The Revenge of Lord Eberlin Read Free

society. Obtaining a title might have seemed impossible to any other man, but he’d been determined that society would never dictate the course of their future again.
    So he’d gone out and bought a title.
    In truth, it had fallen into his lap. A minor Danish count, Lord Eberlin, had arranged for Tobin to bring him enough guns to equip a small army but had not been able to pay. Tobin had been infuriated. He’d delivered the arms at considerable risk to himself and his company, and he would not be hoodwinked.
    As it had happened, the people of Denmark hadbeen in the throes of internal turmoil. Old acts of entitlement had been giving way to the popular will of the people and a desire for serfs to be landowners in their own right—just like the French had done a generation before. Tobin had seized on that knowledge and had assured Eberlin he could make his life quite difficult. And then he’d made him an offer he hadn’t possibly been able to refuse—a generous payment for his estate and his title.
    The former Count Eberlin had taken what money he’d had and decamped to Barbados. It had taken only a generous endowment to the courts in Copenhagen to turn a blind eye to the deal and transfer Count Eberlin’s small estate and title to Tobin. He’d kept dissension among the tenants to a minimum by giving arable parcels outright to the serfs who had tilled the count’s land for decades. As a result, the estate was now little more than forest and manor.
    Tobin didn’t care about the estate; what mattered to him was England. He was now a count in an English society that was rather sensitive to titles and entitlements. He’d accomplished the impossible—he’d become one of them.
    In the winter of 1807, the newly minted Count Eberlin had returned to London to spend Christmas with his sister. Over dinner one evening, she’d told him that the old earl of Ashwood had died.
    “Good riddance,” Tobin had scoffed, and gestured for a liveried footman to fill his wineglass.
    “He left no heir, you know,” Charity had said.
    Tobin had shrugged.
    “Miss Lily Boudine is now his closest kin, so she has been named countess and inherits the whole of Ashwood.”
    That had gained Tobin’s undivided attention. He’d looked up from the goose that graced the Limoges china plates.
    “Imagine,” Charity had said as she’d picked up her wineglass, “that she, of all people, should find herself a countess after all these years.”
    The news had made Tobin’s blood run cold. He’d thought of the injustices she’d heaped on him with her lie, a lie that still festered in him like a septic wound. And he’d come back to Hadley Green to right that wrong, once and for all.
    The memories kept Tobin so lost in thought that he didn’t realize where he was until Tiber Park rose up majestically before him. He reined up for a long look at the place. It was as he recalled it—a monolith, too big for anyone but a king to maintain, abandoned for the want of cash.
    Sometimes it seemed to Tobin that God had all but divined him here. It was a fluke that he should have remembered this place at all, but quite by coincidence, Tobin had hired an Irishman to breed a premier racehorse for him. When his agent had told him that the Irishman would breed the mare at Kitridge Lodge in West Sussex, it had almost been as if the heavens hadset the stage for him. Of course Tobin knew of Kitridge Lodge; his father had worked there when Tobin was a boy. It had reminded Tobin that there were several mansions in West Sussex, and he’d wondered …
    As soon as he’d completed the purchase of Tiber Park, work had begun on the estate. He was pleased to see the progress thus far. The white stone had been cleaned of grime and soot, and construction was under way on two new wings that, appended to the existing house, would form a square around the lush gardens. He’d ordered European rugs and furnishings for it, had bought generations of art collections from estate