had held on to the book of poorly rendered and poorer rhymed erotic poetry came as something of a surprise. Lilith doubted the words were lewd enough to hold his attention for more than a minute, and if he had a streak of sentimentality in him, he’d buried it deep, indeed.

As evidenced when the carriage finally pulled into the inn yard of a little village somewhere west of Wiltshire where Lord Dunaway, who’d spent most of the journey on horseback, waited in the parlor between his chamber and that which the ladies would share for the night.

“Have I told you lately you are a sorry excuse for a father?” Lilith punctuated the question by tossing the book at his lordship, hitting him square in the chest where, by all accounts, his heart ought to reside.

Lord Dunaway picked up the slender volume from the table, turned it over and flipped open the cover. When he’d read the inscription he lifted his gaze, peering at her from vivid green eyes one debutant had proclaimed—aloud and in the hearing of a gaggle of gossips—made her think of wicked things, like rolling about in warm grass entirely unclothed. “Are you someone’s darling, Lil?”

“I pilfered it from your library.”

“Hmm, I suppose that means I am someone’s darling.”

“You are everyone’s darling,” she replied. “Rather like a communal privy.”

“What’s got you riled up, pet?”

“Honestly, Dun, how can you send that poor girl to Baron Malleville in so ignorant a state?” Lilith asked. “The brute is liable to scare her witless on their wedding night.”

“Have you met Malleville, then?”

“When would I have occasion to meet a recluse who hasn’t ventured into Town in more than a decade?”

“I only wondered because he is something of a brute,” Dunaway replied, rubbing one hand over his eyes in what, were he any other father, might have been a gesture of regret or even contrition. “They call him the Beast of Breckenridge.”

“And you intend to marry your daughter to him?”

“It’s a good match.”

“In what world does the marriage of an earl’s pampered daughter to a Cornish brute constitute a good match?” Lilith demanded. “Tell me, I beg of you. I should like to visit such a place if for no other reason than to see lunacy paraded about as reason and nonsensical balderdash touted as rational thought.”

“I know Malleville is not the duke the countess hoped to catch, but he’s the next best thing.”

“A baron is not the next best thing to a duke. And that is not the point.”

“What, then, is the point?”

“Sissy is a child, a woefully ignorant and innocent girl barely out of the schoolroom.” Lilith knew better than to expect more of Dunaway, and yet expect more she did. Time and again.

In that she was no different than all the ladies who’d ever loved the bloody bounder.

“Sissy is no more ignorant or innocent than my lady wife was on our wedding night,” Lord Dunaway replied with the rueful smile that had melted all of those ladies’ hearts, one by one, and sometimes two by two. “The countess and I managed just fine.”

“So fine you cannot contain your amorous attentions to her bed?”

“One’s got nothing to do with the other.”

“No, of course not.”

A serving maid appeared at Lilith’s shoulder just then—a big-boned, freckled girl about Sissy’s age who couldn’t take her eyes from the earl’s shiny, golden beauty. “Will you be wanting tea, miss?”

“I’ll have a pint and a whiskey,” Lilith replied, smiling as her anger slid away to mere aggravation, a common enough state whenever she mistakenly allowed the earl so much as a foothold into her life. “And a pork pie if you’ve got one that isn’t hours old.”

“If it makes you feel any better about the business, I did attempt to dissuade Malleville from the match,” Dunaway said, his gaze lingering on the barmaid’s retreating posterior. “Unfortunately the man wasn’t willing to accept my marker.”

“You proposed to satisfy nearly thirty thousand pounds of mortgages, loans, notes of credit, vowels and markers with yet another marker?” Lilith asked around a huff of laughter.

“When you say it like that it does sound ludicrous,” he admitted. “But taken individually, I was managing the debts well enough. It’s hardly my fault Malleville took it into his head to buy them all up and consolidate them into one exorbitant sum.”

Lilith didn’t waste a breath asking the obvious question. It was never his fault. Not for the losses he suffered at the tables, not for the investments an infant would recognize as too risky, not for the women he seduced and abandoned, not for the daughters’ futures he spoiled.

“The baron is a born shyster,” he continued. “He bought up the debt for pence on the pound and demanded Sissy and interest of three percent per annum with a measly five years to pay off the entirety! Can you imagine? Why, it’s highway robbery.”

“And yet, you agreed to stand and deliver.”

“I did no such thing,” he protested. “I countered with two percent, ten years and an alternate bride.”

“You didn’t,” Lilith hissed. “Harry would never agree to such a thing.”

“Of course not. The girl despises me and would be only too happy to see me in debtor’s prison. Not that she would visit me there.”

“You could not have meant to pull Kate out of school to marry the man.”

“What would Malleville want with a sheepherder’s granddaughter?”

“The same thing you wanted with the sheepherder’s daughter.”

Dunaway waved one elegant, long-fingered hand in the air, carelessly batting away the reminder. “No, pet, I offered you.”

“You what?”