Sword-Crossed Lovers, page 1
part #1 of Those Wild Whitbys Series
Sword-Crossed Lovers
Those Wild Whitbys
Gemma Blackwood
Copyright © 2024 by Gemma Blackwood
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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About the Author
Gemma Blackwood writes historical romance with dashing heroes, brave heroines and the sweetest of happy endings.
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She can be found on the sunny southwest coast of England, where she writes in a shed at the bottom of her garden - the only place she can get away from her inquisitive cat.
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Sign up to her mailing list to keep up with her latest news and receive a free copy of two romantic stories set in Regency England, including the prequel to her series Scandals of Scarcliffe Hall.
Also by Gemma Blackwood
The Impossible Balfours
A Duke She Can’t Refuse
The Last Earl Standing
A Viscount is a Girl’s Best Friend
No Dukes Need Apply
What an Heiress Wants
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Scandals of Scarcliffe Hall
The Earl’s Secret Passion
The Duke’s Hidden Desire
The Lady He Longed For
The Baron’s Inconvenient Bride
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Redeeming the Rakes
The Duke Suggests a Scandal
Taming the Wild Captain
Let the Lady Decide
Make Me a Marchioness
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Standalone Novels
Destiny’s Duchess
The Duke’s Defiant Debutante
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Short Story Collections
The Duke, the Earl and the Captain
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Free Books from Gemma Blackwood
Also by Gemma Blackwood
Chapter 1
Cassandra Whitby pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders, wishing the thin grey wool could keep out the shame as well as the summer wind. She kept her head dipped low so that the hood would conceal her face and hurried down the dark street until she reached a dilapidated cottage that stood apart from the others at the very edge of Appleby town.
A light burned in the window. Cassie paused at the door, mustering the courage to knock.
It was bad enough to call on a gentleman, alone, at this time of night, but it wasn’t only the impropriety that bothered her. Cassie was reasonably sure the people of Appleby had half-forgotten she was not a gentleman herself, given her habits of tramping through the countryside and swearing in polite company. At the age of two and twenty, she had lost all hope of being thought a proper young lady.
No, her main concern was the sheer embarrassment of its being this particular gentleman that she was forced to call upon. The wretched shame of asking Hugo Kendrick for help.
A shiver ran across Cassie’s shoulders. She shook it off. For heaven’s sake, wasn’t she made of sterner stuff than this?
Didn’t she have much more to lose, if she failed, than a bit of foolish pride?
She raised her hand, but the door opened before she could lift the knocker.
Viscount Kendrick, distinguished local landowner, neighbour to her father, and Cassie’s sworn enemy, ran his dark eyes in a slow, unhurried crawl from the toes of her scuffed satin dance slippers, past the shapeless terrain of her summer cloak, and up to her lace-trimmed hood. His lips were quirked into the kind of wolflike smile that was doubtless designed to make her giggle, or blush, or simper. Cassie, fortunately, had never been known to do anything of the sort.
“I hate to disappoint you, ma’am,” said Lord Kendrick, in a low, amused drawl. “But whatever services you are offering, they will not be required.”
Cassie flung back her hood. “Kendrick, you’re an ass.”
Those cool dark eyes flared wide. He let the infuriating smirk fall. “Miss Cassandra Whitby. What an… unexpected honour.” He checked the street behind her, perhaps expecting to see her brother, or at least a maid, but on finding none his face turned grim. “You seem to have misplaced your chaperone. Wait here. I’ll find someone to wait with you while I call for the carriage –”
Cassie took a step forward, blocking the door before he could close it. “Stop being such an old woman and let me in, Kendrick. Before someone sees me.”
He hesitated a moment longer, glaring at her as though he could move her from his doorstep by sheer force of will, then caught her by the elbow and pulled her inside.
The force of his grip made no allowances for her dancing shoes. She skidded over the doorstep, suddenly only an inch from Kendrick’s broad chest. The warmth of him flooded the night air from her senses, befuddling her head with a rush of sea-salt maleness and woodsmoke. The cottage’s narrow hallway was far too small a space to be trapped with anyone, let alone a man as virulently male as Kendrick.
Kendrick shut the door with an angry shove. “What devilry are you up to this time, Whitby Wildcat? What sins have I committed lately to deserve the Curse of Cassandra?”
“Really, Kendrick. There’s no need to make a fuss.” Cassie shrugged off her cloak, folded it over her arm, and ducked past him to escape from the hallway. She’d intended to be aloof, to mask her desperation with the appearance of cool disdain, but she could not conceal the thrill of recognition which rushed through her as she entered the little sitting room.
