The Earl of Hearts

Cover

The Earl of Hearts

When Melony Farramond’s betrothed was disfigured in a horrific fire eleven years ago, she succumbed to her fears and terminated the engagement, unable to face the prospect of a long life with a crippled monster. Now a lonely spinster, she’s overcome by regret and wishes only to see him one more time, so that they might both put the past behind them.

Lord Hartley Kentigern was badly scarred in the fire that took the lives of his father and younger brother, and the tragedy became unbearable when his fiancée broke off their engagement soon after. Sinking deeper and deeper into a morass of cynicism and bitterness and haunted by a rejection he can never excuse, he now lives a solitary life on his estate, resigned to enjoying only fleeting comforts in the arms of an occasional willing woman.

With the annual Valentine masquerade ball approaching, Hartley’s concerned sister hatches a scheme to bring Melony and her brother together once more, in a final effort to force him to confront his demons. It’s a plan that could backfire and reopen the most painful of wounds, or be the one chance Hartley and Melony have to forgive both each other and themselves and rediscover the love they were meant to share.

Title Page

Copyright

The Earl of Hearts

Donna Lea Simpson

This novella was originally published as Valentine Dreams in the collection From My Only Valentine, published by Kensington/Zebra in 2003, copyright © 2003 by Donna Lea Simpson.

Beyond the Page edition copyright © 2014 by Donna Lea Simpson.

Material excerpted from Lord St. Claire’s Angel copyright © 1999 by Donna Lea Simpson.

Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs

Published by Beyond the Page at Smashwords

Beyond the Page Books

are published by

Beyond the Page Publishing

www.beyondthepagepub.com

ISBN: 978-1-940846-08-8

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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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

Excerpt from Lord St. Claire’s Angel

Classic Regency Romances

Books by Donna Lea Simpson

About the Author

One

Hart, you’re brooding again. What’s wrong?

Lord Hartley Kentigern glanced up at his sister, Lady Charmian St. Edwards, and shook his head. You’re mistaken, Charm. I’m not brooding. I was just considering, er . . . the crop in the east field this year.

His sister, a tidy, slim woman of thirty-one years, two years younger than her brother, sat in a chair opposite him, folded her hands on her lap, and stared into his eyes. He turned his face away. So that is why you are sitting alone in your library of a winter’s eve, staring into the fireplace. You’re thinking of crops.

Yes.

I don’t believe you.

That is not my concern.

Charmian expressed her frustration with a clicking noise and a shake of her head. But the earl refused to elaborate, nor would he let her anxiety on his behalf draw him out. His thoughts—and his dreams—were his own.

His dreams. He buried his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes, wondering when he would sleep again without that dream. A woman’s voice, a woman’s delicate touch, her scent, lilacs in rain: it was driving him to distraction, he would admit to himself if not to his sister. It was just that there was something familiar in her touch, and yet not familiar. He couldn’t even explain it to himself, and he knew if he voiced it, it would sound absurd.

He had conned over every woman he had been with in the last ten years—the list was not overlong, but there were a few willing widows and even one divorced woman—but not a one smelled just so, or felt just so in his arms, as the woman in his dreams. It was beginning to haunt his waking hours, this obsession with figuring out who she was.

Because she touched not just his hair and his body, but also his face. His fingers traced his right jaw and up the right cheek, touching, probing . . . wondering. She touched his face. Caressed his scars.

Why? What did it mean?

Charmian gazed steadily at her brother, waiting for a response to her last statement, which had just been that it was her concern that he was not eating and likely not sleeping. But he hadn’t even heard her. He was staring into the fire again. As she watched, he raised one hand and lightly touched his face, the scars on his right side a terrible reminder of tragedy, a harrowing night that lived in her own memory as a grim nightmare. She still awoke, sometimes, thinking she smelled smoke, her heart pounding, her ears ringing, and again she was nineteen and in London for the Season, having a wonderful time until the night that changed her and her brother’s life forever, the night of the fire.

The fire.

It seemed so long ago now, and yet sometimes it came back to her with such clarity it was as if it had occurred just the day before. Her father, the Earl of Kentigern, had been in London with his whole family: his wife, Lady Kentigern; Hartley, who was his oldest son and heir to the earldom; herself, the only daughter of the house; and . . . Lawrence. Little Lawrence, forever seven, her beloved brother, a sweet, energetic, mischievous boy.

Had he been playing with a candle or had the candle just tipped over? No one would ever know how it had started, but it had been conjectured that a candle had caught on a curtain in Lawrence’s room on the third floor. Charmian’s mother later said her husband smelled smoke and raced to his younger son’s room, even as he commanded Hartley to get Charmian and their mother out of the house. He could have commanded a servant to go up to the nursery, but he would trust no one with his younger child’s safety.

Charmian had huddled with her mother on the pavement outside as the eerie glow of fire in the upper floors and the steady stream of panicking servants had filled the dark night with confusion. Nanny, who had been down in the kitchen getting Master Lawrence a drink of milk when the fire started, stood out on the street, milk still in hand, and set up a high keening wail that Charmian could still hear sometimes, ringing in her ears. And she remembered with awful clarity the dark figure moving by the window of Lawrence’s room as the heat shattered the glass with a pop and a tinkle.

The butler, an older man named Bacon, staggered out of the house; he had tried, he said, to get to the earl and young Lawrence, but thick, acrid smoke had choked him until he was close to unconsciousness. He had barely made it downstairs and out.

Hartley had then dashed back into the house after his father and brother even as the butler pleaded with him not to go, saying that the whole third floor was consumed. But Hart was not one to listen.

He seldom spoke about what happened next,