A Wedding For The Scandalous Heiress

A stolen kiss from a dashing stranger…

at her own betrothal ball!

When Isabella Alstone receives a shockingly passionate kiss from a handsome stranger at her betrothal ball, she scandalously ends her engagement. She is even more surprised when she discovers exactly who the stranger is! Ruggedly striking Wulf FitzDevelin is illegitimate, penniless and her ex-fiancé’s half-brother—their match is wholly unsuitable. Yet Isabella cannot escape the burning longing to feel his touch again!

“Beacon has herself another winner.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Governess Heiress

“Historical romance fans will be delighted by this tale... Curl up and spend an enjoyable afternoon with this sweet story.”

—RT Book Reviews on One Final Season

ELIZABETH BEACON has a passion for history and storytelling and, with the English West Country on her doorstep, never lacks a glorious setting for her books. Elizabeth tried horticulture, higher education as a mature student, briefly taught English and worked in an office before finally turning her daydreams about dashing piratical heroes and their stubborn and independent heroines into her dream job: writing Regency romances for Mills & Boon.

Also by Elizabeth Beacon

The Duchess HuntCandlelit Christmas KissesThe Scarred EarlThe Black Sheep’s Return

A Year of Scandal miniseries

The Viscount’s Frozen HeartThe Marquis’s AwakeningLord Laughraine’s Summer PromiseRedemption of the RakeThe Winterley ScandalThe Governess Heiress

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

A Wedding for the Scandalous Heiress

Elizabeth Beacon

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-07360-8

A WEDDING FOR THE SCANDALOUS HEIRESS

© 2018 Elizabeth Beacon

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Extract

About the Publisher

Chapter One

You’re three and twenty, Isabella Alstone, and far too old to hide in the dark. You should stay in the ballroom and pretend to be happy, not creep out here as if you’re planning to steal the silver.

Isabella was tired of being the perfect lady, though, so she stripped off her gloves and waved them in front of her overheated face, ignoring the voice of her conscience. It was hot even outside on this sultry late summer night and she wasn’t going back until she was cooler, calmer and more resigned... No, not more resigned, more collected. Yet promises so logical and right when voiced to a friend seemed strange and wrong now and how could she be calm about that?

‘Now, why is a lady of quality lurking in the shadows with the likes of me? Better go back to being belle of the ball instead of getting caught out here in bad company.’

The voice from the shadows startled Isabella from her reverie. The sound of his velvet-and-darkness voice told her he was right, but she was in the mood to be reckless.

‘Why?’ she demanded, peering into the gloom to try to see through the shadows.

His gruffly masculine voice had a pleasing hint of danger along the edge of it she shouldn’t want to know more about, but she had left safe, respectable Isabella inside and it was wonderful to be a different person altogether for a few stolen moments. She could be the sort of female who’d dive into wild encounters in the dark, as if she was put on this earth to be foolish and bold with the first rake she stumbled on in the shadows. Her fantasy of being a brash and sophisticated lady who took what she wanted from life and laughed at the future, as if it wasn’t heading towards her at the speed of a runaway horse, was too alluring to turn her back on just yet.

‘Because I’m here,’ the mysterious voice explained, as if that was all she needed to know to send her running. She stayed exactly where she was, refusing to scuttle inside like a scared rabbit, and heard him sigh, as if he couldn’t believe how stupid she was not to listen and do as she was bid.

‘You’re no debutante, so the Bond Street Beaux must have told you how beautiful you are by now and that will make everything worse if we’re caught in the moonlight together.’

He stepped forward so the light from the few hundred wax candles could illuminate his face and form and show her how right he was. With a face too much his to match any ideal of classical perfection, he wasn’t the most handsome man Isabella had seen. He wasn’t the tallest or broadest or most obviously powerful male she had ever met either. Of course, he was leanly fit and quietly muscular as well as deeply, darkly intense. And uniquely formed to make her shiver in her dancing slippers with an unexpected and delicious anticipation of something she’d hardly dared think about until now and usually shuddered away from when she saw that feral light in other men’s eyes. Only seconds ago she’d been hot and weary and now she felt so alive there could be air and stardust under her feet instead of solid York stone. If this was how being irresponsible felt, it certainly topped being her usual sensible and reasoned self.

