The Improper Bride (Sisters of Scandal) Read online

  Cold, arrogant, and demanding Henry Eldridge, Marquess of Riverton, would never dally with a mere servant. But when Henry is injured in a horrible fire, his pretty housekeeper Cassandra nurses him back to health, throwing them together day and night. As he slowly heals from his burns, their friendship blossoms, and the class walls between them start to crumble. Cassandra is surprised by glimpses of a kind and thoughtful man beneath her employer’s hard façade—and even more surprised when she develops tender feelings for him. But anything between lord and servant is impossible…and besides, as a widow, she knows love only leads to heartbreak.

  Henry is changing, as well. His close brush with death has opened his eyes to his self-imposed emotional isolation…and has urgently reminded him of his duty to marry a well-bred lady and produce an heir. Determined to do right by his family name, he immediately begins searching for a suitable bride. But Cassandra is the only woman who is never far from his mind or his heart. Contrary to everything he’s been taught to believe, he realizes his lovely housekeeper might just be his perfect match. Now, if only he could convince everyone else of that. Especially Cassandra…

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Lily Maxton. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  2614 South Timberline Road

  Suite 109

  Fort Collins, CO 80525

  Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

  Scandalous is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

  Edited by Nina Bruhns

  Cover Design by LJ Anderson

  Cover Art by Period Images

  ISBN 978-1-63375-548-2

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition January 2016

  Table of Contents

  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

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Discover more from Lily Maxton… The Affair

  The Wager

  The Love Match

  The Mistake

  Don’t miss out on more Scandalous romance… The Earl’s New Bride

  Enticing Her Unexpected Bridegroom

  Love’s Justice

  For my dad.

  Prologue

  Blakewood Hall

  Buckinghamshire, England

  1817

  Eternal damnation was simply a myth.

  A tale to keep everyone behaving nicely as though they were children who needed to be told how to walk in a straight row. At least that was what Henry Eldridge, the Marquess of Riverton, had always assumed.

  Until he woke up one late autumn night because his ribs ached from coughing and saw orange flame surrounding him. His sleep-addled mind assumed the worst had happened—he’d died and gone straight to hell, which, unfortunately, wasn’t mythical, after all.

  His first thought was that he really should have been on better terms with the local vicar. He barely knew the man, since he rarely attended worship. Perhaps he should have prayed once or twice. Perhaps he should have simply been better.

  His second thought was accompanied by relief—he was sitting on his bed, in his bedchamber at Blakewood Hall—he wasn’t in hell, at all.

  The relief lasted for about half a second before he realized what that meant. The flame enclosed him like a living wall. His heart began to race. He could barely breathe through the smoke, and he couldn’t see a way out. Heavy bedclothes tangled around his body from his fitful slumber, trapping him, weighing him down as his skin turned slick with sweat.

  He grabbed a pillow and pushed it against his face. There, he could breathe a little. Not much, but enough to think.

  “Lord Riverton?”

  His valet’s voice.

  “Where the devil are you?” he choked out, his voice as raw as if he’d been screaming. “I can’t see a bloody thing.”

  Except fire, hot and bright and writhing.

  He could die. He could die here, in his bed, suffocating from smoke, flames eating his body. The thought spurred him into action.

  As he tried to kick out from under the bedspread, a horrible creaking sounded above him. He glanced up, just in time to see a beam crash down from his four poster bed. He didn’t even have time to react. One instant he was awake and struggling to get free, the next instant, the burning wood swung toward him like something from a nightmare. It happened so fast he didn’t feel a thing. Not shock, not horror, not even pain.

  One instant, consciousness.

  The next, nothing at all.

  The surgeon arrived too late. The servants had managed, through sheer exertion and force of will, to blockade the fire and extinguish it, but Lord Riverton was stretched out in one of the undamaged guest chambers, lifeless.

  The valet told the surgeon that the marquess had been struck on the head and rendered unconscious. The fiery beam had fallen on one side of his face, a spark from it alighting on his sleeve and setting his nightshirt ablaze. The servant had managed to drag the marquess from the bed before the flames consumed his whole body, but violent burns marred his arm and shoulder and half his face.

  Some of them were severe. The unpleasant scent of charred flesh wafted toward the surgeon, making him cover his nose.

  He wasn’t surprised that Lord Riverton wasn’t breathing. Sometimes the shock of suffering such wounds was enough to kill. And this man was clearly dead. The valet had pressed his fingers against that still throat, had listened and felt for a sign of life. He would have sworn to its absence.