It was all exactly as it used to be. The same threadbare rug covered the floorboards, its red and yellow pattern worn to a shadow by the sun of too many summers to count. The familiar old portraits still hung on the wall – those considered not fine enough for the great house at Thistle Hall – two hunting dogs standing proud atop a rural cliff, and two bright-eyed children holding a hobby horse and a flame-winged parrot.
Even the air was the same: warm, fragrant with the pine logs stacked beside the fireplace, promising a fire merry enough to warm a cup of chocolate. Cassie had not been in the cottage since she was the same age as the boy holding the parrot. It seemed that while she had been busy growing long limbs and an awkward temper, time in the childhood hideaway had stood still.
Hugo strode across to the window, his tall, masculine form cutting through the haze of memory. The cottage might be the same, but he was nothing like the slender, earnest youth he had once been. A glowering frown overshadowed his brow, taking a little of the gilt from his handsome features.
“How did you know I’d be here?” he asked gruffly, as he jerked the curtains closed. “I told no one I was coming.”
Cassie sat down in one of the fuzzy armchairs, surprised for a moment that her feet still touched the ground. These chairs had seemed enormous the last time she visited the cottage – big enough for the late Lord Kendrick to hold two children on his knee as he told them a ghost story.
“Poor Kendrick. It must bother you a great deal to be so predictable.” It bothered her, too, though she’d never admit it to him. The moment she realised she needed Hugo Kendrick, she knew where he’d be. “You always hide away in here when your family’s at Thistle Hall.”
His dark eyes flared, a hint of flame catching at the coal. “I am not hiding. I had business in the village, and this old place is preferable to riding home in the dark.” He gave the armchair she’d commandeered a resentful eye. “Comfortable?”
Cassie patted the cushioned arm, noting the cloud of dust that billowed up. “Do you even keep a housekeeper, Kendrick?”
“Why do you care? You’re certainly not qualified to take up the position.” He folded his arms and leaned against the mantelpiece, his gaze making a disquieting search of her face. She felt picked apart, and she didn’t like the thought of what he was unpicking. Her narrow, bony features, hardened by a lifetime of running away from ladylike pursuits. Her hair pulled too tight into ballroom elegance. The heat in her cheeks, betraying her anxiety, when she’d always prided herself on her courage.
Whatever he saw in her, he did not like. His jaw tensed, and the deep burnt brown of his eyes darkened to charcoal. But he said only, “Please tell me that when you decided to turn up at my door after dark to insult me and my servants, you at least had the wit to organise your own transport home.”
“I didn’t come here to insult you.” Cassie bit the inside of her cheek. Now was not the time to be her usual prickly self. She needed him to listen to her, after all. “I’ll be meeting my sisters outside the Appleby Assembly Rooms at half past eleven, and the driver will have no idea that I wasn’t with them at the dance all the time.”
He pulled out his pocket watch
“I need a favour.”
“Well, that’s easy enough.” He tucked the watch away and gave her a beaming smile. The sort of smile that, given across a ballroom in the glow of candlelight, might make a girl’s heart skip a beat or two. If she were susceptible to handsome men with luscious blonde curls and the devil’s own eyes. “No,” he said, and nodded towards the door. “Good night, Miss Cassandra.”
“Do you think I’d be asking you if I had any other choice?”
She hadn’t meant to say it that way. Blunt. Pleading. Desperate. The strain in her voice caught Kendrick’s attention. He tilted his head to the side, as though weighing up whether he really wished to hear the answers to the questions in his mind.
“It’s about the Appleby Tourney,” she said, before he had a chance to press her. Hugo blinked.
“The fencing competition?”
Cassie took a deep breath, forced herself to meet his eyes, and launched into the story. “I know a farm boy who wants to enter. The son of one of my father’s tenants. I promised I’d help him, but his father forbade it, so he’ll have to enter in disguise. Since the tourney’s only open to locals and he can’t reveal who he is, he needs someone to vouch for him. You.”
Hugo exhaled noisily through his teeth. She couldn’t tell whether he was amused or annoyed. “I never had you pegged as a lover of silly fairy tales, Cass.”
She noted the change of address but knew better than to mention it. Cass, once more – just as she’d been before adulthood stormed between them with its Seasons and ballrooms and Miss Cassandra Whitby. A good sign, she hoped. It suited the place, after all – their old childhood refuge. And as children, they’d been…
Not friends. Never friends. But at least they hadn’t been continually at one another’s throats.
“It’s not a fairy tale. It’s a good plan. Once he wins the tournament, the prize money will be enough for him to marry his sweetheart –”
Hugo let out a snort of laughter. “Oh, he’s going to win, is he? Your farm boy?”
“Why shouldn’t he?” Cassie’s arms crossed in exactly the way her mother lamented over, and she knew without being told that her chin was jutting out in its usual stubborn fashion. “He’s good. I should know. I’ve helped him train.”
