One Wild Dawn Read online

  One Wild Dawn

  Dayna Quince

  Red Rose Press

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Thank You

  Newsletter sign up

  About the Author

  Also by Dayna Quince

  Chapter 1

  May 12, 1825 Selbourne Castle

  Lord Roderick Andrews spotted his prey across the grand hall of his castle home. Her dark hair shined in the candlelight, beckoning him, but he remained where he stood, sipping his brandy and watching. He cursed the rivulets of guests that blocked his view of her until she appeared once more. She moved through the crowd, as graceful as a swan gliding across water, smiling and nodding at guests, but never looking his way. A swell of bodies swallowed her again, and Roderick buried the urge to snarl.

  He hadn’t seen the hall this lit with candles, or this crowded with people since…ever. But his brother, the infamous Undesirable Duke of Selbourne, had recently returned to England and everyone wanted a glimpse of the mad, scarred duke. In reality his brother, Weirick, was quite sane but also determined to see Roderick wed as soon as possible. But none of the women invited to this ball compared to the one he truly wanted, the one woman who scorned the very air he breathed. His lungs hitched as she appeared again, closer than she’d been all evening. She did not even know she held his complete attention. Could she not feel the power of his gaze?

  Was she that immune to him?

  Annette Marsden stood tall and elegant, black hair coiled on her head with loose curls framing her face, speaking with her usual polite sereneness to Mrs. Dalrymple. She wore an outdated, white muslin gown, accessorized with a youthful pink satin ribbon under the bust that led one to believe Miss Marsden was the epitome of innocence. But Roderick knew, with one glance into her dark brown eyes flecked with honey and gold, there was so much more. Not that she wasn’t innocent, she most certainly was. Innocent was a word prescribed to the naïve and young, and Annette was one of those few people born with all the knowledge they would ever need, somehow older and wiser than everyone around them.

  Except for one small defect in her knowledge. She had decided some time ago that he was not worth her time, and tonight, Roderick was going to correct that misinformation.

  But first, he would need to approach her, without garnering one of her freezing stares, and beg for a spot on her dance card. And beg he intended to do, for he could not settle for just any dance. No. It must be a waltz. Only a waltz would do for this momentous occasion of which Roderick would begin his campaign to change Miss Marsden’s mind about him. Changing a woman’s mind was no easy feat. One had to thread carefully, not insist or order, and show her the benefits of changing her own mind, the way a gardener carefully tends a delicate flower, feeding, watering, and keeping the weeds at bay until said flower saw fit to open her petals.

  Not the most advanced prose he’d ever strung together, but he’d forgive himself because he only needed to admit that talking to Annette Marsden, let alone dancing with her, made him nervous, and Roderick had thought he’d become immune to such nonsense long ago.

  He drew closer as the conversation between Anne and Mrs. Dalrymple concluded. Annette pivoted away with a gracious smile aimed at those around her and quietly slipped through a side door.

  Roderick just barely caught himself from bolting after her. Instead he frowned down at his cuff, as if it dared to insult him with a stain, and marched through that same door. Not very discreet, but Roderick had discovered during his years as a careless rake about town, that the more ordinary something looked, the less a person paid attention to it. And besides, no one—his mind vehemently repeated, no one—would ever suspect that he and Anne Marsden were up to something together. Her dislike of him was known far and wide.

  Which meant it was the perfect cover for this little endeavor.

  Roderick closed the door, his eyes adjusting to the darkness on the other side. This door led not to the kitchens or withdrawing room, but to rooms guests would not need to venture, affording him many opportunities. But why did she enter here?

  A creak in the floorboards up ahead alerted him to her presence, or perhaps the presence of someone else in the corridor. Either way, he would soon find out.

  He trod silently to the end of the corridor. In the weak light of a moonbeam breaking through a bank of rain clouds, there she stood, bathed in soft light, using it to ill effects to scribble on the papers of her dance card.

  He stood mesmerized, scarcely breathing as he pored over her features, the radiant glow of her skin, the black shine of her eyes that he suspected, if he looked into now, her face tilted up to his in the light, he’d see stars there. A vast space of black with points of light that he could fall into without fear. Her lips would part, the petal soft skin deeper in shade than its usual mauve perfection. But damn it, what would she taste like? In his fevered imaginings, he could never decide.

  “Eep!” She visibly jumped and clutched her hands to her chest.

  Roderick blinked, his musings vanished from his mind as she glared at him, catching him spying on her like the lecherous rogue he was.

  “What the—, Roderick! What are you doing here?”

  “Devil, I suppose you meant but would never degrade yourself to say,” he said and smiled slyly. He moved closer so that more of the moonlight fell on him. “I live here. I can go anywhere I please without question. But why are you here, Anne?” He looked around the dim hall. “Meeting someone?” he teased. He’d yank his eyelids off if it were true.

