Holt Love's Promise

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62675-366-2
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 1, 430 Seiten

Reihe: Love's Promise

New York Times bestselling author, CHERYL HOLT, will sweep readers away with the first novel in her new and breathtaking 'Lord Trent' trilogy...

CHERYL HOLT is a New York Times, USA Today, and Amazon bestselling author of over thirty novels. She's also a lawyer and mom, and at age forty, with two babies at home, she started a new career as a commercial fiction writer. She'd hoped to be a suspense novelist, but couldn't sell any of her manuscripts, so she ended up taking a detour into romance where she was stunned to discover that she has a knack for writing some of the world's greatest love stories. Her books have been released to wide acclaim, and she has won or been nominated for many national awards. She is particularly proud to have been named 'Best Storyteller of the Year' by the trade magazine Romantic Times BOOK Reviews. She lives and writes in Hollywood, California, and she loves to hear from fans.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Holt, Cheryl

Leseproben

CHAPTER TWO

“Where are you off to now, Fanny?”

Frances Carrington, called Fanny by her family, glanced over at her sister, Camilla. Though Fanny was twenty and Camilla twenty-five, Camilla acted like a petulant adolescent, and Fanny often felt as if she was Camilla’s mother.

“It’s so beautiful outside. I thought I’d walk to the village.”

“You just went yesterday,” Camilla complained. “I swear, you’re restless as a hen when the fox is lurking. What’s the matter with you?”

“The vicar’s wife is supposed to pay me for the mending I completed.”

“How can you take that old biddy’s charity?”

“It’s not charity. I worked hard on that sewing, and I won’t apologize for it.”

“Aren’t you a bloody saint?”

It was a constant quarrel between them. Camilla wouldn’t lift a finger to earn any money, despite how dire their situation, but she was quick to criticize when Fanny did anything that might alleviate some of their financial distress.

Fanny was galled at being forced to rely on the paltry coins the vicar’s wife doled out, especially when the sanctimonious woman enjoyed flaunting her elevated position and how it contrasted with Fanny’s reduced one.

For three decades, Fanny’s father had been the vicar. They’d lived in a fine house next to the church and had been respected members of the community, so when she knocked on the rear door of the parsonage, she felt like a supplicant or a beggar. She’d be invited in to see the new minister writing his sermons at what had been her father’s desk. His wife would be sitting on the sofa in what had been Fanny’s mother’s parlor.

At one humiliating point, Fanny had sold her mother’s wedding ring to the vicar in order to purchase food. He’d given the ring to his wife as a gift, and whenever Fanny stopped by, she cruelly waved it under Fanny’s nose.

The tonic was bitter to swallow, but in the past few years, she’d suffered so many indignities that one more hardly registered. She could tolerate the other woman’s condescension if it helped her support her nephew, Thomas.

“Camilla, please,” Fanny scolded. “Watch your language.”

Fanny gestured toward Thomas who was across the room at the dining table practicing his letters.

“He’s heard worse,” Camilla said.

“Yes, he has,” Fanny agreed, “but we needn’t broaden his base vocabulary.”

“Don’t tell me how to speak to my own boy.”

Fanny couldn’t win the argument, so she didn’t try.

“I’ll be back in a few hours. If she pays me as she promised, I’ll bring some stew meat with me.”

“Meat, bah!” Camilla sniped. “Fat and gristle is more like.”

Camilla was always angry that they couldn’t afford the quality of victuals that had been their typical fare in better times. Her sense of entitlement—as well as her gnawing hunger—made her surly.

Though she never said as much, she seemed to blame Fanny for their poverty, as if their father’s death and Camilla’s subsequent plunge to indigence had somehow been Fanny’s fault. Fanny was weary of defending herself over the calamities, and she was eager to be away.

She grabbed her shawl and bonnet, and she stood in front of the mirror, studying her reflection as she tied the bow under her chin.

With her slender torso, heart-shaped face, and bright green eyes, she recognized that she was attractive. Her hair was long and blond, an unusual shade of luxurious gold, the color of ripened wheat. Since they had no servants, she rarely styled it, finding it quicker to simply brush the lengthy tresses and pull them back with a ribbon.

But her looks didn’t matter, and she shouldn’t continue to pretend that they did. Her lack of a dowry insured there would be no husband, no family of her own. She’d never even had a beau, and circumstances had compelled her to accept that she never would.

