The New Earl's Convenient Wife

An 1830s marriage of convenience, high society romance continues the Soldiers to Heirs series

Reigniting an old longing…

For the new Earl!

When his brother dies unexpectedly, soldier Rafe Tynesley is forced to become the new Earl. His late brother’s betrothed, Juliana Waverton, helps Rafe adjust, but originally destined to be a countess, she’s facing spinsterhood. Rafe’s position requires he wed, so he'll return the favor—by offering Juliana a practical marriage!

Juliana has always secretly loved Rafe, and his proposal is bittersweet—it’s all she’s ever craved, but he’s sworn off love, so she can’t forget it’s for convenience. Yet how will she protect her heart when her husband’s touch sends her up in flames?

Thorne Hall, Lake District, March 1814

CHAPTER ONE

Slipping into a pew, Lieutenant Rafael Tynesley knelt and bowed his head as multicolored light from the ancient stained glass windows washed over him in tints of blue and red, darkening his deep auburn hair to a burnished sienna and turning the sleeve of his uniform coat a glowing blue. After being away at war almost continuously for the last five years, the family pew in the medieval village church seemed both familiar, yet strange.

Not nearly as strange as the tragedy that had brought him home, he thought, a grief mingled with disbelief once again swirling through him. Who could have imagined that what his brother’s last letter had described as a ‘mild autumn cold’ could have turned into a putrid infection of the lungs virulent enough to cause Ian’s death?

He’d intended to say a prayer for his brother’s soul before crossing through the woods and gardens to the house, a way to ease himself back into a place and position he’d never expected to fill. But with his mind clouded by regret or dull with incomprehension, words failed to come.

Not that he’d expected to be inspired by a tide of memories. He’d loved his brother and respected him, but they’d never been close. Ian had been quiet, bookish, musical like their father, while Rafe was the noisy, boisterous one, always eager to leave the house for the fields or the forest, keen on the riding, hunting, and fishing in which his older brother had little interest. The one who always seemed to get into mischief, returning with muddied clothes or skinned knees. When they’d gone away to school, it had been Rafe who shielded Ian, pugnaciously daring anyone to bully his sibling and ever ready to back up that dare with his fists.

He’d always thought, if he survived until the war against Napoleon was finally won, when he returned to Thorne Hall, Ian would be married to his long-time fiancée, Juliana Waverton, the father of an heir and a band of other offspring. He’d go on absently overseeing the estate in the same detached manner as the father he so closely resembled, while between visits, Rafe, as a younger son, would be seeking his fortune elsewhere.

But somehow, that wedding had never happened. Ian had died single and childless, leaving Rafe with no family closer than a second cousin. And making him the new Earl of Thornthwaite.

Earl of Thornthwaite. Shaking his head at how oddly that rang in his ear, he managed to find a few words asking the Lord’s blessing on Ian and rose wearily to his feet. As soon as news of his brother’s death reached him, he’d come home directly from where his unit, the 16th Queen’s Light Dragoons, had been blockading Bayonne while the bulk of the army headed for Toulouse. Stopping only briefly in London to inform the Horse Guards of his intention to resign his commission, he’d not even lingered long enough to obtain new civilian clothing.

He figured the minimal bits of kit he’d left at Thorne Hall would be adequate until he had time to get new garments made up. It wasn’t as if he’d be on display as chief mourner at his brother’s funeral; obviously, that event couldn’t have been delayed for the uncertain length of time it would take for news of Ian’s death to reach him and for him to return to England.

His haste had been prompted more from a sense of lingering disbelief—perhaps he’d return to find the message had been premature, that Ian had recovered after all—and uncertainty about what his position as earl—a rank he’d never expected to receive and a responsibility for which he’d never been trained—would entail.

An uncertainty that made a return to the family home, which should have been familiar and easy, seem even more strange and uncomfortable, as if he were trying to run after inadvertently donning someone else’s boots.

An apt analogy, he thought wryly as he walked out of the church, closing the heavy door gently. He would be running in someone else’s boots—his brother’s.

Why had Ian’s engagement not ended in marriage several years ago? Rafe wondered again as he headed towards the family plot to pay his respects at his brother’s tombstone. He hadn’t imagined he’d be able to attend the wedding, being rather occupied with Wellington’s forces in the Peninsula, but he’d long been expecting to hear about it, either in one of his brother’s brief and infrequent missives, or from the bride herself.

And what of that bride? he wondered suddenly. The two respective families, owning neighbouring estates, had planned since childhood for the Earl of Thornthwaite’s son to marry Baron Waverton’s daughter. At first the proposed bride had been the elder daughter, but with nothing formally settled before Agatha went to London for her first Season, where she nagged a marquess’s son, with no objection from either party, the role of bride devolved upon her younger sister.

Juliana must be…what, four-and-twenty by now? he thought, frowning. An age considered truly on the shelf. Or had something happened he’d not been informed of and she’d married someone else? If not…

Musing about her current whereabouts, as he rounded the side of the church, he spotted a short, slender figure rising from behind a new tombstone before which she’d just laid a wreath of spring flowers. As she straightened and caught sight of him, her hauntingly familiar dark brown eyes widened in shock, her pale face going whiter still. With a gasp, she reached out to clutch the top of the tombstone, as if to keep from falling.

