Captain Langthorne's Proposal

Glimmers of the wild young girl she had once been, up for any mischief on offer, must still lie under Countess Serena’s sober facade after all. She reminded herself reckless actions led to uncomfortable consequences and managed to crush her inner hoyden for the time being.

‘Good luck then, Sir Adam,’ she managed to say cheerfully enough, and offered him her hand in farewell as she opened the front gate.

He bowed over it like a beau from a previous age and kissed it lightly. Fire shot through her, as if he had touched his lips to bare flesh instead of her supple leather glove. She snatched her hand back and looked about her.

‘Shall we say half an hour, my lady?’

Captain Langthorne’s Proposal

Harlequin®Historical

MILLS & BOON

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Author Note

The idea for Adam and Serena’s story came to me whilst I was wondering if a Regency heroine whose ideal match had proved the exact opposite, leaving her an older, wiser and more cynical widow, could fall in love again and this time forever. Surely it would take an exceptional hero to convince her to take another chance on love? And he would need to be even more stubborn than she was herself if he stood any chance of persuading her to actually marry him.

That hero turned out to be Captain Sir Adam Langthorne, and I have to admit to finding him rather exceptional myself. But Serena was never going to be such a pushover and fought her feelings for the handsome baronet every inch of the way. I hope you enjoy their story and their company as they clash, test each other’s passions and love, while also becoming entangled in a series of perilous adventures that threaten to bring their story to an untimely end.

Captain Langthorne’s Proposal

ELIZABETH BEACON

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

To the two Di’s: Diana Russell and Diana Singelton,

the best friends any author could wish for.

ELIZABETH BEACON

lives in the beautiful English West Country, and is finally putting her insatiable curiosity about the past to good use. Over the years Elizabeth has worked in her family’s horticultural business, became a mature student, qualified as an English teacher, worked as a secretary and, briefly, tried to be a civil servant. She is now happily ensconced behind her computer, when not trying to exhaust her bouncy rescue dog with as many walks as the Inexhaustible Lurcher can finagle. Elizabeth can’t bring herself to call researching the wonderfully diverse, scandalous Regency period and creating charismatic heroes and feisty heroines “work,” and she is waiting for someone to find out how much fun she is having and tell her to stop it.

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Contents

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

Epilogue

Chapter One

Countesses didn’t hide in damp woods from handsome baronets, Serena Cambray told herself sternly. Once she had been too proud to hide from anyone—how her current cowardice would have been reviled. Well, people changed, and the widowed Lady Summerton perhaps more than most, Serena informed herself stoutly, and tried to sit as still and cool as an ice-sculpture on her slightly damp tree stump. Even as she tried to tell herself she was quite calm, her thoughts drifted to the man she was avoiding so assiduously. If only she had seen beneath his youthful arrogance and that annoying air of omnipotence to the man he would one day become, how different her life might have been.

The first time she had met Adam Langthorne he had threatened to tan her hide and send her home to her father, with a message informing him that his daughter would never be permitted contact with his sister again.

‘Only my grandfather’s sense of chivalry prevents me from packing you off right now, even if you have to travel all night,’ he had told her, and looked down his nose at her from the superiority of his lanky height and his new commission in His Majesty’s army.

Serena had glared back at him and refused to admit she had anything to apologise for—even if she and Rachel Langthorne had been within a whisker of causing a scandal and had put themselves in deadly peril. To be labelled ungovernable hoydens given to outrageous pranks like dressing up as coachman and postilion and stealing his grandfather’s carriage to go to a mill would have blighted their reputations for life, even though they had only been fourteen at the time, but how she had hated him that day, she recalled with a wry smile. Probably all the more so because she had known he was right. It struck her that if he had published her infamy to the world, George Cambray would never have tainted his great name with such a hoydenish wife. Only think of the danger of passing on such bad blood to the docile and dutiful daughters he had expected her to bear him as the inevitable side effect of breeding his heirs.

Shaking off such unwelcome thoughts, she listened for Sir Adam’s soft footfall on the unpromising surface of the ancient woodland floor and wondered about that first meeting. Even at fourteen to his nineteen had she already been secretly in thrall to the tall ensign of dragoons? If so, she’d stoutly refused to allow the idea room in her silly head—and that would have been one secret she would never have confided in her best friend even if she’d known it herself. So much as a whiff of a match between Serena and her adored elder brother would have turned Rachel into a hardened matchmaker on the spot. In fact, now she came to think about it…Could that explain Sir Adam’s uncanny knack of knowing where Serena was before she’d hardly thought of being there herself?

