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  Historical Jewels

  Carolyn Jewel

  Copyright

  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.

  Boxed Set Copyright © 2016 by Carolyn Jewel

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Cover Design by Damonza.com

  All rights reserved. Where such permission is sufficient, the author grants the right to strip any DRM which may be applied to this work.

  ISBN: 978-1-937823-53-5

  About This Boxed Set

  Three Sexy Historical Regency Romances

  The Spare: Sebastian and Olivia.

  Scandal: Lord Banallt and Sophie.

  Indiscreet: Lord Foye and Sabine.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About This Boxed Set

  The Spare

  Scandal

  Indiscreet

  About Carolyn Jewel

  The Sinclair Sisters Series

  Excerpt from Lord Ruin

  Books by Carolyn Jewel

  Change Log

  The Spare

  Carolyn Jewel

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004, 2011 by Carolyn Jewel

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  Cover Design by BookBeautiful.com

  All rights reserved. Where such permission is sufficient, the author grants the right to strip any DRM which may be applied to this work.

  ISBN: 978-0-9833826-1-4

  cJewel Books

  About The Spare

  She’s missing a day from her life. He thinks she may have killed his brother.

  “A delightful battle-of-wills romance, tinged with suspense.”

  (Kathe Robin, Romantic Times)

  Seriously wounded in his last naval encounter, Captain Sebastian Alexander returns home to recuperate and inherit the earldom vacated by his deceased brother. As a party of relatives and friends visits the Pennhyll Castle to celebrate the year’s end, red-haired Olivia Willow is invited to even out the numbers. But the new Earl of Teirn-Cope has a hidden agenda for Olivia’s invitation.

  The forthright and resilient Olivia witnessed the murderous attack on the earl’s brother, an incident she’s blocked from her memory. Is it possible she had something to do with his brother’s death? As the truth slowly comes to light, Sebastian and Olivia’s lives are changed forever.

  The Spare is a Regency romance murder mystery. If you like well-plotted tales, engaging passion, and a touch of gothic, then you’ll love Carolyn Jewel’s steamy and mysterious novel.

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  The Spare Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About The Spare

  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 One

  Pennhyll Castle, Cumbria, January 3, 1812

  Captain Sebastian Alexander, late of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, glared at his valet’s reflection with eyes reputed to have frozen boiling water on the spot. To no avail. McNaught continued mixing another noxious remedy guaranteed to taste like poison. Sebastian turned on his chair and found the motion did not pain him as much as he expected. He ignored McNaught and his potion. “I am not mad, James,” he said to the man beside him. A hound the color of a thunderhead raised its muzzle and sniffed the air. He stroked the dog’s head.

  “You are an Alexander.” James did not look away from his collection of essays by Montaigne. “You are too practical for madness. Besides, you aren’t old enough to fear your mind in danger of infirmity.”

  “I saw a sailor go mad once, and he not yet twenty.” At rest, Sebastian’s face marked him as a young man, barely thirty, a handsome man with blue eyes and hair just shy of black. Certainly, unquestionably, his eyes were blue. As bitterly cold as ice at dawn. From across a room, his eyes pierced with a rapier’s thrust to the heart.

  James gave him a look. “I’ll warrant his madness was not from age.”

  “The ocean broke his mind. We were becalmed seven weeks on water smooth as glass.”

  “Your mind is sound, of that I am convinced.”

  “I’m not to be back at sea for weeks yet. What am I to do with myself until then?” He shuddered. The hound at his side rose, and Sebastian rested a hand on its sleek shoulder. “If I don’t get another ship right away, I might be here even longer.”

  “Stop complaining. Brave naval captains such as yourself are always at the head of the list for ships.”

  “Jesus.” He rubbed his face with both hands, disliking the way his mind whirled all out of order. “I am ancient, James.”

  “Hardly.”

  “In my soul. Weary to the very core and adrift. Becalmed. I lack purpose.” He drew in a breath, felt pain blossom at the peak of inhalation, and then slowly exhaled. “I want occupation, and I am too exhausted to find one.”

  “You are in the very prime of life, Sebastian.” Which James said in a very deliberate and annoyed manner because the idea of Sebastian Alexander succumbing to weakness was ludicrous.

  Sebastian eased back against his chair. “Listen to me.” He made a face of self-disgust. “Complaining like an old woman. A man makes of his life what he can. He doesn’t sit about bemoaning his fate. I’ll have my ship if I have to get down on my knees and beg for it.”

  James sat straighter. “You are Tiern-Cope. The world comes begging to you, not the other way round.” He gestured, a wave that took in everything. “Forget the sea. Pennhyll is your purpose. Your position in life is now your occupation. You oughtn’t go back at all. Your duty lies here.”

