The Rake of Hollowhurst Castle

‘Something tells me you are truly wild at heart. Do you secretly prefer recklessly courting danger to pretending respectability, Miss Courland?’

‘Don’t presume to know me,’ she snapped back, much tried and confused by her own reactions to the veiled threat in his husky voice.

‘Then discovering your secrets will add spice to the game, my dear,’ he mused.

ELIZABETH BEACON lives in the beautiful English West Country, and is finally putting her insatiable curiosity about the past to good use. Over the years Elizabeth has worked in her family’s horticultural business, become a mature student, qualified as an English teacher, worked as a secretary and, briefly, tried to be a civil servant. She is now happily ensconced behind her computer, when not trying to exhaust her bouncy rescue dog with as many walks as the Inexhaustible Lurcher can finagle. Elizabeth can’t bring herself to call researching the wonderfully diverse, scandalous Regency period and creating charismatic heroes and feisty heroines work, and she is waiting for someone to find out how much fun she is having and tell her to stop it.

Previous novels by the same author:

AN INNOCENT COURTESAN

HOUSEMAID HEIRESS A LESS THAN PERFECT LADY CAPTAIN LANGTHORNE’S PROPOSAL REBELLIOUS RAKE, INNOCENT GOVERNESS

The Rake of

Hollowhurst Castle

Elizabeth Beacon

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my cousin, Jude Taylor, with love and thanks

for your encouragement and enthusiasm. This one’s for you so I hope you like it!

Roxanne Courland stood in the bay of delicately leaded windows that lit the drawing room of Hollowhurst Castle and watched darkness overtake the gloriously unimproved gardens. Soon the quaint old topiary would become a series of unearthly shapes and the holly grove the blackest of shadows. Rumours about the grove being planted by witches, whose terrible curses would fall on anyone unwary enough to visit it after dark, were rife in the surrounding villages. Roxanne thought such tall tales had been invented to frighten the maids away from temptation, though, and wondered if such cunning tactics still worked in the year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and eighteen. Not that it would make an ideal trysting place, of course, but once upon a time she’d have waited all night long for a lover among its spiky darkness, if he’d only asked her to.

Silly, impressionable Rosie Courland and her elder sisters had hidden in its shelter to catch their first glimpse of the guests their brother had invited for Christmas ten years ago, because it was close on midnight and even her elder sister Joanna should have been in bed hours before. How different that joyful season had been at the giddy age of fourteen, she thought now, her heart sore at the likelihood of spending another festive season in splendid isolation. Then she’d been so excited she could barely stop herself squeaking with anticipation as she shifted from one foot to the other in the snow, her boots gradually getting wetter and her feet colder, despite her restlessness.

‘For pity’s sake keep still, Rosie,’ seventeen-year-old Joanna had hissed furiously at her. But keeping still was something elderly people like her sisters did, along with not running and never arguing with one’s elders, even if they were wrong and needed to know it.

‘It’s prickly and dark in here, as well as freezing cold. Why can’t we hide in the oaks by the Solar Tower, or up the Tower for that matter?’ she complained half-heartedly.

‘Because you can’t see the drive, of course, and there’s no leaves on the oak trees to hide us from anyone who heard a squeak from you and swung their lantern in our direction, you silly, infuriating child,’ Maria told her scornfully, ever ready to trumpet her two years’ superiority in age over her annoying little sister.

‘Silly child yourself, maybe you can’t see much from the ground over there, but we could have climbed the oaks, or even looked out from the roof with Grandpapa’s telescope. Nobody would see us up there in the dark at any rate and we’d be a lot more comfortable.’

‘Someone would have caught us sneaking up the stairs the way you rattle on, even if we could see anything up there in the dark with one telescope between three of us. Anyway, I’m not climbing trees in the pitch darkness and Uncle Granger threatened to send you to school the last time you borrowed his spyglass and broke it, so have some sense, do. Either go inside and wait quietly in the warm like a good little girl, or stay here and stop moaning,’ Joanna had whispered impatiently, then gone back to staring fixedly at the avenue as if her life depended on seeing any sign of movement.

‘You’re both so stuffy since you started putting your hair up, I’m surprised you don’t petrify like that silly statue of Virtue in the library. All either of you ever do nowadays is talk about clothes and novels that make no sense at all and you strike the most ridiculous attitudes so the boys will admire you, when they’d like you a whole lot more if you stopped being so stupid.’