‘I haven’t the faintest idea who you are, so if you’re trying to scare me, it’s not working. Although you’re right about one thing,’ she said as lightly as she could when the world seemed to have stopped and they were the only two people left moving. ‘I have been out for a long time now and know false flattery when I hear it.’

‘I don’t flatter, Mrs...’ he shot a steely gaze at her ring finger ‘...apologies, Miss, and there’s no need to pretend to be middle-aged,’ he said with a wry smile that did hot and disturbing things to her insides. ‘We’ll both be old soon enough.’

‘We will?’ she echoed in a breathy whisper that must have given him doubts about that maturity, but she did feel like a giddy girl when he took her gently by the arm and urged her further into darkness and away from the pool of golden candlelight spilling out of a ballroom that now seemed almost as remote from her as the Arctic.

‘Will someone come dashing out to find you any moment now, ready to usher you away?’ he asked with a smile, but she felt a tension in his sleekly powerful body that made her frown briefly.

‘No,’ she told him like a silly debutante desperate to be ruined by a rogue. ‘My family trusts me to behave,’ she added with a late tilt at sophistication and a flutter in her heartbeat that suggested they shouldn’t tonight.

‘They don’t consider the basic needs of the human heart often enough, then, or, in my case, even baser masculine ones you’re better not to know about until you really are a Mrs Belle,’ he replied with a cynical thread in his voice that made her frown for another sensible, bone-jarring moment before the darkness and scent from some exotic hothouse flower nearby wafted it clean away.

‘So you’re not to be trusted?’ she heard herself ask like the fledgling idiot she’d never allowed herself to be in polite society.

Nobody was ever going to lure her in with showy good looks, false promises of love and passion, and heady nights like this one. She remembered her eldest sister, Miranda, falling for evil, charming Nevin Braxton at seventeen and all the horror her elopement and ruin had brought down on her family’s lives too well for that. Isabella had shuddered away from rakes as if their kisses would poison her ever since. This man hadn’t flattered and flirted and fawned on her, though. He seemed to see beyond her golden looks, exquisitely fashioned gown and neat figure and was speaking to the real Isabella.

And out here she could forget what was waiting for her inside the hot room only feet away. On this terrace with the scent of exotic flowers heavy in the air, only now mattered. Just enough light shone from the ballroom for her to see his eyes were ice blue and hot at the same time. Her breath stuttered when he pulled her further from the lights of the party and the glow of a waxing moon gave them a world of their own.

‘You should not trust me, Belle. I’m dangerous,’ he said almost seriously. ‘I’m a wolf in wolf’s clothing,’ he added as if he believed it.

‘It’s not full,’ she told him and sensed his bewilderment. ‘The moon,’ she explained with a nod towards it where it seemed almost touchable, on the horizon, ‘so you can’t claim the moon made you do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘Kiss me,’ she heard herself say rashly. A sane part of her was so shocked it was as if it flopped down on to the stone bench nearby and sat there with its mouth open.

‘Oh? And why would you let me do that, Belle? Perhaps you’re as wild as I am,’ he murmured, suddenly closer than she remembered.

She should run, dash back into the familiar noise and heat and glitter of a tonnish ballroom, and find the nearest respectable female to chaperon her. Instead she stayed as if her feet were rooted into the still-warm stones under their feet. She could touch and taste him if she stayed, hear the urgent saw of breath he’d been holding too long. Moonlight fell on high cheekbones and dark, dark hair springing almost to disarray despite all his efforts to tame it. The hint of a frown at his dark eyebrows told her a goodly part of him thought he ought to fight this basic, gut-deep attraction as well. But there was enough light for the sensual curve of his mouth to betray the fact urgency and passion were getting the upper hand even without her exploring touch and silent encouragement to get on and kiss her and to hell with the real world.

‘I think you’re right,’ she whispered as she padded her fingertips against his tense jaw, feeling how it clenched and suspecting it was taking everything in him not to fall on her like the wolf he claimed to be.

But reason gave way to madness and suddenly she was in his arms. This was the kiss that would bring Isabella Penelope Alstone fully to life. The one she’d been so secretly waiting for since the day she began to be a woman. She hadn’t even let herself know she wanted it until now. His mouth fitted lushly against her eager lips and he felt so familiar against her. He murmured something as if he agreed with her unspoken thoughts and she opened her mouth to say Yes, please, but he dipped his tongue inside first, as if he had to know more, had to know everything now she was here at last. She was melting from the outside in, or should that be the inside out? Heat beat through her in time with his hurried breaths and the dart of his gently exploring tongue, as if he knew she’d never felt passion like this before and it was a shock that echoed through them both.

