Love's a Stage

by Laura London

Genres: Historical Fiction; Erotic & Steamy Romance; Historical Romance; Regency Romance

Synopsis

From the author of the beloved romance classic The Windflower comes a novel of drama, danger, and desire in the cutthroat world of the London theater. From the moment she arrives in the big city, Miss Frances Atherton finds herself in the most treacherous of scenarios-until a golden-haired stranger comes to her rescue. The dashing Mr. David is as handsome and heroic as any leading man in a play. He is also, she learns, one of the most notorious rakes in London. A rake with a secret as shocking and dramatic as her own . . . Frances is a country parson's daughter pretending to be an actress. Her plan is to unmask the infamous Blue Specter, a smuggler who framed her father and hides among the actors, thieves, and ne'er-do-wells of Drury Lane. The plot thickens when David is revealed to be Lord Landry-the most renowned playwright of the day. If all the world's a stage, Frances and David are just the players to expose the Specter's crimes. But how long can they hide their growing attraction . . . when their hearts and their lives are in very real danger?

Release date: May 6, 2014

Publisher: Forever Yours

Print pages: 272

Sample

Miss Frances Atherton, the parson’s daughter, stepped from the hired hackney carriage onto the busy marketplace corner of Charles and Russell Streets. A whimsical spring breeze dandled the long ties of her old-fashioned straw bonnet as if to undo their neat arrangement, and molded her shapeless gray traveler’s cape to her trim young figure, causing more than one head to turn in her direction. Bustling herds of shoppers, hawkers, and costermongers schooled around her as she gazed with innocent awe on the spires of St. Paul’s Cathedral, gilded like a chapel shrine by the late afternoon sun. It was a stirring view for a young lady who had lived her nineteen summers in Beachy Hill, Sussex, a fishing village so small that when Mrs. Brantley’s baby cried on the west side of town, cross old Mrs. Betterton on the east side would shut her window. Miss Atherton’s previous definition of a crowd had been the parish packed into her father’s church on Easter Sunday, but this single London corner contained more souls than her father had had a chance to save in the last decade.

The corner contained more vegetables, too, thought Frances, glancing about—not, of course, that her father had ever tried to save the soul of a vegetable. Frances felt a tiny smile tighten her lips at the idea of her Reverend Papa sermonizing earnestly from his pulpit toward pews packed with hefty radishes. But if Miss Atherton had been spared the company of vegetables at Sunday service, she was certainly surrounded by them now. A dusty mountain of potatoes was heaped on the pavement with a hill of crisp turnips rising at its side. Maroon pickling cabbages fought piled onions and bundles of glossy leeks for space on busy market stalls. Down the street an herbalist’s shop was getting a fresh coat of whitewash from a trio of rowdy youths, who paused to tease a group of apple-women sitting nearby on their porter’s knots sharing a pipe.

The day had been a long and tiring one for Miss Atherton. She had come from Eastbourne on the public stagecoach in a grueling ride that had begun at four o’clock that morning. The other two passengers had been a baker’s widow in black bombazine and a frail stay-maker’s wife with her overweight bulldog. After three hours of battering over rutty spring roads, their stage had become mired in a lowland road near a swollen river bank. Pulling the bulky stage through the knee-high mud had been a hard enough task for the horses even with the coachmen leading them; the passengers had been forced to get out and walk. Frances had descended bravely into the muck, saying that she was sure she wouldn’t mind a chance to stretch her legs. Her two lady companions had followed her with loud complaints, but the fat bulldog had steadfastly refused to leave the carriage. The coachman had angrily announced that he wouldn’t have his horses drag the coach another step with that bulky brute inside, the staymaker’s wife had begun to cry that it wasn’t Doggie’s fault that he didn’t like to walk in the mud, and the widow in black bombazine began a shrill for the return of her ticket price. Frances, with an inward sigh and all the good-natured cheer that she could muster, had offered to carry Doggie. She had marched the next three miles in wet sucking mud carrying a forty-pound bulldog, who alleviated his tedium by struggling and licking Frances vigorously on the side of her face.

