The Wedding Chase: In His Lordship's BedPrisoner of the TowerWord of a Gentleman
Kasey Michaels
Beloved authors Kasey Michaels, Gayle Wilson and Lyn Stone join forces for this delightful collection filled with three breathtaking tales bound to sweep you into the Regency world of rakes, rogues and romance!
In His Lordship’s Bed by Kasey Michaels
In a twist of fate, an innocent young lady and a handsome rogue were caught in bed together. But before their unavoidable marriage could begin, they found themselves facing an altogether unexpected challenge…love!
Prisoner of the Tower by Gayle Wilson
After twelve long years, a widow and a jaded earl were reunited against all odds. But as the past threatened to destroy their newfound happiness, would love be enough to save this battle-scarred man from a lifetime of loneliness?
Word of a Gentleman by Lyn Stone
In order to collect her inheritance, a daring debutante needed a husband. Could she convince her childhood sweetheart—now a penniless ex-soldier—to elope with her in exchange for a share of her fortune?
KASEY MICHAELS
Kasey Michaels is the New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author of more than sixty books. She has won the Romance Writers of America RITA® Award and the Romantic Times Career Achievement Award for her historical romances set in the Regency era, and also writes contemporary romances for Silhouette and Harlequin Books.
GAYLE WILSON
Winner of the Romance Writers of America’s RITA® Award for Best Romantic Suspense, the Kiss of Death Award, the Daphne du Maurier Award, the Texas Gold Award, the Laurel Wreath for Excellence and the Dorothy Parker Award, Gayle Wilson has written over thirty novels for Harlequin and Silhouette Books. Gayle writes historical romance set in the English Regency period and contemporary romantic suspense. She lives in Alabama with her husband and an ever-growing menagerie of beloved pets. Gayle loves to hear from readers. Write to her at P.O. Box 3277, Hueytown, AL 35023 or visit Gayle online at http://suspense.net/gayle-wilson.
LYN STONE
Lyn Stone loves creating pictures with both words and paints. Her love affair with writing and art began when she won a school prize for her poster for Book Week. She spent the prize money on books, one of which was Little Women. She rewrote the ending so that Jo marries her childhood sweetheart. That’s because Lyn had a childhood sweetheart she wanted to marry when she grew up. She did. And now she’s living her “happily ever after” in Alabama with the same guy. They traveled the world, had two children, four grandchildren and experienced some wild adventures along the way. Whether writing historical romance or contemporary fiction, Lyn insists on including elements of humor, mystery and danger.
KASEY MICHAELS
GAYLE WILSON LYN STONE
The Wedding Chase
CONTENTS
IN HIS LORDSHIP’S BED
Kasey Michaels
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
EPILOGUE
PRISONER OF THE TOWER
Gayle Wilson
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
WORD OF A GENTLEMAN
Lyn Stone
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
IN HIS LORDSHIP’S BED
Kasey Michaels
Dear Reader,
My name is Eleanor Olgesby, and please excuse me if I’m not at my best, for, to be frank about the thing, I am not in the best of moods.
There are a myriad of reasons for this descent into the doldrums, beginning with the fact that my sister, Francesca, has married the most cheeseparing man in creation. Not only have I had to leave London in the middle of my first Season (so much cheaper to order about a sister-in-law rather than hire a maid, you see) to escort her to her husband’s country home now that she is nearing the day when she’ll bring the man’s first heir into the world, but I also have had to share a badly sprung rented carriage with that complaining woman, as well as a single bedchamber at a most inferior inn.
Hmm…from the sound of this, one might think I am a hideously spoiled young woman, wealthy beyond her dreams, but that is not the case. I just enjoy crisp, dry sheets and my own bed without Francesca’s freezing toes in it, thank you very much.
Not that I could hope to have a moment’s rest from Francesca’s incessant whining that I be at her beck and call all day, and definitely all night. Now the widgeon has demanded the tin of sugarplums sitting inside the carriage, and here I am, outside in a muddy inn yard after midnight, my feet freezing inside these thin slippers, stumbling around in the dark with a tin of sugarplums and a guttering candle.
All I want is to get back into bed and please, please, have a few hours of rest. Goodness, it’s dark inside this inn. The innkeeper must share Walter’s cheeseparing ways—and there goes the candle! Pfftt! And I’ve stubbed my toe, and—oh, wait, here’s the door to our room. It must be our room; I’ve counted down three doors. I’m sure I have.
Ah, she’s asleep. Well, good, even if I am standing here with the sugarplums she no longer wants. And she’s warm, too. I’ll just snuggle against her, back to back, and drift into dreamland….
To Jean Herman, who keeps us all functioning.
CHAPTER ONE
ELEANOR OGLESBY could be a dreamer.
She could dream about palaces and princes, fairy godmothers and magic spells.
She could lose herself in a fantasy and forget that the real world existed.
Sometimes.
But not, alas, today.
Today, Eleanor Oglesby was most reluctantly being driven away from London at the height of the Season, trapped inside a badly sprung rented coach, forced to attend her older sister, who was traveling to her husband’s ancestral home for her coming confinement because she “Couldn’t bear, just couldn’t bear it if the infant arrived early and Walter missed the birth.”
