Dreaming - Softcover

Devon, England, 1815

The earl of Downe was known for his horsemanship -- which was fortunate because it was harder than hell to stay on a horse when one was drunk. It was even harder at night, and this night was darker than a rake's past.

But Richard Lennox and his mount knew these dank moors. Over the years, they had ridden hell and hounds to the cliffs and on to the small cove below, where he'd found solace away from a house that had never been a home.

He rode across those moors now, away from his estate, until he couldn't taste the stale air of the past, only the briny scent of the sea. He could breathe again.

Horse and rider slowed as they neared the cliffs, and Richard relaxed. Two years before things had been different along this coast. England had been at war with France. Yet now all appeared quiet on the Channel. No storm-swept seas, no dark clouds, no French navy lurking off the opposite shore, nor the frequent sight of British blockade ships zigzagging through the water.

Until a month before he, like everyone else, had thought the war was over. Then Napoleon had escaped Elba. Most recent rumors had the Emperor marching through the French countryside on a campaign to gather support.

Richard stared out at the Channel until it dawned on him that he was behaving like some idiotic dreamer who fancied for one instant that he could see what was happening on the opposite shore.

He saw only black -- an expanse of dark water and the night sky. It was that one time of the month when the moon turned coward and its back was all one could see. A smuggler's moon.

He shook his head in derision and guided his mount along the cliff. Smugglers' moons and French armies. He must be bloody drunk, prattling on like one of those superstitious old fishermen from the village. He gave a humorless laugh. Dreamers and fools, the whole lot of them.

He stared off at the southern cliffs, where lights glimmered dimly from the neighboring Hornsby estate. An instant later his mind flashed with the image of a young woman's face framed in a wild mane of curly brown hair.

Letitia Hornsby.

God...there was a thought. He blanched slightly and rolled his shoulder, the same one she'd accidentally dislocated. Instinctively his hand rose to his right eye, the one she'd once blackened with a cricket ball. His foot twitched as if it suddenly remembered the pain she'd inflicted dancing on it, and more recently when she'd driven over it with his curricle. After that incident he'd been forced to use a cane for two months.

Leaning on his saddle pommel, he watched the manor lights flicker and wondered if she was rusticating in one of those lit rooms. No sooner had the notion crossed his mind than he felt a powerful, instinctive, and self-preserving urge to put a vast number of miles between them.

No, he thought. Not miles...continents.

The Hornsby hellion -- his recompense for every black sin he'd ever committed. Her London season had been one of the most disastrous in recent history, and her unflagging infatuation with him had been partly to blame.

As vividly as if it were yesterday, he could see her standing in a corner during the first ball of the season, trying to look comfortable and failing miserably.

Gallantry was one of those moral attributes Richard usually eschewed. With good reason. Being gallant, civil, or moral hadn't lit a fire under his father. Through years of rebellion, he had acquired a certain expertise at patrimonial arson.

But the night of that ball, he'd asked the hellion to dance. The motive for his doing so still escaped him. Logic had naturally dictated that, by the age of seventeen, the chit would have outgrown her childhood affection for him. But she hadn't. If anything, that one dance had only made matters worse. Every time they met, at every social event they both attended, some catastrophe happened.

It didn't take long for malicious word to come of her banishment with only half her season done. Society thought her a joke and had laughed cruelly. He remembered the brief twinge of guilt he'd experienced when, on a fluke, it had been he, the object of her unwelcome affections, who had won two thousand pounds in a tasteless wager on the exact date of her season's failure.

He looked away from the lights of the manor house just as a man's shout, startlingly loud in the silence, echoed up from the cliffs behind him. Turning suddenly, he faced the sound and paused for an instant, then rode toward it, stopping at the edge of the north cliffs, where he used a thicket of gorse bushes and a huge granite rock as a shield.

An outcropping on the cliff beneath him blocked his view of the cove, so he eased his mount toward a narrow dirt path that cut along the cliffside and led to the shore below. About halfway down, just past the outcropping, he stopped.

In the cove, dim lanterns moved like fireflies in the darkness. Again he glanced out toward the sea, searching for some sign of a ship, but still seeing little. He scanned the shore and spotted two skiffs beached below.

