Read Online The Countess's Groom by Emily Larkin - Free Book Online

the mobcap on her head and looked around. Her nightgown lay on the ground. She picked it up.
    “In London.” Will chuckled softly. “I thought the jeweler had recognized it, that he was going to have me arrested for theft. Instead, he offered me eleven hundred guineas!”
    “Is that enough to buy a farm?”
    “It’s enough for a dozen.”
    “I only want one,” Rose said, folding the nightgown. “With you.”
    Night surrounded them, shadows and moonlight and silence. In a few hours the sun would rise. A new day would begin. And our lives will start afresh .
    Joy bloomed inside her.
    “I bought something for you, Rose.”
    Will took her left hand. Cool metal slid onto her ring finger. “With this ring, I thee wed,” he said in a low voice.
    Emotion constricted Rose’s throat, making speech impossible.
    “This is forever, Rose Cobb.”
    Rose nodded, blinking back tears. She gripped Will’s hand tightly. “Forever.”
     

 
    Epilogue
    SEPTEMBER 16, 1763
    When Henry Quayle, fifth Earl of Malmstoke, returned from the West Indies and read his wife’s suicide letter, he screamed with rage. Turning on Boyle, he drove her from Creed Hall with his horsewhip, beating her as savagely as he’d ever beaten his wife. Then, mad with fury, he ransacked his wife’s room, smashing furniture, shredding her clothes.
    In Rose’s dressing room, he discovered her godmother’s jewelry case. Quayle broke it open with a poker. He shrieked like a banshee when he saw the pebbles nestling in the satin lining and the note penned to him by his dead wife. Midway through smashing the box to smithereens, he felt a pain in his chest. Breathing became difficult. His legs buckled.
    “Help,” he whispered, but nobody heard him.
    It was several hours before his servants dared to venture into that part of the house. They found their master dead on the floor, his wife’s note clenched in one fist.
    …
    Eighteen months later, on the other side of the Atlantic, Will and Rose Cobb’s first child was born, on a bright spring day when the foals pranced in the meadows and young fruit trees blossomed in the orchard.
    The sixth Earl of Malmstoke, disliking Creed Hall’s bleak aspect, placed it on the market. The hall, along with the hidden cupboard and the Countess’s secret journal, passed into the hands of the Strickland family. But that’s another story...
     
     

 
    About the Author
    Emily grew up in a house full of words and books – her mother worked as a librarian and her father was a novelist – so perhaps it’s not surprising that she became a writer.
    She loves to travel and has lived in Sweden, backpacked in Europe, and journeyed overland in the Middle East, China, North Africa, and North America. She enjoys climbing hills, yoga workouts, and watching reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly .
    Emily writes fantasy novels (with strong elements of romance) as Emily Gee, and Regency romance novels as Emily Larkin.
     

 
    The first chapter from The Spinster’s Secret . . . based on Rose’s secret journal.
     
    His lordship swiftly divested me of my gown, placing hot kisses on the skin he bared.
    “You are a goddess,” he breathed, as he untrussed my bosom …
    Matilda Chapple glanced at the window. Outside, the gray overcast sky was darkening toward dusk. If she hurried, she could mail this installment of Chérie’s confessions before night fell.
    Seizing me in his arms, he carried me to the bed , she wrote hastily. He pushed aside the froth of my petticoats with impatience. In less than a minute he had made his entrance and slaked his lust upon my . . .
    Mattie halted, the quill held above the page, and squinted at her draft. What was that word? Feverish? Fevered? Fervent?
    . . . upon my fevered body.
    Mattie continued swiftly copying. Finally she finished: We lay sated in the sunlight. For my part, I was as pleased by his lordship’s manly vigor as he was so evidently pleased by my feminine charms. I foresaw many