A Family for the Reclusive Baron, page 1
The Rivenhall Weddings
A brand-new trilogy from Carol Arens
The three children of Viscount Rivenhall couldn’t be more different: serious Thomas feels the responsibility of his position as heir, while fun-loving William struggles to settle down. But even he hasn’t the same capacity for causing scandal as his younger sister, Minerva!
Now it is time for all three to be wed—but will they marry as they are expected to?
William’s story:
Inherited as the Gentleman’s Bride
Thomas’s story:
In Search of a Viscountess
Minerva’s story:
A Family for the Reclusive Baron
All available now!
Author Note
Thank you so much for reading A Family for the Reclusive Baron. If you have read the first two books of The Rivenhall Weddings, you will have guessed that this is the story that will give Minerva her happily-ever-after. Not such an easy thing for Minerva, who has spent previous books avoiding her happily-ever-after. She does not wish to fall in love or to wed.
But, for the sake of a pair of orphans she is devoted to, she does wed. Her marriage is a good match because her groom, Harrison Tremayne, is also a man who does not wish to wed but does so out of obligation to the same pair of orphans. This ought to make them perfectly suited to one another. They will have a perfectly polite and friendly marriage. What could be more ideal?
You and I know what could be more ideal: for them to fall in love. Come along with Minerva and Harrison while they make that discovery.
Best wishes and happy reading,
Carol
Carol Arens
A Family for the Reclusive Baron
Carol Arens delights in tossing fictional characters into hot water, watching them steam and then giving them a happily-ever-after. When she is not writing, she enjoys spending time with her family, beach camping or lounging about a mountain cabin. At home, she enjoys playing with her grandchildren and gardening. During rare spare moments, you will find her snuggled up with a good book. Carol enjoys hearing from readers at carolarens@yahoo.com or on Facebook.
Books by Carol Arens
Harlequin Historical
The Cowboy’s Cinderella
Western Christmas Brides
“A Kiss from the Cowboy”
The Rancher’s Inconvenient Bride
A Ranch to Call Home
A Texas Christmas Reunion
The Earl’s American Heiress
Rescued by the Viscount’s Ring
The Making of Baron Haversmere
The Viscount’s Yuletide Bride
To Wed a Wallflower
A Victorian Family Christmas
“A Kiss Under the Mistletoe”
The Viscount’s Christmas Proposal
The Rivenhall Weddings
Inherited as the Gentleman’s Bride
In Search of a Viscountess
A Family for the Reclusive Baron
Visit the Author Profile page
at Harlequin.com for more titles.
Dedicated to you, dear reader, with many thanks for reading my stories.
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
Excerpt from The Highlander’s Bridal Bid by Nicole Locke
Chapter One
London, August 1889
Although his brother had been Baron Elmstone, only a handful of people had attended his funeral.
In a sense, Harrison was not there either. He stood by the graveside hearing the minister’s voice reciting his brother’s good deeds...none of which Harrison recalled...seeing the coffin covered with flowers and shifting shadows, and yet it was another image more vivid than this one which occupied his mind.
It was an occasion nine years ago in the Elmstone garden. Not an appropriate memory for the moment, perhaps, but it played in his memory as fresh as if it were yesterday.
Harrison’s hand had ached that night. Not his heart, though. That had felt unnaturally numb...dead, even.
That was what came of punching one’s older brother on the chin.
Juliette Huddleston had screeched, taking shelter behind Stewart’s back.
Trusting Stewart to protect her had been unwise—the very last thing she ought to have done.
‘You always were a fool.’ His brother had rubbed his chin, laughed as if the blow meant nothing, as if Harrison’s righteous anger was impotent, childish even. ‘Did you honestly believe a woman like this one would be interested in someone like you?’
He had, in fact, because she’d said so. Only two nights before she’d vowed her everlasting love and told him she couldn’t wait to announce their engagement.
Said fool had been sitting in an alcove, feeling the night breeze soft against his face, imagining the joy of a marriage based on trust, not betrayal. A union which was as unlike his parents’ marriage as day was to night.
What an outright shock it had been to hear Juliette’s voice coming from a short distance away, declaring her love to Stewart. She’d used the same words she had said to him, spoken with the same inflection in her voice.
It had been as if the words he had taken to heart were simply rehearsed. How many other fellows had she tricked with them?
Seeing her peeking around Stewart’s shoulder, not a shred of remorse in her pale blinking eyes, he’d itched to hit his brother again. If his feelings meant nothing to Stewart, maybe his fists would.
He’d raised his hands, but Juliette had taken that moment to step out from behind his brother, then dash from the garden.
For the first time Harrison had noticed that the buttons of her blouse were undone, her shift exposed.