She shook her head absently and acquitted her friend of such perfidy; Rachel knew everything about her but that one almost unformed secret, and wouldn’t serve Sir Adam such a backhand turn even if she had a suspicion of it. Yet Serena’s stubborn thoughts lingered on what might have been, and she drifted into a fantasy of meeting the by then Lieutenant Langthorne at her come-out ball instead of the rather awesome Earl of Summerton. If only that dashing and dangerous gentleman had presented himself to be danced with, dined with, and even perhaps mildly flirted with, could she have seen a truly nobleman from the outward pattern of one?

Who knew? She had been ungovernably silly in her debutante days, so it would probably have been in the lap of the gods. So goodness alone knew why the wretched man was intent on getting her alone now. Once upon a time she would have assumed he wanted to make her an offer and preened herself on another conquest. Now she dreaded it. And he could hardly find himself a less suitable wife if he combed every assembly room in the British Isles.

‘Good day, Lady Summerton,’ the wretched man greeted her, as if he had no idea she was attempting to hide from him yet again.

Serena jumped at the sound of the deep voice she had been trying not to hear in her dreams, and turned to watch Sir Adam Langthorne effortlessly close the gap between them with a long, easy stride. She told herself it was foreboding that was making her heart beat faster.

‘Oh, dear—I mean…good day, Sir Adam,’ she said, and felt herself blush like a green girl instead of a respectable widow of four and twenty. ‘I felt unaccountably tired for a few moments,’ she explained feebly, trying not to see the hint of laughter and something even more dangerous in his dark gaze as one dark eyebrow rose in polite incredulity at her limp excuse for behaving like a fainting young miss with considerably more hair than sense. ‘It’s unseasonably mild today is it not?’ she heard herself ask with an internal groan, thinking she sounded very much like the vicar’s spinster sister, who was one of the silliest women in England.

‘Last week you were sheltering in that tumbledown barn because you informed me it was too chilly in the open air,’ he responded solemnly, and she wondered if she had been right as a girl to think she would quite like to strangle Rachel’s superior and insufferable brother. Then he grinned at her, and she knew it would have been a grievous waste of both their lives, and a smile trembled on her own lips before she controlled it and looked back at him rather severely.

‘And so it was. Such are the vagaries of the English weather, Sir Adam, in case you have quite forgot them during your sojourn in the Peninsula.’

‘Indeed I have not. This is the only country I ever came across where we have all our seasons in one day, but at least this one is fine and, as I never seem to see anything other than the hem of your pelisse disappearing over the horizon of late, my lady, it must be ranked an especially clement one for me,’ he added with a sardonic smile, and her stupid heart raced all over again.

‘I have been—that is to say, I am very busy,’ she told him solemnly. ‘Very busy indeed,’ she added, and took her late father’s half-hunter watch out of her pocket and inspected it as if every second of her day were precious.

‘Then we mustn’t waste your valuable time,’ he said, taking her gloved hand and raising her to her feet as if she was made of spun glass, then fitting it into the crook of his elbow as if it belonged there. ‘A lady of your advancing years should learn to take life a little more easily,’ he chided wickedly as he led her inexorably back onto the footpath that led away from her brother-in-law’s acreage and onto Sir Adam’s even larger estates.

It felt like venturing onto dangerous ground, but Serena told herself not to be silly for perhaps the thousandth time since she had met him again. It had only taken one look to know the infuriating, arrogant youth who had given her a tongue lashing that had bitten all the deeper for being well deserved, was now an infuriating, arrogant mature and potent gentleman she had endless trouble dismissing as merely her best friend’s brother.

‘And a gentleman of yours should learn better manners,’ she snapped back, before she had time to put a guard on her tongue. Catching a glint of satisfaction in his brown eyes, as temper robbed her of the starchy dignity she was forever striving for in his company, Serena decided she was an idiot to secretly prefer his provocation to the smoothest compliment.

‘I wonder if the objects of your inexhaustible charity know you are a spitfire of the first order,’ he mused, but this time she refused the bait.

‘They are my friends,’ she countered, mildly enough, ‘and as such aware of my faults without you taking the trouble to point them out, Sir Adam.’

‘No doubt,’ he replied amiably, and proceeded to guide her past a particularly persistent puddle.

