How to School Your Scoundrel

Book 2: A Princess in Hiding Romance

by Juliana Gray

Genres: Historical Fiction; Victorian Romance; Romantic Suspense

Synopsis

Three intrepid princesses find themselves targets in a deadly plot against the crown-until their uncle devises a brilliant plan to keep them safe...

Princess Luisa has devoted her life to duty, quietly preparing to succeed her father as ruler. Nothing, however, primed her to live on the run, disguised as a personal secretary to a notorious English scoundrel. The earl is just the man to help her reclaim her throne, but Luisa is drawn to her powerful employer in ways she never imagined…

Philip, Earl of Somerton, has spent six years married to a woman in love with another man-he refuses to become a fool due to imprudent emotions ever again. Only, as his carefully laid plans for vengeance falter, fate hands him hope for redemption in the form of a beautiful and determined young princess who draws him into a risky game of secrets, seduction, and betrayal. And while his cunning may be enough to save her life, nothing can save him from losing his heart…

Release date: June 3, 2014

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 320

Sample

ONE

London

November 1889

The Earl of Somerton leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers into an imaginary cathedral before his nose, and considered the white-faced man standing at the extreme edge of the antique kilim rug before the desk.

Standing, of course. One never made one’s underlings too comfortable.

He allowed the silence to take on a life of its own, a third presence in the room, a roiling thundercloud of anticipation.

The man shifted his weight from one large booted foot to the other. A droplet of sweat trickled its lazy way along the thick vertical scar at the side of his face.

“Are you warm, Mr. Norton? I confess, I find the room a trifle chilly, but you’re welcome to open a window if you like.”

“No, thank you, sir.” Norton’s voice tilted queasily.

“A glass of sherry, perhaps? To calm the nerves?”

“The nerves, sir?”

“Yes, Mr. Norton. The nerves.” Somerton smiled. “Your nerves, to be precise, for I can’t imagine that any man could walk into this study to report a failure so colossal as yours, without feeling just the slightest bit”—he sharpened his voice to a dagger point—“nervous.”

The Adam’s apple jumped and fell in Mr. Norton’s throat. “Sir.”

“Sir . . . yes? As in: Sir, you are correct, I am shaking in my incompetent boots? Or perhaps you mean: Sir, no, I am quite improbably ignorant of the fatal consequences of failure in this particular matter.” Another smile. “Enlighten me, if you will, Mr. Norton.”

“Sir. Yes. I am . . . I am most abjectly sorry that I . . . that in the course of . . .”

“That you allowed my wife, a woman, unschooled in the technical aspects of subterfuge—my wife, Mr. Norton, the Countess of Somerton—to somehow elude your diligent surveillance last night?” He leaned forward and placed his steepled fingers on the desk before him. “To escape you, Mr. Norton?”

Norton snatched his handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his temples. His narrow and unremarkable face—so useful in his choice of profession—shone along every plane surface, like a plank of wood left out in the rain. “Sir, I . . . I . . . I most humbly suggest that Lady Somerton is . . . she has more wits in her possession than . . .”

Somerton’s fist crashed into the blotter. “She is my wife, Mr. Norton. And she slipped through your grasp.”

“Sir, in all the weeks I’ve kept watch on Lady Somerton, she’s traveled nowhere more suspicious than the home of her cousin, Lady Morley . . .”

“Who is undoubtedly complicit in her affairs.”

“Oh, but sir . . .”

“And she has followed me,on occasion, has she not?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“Which means she has neither the good sense nor the propriety of a common shopwife.”

Norton’s massive jaw worked and worked. His gaze fell to the rug. “Sir, I feel . . .”

“You feel?” Somerton barked. “You feel,Mr. Norton? Allow me to observe that your feelings have nothing to do with the matter at hand. My wife, the Countess of Somerton, is engaged in an adulterous liaison with another man. It is my belief that she has carried on this sordid correspondence throughout the entire duration of our marriage. Your object—the task, the sole task for which I hired you, Mr. Norton, as the best man in London for clandestine work—your task was to obtain proof of this affair and bring it to me. You are not paid to have feelings on the matter.”

“Sir, I . . .”