Seeing it had sucked the fight out of him. The woman who until seconds ago had been everything to him was nothing to his brother but one more conquest.
No doubt she’d expected to become the next Baroness. She would not have been the first of Stewart’s conquests to think so. A trail of hard-wept tears led away from the Elmstone estate.
Harrison had thumped down on a bench, thinking that it would feel good to hit his brother again, but that Stewart was probably so used to being punched by cuckolded gentlemen he wouldn’t take it as an insult. Would certainly feel no sorrow for what he’d done.
‘Given your outburst...’
Stewart’s expression had been unreadable in the darkness. Not that Harrison had needed to read it. He had seen the lack of remorse too many times not to know what it looked like.
‘I wonder if you really are the boy your nanny used to say you were.’
‘Mrs Glass? You do know she’s the one who ruined our parents’ marriage?’
‘Her and Father together.’ Stewart had given a careless shrug. ‘Men will be men...and nannies are usually convenient.’
Convenient?
Harrison would never forget the first time that hell had visited Elmstone. Prayed he’d never feel as callous about it as his brother clearly had. Even now he recalled his mother screaming, heartbroken after finding Harrison’s nanny in Father’s chamber.
Having been woken by the noise, Harrison had crept into the corridor, hidden behind a curtain, and watched while Mother had wept, pulling in despair at her own hair. Father had simply laughed at her, much as Stewart had done to Harrison over Juliette that night years later.
The nanny hadn’t run from the room, ashamed in the face of Mother’s grief, but remained brazenly in Father’s bed. In a rage, his mother had stormed out of the chamber, then spotted Harrison peeking around the curtain. She’d gripped his shoulders, bent close to his face.
‘You’d better not grow up to be a monster like him!’
He’d tried to promise her he would not, but tears had locked his throat.
That moment was burned into his memory because he’d never seen his mother again. Not the mother he’d known, at least. She’d become another person, bitter and angry with everyone. She’d got back at his father by becoming more faithless to him than he was to her.
‘Mrs Glass claimed you were a scrapper,’ Stewart had said, absently rubbing the blooming bruise on his chin. ‘A bad seed, she said, who liked to hit people. I wonder now if she had the right of it.’
Harrison had gone through a few nannies in his tender years, but not because he had been ill behaved. It was because Father had used them up.
A new nanny arriving in the household—or any other woman servant for that matter—had always meant an escalation of tension between his parents. He’d been able to count on their fights ringing off the walls for days on end.
To this day he had an aversion to nannies. Over the years his father had taken many lovers, selected both from his staff and willing society ladies, but it had been the nannies who’d wounded Harrison the most. Perhaps because he had been so young and vulnerable.
‘Only that one time when I was four,’ he’d pointed out to Stewart. ‘Mrs Glass was gossiping about our mother. I’ve never hit anyone else until now, and you deserved it.’
‘Don’t look so wounded. You’re twenty years old, for pity’s sake. You need to understand how it is between men and women. You must admit I did you a favour.’
He had known full well a favour was not what his brother had had in mind when he’d dallied with Juliette’s virtue. In the event that she’d even had some, which now seemed unlikely.
Arguing with his brother would have been pointless. Stewart had been who he was, and nothing Harrison had said would ever have changed that.
With the flush of anger fading, he had known there would not be much point in slugging his brother again either—except that it would make him feel marginally better.
Harrison had sat in the garden that night, well after Stewart had returned to the house, whistling as if he had not just dashed the hope out of Harrison’s future...
The steady thump-thump of earth hitting the coffin lid brought him back to the present.
He blinked back a tear. The only one to be shed here today, he feared. But Stewart had been young and innocent once. It was that boy he mourned.
Glancing about, he settled his gaze on his parents’ tombstones on the other side of the narrow path.
Bad seed? It was nonsense, of course—simply something his brother had spouted to excuse his own behaviour. No, Harrison did not believe one could be born immoral. One could learn to be, though, and pass it on to a new generation.
Luckily, Stewart had left no seeds to go bad.
A dark thought came to him, but a true one.
It would be for the best if the Elmstone line died with Harrison.
It would not be so difficult for that to happen. He did not intend to wed—to take the risk of falling in love and ending up as miserable as his parents had been.
Even though he was a faithful sort, his former, if short-lived, fiancée was a reminder that love was not ever to be trusted.
Nothing was worth that kind of pain.
Late summer, 1890, Rivenhall House
‘Let me just tame that one curl, miss.’
Minerva Grant’s maid glowered at the offending lock springing from her temple. Then she cast a sidelong glance at her image in the dressing table’s mirror. Despite the culprit, she looked properly proper—as a lady going to her place of employment ought to.