Still, it was amusing to dream of a different life, one filled with pretty gowns and tons of delicious food, where there was no need to worry over the least little problem.

She wasn’t a woman prone to vanity, but there was no concealing the fact that her dress was shabby and plain, her bonnet tattered and torn. She couldn’t help but wish that she had a fashionable outfit to wear into the village, but cash was scarce and new clothes a frivolous extravagance.

She slipped out and hurried down the path to the lane, when Thomas called to her from their decrepit cottage.

“Aunt Fanny! May I come with you?”

Fanny spun around, smiling.

Thomas was an amazingly sweet and winsome child, and it was impossible to understand how he’d sprung from such an unpleasant mother. Luckily, he was nothing like her.

While Camilla was blond and blue-eyed, her face wasn’t flattering. Her eyes were too narrow, her nose too large, her chin too square. Previously, she’d been plump with good health, but her figure had gone to flab, and her forehead was creased with frown lines that were evidence of her dour temperament.

In contrast, with his rosy cheeks and pert nose, Thomas’s features were so appealing that he resembled a cherub painted on a church ceiling. His hair wasn’t blond, though, as an angel’s might be, but a dark brown that was almost black, and his eyes were very blue, traits that Camilla claimed made him the spitting image of his aristocratic father, John Wainwright.

“No, darling,” Fanny said, “you can’t come. You have to finish your school work.”

“But I’ve been at it for an hour already.”

“Yes, and you need to do another two hours before you’re through. Don’t you want to grow up big and smart like your father and grandfather?”

“No. I want to be a dangerous pirate like Captain Jean Pierre, The French Terror.”

Jean Pierre was currently the scourge of the Seven Seas, and boys all over England were enthralled by tales of his violence, daring, and bravery.

“Jean Pierre attended school, too,” she maintained, having no idea if the vicious criminal had or not.

“He did?”

“Yes. He can read and write better than anyone.”

Thomas pondered this lie, then swallowed it.

“All right,” he ultimately grumbled, “but once you’re back, may we walk by the river?”

“Yes, we may.” She nodded to the cottage. “You go on now. Keep your mother company until I return.”

At the suggestion, he scowled, his distaste obvious, but he didn’t remark. He whipped away and went inside.

He was so obedient and clever, and he was astute enough to realize that his mother detested him. They both knew it; they occasionally skirted the edge of the issue, but there was no way Fanny could justify Camilla’s behavior.

At age sixteen, Camilla had accompanied their neighbors to London for the social season, but she had been poorly chaperoned. She’d thrived on the parties and gaiety, on the wickedness and immoral conduct. She’d fallen in with a bad crowd, had come home pregnant and in disgrace.

The scandal had ruined their family. Their father had been forced to surrender his position as the parish vicar, which had cost them their income and house and status. If that weren’t punishment enough, Camilla had refused to exhibit any remorse, which had shocked the town’s rural sensibilities, so they’d been shunned.

Even after the shame had killed their parents, Camilla still wasn’t sorry for the catastrophe she’d wrought. She’d loved John Wainwright and had relished her indecent life as his paramour. All these years later, she could talk of nothing but London, and if she’d had any notion of how to manage it, she’d move to the city and resume her decadent habits.

Thomas represented all that Camilla had lost. Not her parents. Not her home. Not her reputation. She wasn’t concerned about any of those things. No, she mourned the loss of the whirlwind that was London, and Thomas was living proof of how she’d failed to retain what she craved.

Fanny sighed, wishing she had the temerity to leave Camilla to stew in her own juice, but she never would.

They had been reared as sisters, but they weren’t blood relations. Fanny’s own birth mother had been a young girl, much like Camilla who’d been seduced by a great lord. As a tiny baby, Fanny had been left in a basket on the church steps, with a note requesting that she be placed with a good family.

The vicar and his wife had kept Fanny and raised her as their own daughter, so when her mother had begged Fanny—on her deathbed, no less—to watch over Camilla, it was a charge Fanny wouldn’t shirk.

She hurried on, wondering if there would be another letter in the morning post from pompous, horrid Michael Wainwright, which was the real reason she was walking to the village. His threats were aggravating in the extreme, and she often entertained herself by conjuring visions of the ugly, vile ogre he must be.

His last missive had imperiously informed her that they had begun...