“Look at me, Mr. Norton.”

Erasmus Norton, the most stealthy and deadly assassin inside these British Isles, known to have killed at least one mark with a single silent tap to the skull, lifted his dark eyes carefully upward until he met Somerton’s gaze. For an instant, a flutter of pity brushed the inside wall of the earl’s thick chest.

And then, like the butterfly snatched by the net, it was gone.

“Believe me, Mr. Norton,” said Somerton, in his silkiest voice, “I understand your little predicament. She is a beautiful woman, isn’t she? Beautiful and full of grace. You wouldn’t think, as you watched her smile in that gentle little way of hers, as you watched her float about her daily business, that she would be capable of dishonoring a pet mouse, let alone her husband. I can see how you’ve fallen under her spell. I can hardly blame you. I fell myself, didn’t I, in the most catastrophic manner possible. I married her.” The word married came out in a growl.

“If I may say, sir . . .”

Somerton rose to his feet. “But you are paid to set aside these tender notions, Mr. Norton, these misguided ideas of yours, and see to your business. Otherwise, I shall be forced to consider, one by one, the various means by which your feelings may be forcibly exhumed from your incompetent breast.” He leaned forward and spoke in a low voice, just above a whisper. “Do you understand me, Mr. Norton?”

Norton hopped backward from his perch like a startled brown-haired parakeet. “Oh, but sir! She’s innocent, I’ll stake my life on it . . .”

“Innocent?” The low simmer of fury in Somerton’s brain, the fury he had battled all his life to control, flared upward in a roar of heat. “Innocent? By God, Norton. Do I hear you correctly? Are you actually saying I’m mistaken about my own wife?”

Norton’s white mouth opened and closed. “Not mistaken exactly, sir, that’s the wrong word, I . . .”

Somerton walked around the side of his desk. Norton’s eyes followed his progress, while his words drifted into a wary silence.

Somerton came to a stop next to the edge of the rug, mere inches away from Norton’s blunt and unlovely figure. They were of about the same height, he and Norton. In fact, taken both together, they made a pair of brothers: tall, dark-haired, brute-boned, thick with muscle, crowned by faces only a particularly adoring mother could admire.

Not that the woman who had given birth to Somerton was that sort of mother.

“Mr. Norton,” he said, “I find this conversation has dragged on long enough. Either do your duty, or I shall exact the usual forfeit. There are no other choices. We’ve done business together before, and you know this fact as well as any man on earth.”

Norton’s dark eyes blinked twice. “Yes, sir.”

“You may go.”

Norton turned and dashed for the door. Somerton waited, without moving, until his black-coated figure had stepped off the rug and reached gratefully for the handle.

“Oh! There is one more thing, Mr. Norton.”

The man froze with his hand on the knob.

“As I observed, you have allowed Lady Somerton to follow me about my business in the evening, from time to time. A dangerous occupation, that.”

“I have kept the closest watch on her, sir. As close as possible without revealing myself,” Norton said to the door.

“Let me be clear. If a single hair on Lady Somerton’s head, a single eyelash belonging to her ladyship’s face, is harmed, you will die, Mr. Norton. I shall perform the deed myself. Do you understand me?”

Norton’s hand clutched around the knob, as if struck by the actual cold-blooded wind of Somerton’s voice.

“I understand, sir,” he whispered.

“Very good.”

Lord Somerton returned to his seat without another look. The door creaked slightly as it opened and closed, and then there was silence, profound and merciful silence, except for the rhythmic scratch of Somerton’s pen as he finished the letter that Norton’s entrance had interrupted.

A double knock struck the study door.

He signed his name, considered it carefully, and blotted the ink on the page before he answered.

“Come in,” he said.

The footman stepped cautiously through the doorway. “Mr. Markham is here to see you, sir.”

“Mr. Markham?”

“For the position of secretary, sir.” The footman’s voice lifted just a single nervous trifle at the word sir, turning the statement into a question. Servants and peers alike performed a similar vocal trick when engaging Lord Somerton in conversation. He couldn’t imagine why.

“Send him in.”