No sooner had the bedraggled and weary travelers returned to the cramped interior of the stagecoach than the baker’s widow insisted that there was too much draft and ordered the scuffed leather curtains pulled down to cover the windows. Frances had sat in increasingly stuffy discomfort while the staymaker’s wife enumerated the outstanding qualities of her son, currently apprenticed to a snuff-box painter, and then went on to describe his advent into the world, which, it seemed, had been accomplished in miraculously short order. Not to be outdone, the baker’s wife had offered the tale of her own confinement, some forty years past, which, she said smugly, had been remarkable for its length and difficulty. The staymaker’s wife quickly countered with the claim that, of course, everyone knew that short confinements were more taxing and risky than long ones. The baker’s widow did not take well to a suggestion that any confinement could have been more risky or taxing than her own, and from thence the two ladies began a prolonged and detailed exchange of obstetrical histories that caused Miss Atherton to lose what little appetite she had left for the roll and hard cheese she had brought for lunch, and might have (had she not been a young woman of common sense and character) caused her to enter a nunnery forthwith and eschew the company of men not likewise celibate.

Frances had found no emotion within herself stronger than that of relief when the stagecoach had finally pulled into the hopping courtyard of the London’s Great George Coaching Inn. She had hired a hackney carriage, seen to the transfer of her case, and within minutes here she was among the vegetables.

The picturesque hustle about her filled Frances with fresh energy. She smoothed a wisp of her soft brown hair under her bonnet and gave her crumpled skirts a brisk shake. A sparkle returned to her hazel eyes as she filled her lungs determinedly with the dense acrid air of the metropolis. Tilting her head back, she smiled politely at the hackney driver.

“This is my first trip to the capital,” she said. “But I can see that it’s a city of which England can be proud.”

The hackney driver was a surly man in a green felt cap and a double-breasted cloth frock coat with a turned-up collar. He looked contemptuously at Frances and muttered a reply largely indistinguishable, but which sounded suspiciously like “Sure, girlie, and me old dad was a kidney pie.” In more audible tones he said, “Fare.”

Miss Atherton opened her purse, selected the coins, and handed them up to the driver. “Here you are, one shilling and sixpence. If you please, you may set my case here on the pavement.”

The driver looked at the fare in his cracked palm as if someone had presented him with a cockroach corpse. The other hand he lifted to scratch his unshaven chin, and he looked down at Frances with an intimidating frown.

“Ain’t enough,” he growled.

“But it is,” she answered, taken aback. “I counted it out most carefully, one and sixpence.”

“One and six ain’t enough,” returned the driver, with the air of one talking to a dimwit.

“Most certainly it is,” said Miss Atherton stoutly. “ ’Tis the fare on which we agreed at the coaching inn not twenty minutes ago.”

“One and six was enough then. If yer don’t like it, yer can come and get yer own trunk,” said the driver, smirking unpleasantly.

As Miss Atherton’s case was strapped onto a baggage rack behind the hack driver and more than six feet off the ground, its retrieval would have called for her to clamber up the side of the coach on widely spaced footholds and kneel over the driver’s lap. Miss Atherton stood back and reassessed the situation.

“Sir, you are not behaving well,” she observed.

The hack driver cleared his throat with disgusting, and quite unnecessary, resonance and spat upon the pavement.

The three youths who had been whitewashing the herb shop saw the exchange and, sensing that better amusement was to be had near the coach, trotted over to gape at Frances and nudge each other suggestively.

Ignoring her chortling audience, Frances said firmly, “I shall have my trunk now, please.”

The driver squashed his cap further down on his grizzled head and fixed Frances with a cold stare.

“Ye can come and get it,” he said, with tight-mouthed satisfaction.

Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd, and before Miss Atherton had time to think of an adequate retort, the watching group had swelled to include a bevy of sooty chimney sweeps, a greengrocer in a blue apron bulging with carrots, and a red-faced woman with a gaudy gypsy scarf and a basket of crimson love apples on her head. A youth with a long, pointed nose and coarse ginger bowl-cut hair made a saucy comment that drew snickering approval from the gathering. The Golden Rule and chivalry aside, a young, unaccompanied female on the London streets was considered fair game.

A less resolute young lady might have let prudence win over principle and paid the hack driver his demanded due, but Miss Atherton was made of sterner stuff. Turn and run? Not she, the girl who, at the tender age of eleven, had taken the village smithy to task for drinking away his good wife’s market money at the county fair.

Frances shook her finger reprovingly at the hack driver. “I suppose because I am from out of town that you think I’m to be easily bamboozled,” she said, adopting a tone one would use with a refractory child. “You’re quite wrong! I won’t allow you to take advantage of me.”

To the crowd’s heartily expressed enjoyment, several voices inquired if they might be allowed to take advantage of the young lady. A burly giant with curly black hair and enormous shoulders in a coster’s corduroy was inspired by the uproar to drop his bundle of beets with their dirty dangling roots and step toward Frances with a foolish grin that stretched from one stumpy ear to the other.

“I’ll help you get your case, missie,” he proclaimed. “Let me put my hands on yer waist and I’ll lifts ye right up to your case and in no time, too.”

Miss Atherton barely had time to say “thank you, no,” when the rough giant slipped his hammy hands under her cape, taking her in a bruising grip. With real alarm, she jerked away from him and took a step back, and the rough fellow came after her, arms outstretched as if to get a better hold on the situation. She stumbled, her heel striking an upturned flagstone, and fell backwards.

A pair of light, strong hands steadied her from behind, releasing her when it was plain that she had regained her footing.

She turned instinctively, looking backward over her shoulder, and found herself gazing into a young, vividly male face so attractive as to be almost startling. Miss Atherton was not one who allowed her knees to turn to pudding every time she met a handsome gentleman (which, it must be admitted, was not often), but however immune one might be to the Hollowness of mortal Beauty, Frances was aware of a rather intense, if brief, sensation somewhere in her middle that Modesty forbade her to name, even to herself. The gentleman was tall, fashionably dressed, and sensuously slender, with hair the color of melted gold touching his collar. His eyes had been painted by the same brush that decorates the first sweet greens of spring; they held an expression that was at once mocking and friendly. Frances was far too inexperienced to see the serenely calculating admiration in them. She didn’t know that she was face to face with one of her country’s foremost and most fascinating rakes. She might not know it, but the watching crowd did. They gave a cheerful shout of recognition, which further disoriented Frances, and she failed to understand its cause.

The black-haired knave who had been so willing to offer Frances unwanted assistance gave the blond stranger an affable salute, and gestured toward the driver of the hackney carriage, saying, “This son of a whip has been tryin’ to take advantage of the dimber mort” (this with a lewd wink toward Frances), “so her says.”

“Does she?” said the golden-haired stranger, his wonderful green eyes alive with interest. He gave Frances a smile that was famous throughout London for its irresistibly engaging tenderness. It quite completed the job on her. “What happened?”

The black-haired man seemed to consider himself the party who had been applied to for information. He hitched his hairy thumbs through his belt, looking as pleased as the schoolboy winner of a running contest. “ ’Er driver says ’e won’t give up ’er case until she gives ’im ’is fare,” the fellow chuckled proudly, “and I says I’m gonna ’elp ’er by liftin’ ’er belly up to board.”

Miss Atherton had not yet recovered from the shock that she, noted in her family from the cradle for her sensible attitudes, could react to a member of the opposite sex like a giddy miss. It did nothing to assist her composure to hear herself publicly proclaimed to possess so vulgar a member as a “belly.” With an effort that can only be described as heroic, she gathered her not inconsiderable mental resources, blocked the blond stranger from her mind, ignored the crowd’s gay jibes, delivered a quick, reproving frown to the black-haired lout, and stepped toward the hackney carriage.