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “I needed a space to think, and every other public spot available is brimming with people.”

  “Ah, yes. Your demise is other people, hordes of them.”

  She pressed her lips together, no doubt curbing some urge to insult him. Restraint is what lent Anne her peculiar air of seriousness.

  “Whatever the case may be, the truth is I followed you here, so that I may ask to be your partner for the waltz.”

  For a delicious moment, Roderick enjoyed the blanket of shock that covered her features.

  Then she blinked it away. “I beg your pardon?”

  “The waltz. There is only one, and I want to dance it with you.”

  She blinked again. “Good God, why?”

  He chuckled, inching closer. She was still safely out of arm’s reach, but he’d never had the privilege of standing so close to her, utterly alone, and the space between them was rife with possibilities. He was the only one of them aware of the possibilities, but all the same, he was awed to be so close to her. The only recipient of her attention, even if it carried a fair bit of scorn. He was that—he tried to find the right word—lost for her. Yes, lost. That was how he felt. Unmoored, drifting in foreign currents.

  He thought of his poem again.

  She’s quiet as a starless night, as still as waters deep. What lurks there in, secrets? The bones of ships long sailed, sailors entombed…

  Ah, a bit macab
re he decided but still worth finishing, for that was precisely what she made him feel. Lost, destroyed by a force as mysterious and all-consuming as the sea. That was how Anne Marsden made him feel.

  Damn it all.

  He was speechless, and she was gawking at him as if he’d grown a second head.

  He cleared his throat.

  “You…want to dance with me?” she said, with more than a little disbelief.

  “I will be required to dance every set, according to my mother, but tonight I want to waltz with you. We’ve known each other all our lives. It’s time, Anne.” Christ, what did he mean? Time for what?

  An unreadable emotion rippled over her face. “But what of Miss Everly. Everyone thinks you will pick her for a wife.”

  He swallowed, wanting to tug on his cravat that bit into his neck. He stepped closer.

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  She cocked her head to the side and gave him a slow blink to warn him of his stupidity and her impending lack of patience for it.

  “Of course, you can”—he stepped closer—“you see…” Lud, but she was within arm’s reach now. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d been this close to her, near enough to smell her perfume, to count the freckles on her cheeks.

  She folded her arms. She was not amused in the slightest.

  “Miss Everly is in love with my brother, and my brother is in love with her. My courtship of her is only a ruse to incite my brother to stop being an idiot.”

  She snorted, an entirely unlike-Anne sound. “You cannot be serious.”

  “I am extremely serious.”

  “You are never serious.”

  He scoffed. “I am about this. He means to leave England again—for good this time—and I can’t see my mother suffer like that again.”

  Her features softened. “That I believe.”

  “Good. But don’t tell a soul what I have told you. If Weirick knew we conspired to make him fall in love, he’d revolt.”

  “He’d tear your arms off,” she said with a smirk, as if she’d enjoy the spectacle.

  “Yes, I can tell you’d enjoy that, but in the meantime, I’d like to use my arms to waltz with you.”

  He’d caught her off guard. Good, she was forever en garde with him. He needed to convince her to let her walls down just a bit, at the very least.

  “Very well,” she said.

  He raised a brow but kept his triumphant hoot bottled inside. “Very well?”

  “I will give you my waltz.”

  He wasn’t about to question good fortune and ask why she had agreed. He nodded and presented his arm. “Unless you have more meetings to tend to in this hall?”

  She tentatively took his arm. “Not at the moment.”

  The touch of her gloved fingers sent trails of shock up his arm. He escorted her back to the hall where the music was beginning. He scribbled his name in her dance card and then retreated to his brother’s study for a bracing shot of whiskey.

  He was going to dance with Annette Marsden.

  At last.

  Chapter 2

  Anne stood frozen, dazed by the brightness of the King’s Hall lit by hundreds of candles, illuminating every nook and cranny of the intricately carved ceiling. She blinked up at it, the noise around her blurring to one indecipherable sound.

  To be frank, she was stunned. Roderick had spoken directly to her, something they hadn’t done since—she thought back—nigh on eight years? She chewed her lip as she tried to remember.

  It was the summer she turned sixteen, when things were truly terrible for her family and their tenants after the famine of 1816. She was alone on the bluff, watching the sunlight shimmer on the water and enjoying a moment of quiet away from the noise of her family, when he’d come upon her and sat beside her. Anne remembered the tension that had filled her body. She’d seen very little of him since he’d gone away to school years before, but he still came back every summer. He was less a boy and more a man, and at sixteen, she’d begun to notice the difference, and the changes in her own body. His masculine and yet beautiful face had stunned her into silence, the breadth of his shoulders so wide she could imagine him carrying logs with ease. But he was still lanky and lean, not as he was now, his bodied thickened by muscles and maturity.