Somerton folded the letter, slipped it inside an envelope, and addressed it himself in bold strokes of black ink. A wretched and time-consuming chore, that. He did hope this current secretarial prospect would prove capable of the position, but the hope was a faint one. For some reason, he had the most appalling luck with secretaries.

The footman dissolved into the darkness of the hallway. Somerton consulted the list he had prepared an hour ago—another damned chore he was eager to relinquish—and made a small check next to the word Ireland. Two more words remained: Secretary and Wife.

He was about to take care of the first, anyway. He preferred not to think about the second.

A coal popped in the fireplace nearby. The London air had taken a turn for the chillier this week, and the usual miasma of yellow fog had thickened like an evil enchantment about the streets and buildings of the capital, as millions of chimneys put out millions of columns of coal smoke into the damp English atmosphere. In another week, the household would retire to Somerton Hall for the Christmas season. Hunting every day, drinking every night. His wife’s uncomplaining mask at dinnertime; his son’s brave Yes, sir and No, sir to the few questions Somerton could stretch his adult imagination to ask.

In short, the usual jolly old Yule.

The door opened. Somerton flexed his fingers.

“Your lordship: Mr. Markham,” said the footman.

A young man stepped through the doorway.

“Good morning, Mr. Markham.” Somerton glanced at the clock on the mantel. “I hope the hour is not too early for you.”

“Not at all, your lordship. I thank you for taking the trouble to see me.” Mr. Markham moved into the lamplight, and something stirred in the pit of Somerton’s belly.

Indigestion, no doubt.

They were all young men who came to interview for the position of personal secretary to the Earl of Somerton, but this young man seemed younger than all of them. He could not have been more than eighteen. A suit of plain black wool covered his coltish limbs a little too loosely. His face was smooth and unlined, without a single whisker; his dark ginger hair was slicked back from his head with a stiff layer of pomade. In the symmetrical architecture of his face, there was a trace of almost delicate beauty, a lingering evidence of boyhood.

But there was nothing childlike about the way he moved. He squared his thin shoulders, propelled his lanky figure to the center of the rug, and went on, in a firm, rich alto, “I have come to interview for the position of secretary.”

Somerton set aside his pen in an exact perpendicular relationship to the edge of the desk. “So I am informed, Mr. Markham. I read over your references last night. Astonishingly fulsome, for a man so young.”

“I hope I have given satisfaction, sir.” In a voice that knew full well he had.

Cocky little bastard.

Not that cockiness was necessarily a fault. A secretary should approach his work with confidence. That cockiness could shove open more than a few doors in his employer’s service; it could accomplish what timid self-effacement could not.

Just so long as the two of them were quite clear: That cockiness should never, ever, direct itself toward the Earl of Somerton himself.

Somerton raised his most devastating eyebrow. “No doubt, Mr. Markham, you gave the—er—the attaché of this beleaguered ambassador of Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof the very utmost satisfaction. I presume you left his employ because of the political revolution there?”

A slight hesitation. “Yes.”

Somerton shook his head. “A shocking state of affairs. The ruler murdered, the heir snatched away from the funeral itself. Is there any news of the missing princesses?”

“None, I’m afraid,” said Mr. Markham. “One hears they escaped to relatives in England with their governess, but it’s only a rumor. Likely a false hope.”

“My sympathies. Regardless, I should warn you that my standards are perhaps a trifle more exacting than those of a backward, corrupt, and regicidal Germanic principality.”

Ah. Was that a flare of indignation in Mr. Markham’s warm brown eyes? But the lad smothered it instantly, returning his face to the same pale symmetry as before. Another point in his favor: the ability to control emotion.

“That unfortunate state,” he said icily, “is nonetheless most exact in its notions of ceremony and diplomatic procedure. I assure you, I am well versed in every aspect of a secretary’s duties.”

“And I assure you, Mr. Markham, that the duties required of my secretary will soon prove unlike any you have encountered before.”

Markham’s eyelids made a startled blink.

“We will, however, begin at the beginning, so as not to shock your tender sensibilities. I start work directly after breakfast, which you will enjoy on a tray in your bedroom. I dislike company in the morning, and my personal secretary does not take meals with the household staff.”

“I see.”