Yes, there was the shake of novelty and wonder in his fingers as he danced them across her cheekbone and down to outline her chin as if he was learning her with every sense he had. Never before had she been tempted to burrow into a man’s arms, to try to become a part of him by melding her heat with his, her mouth with his. For a minute reality threatened to pull her back and her mind told her body to flinch away, but the alluring stranger snatched all her attention back by sliding his wickedly exploring tongue over her lower lip, deepening the kiss.

She shifted even closer and copied his exploration. His cheek and jaw felt so firm under her touch and her fingers were intrigued by the contrast between her own softer features and his hawkish ones. She could feel the suggestion of his beard despite a careful shave and she spared a moment to scent the clean, sharp smell of soap and something tangy used to take the sting of the blade away when a gentleman was making himself civilised and smooth for the company of ladies.

Real life threatened to jump in again, but she told it to go away and muttered something encouraging instead. Nothing in reality could beat a meeting outside time and all the rules of polite society. Her heart beat so fast and her breath demanded air while pleasure and hope and a big, wide yes to life and this stranger and all he could be opened up inside her. She was shivering like a thoroughbred and rode a tide of heat more intense and deep and demanding than anything she’d ever felt before. There were no words to describe how right it felt when he pulled her closer to show her what she was doing to him. She felt the tension of deep desire in his rigidly muscular form. This was the carnal, primal need that carried men and women to places they’d never intended to go to when they started an evening not even knowing one another.

Instead of flinching back and telling him, no, they couldn’t go any further down that road when they didn’t even know one another’s real names, she pushed her curious hands under his unbuttoned evening coat and gave a pleased little grunt at the feel of a hot, needy and intriguingly muscular male under her exploring touch. Her fingers soothed the tight muscles at the base of his spine, whispered inquisitively downwards, desperate to know the difference between his spare male flanks and her own sleekly feminine curves. He gasped as if she’d stung him, then sucked in breath as if he might need more if she was going to carry on, so she did. She could feel his muscles shift and soothe, then tense again as she explored the sparseness of his buttocks and the honed, pared-down line where they met long, strong legs. Her own legs wobbled and almost let her down as their stance thrust his unmistakably eager manhood emphatically against her.

This was what uncontrollable desire felt like. This was how a woman felt when she was desperate for the man she loved to take her somewhere magical. That old taboo, that stark little four-lettered word sounded like a death knell in a corner of her mind, but she was moon-mad and curious enough to ignore it for a little longer. It put a hiccup in her sigh, though, a caveat in her exploration even as she buried a gasp of awe and need against his shoulder, then stood on tiptoe so that every bit of her felt it knew every bit of him.

But they didn’t, they couldn’t; not with so many sharp eyes and curious minds dangerously close by. She felt him stand a little straighter, pulling back his leanly powerful shoulders so he stood more sceptically apart from her as she burrowed against the warmth and strength and certainty of him and tried to hold on to this moment for a little while longer. If she let go, she’d have to see what she’d done and what she ought to have been doing instead. Ever since she’d given in to impulse for once and stepped outside the stuffy ballroom behind them, the way her life was planned out from now on was weightless in the balance against this rebellious encounter under the stars. Let him go and that weight would tumble back and she would end up more wrong than she had ever been in her life.

As she stood in the stronghold of his arms, trying to hold the real world at bay for as long as she could, voices started to disturb the fog of her mind.

‘Isabella can’t be out here,’ she heard Magnus Haile’s voice say in the vast, close distance between his world and the one she and the stranger and the moon inhabited.

Now just a few yards away his voice sounded pacifying with forced casualness. She stiffened and felt her fellow moon-led simpleton do the same. Magnus must be with his father for him to sound like that. The Earl of Carrowe was a despot with his family, but so sleekly charming in the polite world the stark difference between public and private man still took Isabella’s breath away.

‘Where is she, then? Get your engagement puffed off so I don’t end up in the sponging house or have duns to breakfast. You have shilly-shallied for far too long, so you find her before her upstart brother-in-law withdraws his consent or I’ll spill your secrets.’

‘She’s of age and so am I. We need no consent,’ the Honourable Magnus Haile asserted uncomfortably, as if he was trying to remind himself that he and Isabella were two free and unencumbered adults.

