Loving Lady Marcia Read Free Page B

Love.
    Love, love, love.
    She smiled at the ceiling, rubbed her lips together, remembering how Finn had kissed her. Ran her hands over her belly, and lower. He’d been there. He’d been everywhere.
    He was a part of her now.
    But then tears blurred her vision when she remembered that she wouldn’t be seeing him that day. She wouldn’t be seeing him for weeks . She lingered in her room, feigning a headache—utterly miserable, ready to snap at anyone who dared speak to her, almost hoping she could, because then she could cry openly, and everyone would think it was because she was sorry for being a shrew. But that wouldn’t be why she’d be crying. Oh, no. She’d be crying because she didn’t belong anywhere Finn wasn’t.
    She was in the midst of packing for the journey to Ballybrook—as if she cared anymore about the new wing Daddy had designed!—when she received a note from Finn.
    Finn.
    Finn, Finn, Finn .
    She wanted to hug the servant who’d brought the stiff envelope. She sniffed it. It smelled of him. Suddenly, her world was sunshiny again.
    She pressed the paper over her heart and seated herself at her dressing table, luxuriating in the knowledge that she was Finn’s and that a message had come from her beloved.
    It would be a love note to tide her over until she got back to her school in Surrey, a missive she’d keep under her pillow. And perhaps in the letter he’d write about when they could next … be together. Perhaps he had a plan for that. Gretna couldn’t come soon enough. She could hardly breathe, thinking of the risks they were taking.
    Being in love, she decided, was not for the fainthearted.
    When she finished the note, she stared at her reflection in the looking glass. The woman that she’d become overnight looked back at her. But whereas moments ago, that woman had been flush with love, her heart brimming over with it, in fact, the person looking back at her now was an empty shell.
    Finn had written that he was shocked to hear he’d be sailing not back to England from Ireland but to America—in accordance with his brother’s wishes.
    “He’s sending me to a property of ours in Virginia for an apprenticeship in land management,” Finn wrote, “but I know the real reason I’m going. He wants to keep us apart.”
    There was a blob of ink, as if he’d forgotten to sign it—as if his hectoring sibling were standing at his bedchamber door with an open trunk demanding that Finn throw his breeches and cravats into it then and there.
    It was the last note Marcia would ever receive from him.

 
    Chapter Two
    1819
    Duncan stopped abruptly on the London pavement. There she was. Across the street in the window of the modiste’s shop. His own girl-on-the-prow.
    Lady Marcia Sherwood.
    He was surprised how visceral his reaction to her was. One minute he’d been discussing the merits of the latest corn laws with his cousin and the next, he couldn’t think quite straight. “Excuse me, Richard.”
    Richard, after Finn the next in line for the earldom, stopped alongside him. “What is it?”
    Duncan was astounded at how the young girl, who’d been sweetly pretty, had blossomed into an extraordinarily beautiful woman. What a lovely surprise.
    “I know her,” he said, taking in the limited view he had of the female who, during his most memorable moment in her company, had unleashed a torrent of words at him. More than words, really—she’d been a veritable hurricane on the high seas, all at the tender age of fifteen.
    “Lady Marcia Sherwood?” Richard craned his neck to get a better view. “Daughter of the Irish peer—and an elusive beauty?”
    “Yes.” And Duncan had a sudden desire to see her. Girl become woman. Beloved become … unbeloved.
    Oh, but that was long ago. Surely her schoolgirl’s heart had recovered from Finn’s decision to leave for America from Ireland a whole year before Duncan had planned to send him. It had turned out to be nothing more than a calculated