A small group of men was unloading crates of contraband, more than likely brandy, Belgium lace, and salt. More dark-clad men moved out from the cave beneath the cliff, lugging long wooden boxes to the boats.

Odd that they would be loading --

A twig cracked above him. He stilled.

A sudden commotion thrashed in the bushes overhead. He tensed, and his mount shifted slightly. Slowly he slid a hand inside his cloak and drew a pistol, then tightened his thighs and nudged the horse forward. Looking upward, he leaned back and took deadly aim.

Another loud rustle...and the bushes parted.

The Hornsby hellion peered down at him. Their gazes met.

He looked at her in horror. She looked at him as if he were the sugar for her tea.

Groaning, he closed his eyes and lowered the pistol.

"Richard..." She whispered his name like a prayer.

With her anywhere near him, he needed a prayer -- a long prayer.

There was another rustle and a vicious growl. Richard stifled another groan as a huge and droopy canine head poked out of those same bushes.

Her dog.

Forget the prayer. He needed a benediction.

The animal took one look at him and snarled. His horse shied. He struggled to control his mount on the narrow path. Dirt and rocks tumbled down to the beach below.

The beastly dog barked.

Quickly he turned in the saddle, scanning the cove. The smugglers must have heard it. Hell, Napoleon could have heard it.

A lantern had stopped directly below him, then another, and another. Richard froze. The men below stared up at the cliffside.

He was caught between two evils -- the smugglers and the twosome from hell.

Her blasted dog barked again.

His horse sidestepped, nearly sending them both over the crumbling edge of the path.

"Oh no!" Letty called out and reached toward him, her face stunned, then horrified. "Richard!"

Naturally, the dog growled.

His horse reared. With an odd kind of resigned horror, he felt the reins sliding through his hands. And Richard slipped off the saddle, his graphic swearing the only sound as he fell.

Down...

Down...

His last conscious thought?

He'd be better off with the smugglers.

Letitia Olive Hornsby believed in fate, in hearts destined, in love at first sight. And she had loved him forever.

Well, perhaps not quite forever, but at nineteen, eight years was nearly half of her life. She could barely remember a time when her heart had not belonged to Richard Lennox, her neighbor and, of late, the earl of Downe.

His enviable title had nothing to do with her devotion. The earldom should not have been his. In fact she'd heard that he held nothing but scorn for his father and the title. Richard was a second son and grossly out of favor if rumor had been true.

But two years before all that had changed with two shots from a highwayman's pistols. His father and older brother had been killed. Richard was suddenly an earl.

No, to her the earldom meant nothing. The man meant everything.

No one tried harder, or with less success, than Letty to make her dreams come true.

But she had hope, and the solid belief that God never closed one door without opening another. The strength of those beliefs and her tenaciousness were what carried her through the times when God slammed that proverbial door in her face.

Her mother had died when Letty was seven. Although her father loved her, he was no substitute for the gentle hand and guidance only a mother could give a daughter.

Not a day of her awkward girlhood had passed that she didn't miss her mother terribly and wonder if perhaps she might have turned out differently -- better, more refined, less inept, and perhaps less lonely -- had her mother lived.

Her father spent most of his time with antiquities -- anything ancient, buried, and Roman, which accounted for her horrid name. Letitia was Latin for "delight," and her parents thought it most appropriate at the time. Her papa christened her with the ghastly middle name of Olive, which was the Roman symbol of peace -- something he'd also claimed he'd had little of since the day she was born.

The first disaster she could remember happened when she was eight. It had been a difficult and lonely year for a suddenly motherless girl. Her father's attention had become so terribly important to her.

She had practiced talking for hours, until she could cover numerous subjects and thoughts in one breath. Intending to dazzle him with what she considered her oratory skills, she'd plotted a reenactment of a discourse by the famous Roman orator Cicero.

She had donned a toga -- one of the crisp white bedsheets from the linen closet -- then painstakingly cut Roman sandals from one of her papa's saddle flaps and ingeniously fashioned the sandal straps from his finely tooled Spanish bridle.

With a pair of dressmaking sheers, she had cut her long hair into a short cap of curls just like that on her papa's bust of Julius Caesar. And she topped those curls with an...