Even as she stood in another man’s arms and felt him go rigid before he let her go as if she’d suddenly grown horns and a tail, Isabella frowned at the flatness in Magnus’s usually pleasant tenor voice. He had spent last Season courting her so half-heartedly it took her until the end of it to notice. Then he had asked his fateful question and it shocked her even now to recall she had agreed. They were friends, she reassured herself. They would run in harness well together and she had never met anyone who made her heart race or her inner wanton melt with greed and heady desire. Until tonight. When it was too late.

Isabella stepped cautiously away from her stranger; stiff as he was now reason had rushed back in. A sluggish breeze stirred the sticky heat and fluttered her pale gown as space opened up between them.

The Earl of Carrowe pushed his protesting second son aside and stepped away from the pool of candlelight. Still as a statue now, Isabella froze and held her breath. This familiar stranger standing so stiffly next to her felt remote and withdrawn as an iron statue. She desperately hoped the night was deep enough for the Earl not to see them standing here like guilty lovers. Who would have thought a man she never laid eyes on until tonight could show her Isabella the Undone? All in the space between the ballroom and here and now.

‘You don’t need consent, you need a pitchfork up your...’ the Earl said in the coarse manner he saved for his family. Or at least those who depended on him for a leaky roof over their heads. Here at Haile Carr he had to hide his true self or risk the fury of his wealthy daughter-in-law and her even wealthier father.

‘You’ll keep a still tongue in your head about my future wife if you want me to go through with this marriage.’ Magnus sounded as austere as a monk and halted his father’s trail of obscenities in their tracks.

Isabella stifled a hum of sympathy as she felt the weight of real life settling back on her shoulders. It felt even more of a burden now than when she had first decided to share Magnus’s responsibilities. They weren’t in love, but she never wanted to be in love anyway. Love was a trap and an illusion, nothing like the fairy-tale emotion three-decker romances portrayed. Isabella had agreed to Magnus’s proposal for one reason—to get him and his sisters out from under the Earl’s thumb—to give her best male friend outside her family a chance to be free of the monster she had heard bully and even beat his children. She had had no idea until a visit to the Haile ladies showed her the insults and foul language of the real man under the Earl of Carrowe’s urbane outer shell. The Countess had hidden Isabella’s presence and even took her out down the backstairs so the Earl wouldn’t know she had been there. From that moment on she was filled with a passionate desire to help the Earl’s daughters and Magnus had given her a chance to do it, so she took it and him and told herself all would be well because she didn’t want to be in love with her husband anyway.

Except it felt as if they had missed something vital out. Isabella had been restless and hot and uncomfortable in her own skin in the ballroom and bolted outside to get away from what she’d done with her eyes wide open. And look where that had got her; she’d taken light in the arms of a stranger and now had to live with the memory of it on her conscience while she pretended to be Magnus’s glowingly happy bride-to-be.

‘Renege on our deal and I’ll tell the world what you did last year and who you did it with,’ the Earl threatened Magnus as if he couldn’t bear to be bested by another son after his heir married a rich woman and got control of his own purse strings. The atmosphere in the ballroom had felt oppressive with Viscount Haile and his wife holding court while family tensions simmered just below the surface. Or maybe she was making excuses for her own bad behaviour.

But what did Magnus do last summer? A couple of times since she arrived here Isabella had sensed something was deeply wrong with Magnus. It felt as if she knew only half of what was going on. Their engagement was supposed to be a surprise that would make this annual party even happier, but it didn’t feel very joyous to Isabella. Her money and family power were pitted against the Earl’s extravagant self-indulgence and his cruel grip on his family. He’d traded control of his unwed daughters for part of her fortune; Magnus would save his sisters and Isabella could start the family she longed for. But then she arrived here and the reality of marrying the man who’d been her friend since she made her debut finally hit home. To make those babies they would be intimate together and it felt like a giant factor she left out of her calculations about marrying for sense and companionship. Much as she liked Magnus she wasn’t sure she wanted to couple with him. She was a country girl at heart and three and twenty; she knew enough about the mechanics of marriage to shiver at the very idea of the one she’d committed herself to while she stood so close to a man who had nearly taught her a lot more than she needed to know about how a man and a woman were together when they wanted each other so urgently they couldn’t even wait for a bed.