Infuriating wretch! How dared he be so irritating and look so devastatingly handsome while he did it? Yet she suspected that even if he had been born as plain and homely as a man could rightly be, he would still have commanded the attention of any room he walked into—and why on earth wouldn’t he take the hint and turn his charm and wit and undoubted looks on some other unfortunate woman and stop plaguing her with them?

She had resolved to avoid the man when she noticed how his eyes heated whenever she met them, but he now seemed determined to force a meeting on her. A craven part of her wanted to wrench her hand from the warm contact on his russet coat sleeve and run away before she let herself consider the flesh-and-blood man underneath it, and reawakened some of the wicked fantasies that had been disturbing her dreams since he had come home. If she had ever met a man who inspired such contrary emotions in her she was very certain she would have recalled him, and a seductive voice whispered how very satisfying it might be to be constantly surprised, exasperated and seduced by such a faulty and unforgettable gentleman for the rest of her days.

Utter rubbish, of course, and the sooner her life returned to its usual mundane serenity the better. Until Sir Adam had come home from the wars the unchanging routine at Windham had been so soothingly predictable—and novelty, Serena decided huffily, was vastly overrated.

‘The news from Spain is decidedly mixed, is it not?’ she finally asked, in the hope of introducing a topic even he couldn’t bend to his own ends. The storming of Badajos by Lord Wellington’s Peninsular army had cost so many deaths Serena wasn’t sure whether to cheer or weep, and felt vaguely ashamed of herself for using it as a means to deflect a possible proposal and the discomfort and distress it would cost her to refuse him.

‘Very,’ he replied, seriously enough to make her feel much better, so it was a shame she merely felt guilty for reminding a former soldier of what his comrades had so recently endured. ‘Old Nosey’s not that good at sieges, I’m afraid,’ he added, and she had little doubt he was one of those who saw past the glowing accounts of victory to the long lists of dead and injured.

‘I dare say you know his strengths and weaknesses better than most, Sir Adam,’ she replied.

The mere mention of his service in the Peninsular reminded her of her first sight of him as a fully adult male, in the prime of his life and power, instead of the annoying brother of her best friend she remembered from that humiliating encounter as a rebellious girl. Captain Sir Adam Langthorne, dark-haired, dark-eyed and breathtakingly handsome, in silver-laced blue coat and all the attendant glory of a cavalry officer’s uniform, had still had the power to disturb her six months later. It ought to be made illegal for any man not blessed with a squint, or a figure akin to the Prince Regent’s portly one, to go abroad so decked out in the presence of susceptible ladies. Now he had sold out of the Queen’s Light Dragoons she would get over the memory, of course—if she contrived to avoid him a little more successfully in future.

Today his russet coat fitted loosely, and his shabby leathers shouldn’t enhance his powerful figure. But neither did anything to disguise the latent strength in his broad shoulders and those long and sleekly muscled legs. Put her brother-in-law in such a ramshackle outfit and he would look like a carter instead of an earl, yet Sir Adam looked just as dangerous as ever.

‘Your brother-in-law has just informed me the war is costing too much and our army should be brought home—to do nothing, presumably,’ he now informed her rather shortly, as if he was still restraining himself from telling his most powerful neighbour and fellow magistrate exactly what he thought of such waverers.

‘Henry has no concept of military strategy or battle tactics, I’m afraid,’ Serena said apologetically. Her brother-in-law probably had no idea how offensive such second-hand ideas were to a man who had seen what price the expeditionary forces were paying for keeping some of Bonaparte’s most battle-hardened generals so unsuccessfully occupied.

‘If he paid more attention to you and regarded his wife’s arrant nonsense a little less, I dare say he might speak a little sense once in a while,’ Adam said ruefully, and there was laughter and something more disturbing back in his fascinating eyes.

They were too complex to be categorised as just brown, she decided dreamily. His pupils were rayed with gold, as if permanently touched with sunlight, and there was a depth of rich colour to the rest that had nothing simple about it—although she really shouldn’t be intimately acquainted with them. Oh dear, now she was cataloguing his assets like a besotted schoolgirl! She looked away swiftly, but heat still surged through her in an embarrassing tide, and made her wish him distinctly less acute, for there was amusement and a little too much understanding of her confused feelings in his eyes now.