  Sebastian sighed. “I never wanted this.”

  “I daresay a gentleman doesn’t want half the duties that fall to him, but that does not absolve him of responsibility.”

  “Of that, I am painfully aware.”

  “Sebastian, you are not old,
and you are certainly not mad.”

  “Not mad.” He laughed softly. “Last night, I saw—” He pressed his lips together, then continued because he feared silence would break his mind the way a glassy sea broke that young sailor. “I dreamed a man stood at the foot of my bed.”

  James closed his book on an index finger. “What an appalling lack of imagination.”

  “I thought it was Andrew.”

  “Was it?”

  Andrew and his countess both gone and their killer not brought to justice. By the time the black-bordered letter caught up with him, his brother was nine months dead, on the very heels, it seemed, of the death of their father. And then he’d been wounded and given leave to recuperate and put his affairs and estate in order. Six weeks of his leave passed in a fog of pain. Nothing had been the same since he came to Pennhyll. Nothing. “Andrew is dead.”

  “Well, yes, of course he is. But this is Pennhyll, after all.”

  Sebastian almost let the subject drop right there. Except he couldn’t. The mood of his dream clung to him like the scent of smoke on a man who went too near a fire. “Andrew never had eyes like that.” He remembered the impact of staring into those eyes as if it had really happened. Blue eyes. Alexander eyes. Instead of the affable gleam so typical of his brother, eyes of keen appraisal. “Like ice in the morning.”

  “Is that all he did? Stand at the foot of your bed?”

  Sebastian stared at the blanket on his lap. He did not like feeling ridiculous, and he was uncomfortably aware of the absurdity of implying a dream was more than a dream. Jesus, he must be mad. “He spoke.”

  “And?”

  “As if my life depended upon what he said.” The hound rested its head on his lap. With an absent fondness, his fingers stroked the grey dome of the dog’s head. Even at rest, there was about him the promise of action, as if he might at any moment leap to his feet.

  “And?”

  “I could not hear him.”

  “Actually,” James said, lowering his voice and leaning with one hand at the side of his mouth. “It’s normal to have dreams. Lots of people have them. I had one myself last night. About a lusty widow who—”

  “I saw him as clear and solid as I see you right now, and then he disappeared. I don’t want that.” Sebastian pushed away the glass proffered by his valet.

  “Pennhyll, my dear Captain Alexander, is haunted—”

  “Damn potions addle my brains.”

  “—however—”

  McNaught’s round cheeks drooped. “A new tonic, my lord. Prepared—”

  “Jesus! That smells like—” At his side, James’s book snap closed. “Awful.”

  James shook his head. “I doubt you saw Andrew last night.”

  “Hell.”

  McNaught stared at the glass in his hands. “Wouldn’t be proper medicine if it didn’t, my lord.”

  A smile flickered on James’s face. “You saw not Andrew, but the fourth Lord Tiern-Cope.”

  “Sod off. Not you, McNaught.”

  “The Black Earl, dead these four hundred years and more, appears to the Lords Tiern-Cope to warn of impending doom.”

  “I mean it, James.”

  James’s flint-grey eyes widened in mock horror. “It’s plain why he appeared to you, Sebastian.” He waved a hand and came perilously close to knocking aside McNaught’s potion. “A fate worse than death itself awaits you.”

  “Bugger yourself.”

  “Not what I had in mind.” James pretended to dodge a blow and McNaught, seeing his potion once more in danger of being dashed to the floor, clutched the glass to his chest. “My dear Captain,” James said in a drawl that sent Sebastian to the very brink of irritation, “you are not mad. You saw the Black Earl last night—”

  “I didn’t.”

  “—because your bride, the future countess of Tiern-Cope, is here. At Pennhyll. Or, more precisely, there.” He pointed at the window before them.

  “Where?” The glass-paned conservatory wall reflected his image, though faintly, as if this, too, had been depleted by injury. He saw a leaner man than he used to be, with a pale face below dark hair. Next to him, James’s seated reflection held a book on his lap. A third figure showed in the glass, looming just behind. McNaught, of course, though for an instant his heart jumped unpleasantly. Some trick of optics made his servant appear quite tall. Nearly as tall as Sebastian himself. McNaught, however, stood no higher than Napoleon and a full foot short of his employer’s height. Quite the trick of light for his rotund little servant to seem twice his height and half his weight.