“You will report to this room at half eight. We will work through until ten o’clock, when coffee is brought in and I receive visitors. Your desk is there”—he waved to the small mahogany escritoire set at a right angle to the desk, a few feet away—“and you will remain in the room, taking notes of the meeting, unless I direct otherwise. You can write quickly, can you not, Mr. Markham?”

“I have recently learned the essentials of shorthand notation,” Mr. Markham said, without the slightest hesitation.

“We will take lunch here in the study, after which your time is your own, provided you complete your assignments by the time I return at six o’clock. We will work for another two hours, after which I dress for dinner. I invariably dine out. You may take your evening meal in the dining room, though you will likely find yourself alone. Her ladyship dines in the nursery with my son.” Somerton congratulated himself on the absence of expression in his voice.

“Very good, sir. Do I understand you to mean that I have met with your approval?” Mr. Markham said. His face tilted slightly against the lamplight, exposing the curve of his cheekbone, prominent and graceful, in perfect balance with the rest of his face. His arms remained crossed behind his back, his posture straight. Almost . . . regal.

What an extraordinary chap. The thought slipped without warning between the steel columns of Somerton’s mind.

He rose to his feet. “Approval, Mr. Markham? Nothing of the kind. I am in want of a secretary. You, it seems, are the only man daring enough to apply for the position.”

“Rather a tight position for you, then, sir.”

The words were said so effortlessly, so expressionlessly, that it took a moment for Somerton to process their meaning.

What the devil? Had the fellow actually just said that?

Rather a tight position for you. The cheek!

Somerton’s shoulders flexed in an arc of counterattack. “You have one week, Mr. Markham, to prove yourself capable of the position. A position, I hardly need add, that no man has held for longer than two months together. If you succeed in winning my—what was your word, Mr. Markham?”

The young man smiled. “Approval, Lord Somerton.”

“Approval.” He sneered. “You will be compensated with the handsome sum of two hundred pounds per annum, paid monthly in arrears.”

Two hundred solid English pounds sterling. A fortune for an impecunious young man just starting out in his profession, clinging by his claws to the first rung of the professional ladder; twice as much as his wildest hopes might aspire to achieve. Somerton waited for the look of startled gratification to break out across Mr. Markham’s exquisite young features.

Waited.

A small curl appeared in the left corner of Mr. Markham’s round pink upper lip.

“Two hundred pounds?” he said, as he might say two hundred disemboweled lizards. “I no longer wonder that you have difficulty retaining secretaries for any length of time, your lordship. I only wonder that you have tempted any to the position at all.”

Somerton shot to his feet.

“I beg your pardon! Two hundred pounds is impossibly generous.”

“You will forgive me, Lord Somerton, but the facts speak for themselves. I am the only applicant for the position. Evidently two hundred pounds represents not nearly enough compensation for an ambitious and talented young fellow to take on such an overbearing, demanding, bleak-faced despot as yourself.” He uncrossed his arms, walked to the desk, and spread his long, young fingers along the edge. “Allow me, if you will, to make you a counter-proposition. I shall take on the position of your personal secretary for a week’s trial, beginning tomorrow morning. If the conditions of employment meet with my approval, why, I’ll agree to continue on for a salary of three hundred pounds a year, paid weekly in advance. My room and board included, of course.”

Mr. Markham’s eyes fixed, without blinking, on Somerton’s face. That unlined young face, innocently smooth in the yellow glow of the electric lamp, did not twitch so much as a single nerve.

“By God,” Somerton said slowly. The blood pulsed hard at the base of his neck. He sat back in his chair, took up his pen, and balanced it idly along the line of his knuckles. His hand, thank God, did not shake.

“Well, sir? My time this morning is limited.”

“You may go, Mr. Markham.” He waved to the door.

Markham straightened. “Very well. Good luck to you, sir.” He turned and walked to the door, at that same regal pace, as if leading the procession to a state dinner.

Somerton waited until his hand had reached the knob. “And Mr. Markham? Kindly tell my butler to arrange for your belongings to be brought over from your lodgings first thing tomorrow and delivered to the suite next to mine.”