Hugo’s eyebrow quirked upwards, but his mouth pressed into a tight line. “He’s not your sweetheart, is he, Cass?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
He took a sharp pace forward but stopped before he reached her, arms swinging at his sides as though he was unsure how to get rid of the energy within them. “Your father would kill me if I helped one of his lovely daughters elope with a farm boy.”
Cassie bit her tongue, trying to mimic his cool demeanour despite the sting the assumption left inside her.
No one would ever accuse her sisters of planning to elope beneath their station. Not Evie, self-possessed and self-assured and replete with ladylike accomplishments. Not Georgie, most noted beauty in the county, belle of every ball.
Oh, but poor, awkward Cassandra – scrawny, lanky Cassandra – Cassandra with grass-stained skirts and lost gloves and scarecrow hair, who liked to run and ride and fish and swim – wasn’t it all too easy to believe that poor Cassandra Whitby would settle for a penniless farm boy rather than succumb to spinsterhood?
She shouldn’t have invented the sweetheart. It was a step too far.
“If I wanted to marry a farmhand, I’d simply inform my father of my decision and go ahead exactly as I pleased,” she said, with a careless shrug. “I wouldn’t bother with the nonsense of the fencing tournament. Why should I?”
Why, indeed?
What significance could the silver trophy and bag of sovereigns handed to the winner of the Appleby Tourney possibly have to a lady as replete with material blessings as the daughter of the wealthy Mr. Horace Whitby?
In her lap, Cassie’s broken fingernails dug into her palms through her thin summer gloves. But she gave Hugo Kendrick nothing more than her usual scornful smile. He relaxed, barely.
“Your father’s tenants aren’t playthings, Cass. This isn’t like rescuing a stray cat or hand-rearing an orphaned lamb. Does this lad know what he’s getting into by becoming one of your noble causes?”
“For goodness’ sake, Kendrick, must you be such an old woman? I’m not convincing the boy to run off to sea. He needs a sponsor for the tournament, that’s all. And since my father won’t do it, you’re the closest thing to a respectable local landowner I can find.”
Hugo made an ironic bow. “Flattered.”
“Will you do it, then?” She’d never been good at hiding her emotions. Anger, pain, sorrow – they all lit up her face like a flare from a sinking ship. But she was fighting down the tension in her throat with all her strength. If there was one thing Cassie knew she could do, it was fight.
She seized her anxiety by the throat and shook it into submission as she waited for Kendrick’s response. She even managed a smile.
He grinned. “What will you give me in return?”
“What?”
Her alarm slipped from her grasp. Hugo was advancing on her with a predatory gleam in his dark eyes. That flash of even, white teeth made her think of what small animals must see when the darkness of their burrows was invaded by a fox.
Cassie leaned back into the scant safety of the armchair as Hugo propped a hand on each of its arms and leaned close. Penning her in. Bringing himself near enough that even in the dim light of too-few candles she could trace the laughter-lines at the corners of his eyes and pick out two or three silver strands hidden in his thick waves of hair.
He wasn’t old. Two years her senior. But he looked… tired.
He looked as though the handsome crinkles at the corners of his eyes had been etched by something deeper than laughter.
His voice dropped so low that Cassie felt it thrumming up through the soles of her feet. “I said, what will you give me in return?”
Cassie’s sense of social niceties might be terrible, but her sense of danger was spot on. Her spine tingled. “I didn’t come here to make a bargain.”
“You never do, Cass. You only make demands.”
“What about the goodness of your heart?” She flicked her eyes to the spot on his chest behind which, presumably, a worm-rotted husk was doing its best to beat. Her own was racing out of control, as though she’d just plunged into the sea on New Year’s Day, but she’d never give him the satisfaction of revealing it. She unclenched a hand and gave Hugo’s chest a prod. “You might at least pretend to have some finer feelings in there.”
“Oh, I truly mourn for the plight of your star-crossed farm boy. What’s the lad’s name, again?”
“Jack.” She’d been ready for that.
“Jack…?”
“Jack Smith, and you’ll take it on my word that he’s the son of a local farmer and eligible to enter the tournament.”
“Will I really?” And he looked so pleased with himself that she knew in an instant that whatever she’d imagined about his tired eyes was pure fantasy. Hugo Kendrick was now, and always had been, about as deep as a puddle.
“I’ll do it,” he said, and she breathed out a sigh. “If you ask nicely.”
A muddy puddle. One into which a cow had recently dropped the fruits of its ruminations.
Cassie crossed her arms, glared at him, and cleared her throat. “Lord Kendrick. I’d be ever so much obliged if you could see your way to vouching for my friend Jack so that he can enter the fencing tourney at the Appleby Fair. There. Will that do?”