  She didn’t speak, but he placed a bundle of wildflowers down between them. She eyed it warily, expecting a huge spider to crawl out of it. A trick he’d attempted many times before.

  He chuckled. “It won’t bite.”

  She raised a brow, though breathless as she studied his profile. “If I touch them will my skin erupt in some terrible rash?”

  He picked up the flowers and brushed them against his cheek, then he presented them to her. “See? They’re for you. Happy birthday, Anne. I’m sorry I’m four days late.”

  Her heart sweetly exploded in her chest as his gaze held hers. “For—for me?” She took the flowers.

  “I know it’s been hard for your family since last year. It’s not much of a gift.”

  “Their lovely. Thank you.” She took the flowers, their fingers brushing. Her insides melted into warm honey.

  “I know I haven’t always behaved gentlemanly in your company, tossing insects at you and stealing your hair ribbons, but I’ve come to realize that—”

  “Roderick!” The duke bellowed. They’d both frozen in place, as if they’d been caught in some scandalous act.

  “Come away, Roderick.” The duke’s blunt-edged voice carried over the taught silence between them. Anne twisted to see the duke atop his horse some yards behind them on the road.

  Roderick slowly stood, as if the duke wasn’t there at all, and he was simply bored of watching the ocean waves. He lent a hand to Anne. Anne looked up at him, afraid, and more than a little confused by his actions. Who was this lad and where had he been all this time?

  “I won’t bite”—he grinned—“unless you want me to.”

  A flurry of heat filled her, but before she could respond the duke galloped toward them, and reared his horse far closer than any sane man ought to. Anne bolted to her feet, dropping the posy of flowers, her heart pounding against her ribs.

  “Are you mad!” Roderick bellowed at his father. “You could have killed us both.”

  “If I see you so much as look at that girl, I will. I can spawn another son but I won’t have my blood shamed and diluted by poor gentry. Return to the castle now. You will return to school at once.”

  Anne stood still, afraid of what wrath the duke would turn on her next, but he didn’t even bother to glance at her as he wheeled his horse away and rode off. To the duke, she was only that girl. Never mind they’d been neighbors her whole life. She was poor, and in his eyes, that meant she was nothing to him.

  Roderick glared hotly after his father, but then his gaze moved to her, his cheeks flushed with anger. “I’m sorry. Don’t take anything he says to heart. My brother, my mother, and I think very highly of you and your family. You’re…good, Anne. Better than I could ever hope to be. I must go. Happy birthday,” he said.

  Anne nodded, unable to speak. The flowers had been trampled under the hooves of the duke’s horse. He’d known her birthday? She questioned everything she thought she knew of him, and something warm and pleasant spread throughout her. What had he been about to say? Would she ever know? She watched him walk back toward the castle, the duke shouting orders at him and Roderick ignoring him.

  It was the first kindness he’d ever showed her and the last she ever saw. He seemed to forget that day and returned to his usual arrogant self, but Anne could never forget the way he’d made her feel.

  Alive, hot, and weightless, like she was falling.

  Her foolish young heart could have declared itself won by him in that single moment had the duke not interrupted and reminded her of her place. She’d always wondered what would have happened between them if the duke hadn’t interrupted them. What he would have said, and if—if he might have kissed her. But it was all wishful thinki
ng.

  Their interactions were scant after that day. He grew older, wilder, and he remained mostly in London after finishing university, but her curiosity only intensified. Rumors spread all the way to Northumberland of his antics, the drinking, the carousing. She only saw him in passing, receiving cool nods of recognition. Never again did he look at her as sweetly as he had when he’d tried to give her those flowers. She’d even thought maybe that moment had been a fever dream, born out of her fantasies. So instead she tucked the memory away and chided herself for even thinking he was anything more than what he was.

  A spoiled lord.

  But the moment, the memory still lingered in her mind, burrowing deep and taking root, making her dream of things that could never be.

  And now he wanted to waltz with her. He was a puzzle she couldn’t quite fit together. It didn’t help that his pieces were wit-scattering beautiful, his masculine air nearly overwhelming with his thick light brown hair and stormy sea green eyes. Very much the fallen angel, he was. And he knew it. And he used it. Much like Lucifer, he delighted in being shocking and stirring trouble if it amused him. And that was the very core of Anne’s deep dislike. Though his life was never perfect—she knew never to accuse him of that—he’d still been given everything he could ever need or want, and he dared to not appreciate it.

  Anne, one of nine daughters to an impoverished landed gentleman and extremely fertile mother, simply had no patience or forbearance for his ilk.

  But he still had the ability to stun her with his physical magnificence and it galled her.