“Sir?” At last, a note of astonishment in that imperturbable young voice.

Somerton took out a sheet of blank paper, laid it on the blotter, and smiled. “I suspect you shall suit this overbearing, demanding, bleak-faced despot very well, Mr. Markham.”

• • •

Luisa closed the door to the study and leaned back against the heavy carved wood.

Her heart still thudded inside her ribs at an alarming speed, as if she’d just finished a footrace around the shore of the sparkling clear Holsteinsee. Thank God for starched white collars and snug black neckties, or else that man—that Somerton, that predatory prizefighter of an aristocrat with his keen black eyes and his impossibly thick shoulders—would have detected the rapid thrust of her pulse against her skin.

Her tender female skin.

He would have seen right through her mask of male bravado. He would have annihilated her.

How her chest had collapsed at the words You may go, as if the world had vaporized around her.

And then unpacked in the suite next to mine, the point at which her heart had resumed beating, with this alarming and reckless patter of . . . what? Fear? Relief? Anticipation?

When Luisa was younger, before her skirts were lengthened and her hair arranged in elaborate knots and loops under a jeweled tiara, her father used to take her out in the Schweinwald to stalk deer. They would set out at dawn, while the grass still breathed out rings of silver mist, and the thud of the horses’ hooves rattled the autumn silence. In those quiet mornings, Luisa learned how to hold herself still, how to be patient, how to listen and watch. She would study her father’s movements and replicate them. She was Diana, she was the virgin huntress, wise and ruthless.

Until that October day when her horse had gone lame and she had fallen behind, unnoticed, and the familiar trees and vines of the Schweinwald had become suddenly and terrifyingly unfamiliar. She had hallooed softly. She had whistled. She had called out in mounting alarm, panic mottling her brain, and as she stood there with her hands gripped around the loops of her horse’s reins, a black bear had wandered into view among the trees and come to a stop about twelve feet away.

They had stared at each other, she and that bear. She knew, of course, that you weren’t supposed to stare. You were supposed to look away and back off slowly. But she couldn’t remember all those rules of engagement. She couldn’t leave her lame horse. She had nothing to fall back on, no rear position in which to shelter. So she stared back, for what seemed like an hour, and was probably less than a minute.

She still remembered the absolute blackness of the bear’s fur, except for a small patch of rufous brown where a miraculous ray of sunlight penetrated the forest canopy. She remembered the dark watchfulness of its eyes, the fingerprint texture of its round nose. She remembered the syrupy scent of the rotting leaves, the chilling handprint of the air on her cheek.

She remembered thinking, I am going to die, or I am going to live. Which is it?

“Sir? Are you going to see my father?”

Luisa opened her eyes and straightened away from the door.

A young, dark-haired boy stood before her, examining her with curious black eyes so exactly like those of the Earl of Somerton, her heart jumped an extra beat for good measure.

“I beg your pardon?” she said.

“My father.” The boy nodded at the door. “Are you going in to see him? Or has he tossed you out?”

“I . . . I have just finished my interview with his lordship.” Luisa heard herself stammering. Children made her nervous, with their all-seeing eyes and their mysterious minds, occupied with infant imaginings Luisa could no longer even attempt to guess. And this one was worse than most, his pale face poised upward with unsmiling curiosity, his eyes far too reminiscent of that pair she’d just escaped. She scrambled for something to say. “You are Lord Somerton’s son?”

The boy nodded. “Philip. Lord Kildrake,” he added importantly.

“I see.”

“I guess he’s tossed you out, then. Well, buck up. That’s what Mama says. Buck up and try again later, when he’s in a good mood.”

“I see.”

Young Lord Kildrake sighed and stuck his finger in his hair, twirling it into a thoughtful knot. His gaze shifted to the door behind her. “The trouble is, he never is. In a good mood.”

From the entrance hall came the sound of feet on marble, of the butler issuing quiet orders. A woman’s voice called out. The boy’s mother, probably. Lady Somerton, summoning her son.

He never is. In a good mood.

In the end, that long-ago day, Luisa had lived, but not because she had stared the bear down. The thunder of avenging hoofbeats had filled the forest, and Prince Rudolf had appeared on his white charger. He had risen in his stirrups, dropped his reins, lifted his rifle, and shot the bear dead without a break in the horse’s stride.