Recognition registered in a flash. ‘Mouse!’ he exclaimed, surprise at seeing her so unexpectedly sending her old nickname to his lips. Concern immediately submerging surprise, he hastened to assist her.

Sliding to a halt, he reached out to steady her, immediately suppressing an odd tingle his mind refused to identify. Concentration back on Juliana, he thought for a moment she would throw herself into his arms before, with a ragged sigh, she gently edged out of his hold and gave him a tremulous smile. ‘Rafe! I’m so glad you are home at last.’

She looked so careworn and vulnerable, every protective instinct urged him to pull her close and shelter her against his chest. But this was no longer the little girl he’d rescued from tree branches and whose scratches he’d patched up after they’d roamed through the woods. Noting the self-possession and a quaint dignity in her expression, instead, he said, ‘Juliana, I’m so sorry for your loss.’

‘Your loss, too. As tragic as the circumstances are I can only be thankful you were called home and out of war’s danger still intact.’

‘You worried about me?’

‘Of course!’ she replied, looking a bit affronted. ‘You’ve been my best friend since I was seven. Brave and valiant as I know you are, surviving takes luck, too. How could I not worry and pray for your safe return? But you’ve had a long ride and must be longing for a warm fire and some hot tea. Shall we go?’

Nodding, Rafe offered his arm, which she took with a bit of reluctance, a wave of sympathy for her muting the slight frisson induced by that contact. How odd must it seem to her, so long affianced to his brother, to touch or accept assistance from any other man? Even from him, who truly had been a dear friend since their youth.

‘My return has been expected, I’m sure,’ he said as, after giving his brother’s grave a quick salute, he turned her down the pathway towards the Long Walk leading back to the Hall. ‘How do you come to be at Thorne Hall? And wherever is your maid or groom?’ he asked, only belatedly realizing she appeared to be entirely alone. ‘Your family should never have let you visit here unprotected!’

‘My nurse-turned-maid, Baxter, is back at the Dower House. Where we have been staying. As you know, it’s only a short walk from there to the church and I wanted solitude.’

To mourn, he thought with another wave of grief and sympathy. ‘You always were a solitary creature,’ he teased, trying to lift her spirits. ‘But—you said you’d been “staying” there? Are your parents visiting as well?’ The family would certainly be welcome, but as their home, Edgerton Manor, was only a several-hour journey by coach, it seemed odd that they would prefer the accommodations available at the Dower House, which Rafe vaguely remembered as old-fashioned and sparsely furnished, to the comforts of their own house.

Juliana gave a derisive sniff, but bit back the acid rejoinder it appeared she’d been about to utter. ‘I’ve been here some time, and their duties at home precluded either Mother or Papa from accompanying me.’

Distracted at first by his irritation at this most recent example of the slighting fashion in which her family had always treated their younger daughter—a strange woodland sprite who either would not or could not adapt herself to the habits and behaviour of a ‘proper’ young lady—Rafe only belatedly realized the implication of her remark. ‘You’ve been here for some time?’ he echoed.

With a sigh and another tremulous smile, she nodded. ‘I’ll tell you the whole. But first, I must give you some…warning. I’m afraid you’ll find Thorne Hall sadly changed from the way you remember it.’

Surprised, he’d been about to ask in what way, but as they left the woodland path and passed through the brick gatepost into the Long Walk, he understood immediately what she’d meant.

The Tudor-designed brick-walled enclosure had been his late mother’s chief delight. Arranged around a central walkway were rectangular beds planted in ornamentals, alternating with square areas intended for herbs and vegetables, with espaliered fruit trees on the brick walls beyond the pathways that outlined the whole expanse. Graceful carved statues of wood sprites and smiling maidens decorated some of the corners, fancifully shaped topiary shrubs as their backdrop, while the outside edges of the beds were bordered by low-clipped boxwood hedges.

At least, that’s the way the garden had looked the last time he’d strolled through it. After his mother’s passing while he was still a teen, his father and then his brother had maintained it according to her design.

She’d hardly recognize it now.

Walkways were still visible, but the grass that had once been lowcut and even now grew in untidy clumps. Weeds surrounded the hardy herbs in the vegetable plots and a haphazard mix of roses and cottage garden flowers filled the ornamental beds, the most aggressive ones leaning out over the uneven boxwood borders into the pathway, as if to grab at the heels of passers-by. An unrecognizable sprawl of greenery spread in all directions behind the
statues, while untrimmed extra branches reached out like beseeching arms from the untended espaliers on the walls. The whole area gave an impression of forlorn abandonment.

Rafe turned to Juliana in dismay. ‘Is the house as bad as this?’

Her expression solemn, she said, ‘Not quite. But the evidence of neglect is still apparent. Which is why we’ll go to the Dower House first, where we can be sure of a warm fire in the hearth, hot tea and something edible to accompany it. As no one tried to interfere, Baxter and I saw to putting it in order right after we arrived.’

‘If the house looks anything like the Long Walk, I’ll need sterner sustenance before I see it,’ he replied grimly. ‘But why is everything in such disarray? Ian was no more enthusiastic about estate management than our father, but surely he tended things better than this! Or his staff should have. I’d understand it better if he had been ailing for years, but he only fell ill last autumn, didn’t he? How could so much damage occur in just a few months?’

‘First, tea and a warm fire. Then I’ll explain.’