About the Author
JANICE PRESTON grew up in Wembley, North London, with a love of reading, writing stories and animals. In the past she has worked as a farmer, a police call-handler and a university administrator. She now lives in the West Midlands with her husband and two cats and has a part-time job with a weight management counsellor (vainly trying to control her own weight despite her love of chocolate!).
ISBN: 978-1-474-08529-8
REGENCY SURRENDER: SCANDALOUS RETURN
Return of Scandal’s Son © 2015 Janice Preston Saved by Scandal’s Heir © 2016 Janice Preston
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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Chapter One
April 1811
Eyes streaming, coughing and choking, she tugged at the window, but it refused to budge. The floorboards scorched her feet and she could hear the ominous roar of the fire below. Dragging the pungent air deep into her lungs, she screamed.
‘Ellie. Ellie. Wake up!’
‘What?’
Eleanor, Baroness Ashby, roused to the gently rocking rhythm of her carriage. She stared groggily into the anxious eyes of Lucy, Dowager Marchioness of Rothley. Eleanor levered herself upright on the squabs, her nightmare still vividly real.
‘You screamed. Was it the nightmare again?’
Eleanor drew in a deep breath—fresh, clean, untainted. ‘Yes. I’m sorry if I frightened you, Aunt.’ Her heart slowed from a gallop to a fast trot. ‘Everything seems so real in the dream. And I can never get out.’
‘Well, we must be thankful you escaped the real fire, my pet. It doesn’t bear thinking about, what might have happened.’
‘Milady?’ Lucy’s maid, sitting on the backward-facing seat, opposite Eleanor, leant forward.
‘Yes, Matilda?’
‘Is it true someone set fire to the library deliberately?’
‘Yes.’
Eleanor did not elaborate. Someone had broken into Ashby Manor—her beloved home—at the dead of night, piled books into the middle of the library floor and set fire to them. The whole east wing had been destroyed. All those beautiful books!
‘I told you.’ Lizzie, Eleanor’s maid, also travelling in the carriage to London, nudged Matilda. ‘If milady had not woken up when she did, she’d be—’