Joanna Maitland - My Lady Angel

Angel found she longed to see his face.

He shook his head slightly. “Better you remember me as I am now—your unknown cavalier, the man who is bewitched by your beauty. I would not have you think of me as I really am.”

Angel did not have the first idea of what to make of his words. Her brain seemed to be fully occupied in dealing with her heightened senses and the odd reactions of her body. It had never betrayed her like this. Why on earth…?

His mouth descended on hers with the softness of a butterfly alighting on a flower. The last vestiges of rational thought deserted her. She wanted…she wanted so much more. She reached her arms up to him and pulled him closer, returning a man’s kiss for the first time in her life.

A Poor Relation

“Regency purists will note that Maitland has a fine

command of the era’s sensibilities.”

—Romantic Times

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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

‘I f I must take another husband, I suppose I could always marry Cousin Frederick.’

Lady Charlotte stared at her niece with narrowed eyes and pursed lips. She looked as if she had suddenly been confronted by a very bad smell. ‘If I thought for one moment that you might do such a wicked thing, Angelina… Why, even you would deserve to be locked in the round tower till you came to your senses.’

Her niece rose swiftly from her spoon-back chair by the fireplace and came to sit on the sofa beside her aunt, taking the old lady’s wrinkled hands in her own smooth white ones and stroking them reassuringly. ‘Dearest Aunt, there is no need to threaten me with the tower. It is enough to hear you call me “Angelina” to know that I have offended you. I was only bamming you, I promise. You know I am in no hurry to marry again.’ She managed to suppress the involuntary shudder that accompanied the word. ‘I would certainly never marry another man called “Frederick”,’ she went on, assuming a teasing tone.

‘Hmph,’ snorted the old lady. ‘You should not jest about Cousin Frederick and his family, Angel. They’re a bad lot, every last one of ’em. And I’m sure they would all be delighted to see you dead and buried.’

‘Aunt! You must not speak so. Truly, you must not. Especially of a man we have never met.’

‘Don’t need to meet him,’ Lady Charlotte said roundly. ‘Knowing your Great-uncle Augustus was quite enough for me, even if he was family. Never known a man so full of greed and envy. Couldn’t ever accept the fact that his son remained plain Mr Rosevale while your father inherited all three titles.’ Lady Charlotte had no qualms about speaking ill of the dead.

Angel tried another tack. ‘Well, Cousin Frederick should be happy at last. After all, he is Lord Penrose now.’ She smiled conspiratorially.

‘Minx! If I didn’t know you so well, I might have believed you meant that. What good is the earldom to Cousin Frederick when all the money and almost all the land goes with the barony? And to a mere slip of a girl at that?’ She returned Angel’s wicked smile with interest.

Angel dropped her gaze, trying to look like a demure young miss. She failed, as usual. ‘He does have a seat in the House of Lords, Aunt Charlotte. Perhaps that will be some consolation to him.’

‘I doubt it. The only law he would wish to enact would be to prohibit inheritance in the female line. Besides, he probably cannot afford to take his seat. It would not do for the Earl of Penrose to be threadbare.’

Angel tried not to smile at the picture her aunt’s words had conjured up. Cousin Frederick, now the Earl of Penrose, had inherited a small impoverished estate in Cornwall, a seat in the Lords—and nothing else. As long as Angel and her aunt were alive, Frederick would have only an empty title.

But if Angel died without an heir, he stood to inherit everything.

‘I think it is time we mended the feud, Aunt. After all, Frederick is head of the family now. We cannot refuse to receive him.’

‘Nothing of the sort,’ said the old lady. ‘There are two families now. You hold the barony. As Lady Rosevale, you are head of the Rosevale family. Frederick may out-rank you, being an Earl, but his is still the cadet branch. Let him head his own family. There is no need for us to receive him. No need at all. I, for one, shall never speak to him. It is impossible.’

Angel shook her head at her aunt’s stubbornness. The Rosevale family was notorious for its short tempers and prolonged feuds, but neither her father nor her aunt had ever been prepared to explain the origins of this one. ‘Aunt,’ she said, ‘I must ask you to tell me why Papa quarrelled with Great-uncle Augustus.’

‘No, dear.’ Aunt Charlotte looked decidedly mulish, but then, seeing Angel’s set expression, she added, ‘It was a very long time ago. It is best forgotten.’

Angel sat up even straighter. ‘As head of the family,’ she said, with emphasis, ‘I need to be fully aware of such things. You must agree with that. You yourself said that—’

‘No, I—’ Aunt Charlotte was shaking her head.

‘I insist, Aunt.’ Angel looked meaningfully at her. The old lady was stubborn, but she also believed implicitly in the role of the head of the family. It was only a matter of waiting.

‘Oh, very well. But it is not an edifying tale.’ Aunt Charlotte took a lace-trimmed handkerchief from her pocket and touched it to her lips. ‘Your papa… Er…your papa was not yet twenty when he inherited. I was already of age, of course, but your grandfather had appointed his younger brother, your Great-uncle Augustus, to be your papa’s guardian and trustee. Uncle Augustus was very proud, very conscious of his rank. And grasping when it came to money.’

Angel’s face must have shown some reaction to her aunt’s outspoken description of the late Augustus Rosevale, for Lady Charlotte nodded bleakly and squeezed her niece’s hand.

‘You insisted on knowing, Angel, and so I must give you the truth with no bark on it. Augustus Rosevale was a miser…and a fortune-hunter to boot. Since he could not have the titles for himself, he did everything in his power to persuade your papa to marry his own daughter, Mary.

‘Your papa would have none of it. And I encouraged him in his resistance, I freely admit. Uncle Augustus was a tyrant…and Mary was a plain little mouse, with neither spirit nor brains to recommend her. A marriage between them would have been a disaster from the first.’

‘But I thought Papa’s first marriage was a love match?’

Aunt Charlotte smiled fondly. ‘Yes, indeed. Your papa had already met and fallen in love with Lady Jane Ellesmore. He paid no heed at all to Uncle Augustus’s attempts to separate them or to advance the claims of his own daughter. The day your papa came of age, he proposed to Lady Jane. They were married within a month.’

‘But she died.’

‘Yes, she died. Although they did have twelve happy years together. In spite of Uncle Augustus.’

Angel looked at her aunt enquiringly.