Not, she thought ruefully, that a viscount’s daughter going to any place of employment was in any way ‘proper’. But she did at least present a dignified image.
‘Dottie, you know very well that it is futile to even attempt it.’
Ever since Minerva had been of an age where her hair was expected to be contained in a fashionable style, that curl had been the bane of every maid who’d attempted to make it behave.
For all that it stuck out from her temple like a fuzzy corkscrew, Minerva rather liked it. Her late mother’s hair had been curly all over. It had used to tickle Minerva’s cheek when she was little. Seeing the curl reminded her of that.
It had been such a long time since her mother died. Minerva had only been seven years old, so she didn’t remember everything about her. But she did recall her to have been adventurous. A woman to be admired and emulated.
‘Still, I ought to give it a go. There is a gentleman downstairs. Your father is eager for you to make his acquaintance.’
Heaven help the fellow, then. Life was lovely as it was and she had no intention of changing it.
Why, she had been discouraging suitors even before she’d made her debut.
The men her father presented to her were high in society—gentlemen used to having everyone dash about to do their bidding. The only bidding Minerva wished to do was her own.
‘At this time of the morning?’ she asked.
She didn’t know why she should be surprised. Father tended to spring hopeful suitors upon her without much notice.
‘You might not wish to avoid this one, miss. I got a peek at him and he is quite handsome...if you don’t mind me speaking freely.’
‘You know I do not, Dottie, or you would not have spoken.’
Dottie’s opinion notwithstanding, it was unlikely that this fellow was any different from the others Father had set in her path. Society had an abundance of handsome gentlemen. Which did not mean she was willing to give up her freedom to any of them.
This man might believe he was here on business—and perhaps he was. Only he did not know all of it. He was a candidate...chosen by her father with great care. Father could be very determined in getting what he wanted.
But not as determined as she was in avoiding what she did not want, she thought with a touch of satisfaction.
Thanks to Berthie, the widowed governess her father had engaged after her mother died, Minerva understood that a woman might enjoy life beyond a marriage prescribed by society.
Berthie had been much like Mother, having a merry, sportive spirit. Because of it, she’d managed to bring a grieving child from sorrow to joy. With tales of her adventures before she’d wed, Berthie had taught her to see the joy of each day, to be like her mother and embrace all the excitement she could find.
Sadly, she and her father had been at odds as to what made for contentment.
Really, though, what sensible woman would choose contentment when she could choose excitement?
‘Father is persistent. I will give him that,’ she muttered.
She had no time this morning to reject another suitor. She must get to the orphanage.
‘Let me just make that curl neat and tidy before you go down.’
Dottie reached for it, but Minerva shook her head, tugging another strand of hair free. This one was merely wavy and hung past her chin. Judging by Dottie’s frown, she looked absurd.
As acts of rebellion went, this was not much of one, and Father was not likely to take note of it, but it was all she had to hand in the moment.
‘I have no time to speak with one of Father’s hopefuls. As it is I will need to hurry to get to the orphanage on time.’
‘You might not wish to mention you are employed, or you will frighten the gentleman away.’
‘I shall bear it in mind.’
Most members of her social circle already knew of her rash behaviour in working for a wage. Although she had outgrown setting birds free and rescuing pink poodles, as she had done in the past, she still managed to set tongues wagging.
If the man downstairs did not already know of it, news of her gainful employment might very well send him on his way.
Plucking a pair of peppermint sticks from her writing desk, she put them in her embroidered purse. With a quick nod of goodbye, she hurried down the corridor, taking the stairs down as silently as she could manage, the sweet minty scent wafting out of her purse at each step.
While she was tempted to indulge in one, they were meant for the two orphans who had been delivered to London Cradle last night.
Last time she’d seen them, the poor children had been distraught. She’d felt horrid about leaving them, but her shift had been over. If she did not return to Rivenhall on time Father would send half the staff to fetch her home. She knew this because it had happened in her first week of working at the orphanage.
She had been embarrassed beyond words. How was a woman to appear responsible and independent with an army of servants at her back?
At the bottom of the stairs, she tiptoed across the hall, careful to make sure her father did not notice her leaving.
The footman opened the front door.
Escape was but a step away.
She lifted her foot and stepped over the threshold.
‘Minerva, my dear. There is someone I wish for you to meet.’
‘I haven’t time now, Father,’ she called over her shoulder.
Oh, drat! The fellow—who was indeed handsome—and Father were striding her way. She could hardly ignore them now.
With no way out, she exchanged a few polite words with Father’s visitor. What he could not see was her toe, tapping impatiently under her skirt. Moments were ticking by.
Truly, she hated being late. Employees were expected to arrive on time, no matter what their father’s rank was... Although, to be fair, she was the only employee whose father had a title.