  He turned away sadly, prepared to tell the servants and the handful of houseguests gathered outside that the worst had happened.

  He took one step. And stopped as a great rattling breath sounded behind him. Slowly, he turned to look at the man on the bed. The marquess wasn’t con
scious, but his chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm.

  The surgeon didn’t know if anyone would believe him, but he was quite sure about this startling fact:

  The Marquess of Riverton had just returned from the dead.

  Chapter One

  Cassandra Davis was shirking her duties as the housekeeper of Blakewood Hall. She’d sent away Lord Riverton’s houseguests, as the man in question wasn’t actually conscious, and the staff didn’t need aristocrats running about with no one to entertain them. Unoccupied aristocrats could be a bit like the sheepdog her family had once owned—friendly when something was put in front of them to catch their attention but rather inclined to tear up the furniture when there wasn’t.

  But she didn’t consider sending them away neglecting her duties. Lord Riverton wouldn’t want them there while he was incapacitated—she was certain of it.

  This, on the other hand—resting in a winged chair in the library while she perused the man’s extensive book collection—was clearly shirking.

  But Lord Riverton would never know. And books were meant to be read. As long as none of the servants noticed where she’d been sneaking off to these past few days, no harm was done. Her fingers smoothed over the crisp parchment, almost lovingly.

  She jumped to her feet when the door opened with no warning. Heart in her throat, she turned, half expecting it to be Lord Riverton. But no, the master of the house wouldn’t be visiting this lovely room anytime soon.

  “Mr. Taylor,” she said, relieved that it was the butler. She’d come to think of him as a friend, though he was at least two decades older than her. All of her brothers were younger than she was, and though she loved them all, they had been absolute terrors at the best of times. If she pictured what a kind older brother would have been like, Mr. Taylor always came to mind.

  In fact, he could sometimes be a little too kind with some of the lower servants, but she balanced him out by being stricter, and they worked well together.

  He might have been a handsome man when he was younger—even now his dark gray hair and long face looked more distinguished than aged.

  He watched her curiously from the doorway. “Hiding away, Mrs. Davis?”

  “Of course not. What would I be hiding from?”

  He moved across the thick Axminster carpet to stand by the winged chair. Before she could protest, he’d lifted the book she’d been reading from the chair. “Latin?” he asked. “Can you read Latin?”

  “No,” she said, suddenly embarrassed. “I was just…” Indulging my silly fantasies. “I was just looking,” she responded, almost wryly.

  Mr. Taylor handed the book to her with a slight lift of his eyebrows, and she turned to the tall mahogany bookcases to replace the volume, pretending it was perfectly normal to a find a housekeeper in her master’s library looking through a book written in Latin. She didn’t know what she’d been thinking, to start coming here after the fire.

  Well, perhaps she did. At first she’d been thinking she was grateful the fire hadn’t touched the library and all the beautiful, beautiful books Lord Riverton owned. She’d been right alongside the other servants, scraping her hands on brick as they’d walled up the south gallery to contain the fire. For a moment, she’d nearly sunken into despair. It was too late. The fire was spreading too fast. Blakewood Hall, the house she’d run for five years, the place she took such pride in, would surely crumble to ash.

  It was silly to become so attached to stone and wood, but she feared losing the house would take a piece of her heart.

  But by some miracle, by the sweat and blood of every single servant working together, the gallery was walled in time, and when Thomas arrived back from the parish church with the fire engine, they’d managed to put out the blaze.

  The south wing of the house was damaged beyond repair. The day after the fire, she’d stood in one of the ruined bedchambers. Bare trees had been visible through the gaps in the blackened wall. She’d wrapped her arms around herself to ward off the cold autumn breeze that came through the breaches. The wall hangings had been scorched beyond recognition, the furniture only rubble.

  So, she’d initially gone into the library, her favorite room in the entire house for its understated elegance—plain white walls offset by rich green and white drapes with a floral pattern that matched the furniture—just to make sure it was still there. Still in one piece. It was a sentimental gesture, she supposed. Obviously, it was all in one piece. The library wasn’t in the south wing. The heavy damask curtains didn’t smell of smoke. The parquet floor was untouched. The lovely crystal chandelier still hung in the middle of the ceiling. And the bookcases that stretched along nearly every inch of available wall were intact.

  There was no reason for her to be there. She didn’t need to inventory any destroyed furniture. Or clean any blackened surfaces. But even though she had no call to be there, she’d still taken a book from the shelf, still sat down in the winged chair.