“I shall summon a magistrate,” she announced valiantly, not having the faintest notion where in this vast city one was to be found.

The hackney driver had been deriving a fair measure of sour enjoyment watching Miss Atherton’s discomfiture, but at the mention of the law, his pleasure evaporated. “Oh, you will, will you?” he snarled. “Damned if I’ll take sauce from a snooty little curtezan like yourself. If you don’t pay your fare, see if I don’t take it out in trade before you’re much older.”

The black-haired lout captured the spotlight. He made a rude gesture toward the hack driver shouting, “That ya couldn’t, old Domine Do-little!” The crowd roared its approval. “This kitten needs to take her aqua vitae from a Johnny Ready like meself!” The fellow made a lunge for Frances, attempting to envelop her in his bearlike embrace.

Again Frances felt light, experienced hands encircle her waist as the golden-haired man laughingly plucked her from her attacker’s path, setting her down behind him. Her rescuer held a restraining hand toward the black-haired giant.

“Oh, no, my friend,” said the gentleman, giving the giant a dose of that curiously affectionate smile. “You may be ready for her, but I very much doubt that she’s ready for you.”

As if by magic, the lout stopped fast in his tracks, scratching awkwardly at the shaggy hair above his ear. He grinned shyly back at Miss Atherton’s champion.

“I was jest funnin’ loike. Didn’t mean ’er any ’arm,” said the lout in sheepish apology.

“No,” said the man with the golden hair, subjecting Frances to a swift, intimate appraisal. “And I don’t think you did her any, either, because she doesn’t appear to have understood half of what you’ve been saying to her.” He flipped a coin of generous denomination to the hack driver, and said good-naturedly, “The lady’s case, please.”

The size of the coin rendered the hack driver’s lugubrious aspect into something approaching happiness.

“As ya say, guv.” Twisting behind him, he unstrapped the heavy traveling case, handing it to the black-haired giant, who set it before Miss Atherton, saying, “There you are, missie, all’s right now.”

Miss Atherton, however, did not share his opinion. She nerved herself to look the blond man directly in the eye.

“That was wrong,” she said severely. “Very wrong.”

“Oh, I’m sorry; did you want Johnny Ready to hug you?”

She regarded him with a searing eye. The gentleman, it seemed, meant trouble. She hadn’t liked the effect his more than pleasant aspect had on her heart rhythm; she hadn’t liked the obligation that his unsolicited gallantry placed on her; she hadn’t liked the casual manner in which he discussed the level of her understanding with her black-haired pest; and she hadn’t liked the way he’d taken the situation with the hack driver into his own hands. “I am referring, sir, to the monies you have dispensed on my behalf and without consultation with me. I had already paid the driver the agreed-upon fare, and to concede to his extortionate demands encourages him to expect more than the justly agreed-upon rate.”

“A well-done speech,” smiled her rescuer, “considering that you couldn’t possibly have rehearsed it. There is the merest hint of a staccato, though, which it probably wouldn’t hurt to watch. Still, overall as an impromptu recitation, I would rate it decidedly above the average.”

Only the strong conviction that she had already bandied too many words about on a street corner kept Miss Atherton from advising the blond gentleman to mind his own staccatos. She would give him no further opportunity to make game of her and turned her attention to the wayward hackney driver, who was gathering his reins preparing to depart.

“Sir,” Frances addressed the driver, “you know you ought to return that coin to this gentleman.” From the expression on the hack driver’s face, not the most dyed-in-the-wool optimist could have held the hope that this was his intention. Miss Atherton decided not to pursue this almost certainly fruitless line of conversation, instead continuing: “You must let your conscience guide you. I hope that when you’ve thought more on the matter you will change your attitude and remit that money to charity.”

“Ain’t likely,” said the driver with a raspy chuckle. He gave the blond gentleman a knowing grin, nodded, and drove away.

