The Awakening of Lord Ambrose
The Lost Lords
Book Six
Chasity Bowlin
Copyright © 2019 by Chasity Bowlin
Kindle Edition
Published by Dragonblade Publishing, an imprint of Kathryn Le Veque Novels, Inc
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Books from Dragonblade Publishing
About the Book
Prologue
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
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Epilogue
Author’s Note
About the Author
Cornelius Garrett, Lord Ambrose, has withdrawn from society in the wake of scandal in order to focus on finding the numerous illegitimate children that his father sired. Desperate to locate his many siblings and build some semblance of a family for himself, Cornelius is ill-prepared for the many complications that his most recently discovered sibling, Lila, brings with her—namely her older sister, Primrose Collier.
Primrose is the most stunningly beautiful woman he’s ever encountered. She’s also fiercely proud and protective with a well-founded distrust for the opposite sex. It takes all of his considerable powers of persuasion to sway her to bring her young siblings and move to his estate, Avondale. But no good deed goes unpunished. Cornelius’ unscrupulous neighbor, Lord Samford, also has a prior acquaintance with the Collier family. Threatened by their presence and the ugly secrets of his past that they might expose, Samford sets out to eliminate what he views as a complication.
Samford’s machinations result in Prim being injured and spending a night, unchaperoned, with Cornelius. In order to preserve Prim’s reputation and also to afford her and her siblings more protection, Cornelius proposes marriage. But it isn’t all duty and obligation. For the first time in his life, Cornelius must find balance between what honor demands and what he desires.
Determined to stop Samford at any cost, they set out on a journey fraught with danger and with discovery. Primrose has awakened something inside him he did not know existed—something fierce, passionate and imp
etuous. Could it be love?
Prologue
Blackfield Village, 1823
The pistol hung from his limp fingers and the acrid smell of smoke burned his nose. The tableau before him was certainly an odd one. Lady Ramsleigh lay on the ground, her nightrail covered in mud and a spreading stain of crimson. His half-brother, Dr. Nicholas Warner, crouched over her, clearly distraught. And all of this was taking place in the small cemetery that butted up against the picturesque church, backlit in the purple and gold shades of the coming dawn, as a crowd of people stood over the exhumed corpse of the girl buried in Lady Ramsleigh’s stead.
The magistrate came forward, wearing a heavy dressing gown over his nightshirt. He had also hastily donned and misbuttoned breeches with boots that appeared to be on the wrong feet.
“You had no choice, Ambrose. We all know it,” the magistrate said, reaching to slip the pistol from his lifeless fingers.
He felt strange without it, Garrett realized. In that split second, that weapon had become a part of him and he would likely feel the presence of it there forever. “I was too late. So it doesn’t really matter, does it? He’s killed her.”
“He might have had yet another pistol on him. It’s likely he did and would have shot the good doctor, as well. I’ve no wish to take you into custody, but there must be an inquest, at the very least, as you were both gentlemen of standing. You understand that you cannot leave Blackfield until it is done?”
“I understand,” Garrett agreed. An inquest meant records of what he’d done, meant newspaper accounts of the day that he, Cornelius Garrett, Lord Ambrose, became a murderer. Whatever his reasons were, and he did not question that they had been sound and that the choice hadn’t been a choice at all, the fact remained he had taken another man’s life. It would not be easily forgotten or forgiven. “I will return to Castle Black. You may send word when I am needed for the inquest.”
“Good. Good. It’ll all be sorted out in no time. You shall see,” the magistrate said. It was clear from the man’s discomfiture that offering sympathy and reassurance were somewhat alien to him. As a magistrate, he should have been better equipped.
“We shall all see, I daresay.” One thing he could be entirely certain of, he’d just cemented his place in the ignoble history of the Ambrose line. There was no coming back from having done murder. He would be painted with the same brush his father had been in his profligate life. All the discretion and grace with which Cornelius had attempted to live his life to that moment would be for naught. He had not salvaged his family’s honor in the least, but rather smudged it further. Somehow, it would be worse, because he had been above reproach for so long. How often had it been commented on that he was not at all like his father, not reckless or wild, or given to fits of temper or strong passions. He was a man of a placid and kind nature, of peace and refinement. And now a murderer. The further the fall from grace, the more it was bandied about by the gossips. They would whisper his name for years with glee. All for naught. All the self-denial, all the mindfulness of his choices… gone.
Turning, Garrett mounted the same horse that had brought him to that fateful spot and followed the road away from the village and toward the rugged, hulking silhouette of the castle perched on a cliff high above the village. But it was not to the castle he retired. Instead, he took the path around it that led to the rock-strewn beach below. In those dark moments, the sea offered him no solace, but the incessant ebb and flow of the waves did remind him that there was an order to all things.
Even as the tide shifted and those waves became fiercer, the whitecaps frothing and churning as the spray from them dampened his face and clothes, there was still a rhythm and a pattern. He would find his way through the ruin that would unfairly fall upon his head, but only if he could accept what came at him, just as those rocks on the beach sat unmoving in the face of the sea’s wrath. They might be dulled by the constant beating of the water against them, their edges rounded and worn away, but they remained. As would he.
