More or Less a Temptress Read online

  TEMPTING LACHLAN

  The ballroom was crowded, but predictably, everyone scurried out of Lachlan’s way. Hyacinth had hardly caught her breath before he was standing before her.

  He didn’t say a word. He paused for a moment, his eyes on hers, and then his gaze drifted upward. A muscle in his jaw jerked as he took in her jeweled headband, the mass of fair ringlets gathered at the back of her head, and the long curls trailing down her face to brush her shoulders.

  And then…and then, dear God, his gaze drifted downward.

  Slowly, deliberately, those hazel eyes took her in, and he saw everything. The frantic pulse beating at the base of her throat, the flush spreading over her bare neck and shoulders. She’d been obliged to lace more tightly than usual to accommodate the snug fit of her bodice, and now his hot gaze lingered on the high curves of her breasts rising from the clinging violet silk.

  Hyacinth couldn’t prevent a soft gasp at this blatant appraisal, at the way his lips parted as he skimmed over the trim curve of her waist, the gentle swell of her hips, and lower, over the outline of her legs just visible through the filmy silk. He devoured every inch of her, leaving her breathless, and far warmer than she should be…

  Books by Anna Bradley

  LADY ELEANOR’S SEVENTH SUITOR

  LADY CHARLOTTE’S FIRST LOVE

  TWELFTH NIGHT WITH THE EARL

  MORE OR LESS A MARCHIONESS

  MORE OR LESS A COUNTESS

  MORE OR LESS A TEMPTRESS

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  Table of Contents

  TEMPTING LACHLAN

  Books by Anna Bradley

  Dedication

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Author’s Notes

  About the Author

  More or Less a Temptress

  Anna Bradley

  LYRICAL PRESS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  LYRICAL PRESS BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2018 by Anna Bradley

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  All Kensington titles, imprints, and distributed lines are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotion, premiums, fund-raising, educational, or institutional use.

  Special book excerpts or customized printings can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write or phone the office of the Kensington Sales Manager: Kensington Publishing Corp., 119 West 40th Street, New York, NY 10018. Attn. Sales Department. Phone: 1-800-221-2647.

  Lyrical Press and Lyrical Press logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  First Electronic Edition: November 2018

  eISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0534-2

  eISBN-10: 1-5161-0534-6

  First Print Edition: November 2018

  ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0537-3

  ISBN-10: 1-5161-0537-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  For my daughter, Annabel. Keep putting kindness out into the world, sweet girl. We need it now more than ever.

  Prologue

  Lochinver, Scotland

  January 1818

  His mother was going to die.

  Lachlan Ramsey stood beside her bed, staring down at her wasted face, and he knew this, as surely as he knew the sun would rise this morning, and again the morning after that.

  She might not die today, or even tomorrow, but one day soon the sun would rise, and she wouldn’t be here to see it.

  Elizabeth Ramsey plucked at her bedclothes with pale, skeletal fingers. “What of Isobel Campbell? Surely she hasn’t forsaken—”

  “She has.” Lachlan, unable to bear the pathetic hope on her face, cut in before she could finish speaking. “Isobel, and Ewan as well.”

  Isobel Campbell, his brother Ciaran’s betrothed, and her brother Ewan, Lachlan’s oldest friend. He hardly had a memory that didn’t include Ewan Campbell. Tearing across the moors on their ponies as boys, brawling with the Fitzwilliam brothers as restless youths, and later, chasing redheaded Scottish lasses as randy young men—Ewan had been by his side for every bloody nose, every schoolboy infatuation. Less than a month ago, Lachlan wouldn’t have believed Ewan could ever turn his back on him.

  But he had. They all had.

  “Isobel, and Ewan, too.” Elizabeth closed her eyes for a long, quiet moment, and when she opened them again, they were bright with fevered determination. “It’s over, Lachlan. There’s nothing left for you here. Take Ciaran and Isla and leave this place, and once you’ve gone, never look back again.”

  “They could still change their minds.”

  “They won’t. You know the people here—how stubborn they are, and how proud. They won’t change their minds.”

  “We won’t leave you—”

  “There will be nothing left of me to leave. I’m dying, Lachlan. Let’s not pretend otherwise.”

  He wanted to deny it—to rail at her—to storm through this castle’s every room. He wanted to leave nothing but wreckage in his wake—anything to vent the impotent fury clawing at him, its talons ripping deep into his flesh.

  But rage would do him no good. His mother was right. Elizabeth Ramsey had never been one to cheat the truth, no matter how painful it was. She would die, and they would leave her behind, buried in the cold ground, her grave the only evidence the Ramseys had ever been here at all.

  “Where will we go?” He didn’t say, it doesn’t matter where, though it was true.

  Elizabeth rolled her head on the pillow, and gestured weakly toward the small table beside her bed. “There, in the drawer. A key. Fetch it for me.”