  Sebastian stared hard at the shadowed orbits of his eyes. Penetrating the reflected trio of invalid, friend and servant, he looked through himself. Outside himself. Thick hedge the height of a man’s thighs marked the nearest garden limits and beyond that, lawns and more gardens. Instead of grey reflection, he saw filtered sunlight on a winter’s palette. A freshly swept flagstone path led up-slope to a lawn twenty yards distant where, through the gap in the border, he could see people strolling or lounging on chairs. In the sizeable area of lawn cleared of snow, two women played tennis, watched by several men intent on the contestants.

  James re-opened his book. “You were sleeping when they got here.” He shot a glance behind them. “McNaught, bless him, as much as told me it’d be my life if I disturbed your rest. Besides, I’m certain I mentioned she’d be here any day.”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Fourteen. Sixteen counting the two of us.”

  “You said a few.” He didn’t even try to keep the peevishness from his voice. “Only a few guests.” What he wanted was the comfort of a ship under his feet and failing that, one night without dreams that felt more real than the stones of Pennhyll Castle.

  “Sixteen is a very good number for a country outing.”

  “It’s a damn crowd.”

  “You oughtn’t complain of me, Sebastian. I’ve got you four ripe country lasses to choose from, any one of whom would be thrilled out of her stockings to be the next chatelaine of Pennhyll.”

  “I do not want any guests at all.” He had never been the most social of men. Now, he was realizing how much he’d come to enjoy solitude during his years at sea. As for Pennhyll and his title; he didn’t want either.

  James shrugged.

  “I don’t want a wife.”

  “A problem, my dear Captain.”

  “I know I must.” He snorted. “The earl must be married so he may start his nursery and ensure the succession.”

  “Special license at the ready, I trust.”

  He lifted a hand in a gesture of disinterest guaranteed to dash the hopes of feminine hearts. “All I need is a bride I don’t want.”

  “Well, then.”

  “What I want is to go back to sea. If I cannot have that, I want to be left alone. And if I cannot have that, then I want to be married without the bother of country outings, or parties or wooing or of pretending emotion I do not feel. And never will feel.”

  “Sebastian, Sebastian, Sebastian.”

  “I want a wife happy to leave me my solitude, who makes no demands for love or affection. Will one of those young ladies do that?” He pointed, then stared out the window. Imagining him in command of a ship, cool in crisis, took no effort whatever. “There are six young ladies, James. You said there were four.”

  “One of them is my sister. And though Diana is young, she’s hardly a country lass.”

  “Which one is she?”

  James looked out the window. “The one with the largest dowry.”

  Sebastian tried not to laugh but not hard enough to succeed. God save him, James did make him laugh, even when he didn’t want to. The smile warmed his features and threatened to put life in his eyes.

  “She’s playing tennis. The brunette.”

  “Ah.”

  “Of the gentlemen, I’ve made sure you’ve no competition there. None are as rich as you are now, they haven’t titles, and they’re quite dull. I don’t think even one
of them has been to London in a decade or so the least. Good squires and yeomen all, I’m sure. And, aside from me, of course, none are as handsome as you, either. You ought to thank me.”

  “Why did you say there were four to choose from when there are six?”

  “Why, indeed.”

  “If you were a sailor, I’d have you keelhauled for your insolence.” His father echoed in his voice, a fullness of confidence and arrogance. He’d never once thought he’d be the last of the Alexander men. Instead, the youngest of three sons, he’d embraced a career at sea and found that, like his father, he was born to command. He wanted that again, to return to the sea and to command, because then his life would be his own once more. Ever since he knew he would not die of his wound, if he reached for the man he used to be, he found nothing he recognized. The certainty of his life and his place in it had forever sunk beneath the waves, washed away in a tide of pain. He wanted his old self, his real self, back.

  James’s eyebrows arched. “The gentlemen have more polish than you. You’re a bit rough about the edges, Sebastian. But—” James sounded altogether too cheerful “—that can’t be helped.”

  Sebastian stared out the window. James’s sister hit the ball smartly. Her opponent, patently a novice at the game, did not. A good many of the exchanges involved her picking up the ball and attempting to lob it over the net. She didn’t make two in five shots, though with practice she no doubt would soon make a better account of herself. She moved with a vigor out of proportion to her ability. Her bonnet, a useless cap so far as he could see, flew off her head. Red hair. Not auburn or Titian or strawberry blonde, but hair of a deep and excessively blatant red.

  Images from another of the wretched dreams that plagued him flashed into his head. A woman swooning or perhaps falling. Red hair, red as a copper kettle on fire. Sounds, too, he recalled with unpleasant clarity. A deafening, roar. Fear. A shrill cry. Pain. A woman’s inconsolable sobs. Though quickly banished, the memories left an imprint, an echo of color and emotion that once come to mind, like the contents of Pandora’s box once opened, could never again be locked safely away.