Frances shook her head in resignation, and being careful not to look in the direction of the golden-haired man, she bent to pick up her case, giving a firm refusal to the giant’s offer to carry it for her. The giant shrugged, winked at the gentleman and, grabbing his bundle of beets, was off down the street. Seeing that the show was finally over, the gathered crowd melted into the bustle as easily as it had appeared.

Frances began to thread her way down Charles Street, perusing the numbers over each door for Number 59. It took both hands wrapped around the handle of her heavy dressing case to drag it beside her. The handle bit through her wool traveling gloves to sting her palms, and the case banged mercilessly against her knees. How in the world had the case become so heavy? She had originally intended to bring a few necessities in a small jute bag, but that was before the members of a large and dear family had each added their own article to her packing. Eight younger brothers and sisters had contributed such indispensable objects as a ponderous stone paperweight lovingly hand-painted with flowers, a large notebook of press-dried wild herbs, a driftwood carving of a fishing bark.

Mother had touchingly presented Frances with the old Bible Papa had used at Seminary (it was what Papa would wish, after all), and the jute bag had grown to a round valise. Frances was congratulating herself on being able to fit everything in when Grandma Atherton had arrived with a warming pan and a bed brick. Nothing could convince Grandma that her London daughter-in-law would be sure to keep a fire burning in Frances’ bedchamber. The valise had been returned to the attic and the unwieldy dressing case chosen. When Frances’ brother Joe had handed it to the stagecoach driver that morning he had said:

“God forbid you should have to carry this thing, Fran. It weighs like a cheese wheel.”

Frances looked at the doorway above her. Number 62. She set down her bag on the pavement, clapping her palms to rekindle the circulation. Suddenly, she realized that she was not alone, and turned to look into the eyes of her blond rescuer. With some indignation, she said:

“You’ve been following me.”

He smiled. “Actually, I’ve been walking beside you, but you’ve been so busy scowling at the doorways that I’m afraid you haven’t noticed.”

Miss Atherton fought the urge to deny that she’d been scowling.

“If you have been walking beside me, then please don’t do so anymore. I don’t walk with gentlemen to whom I haven’t been introduced.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” he said, “because you strike one as being a little untutored.”

“Untutored! What, pray, do you mean by that?”

“Do you realize that your eyes lighten almost to amber when you’re angry? It’s very unusual. Was your father by any chance a Moor?”

“Certainly not! I wish you will go away.” Frances grabbed her case, hoping fervently that he would ask if he could carry it so that she would have the pleasure of refusing. Unfortunately, the gentleman was either too perceptive or too lazy to offer his assistance, and Frances was forced to endure him strolling beside her while she tugged at the heavy baggage.

“Do you know, Prudence…” he began.

“My name is not Prudence!”

“No? What is it?”

Not so easily tricked, Frances remained silent. He gave her a sidelong glance and smiled inwardly.

“As I’d begun to say, and believe me, I wouldn’t mention the matter if it were not that you might encounter this problem again… You see, in London we have a quaint custom called the gratuity. Believe me, it’s very pervasive.”

Frances would have liked to discard this verbal tidbit, but the import of his words began to penetrate her tired mind. She set down her case, rubbing arms that felt as though they had been pulled from their sockets, and allowed herself the luxury of one more glance at her companion.

“Do you mean,” she asked slowly, “that the hack driver was angry because I didn’t give him a tip?”

“Something like that.”

She got a new grip on her case and dragged it a few more feet. “Very well, you’ve told me, so you can go away. If you’re waiting for me to admit I was in the wrong, you’re wasting your time, because I won’t. I hate admitting it when I’m wrong.”

“An admirable quality.”

“You know it’s not,” she said with a gulp of exertion. “Everyone knows that it’s a terrible weakness, besides being a sin of pride.”

She heard his soft laughter as he stepped in front of her, bringing her painful trek to a rest. He placed one caressing hand on her shoulder and, with the other hand, lifted the tip of her chin between the thumb and forefinger.

“I find your pride enchanting, Prudence, and I would never consider it a sin. Will you let me carry your case, or are you going to drop first?”

Frances had alread. . .