  Lachlan fumbled through the drawer until his large fingers closed around a tiny silver key. “This?”

  He held it up, and his mother nodded. “In my dressing closet, buried under a pile of quilts, there’s a wooden box. Bring it to me.”

  Lachlan did as he was bid. The muted thud of his boots and the rattle of her labored breaths were the only sounds as he crossed the room and entered her dressing closet. He knelt down and shoved the blankets aside, but when he found the box, he paused, sitting back on his heels.

  It was a plain wooden box, unremarkable in every way, and yet the moment he laid eyes on it, a shadow seemed to pass over the room. Lachlan couldn’t have explained why, but everything inside hi
m recoiled at the thought of opening that box.

  “Lachlan?”

  He turned at the sound of his mother’s voice, then rose to his feet and hefted the box into his arms. No use hesitating now. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be worse than what had already passed.

  Much later, after his mother had revealed her secrets, and he, Ciaran and Isla were on the road to England, he’d think about this moment, and curse himself for a fool.

  Things could always be worse.

  “Put it here, on the bed.” His mother was struggling to sit up, and Lachlan helped settle her against the pillows behind her. He tried not to notice how emaciated she was, but as he lifted her, a memory of a dead bird he’d found as a small child drifted through his mind. The dogs had killed it, and underneath the scattered feathers was a pile of tiny, fragile bones—white, impossibly thin, pathetically breakable.

  His mother turned the key in the lock. Lachlan lifted the heavy lid and peered inside.

  Papers—thin stacks lay neatly on top of each other. Most were letters, their seals broken. It looked as if a crest had been pressed into the dark red wax, but it had cracked and hardened over the years, and he couldn’t make it out.

  “The papers, Lachlan. Hand them to me, will you?”

  Again, Lachlan did as his mother bid. Instead of reading them, his mother sagged against her pillows. Her thin fingers clutched at the yellowed sheets. “Perhaps I was wrong to keep this from you, but I’ve never had much use for regrets. They serve no purpose, and they won’t do us any good now. When I die, Lachlan, I wish to be buried beside Niall Ramsey.”

  Niall Ramsey. Not ‘your father,’ but Niall Ramsey.

  He should have anticipated what would come next, but he didn’t.

  He didn’t, because how could he? How could anyone?

  “Once I’m buried, you will take your sister and brother to Buckinghamshire—to an estate there called Huntington Lodge. Present yourself to Phineas Knight when you arrive. He’s the Marquess of Huntington. He may not be pleased to see you—by all accounts, he’s a proud, stern sort of man—but that doesn’t matter. He can’t refuse to acknowledge you.”

  Lachlan stared at her. “Acknowledge me as what?”

  “As his brother.” Her fingers tightened around the sheaf of papers in her hand. “The previous Marquess of Huntington recognizes you as his son in these letters. The current marquess, Phineas Knight, is your elder brother, Lachlan.”

  “Ciaran’s my only brother.” Dozens of confused images of Ciaran flooded his mind—Ciaran as an infant, cradled in their mother’s arms, and later, Ciaran as a boy, always running after Lachlan on his stout little legs, tedious in his adoration, in the way of all younger brothers.

  “No, Lachlan. Ciaran is your half-brother, and Isla your half-sister. Niall Ramsey is their father, but he…he’s not yours. He loved you as his own—no man could have loved you more—but your real father is the late Marquess of Huntington, father to the current marquess.”

  Lachlan took the papers from her hand and stared at them blindly for a moment, then tossed them aside. Even if they did prove his claim to another life, he couldn’t make them mean anything, or connect them to himself in any way. They were just marks on a page, rendered in fading black ink.

  “I’m the bastard son of a marquess?” It was odd, how calm he sounded—almost as if his life hadn’t just been torn apart, and the pieces rearranged in a pattern he didn’t recognize.

  “You’re not a…I was married to Lord Huntington when you were conceived. When I met your fa—when I met Niall Ramsey, you were already growing in my belly.”

  Lachlan sucked in a quick, hard breath, as if he’d just taken a powerful blow to the stomach. “You fled your marriage, and left your first son behind? What kind of mother—”

  What kind of mother leaves her son? What kind of father lets her go, knowing she’s carrying his unborn child?

  He bit down hard on the bitter words, because what did it matter what her reasons had been? There was no answer she could give that would make any of this right in his head, and recriminations were as useless as regrets.

  Then something else occurred to him and his chest tightened with dread. “What about Ciaran and Isla? The Marquess of Huntington divorced you after you left him, didn’t he?”

  Because if he hadn’t, if there’d been no divorce…

  “No. He died several years later. I married Niall Ramsey then, but not before—”

  “Not before Ciaran was born.”