At least Francesca would come out of that “confinement” with a brand new son or daughter— No, definitely a son. Walter Fiske had decreed it, and so it therefore must be.
Eleanor, on the other hand, would merely be released from her own “confinement” just in time for the King’s birthday, the end of the Season, and yet another coach trip back to her ancestral home.
Not that Eleanor didn’t love her sister, or babies, for that matter—but she definitely was not enamored of the top-lofty and rather bossy Walter. And not that the Season had been running along that smoothly, seeing that Eleanor was petite, brunette and brown-eyed, and the favor this Season ran to tall, blond and blue-eyed.
She was not in fashion, and the saddest part was knowing that gentlemen she might have otherwise considered handsome and appealing were all competing like fools for the honor of drooling on the shoe tops of all the tall, blond, blue-eyed debutantes, just because they were in fashion. Half of these females giggled and the rest could be dumb as red-bricks. But fashion was fashion. That knowledge had not only depressed Eleanor, it had depressed her admiration for the supposed smarter sex.
Still, she liked London. Adored London, in fact. And this was to have been her first Season. Wasn’t it just like Francesca to pick now to give silly Walter Fiske his heir? She might even have done it on purpose, counted out the mo
nths on her fingertips—Francesca had never been accomplished at sums—just to be sure she would be delivering that heir smack in the middle of Eleanor’s first Season.
Francesca could be like that.
With their mother long dead, it had naturally fallen to Francesca to take over the rearing of Eleanor, four years her junior. The secret pinches, tickles and nasty remarks Francesca had employed to torment her sister for this added burden were still not quite a distant memory.
But they had both grown up, eventually. Francesca, now three and twenty, had been married for two years. And those two years, which Eleanor had spent alone with her father in Kent, had probably been the happiest of her life.
That was because her father was hunt mad, and mad for fishing, for billiards and for gallons of port shared with male friends—all of which kept him away from their home for months on end, leaving Eleanor to her own devices.
But she had to be chaperoned for the Season. Oh, yes, quite definitely, and a woman must monitor her wardrobe, her hair, her deportment. Some man of sense must vet all of her invitations so that the fool child wouldn’t innocently accept an invitation to stroll the Dark Walk at Vauxhall, or to attend some risqué masquerade where disguised ladies of the evening mingled with the ton.
Who better, their father had said before haring off to Scotland, to take his dear Eleanor in hand than his so-sensible Francesca and her fine, upstanding husband? Which had brought Eleanor and Francesca back together again, neither of them exactly overjoyed by either the prospect or the reality.
So Eleanor had been tutored in the dance, her manners had been frowned over, much to her frequent embarrassment, and she and Francesca and the ever-frugal Walter had been installed in the Oglesby town house in Mayfair, Eleanor champing at the bit to be out and about, and Francesca repeatedly complained about her altered shape, her swollen ankles and the fact that her dearest Walter had been unexpectedly summoned to his father’s estate because of something to do with poor field drainage.
Since Walter had deserted the theoretical ship, it had been left to Eleanor to do the entirety of the care and feeding of Francesca. Francesca, who quite obviously believed herself to be the first woman on earth to give birth, stated—again, repeatedly—that Eleanor “owed” her for the years she had helped raise such a wild, contrary and perpetually ungrateful brat.
“Does this mean I get to pinch you when nobody is looking, then say I have no idea why you’re crying?” Eleanor had asked with her sweetest smile.
Francesca hadn’t spoken to her for three days, which had suited Eleanor straight down to the ground.
But now Francesca was speaking to her again. Repeatedly. Incessantly. The hair-witted woman never shut up!
Even as they rattled and bounced their way through the countryside in Walter’s idea of a “fine, closed carriage,” Francesca was running her tongue nineteen to the dozen, when all Eleanor could do was close her eyes and hope her stringy mutton stew partaken of three hours earlier at a most inferior inn wouldn’t come rushing back up for an encore.
“You will, of course, defer in all things to me, Eleanor, while we’re at Fiske Hall, and during the worst hours of my confinement, to Mrs. Thistle-down, who has been with the family for eons, and brooks no nonsense from flighty young girls, let me tell you.”
“Yes, Francesca,” Eleanor said, then bit her lips together, because the mutton was knocking on the back of her teeth.
“And you will not refer to Walter as ‘Fiske-the tight-fist’ behind his back, the way I heard you muttering under your breath last week when Walter forwarded our travel arrangements to us. This is a perfectly fine coach.”
“It smells like moldy hay and sweat,” Eleanor said. “I feel it only fair to warn you, Francesca, that if you don’t soon let me drop a window I could be very, very ill. Messily ill.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, stop your whining. Drop the window. But if I catch cold, it will be on your head. I carry the heir, remember?”
“How can I forget?” Eleanor sniped. “You remind me every five seconds.” She removed boxes and bags from beside her on the worn velvet seat in order to scoot over and drop the window, only to find that it was stuck shut. “And why should I have expected anything else?”