Chapter One
Salisbury, October 15th, 1825
“Lila will need a new dress,” Prim said. Their youngest sister, aged eleven, was quite possibly the clumsiest child to ever draw breath. She could actually trip on air. Prim had seen it, time and again.
“We haven’t money for a new dress for her,” their elder sister protested as she held her hand to her head. “She will simply have to make do. If you are to work for Lady Linden, you cannot do so in rags. Showing up to such a fine house in torn dresses, or worse, dresses so worn that when you bend to wipe down a table the seams split—no. That cannot happen.”
“My not-quite-red-anymore cotton is not so bad off as that. And it’s long past the days of being considered my good dress. I will not have a new dress and we will use the wool for her. Besides, I will be doing little more than lighting the fires and scrubbing the floors. A new dress would be wasted on me, Hy,” Prim protested.
Hyacinth Collier gave her sister a baleful stare. “And it would not be wasted on Lila who attracts dirt like bees to honey?”
“It cannot be helped. She’s outgrown one of the two gowns she possesses and the other one is so threadbare I hold my breath and pray any time it must be laundered.”
“We will add a ruffle to the bottom of it then and to the sleeves if they are too short.”
Prim sighed wearily. “It is not her height that is the problem. That dress was made for her two years ago, Hy. Her figure is altering and becoming that of a young woman. She’s not a little girl, now.”
Hyacinth looked at her levelly. “Then we will take one of the gowns that Mrs. Dalrymple gave me and cut it down for her.”
Mrs. Dalrymple was their benefactress, of sorts, as much of one as they had to be sure. She often sent food items to them from her own larder and had taken to giving any cast-off clothes or furnishings to them for the small cottage that they leased on her property. It was barely large enough for them to turn about in and as the children continued to grow, it was feeling smaller and smaller. “That dress is thirty years out of fashion, Hy.”
“So it is. And little enough Lila will care one way or another. She could walk naked into the lane and hardly be bothered to notice.” Hyacinth rubbed her forehead and winced.
Prim had no answer for that, as it was entirely true. Lilac Hester Collier was the most distracted child she’d ever encountered in all of her life. Instead, she focused on something else that was just as worrisome. Hyacinth appeared to be having another one of her attacks. Her elder sister was rubbing her forehead, her eyes tightly closed against the light which pained her. “You’re having another megrim?”
“I always do when we discuss our lack of funds, all the things we need and can’t afford, and—well, I suppose that’s all we discuss anymore, isn’t it?”
“We’ll make do, Hy. We always do,” Prim pointed out.
“Will there ever be a time in our lives when making do isn’t quite so hard?”
“We shall complete the dress for Lila tonight and Sunday after church we will put together a new dress for me.”
“Well enough,” Hy agreed. “And if there is enough fabric left over, and I think there should be, we will sew a new coat for Rowan. His has gotten terribly tight over the shoulders… if not, we will simply add a bit of fabric at the seams, though I am afraid that would look quite shabby.”
Shabby. It was an apt description of everything about their lives, but it was still a far cry from the hovel she could recall from their time in London. The small room with the leaking roof, smoking hearth, and uneven floor had housed the lot of them. Their mother had a bed behind a curtain where she had “entertained.” The three of them had slept on a pallet on the floor beneath the drafty window. Poor Lila had only been a baby then, and it was likely she had no memory of it at all. For herself, she’d been close to the age that Lila was now and Hyacinth two years her elder. Rowan had come along just after they moved. In fact, he had, in some ways, been the very reason they coul
d move. His father had been a wealthy man, the son and heir apparent of a titled gentleman. He had claimed to be in love with her, had scandalized her parents with suggestions that he might actually marry a woman who was little better than a doxy.
The man’s father had paid them a visit, offered her mother a significant enough sum of money that they’d used to keep body and soul together. As the amount had dwindled, they’d stretched it thinner and thinner until even the very last shred of it was gone. But it was with those funds that they’d fled London in the darkest of hours, just before the dawn had begun to break. They’d sought shelter in the heart of Devonshire, only a few miles from whence Isabelle Collier had been born and bred. It had been a happy place for them, at first. But over time, rumors of their parentage and of their mother’s past had slowly caught up to them.
Rowan had been born only a few short months later. Whether he was the son of that gentleman or not, Prim could not hazard to guess. Regardless, they were living a better life for that man’s generosity, regardless of his motives.
“And the cottage rent? How far are we from meeting it this month?” Prim asked.
Hy frowned. “Too far. Mrs. Dalrymple did not mind so much, but now that her nephew is here and managing the estate in her stead… I fear that will change. We were late last month and he threatened to tack on a fine if we were late again.”
Prim snorted. “And if we could afford to pay his blasted fines we’d not be late with it to begin with! I’ve heard things about him… he’s been taking up with some woman in the village. I think he means to install her right here in this very cottage as his mistress.”
“Why would that matter? You’d think he’d be strutting like a peacock for the world to know he had a mistress given how pinched and homely he is,” Hyacinth said. It was a rare thing for her sister to have a negative word about anyone.
Prim smiled. “I heard some very unflattering comments about the duration of his visits to his mistress. Apparently he only stays a very, very short time.”
“Oh,” Hyacinth said and giggled. “I see. So it’s not a question of his morals but his prowess.”
“So it would seem. Though I daresay, amusing as it is, it’s to our detriment that he lacks… stamina.”