  “Not before, no.” There was no hesitation, and no shame—only determination. “You’re my son, Lachlan, the legitimate son of the late Marquess of Huntington, and younger brother to the current marquess. Isla is my legitimate daughter with Niall Ramsey, and Ciaran—”

  “Was born a bastard.” Lachlan stared at the wooden box, half-expecting a nest of poisonous snakes to slither out. “It’s dumb luck he’s not a bastard still, and I’m…Jesus. I’m not even Scottish. I’m an Englishman.”

  He shook his head, dazed. Less than an hour ago, he’d entered this room as Lachlan Ramsey, son of Niall and Elizabeth Ramsey, brother to Ciaran and Isla.

  Now he was someone else. Someone he didn’t know, and didn’t have the first bloody idea who to be.

  “Not just an Englishman, but an English lord, son to a marquess. It’s your birthright, and your future. Listen to me, Lachlan.” His mother gripped his hand with surprising strength in one so ill. “When you leave Lochinver, you must leave your past here. Isla’s…misfortune, and everything that followed it—you can’t breathe a word of it to anyone. Promise me.”

  He jerked his hand away, repulsed by the touch of her cold, shrunken fingers. “More lies? Haven’t they done enough damage?”

  “Not nearly as much damage as the truth will do, should anyone in England discover it. You need look no further than Lochinver for proof of that. These people have known you your entire lives, and they’ve all turned their backs on you. Do you suppose strangers wouldn’t do the same, if they knew the truth? I lived among the English aristocracy, Lachlan. I know them, how vicious they can be. The past must stay in the past. If it doesn’t, Ciaran and Isla will be the ones to suffer for it.”

  And Ciaran and Isla have suffered enough.

  His mother didn’t say it, but she didn’t need to. Lachlan had witnessed their pain. Their wounds had left scars on his own heart.

  “Protect them, Lachlan. I’m begging you, on my deathbed, to keep the secret. Start a new life, without the burdens of the past weighing on you.”

  Wasn’t a secret its own kind of burden? He laid a hand against the wooden box, and recalled how heavy it was.

  Heavy with secrets and lies…

  Tears stood in his mother’s eyes. “Promise me, Lachlan.”

  Promise her, when she’d broken every promise she’d ever made to him, and to Ciaran and Isla, by keeping the truth hidden away in her dressing closet, locked inside a wooden box.

  But she was his mother, and she was dying, so in the end, Lachlan gave her the promise she demanded. Not only because she’d begged him to, and because he loved her still, no matter what she’d done, but because he couldn’t deny the truth of her words.

  He couldn’t trust anyone. Not those you believed to be your friends, or the man you’d called your father, and not your mother, who had secrets of her own, and would have seen them buried along with her, if she could have.

  By the time the sun rose the following morning, Elizabeth Ramsey was dead. By the end of the week, they buried her. The flowers they placed on her grave were still fresh when Lachlan, Ciaran and Isla left for Buckinghamshire.

  Their mother had warned them to forget their past, and they heeded her words. They left the only home they’d ever known, the only friends they’d ever had, and two cold, silent graves behind them.

  Not a single one of them looked b
ack.

  There was no reason to. There was nothing left to see.

  Chapter One

  Aylesbury, England

  Late January, 1818

  Blood oozed from the corner of Lachlan’s lip, trickled down his chin, and dripped onto the snowy white folds of his perfectly knotted cravat.

  Damn it. Another night, another brawl, and another ruined cravat. “Damn you to hell, Ciaran. Why do you always have to strike me in the mouth?”

  Lachlan seized his younger brother by the neck of his shirt and shoved him backwards, and the two huge hands squeezing Lachlan’s neck fell away as Ciaran stumbled against the railing behind him. He and Ciaran were of a similar size, so it was no easy feat to send his brother sprawling, but then Ciaran was already staggering before Lachlan laid a finger on him.

  Drinking the better part of a bottle of whiskey could do that to a man.

  Ciaran, who was far too drunk to know any better, staggered to his feet and lurched forward again. “It’s not a proper brawl without blood, brother, and mouths bleed.”

  As if to prove his point, one of Ciaran’s enormous fists came barreling straight for Lachlan’s face, but before he could land the blow, Lachlan grabbed his hand, threw him off balance with a twist of his arm, and slammed his foot into the side of Ciaran’s shin.

  Ciaran dropped to his knees, and Lachlan was over him in a flash, his fingers gripping Ciaran’s hair to keep him still as he lowered his nose to within an inch of his brother’s. “Noses bleed, too. You’re begging for my fist in yours, but I’ve no wish to spill your blood tonight.”

  He’d spilled Ciaran’s blood the night before, and the one before that, but any hopes Lachlan had he wouldn’t have to spill it again tonight vanished when a sudden blow to his ribs ripped the breath from his lungs.

  “Oof!” He toppled sideways, and landed on the ground next to his brother, gasping for air. He rolled onto his back, but before he could scramble to his feet, Ciaran’s knee landed in the center of his chest and pinned him to the ground.