Having had six months to consider his graces, and one or two of his faults, she already knew he was tall enough to make her feel less lanky than usual. And she really must stop meeting his eyes in this coming fashion—just because she had met a gentleman who could look down at her without standing on a box! He was quick of thought and action for a tall man too, she remembered dreamily, picturing him exerting iron strength to stop a bolting horse stampeding through Marclecombe village and threatening to crush a child under its deadly hooves…

Reminding herself he was also impatient and domineering, and as irritating and persistent as a burr, she slanted a minatory glare at him, adding ‘managing’ to his list of faults. One benefit of widowhood was her freedom from being managed, she reminded herself sharply. And of course being excused marital duties. Given her late husband’s outspoken disgust with a wife who could not even give him a daughter in four years of marriage, that was a decided advantage.

Guilty that she couldn’t mourn a man who had changed from a light-hearted and carelessly charming fiancé into a spendthrift husband with a foul temper and worse habits, she ordered herself to be more dutiful. It hadn’t been George’s fault she had been too young to tell love from infatuation—although he had killed any lingering enchantment stone dead by the time he had died. She shivered even in the bright sunlight and turned her attention to the present. Even with the conundrum that was Sir Adam Langthorne in it, now was much more pleasant time in her life.

‘I can think of nothing more likely to cause trouble,’ she said, with a shudder at the thought of Henry being silly enough to listen to her views over his wife’s. ‘But pray tell me, is Rachel still busy with her spring cleaning?’ she added brightly, once more intent on finding a neutral topic of conversation.

‘Indeed, my house is not my own. I might wish myself back in Spain and enduring the rigours of campaign if not for certain compensations,’ he replied, with a warmth in his deep voice that shouldn’t make her senses sit up and take notice.

Drat the man! She should have known he could bend any subject to his own ends, and there it was again—that fascinating softening of his acute gaze she was determined to resist. If she once let him get the words out it would be the end to so much, and Rachel Langthorne’s friendship was too precious to lose because her brother refused to be set at a proper distance.

‘I suppose Burgess wishes to consult you about the lambing, Sir Adam?’ she asked, still trying to keep their conversation impersonal, despite his lazily amused gaze telling her he knew exactly what she was about.

‘I expect Burgess is all but finished with that,’ he replied, obligingly for once, ‘and at least he won’t talk me half to death while Mrs Burgess provides you with a list of her ailments and those of her numerous brood.’

‘Bearing twelve children and keeping ten alive is an achievement in itself,’ Serena told him, as she fought back a smile at this all-too-accurate description of Mrs Burgess’s preoccupations.

‘You’d think she would realise what was causing them by now, wouldn’t you, though?’ he asked with a wicked grin.

‘Well, really, Sir Adam!’

He raised one dark eyebrow and his eyes were alight with laughter. ‘I hope you’re not turning into a prig, Lady Summerton?’

‘Pray confine such comments to the gentlemen in future,’ she said stiffly, trying to remove her hand from the crook of his arm.

He bowed briefly, but placed his other hand over hers. She stilled immediately. ‘I beg your pardon. I thought you were beyond the series of hypocrisies and evasions that commonly make up polite conversation,’ he told her, and she couldn’t tell if he was teasing or deadly serious.

‘Then you thought wrongly.’

‘Perhaps,’ he replied enigmatically, releasing her hand at last—only to clasp it again as he helped her over a stile and onto the footpath that led to Red Bridge Farm.

‘I’m a conventional creature, Sir Adam. Despite any rumours you might have heard to the contrary,’ she made herself say airily, over the thundering of her heartbeat as she leant on his strength as briefly as she could without tripping over.

‘I don’t listen to rumour, my lady. Instead I like to gather facts and make an informed judgement for myself.’

‘If only more of our kind did that,’ she replied impulsively, and risked undoing all the good she had managed to do herself by smiling up at him as if they were more than the mere acquaintances she had assured herself they were.

Luckily he resisted such an obvious opening, and returned her look with a quizzical one of his own. ‘It has often occurred to me that most of the nobility and gentry don’t have nearly enough to do—unlike you, my lady.’

‘I hate being idle,’ she told him earnestly.

She didn’t have it in her to be as elegantly useless as her sister-in-law, although Amelia was increasing, and had an excuse at the moment, and the Dowager Countess was a martyr to rheumatics. As the only Countess of Summerton currently willing and able to carry out her duties, there was little risk of Serena becoming bored. Yet at four and twenty should her life really be so settled, so relentlessly unchanging? The suspicion that it shouldn’t had been driving her harder than ever of late, and she was almost sure Adam Langthorne had nothing to do with that unease.