Luisa looked down at the little boy. He had lost interest in her now. He let out another long sigh, turned, and ambled back down the hallway, still twirling his hair.

Her father was dead. Her husband was dead. Her sisters, her governess, all scattered to the winds of England.

She was alone.

Luisa straightened away from the door and shook out her shirt cuffs. She had better get on with it, then, hadn’t she?

TWO

On the occasion of his fifteenth birthday, the Earl of Somerton’s father had taken notice of him at last. “Getting to be a man, aren’t you, Kildrake, my boy?” he’d said, in his rough-edged voice. “Look at the shoulders on you.”

Somerton—then merely Leopold, Viscount Kildrake—had beamed with embarrassed pride. He had returned home from school just the day before for the summer holiday, and apart from the butler, who had made the arrangements for his journey, nobody in the house seemed to have noticed his arrival. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“You’re rising fourteen now, aren’t you?”

“Fifteen today, sir.”

“Today! By God!” The earl’s red-tipped nose had dipped toward his. “Been having a go at the housemaids, have you?”

A bolt of pure fright went through young Leopold’s body, as if his father had just read his thoughts. Not that he’d attempted a single housemaid—he hadn’t dared to poach on his father’s established turf—but he’d admired them from afar. Plump bosoms and round arses and . . . He folded his hands behind his back and dug his fingers hard into his skin, because his unruly young adolescent body was already responding to the mere suggestion of female flesh. “No, sir!”

“No?” A perplexed scowl. “Well, then. Come along with me.”

It was ten o’clock in the evening, and Leopold had been on his way upstairs to undress for bed, after a solitary dinner in the family dining room. (His mother was attending three different balls that evening and took the usual tray in her dressing room during her two-hour preparatory toilette.) “Yes, sir,” he’d said, and walked outside to the waiting carriage with his father. They had proceeded to his father’s favorite brothel, where Leopold had lost his virginity to a plump forty-year-old whore in one room while the Earl of Somerton had expired of a stroke in another.

In the curious way of memory, he recalled little of the carnal act itself, or how he had come to be lying in mingled shock and shame atop the wide white belly of his companion, veins still throbbing, at the vivid instant when his father’s two strumpets had burst naked through the doorway screaming, He’s dead! He’d dead! God save us! He was still wearing his shirt, and his trousers were tangled around his ankles; he remembered that, because he had tripped off the bed and fallen on his face, and the whore had laughed. “Why, then, you’re the earl now! And I’ve got your mess in my cunt this instant, bless me! Ha-ha!”

He’d turned red with humiliation at the words mess and cunt;he’d turned black with horror at the words He’s dead, which the other two prostitutes were still screeching, over and over. Eventually the proprietress had swept through and sorted out the bedlam, arranged for a discreet visit by a friendly pair of police inspectors, apologized profusely to the new Earl of Somerton and hoped he would continue to favor Cousin Hannah’s with his custom.

He had.

In fact, Cousin Hannah sat before him now: a different and younger Hannah, in the way of things, but just as efficient. Her violet skirts pooled on the chair about her, and her copious bosom was buttoned up to the throat, because it was daytime. By some miracle of corsetry, her waist appeared almost as narrow as her neck.

She released the stopper of a slim bottle of brandy, allowed a luxurious splash into the teacup below, and stirred with a dainty spoon of well-polished Sheffield plate. She motioned the bottle in Somerton’s direction. He shook his head patiently.

“To answer your question, sir,” said Hannah, though not before taking a sip of tea, “his lordship has frequented my humble establishment a number of times in the past fortnight, but never in company with your wife.”

“You have examined all his companions? She would, of course, have disguised herself.”

Hannah sent him a look of patient indulgence, a look he particularly loathed. “Yes, sir. As I did the previous fortnight, and the one before, and all the others.”

Somerton’s cup of tea sat untouched before him. A last thin gasp of steam rose upward from the surface and dissolved into the air. He leaned forward. “Obviously she’s been too clever for you.”

“With all respect, sir, she hasn’t.”