Eleanor rearranged the mountain of luggage, scooted to her left this time and tried the window on the other side. It was likewise immovable. Francesca forestalled any further investigation by quickly stating that no, her windows would not be opened, not under any circumstances.
Eleanor took a lace-edged handkerchief from her reticule and dabbed at her top lip, which she knew to be moist. All of her was moist, and she so longed for a long soak in a bathing tub that just the thought nearly brought her to tears.
“My sugarplums, Eleanor,” Francesca ordered. “They’re under your feet, in that tin.”
“I don’t understand,” Eleanor said, because although she was a nice person, really, currently she was in a foul, foul mood. “Are you merely pointing out a bit of information, as if I was not already painfully aware that my side of this woefully undersize coach is piled high with luggage and I am only sort of stuck on the seat as an afterthought? Or are you saying that you’re hungry, yet again, and that you would be so very appreciative if I, your dear and only sibling, would please be so kind as to reach down and get the tin, open it and then offer its contents to you? Perhaps,” she ended, her eyelids slitted, “you’d also like me to chew them for you?”
“No wonder you were such a wallflower,” Francesca shot back nastily. “The hair and eyes had nothing to do with it. You’re just a horrid, horrid child, and everybody knows it.”
“Sugarplums?” Eleanor asked sweetly, pulling the lid from the tin and all but jamming the tin into her sister’s nose.
And so it had gone for two days—one day, if theirs had been a better team of horses rather than the broken-down nags currently in the traces. And so it went until after dark on this day, until the coach finally limped into yet another benighted village and stumbled to a halt outside the meanest, smallest, most tumbledown and undoubtedly inexpensive inn there.
“Ah, how charming, even nicer than last night’s inn,” Eleanor said, squinting through the clouded—and quite immovable—window to the muddy courtyard and the slovenly ostler who was eyeing the coach as if to say, “And I suppose you want me to do something about this?”
“Don’t be facetious, Eleanor,” Francesca warned tightly. “Walter is economical. You don’t become wealthy by tossing money around for temporary lodgings.”
“Or dry beds, privacy, edible food and on and on,” Eleanor groused as she opened the door and kicked down the steps. She’d already learned that their hired driver thought any of these chores beyond the scope of his duties. For what Walter was probably paying the man, Eleanor was just glad the fellow dealt with their luggage at each stop.
She stepped into the inn yard—literally into it—feeling her half-boots sinking a good two inches into the muck, and held out a hand to her sister. “Come on, Francesca. You’ve been longing to use the facilities for at least an hour and moaning about it for twice that long. Just step carefully. This could be quicksand.”
“Oh, yuk,” Francesca said, grimacing, as her own half-boots sunk into the muck. “I didn’t know it had rained.”
“Neither did I, which is why I don’t want to think about what might have made this yard so muddy. Just please do hurry up, Francesca. Difficult as this is to believe, I think something in the air just might smell delicious. Wouldn’t some roasted beef and pudding go down nicely?”
They were halfway to the inn door when three men walked up, one of them hastening to open the door for them.
“Thank you, sir, I— Oh, my, aren’t you Nicholas Marley, Earl of Buckland? Why, of course you are. Forgive me for being so forward. I’m Francesca Oglesby Fiske, Walter Fiske’s wife?”
Eleanor watched as Lord Buckland looked down at Francesca, who had foolishly attempted a curtsy.
Hair for bra
ins, that was Francesca, Eleanor thought as she quickly grabbed her sister’s elbow and helped pull her upright before she tumbled forward into the mud.
Lord Buckland bowed and then introduced his two companions to “Mrs. Fiske,” but not to Eleanor. First, probably because Francesca hadn’t introduced her. And second, because he must have thought the wrinkled, sweaty and put-upon-looking Eleanor was her sister’s companion, not her sibling. And, in truth, that was what she was, since Walter had pointed out that there was a plethora of maids at Fiske Hall and he could see no reason to transport one from his father-in-law’s domicile then have to put down the blunt to get her back there once the trip was accomplished, what with Eleanor being so…handy?
Still, ignoring her would be just like Lord Buckland. Arrogant, insufferable man. Eleanor had observed him from her wallflower status against the walls of more than one ballroom, watching the tall, dark-haired and exceedingly handsome man as he sailed through society, leaving a flotilla of sighs and wishful dreams in his wake.
He was just the sort of man she loathed…when she wasn’t slipping him very neatly into her dreams about handsome princes come to rescue her from her lonely tower.
As the two sisters entered the dim foyer of the inn, Buckland and his friends brought up the rear, then quickly disappeared into what Eleanor believed she could wager her quarterly allowance with no fear of losing it, had to be the single private dining room in this miserable, forsaken excuse for an inn.
She even smelled the heavenly aroma of roasted beef before the door had entirely closed behind Buckland, and would have wagered her next quarterly allowance that the man had brought his own chef with him, and the meal she and Francesca would be offered in the common room would have been lately hopping, arthritically, through the woods, then conveniently expiring of old age just at the back door of the inn, precisely in time for dinner.