  And had continued to do so, every afternoon, for the past three days.

  She tried not to remember that this was Lord Riverton’s private library, and he wouldn’t want her here. Nor that the marquess was currently inches away from death, according to Mr. Faulkner, the surgeon.

  Mr. Taylor gazed at the bookcases for a moment, his back to her. Then he turned, and they stood facing one another, a few feet apart. “You’ve never liked him, have you?”

  She tensed. “Pardon?”

  “Lord Riverton.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “You become…I don’t know how to phrase it—stiffer, perhaps?—when you’re around him.”

  She wanted to say she did no such thing. But she had a sinking feeling she did. She hadn’t realized anyone else had noticed.

  “Mr. Faulkner doesn’t know if he’ll awaken,” Mr. Taylor continued when she didn’t respond.

  She glanced at him, her heart taking a sharp descent. “He thinks Lord Riverton won’t survive?”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  That little dart of…something…shot through her again. Surely, it was only trepidation. She had a secure position at Blakewood Hall. Had, in fact, imagined working here until she retired, though she was currently only two and thirty.

  So it was in her best interest that Lord Riverton didn’t die.

  She didn’t want to be uprooted from the life she’d built here. The security she’d waited for so long to attain. Since her husband’s death, she’d wanted nothing more than a place she belonged, and she’d found that place, found an occupation, at Blakewood Hall.

  “The marquess is demanding,” Mr. Taylor said.

  “And ungrateful,” she added.

  “But he’s never been cruel to any of us.”

  And, sad as it was to admit, that was more than could be said of some employers. She supposed this was Mr. Taylor’s way of saying he wouldn’t like it if the marquess died.

  Cassandra, contrary to whatever she felt she should feel, didn’t think she’d like it, either.

  Chapter Two

  Later that day, Cassandra slipped up the narrow servants’ staircase, coming to stand in front of the door to the guest chamber where they’d put Lord Riverton. She knocked gently, and when no one answered, she went inside.

  The room was about half the size of Lord Riverton’s normal bedchamber. On one side stood a wardrobe and washstand, on the other, a plain, unadorned bed. The wall hangings were a simple striped blue.

  Lord Riverton was unmoving, but she could hear his deep, even breathing. That was a good sign, wasn’t it?

  She stepped closer to the still heap on the mattress, viewing him through a shaft of evening sunlight that filtered past the curtains. He was so wrapped up in cloth and bandages that she wouldn’t have known who he was if she’d come upon him unawares. Gone was his command, gone was his confidence, gone was his arrogance.

  His skin—the parts she could see at least—was pale. Bandages covered one side of his face but the other was untouched. Lon
g lashes shadowed his cheekbone. His eyelid, a bruised blue, almost looked delicate.

  Strange, seeing him like this should have humbled him in her eyes. At least some small, mean part of her should have enjoyed it. But to Cassandra it felt all wrong. Lord Riverton wasn’t this pale, lifeless thing. He wasn’t a shell. She would have preferred him snapping out commands. She would have preferred…anything but this.

  She lifted her hand. Anticipation twisted in her chest, the sharp thrill of the forbidden, and before she knew what she was about, her fingertips grazed his cheek. He felt warm—hopefully it wasn’t the beginning of a fever. Stubble scratched at her, and when she looked closer, she noticed the shadow of an unshaved beard. She’d never seen him less than immaculate before.

  More startling, she’d never touched him before. Five years living in the same house as a man, managing said house for him, and they were little more than strangers. He gave her commands. She obeyed. She never would have thought to touch him if he hadn’t looked so defenseless.

  Never would have known what his skin felt like beneath her fingers.

  Shame filled her. What would he think to wake up and find his housekeeper pawing at his face? What on earth had possessed her?

  A huff of ironic laughter escaped her lips. She knew exactly what had possessed her. For years, some small, secret part of her had wanted to touch the coldly perfect marquess.

  She lifted her hand from his cheekbone and left the room quickly, guiltily, like a child who’d been caught sneaking sweetmeats.

  The next day Mr. Faulkner burst into the servants’ hall while they were at their meal.

  “Lord Riverton is awake!”

  And the relief that swept her at hearing this news was a little too strong for the simple relief a servant might feel for her employer.

  Chapter Three

  Cassandra was in the housekeeper’s room, checking over the household accounts, when a raised voice in the hallway caught her attention. She went to investigate and found two maids, Kitty and Mary, standing in the middle of the narrow corridor with their heads bent together. They were so deep in conversation they hadn’t noticed her.