A Necessary Deception Read online

  A Necessary Deception

  By

  Georgie Lee

  Please visit www.Georgie-Lee.com to learn more about Georgie Lee and her books.

  Other Novels & Novellas by Georgie Lee

  The Cinderella Governess* - Book #1 Governess Tales

  Rescued from Ruin* - Book #1 Scandal and Disgrace

  Miss Marianne’s Disgrace* - Book #2 Scandal and Disgrace

  A Debt Paid in Marriage* - Book #1 Business of Marriage

  A Too Convenient Marriage* - Book #2 Business of Marriage

  It Happened One Christmas*

  The Captain’s Frozen Dream*

  The Courtesan’s Book of Secrets*

  Engagement of Convenience*

  Lady’s Wager

  Studio Relations

  Hero’s Redemption – novella

  Mask of the Gladiator – novella

  A Little Legal Luck – novella

  Rock ‘n’ Roll Reunion - novella

  Sweet Chances – novella anthology

  *also available in paperback

  COPYRIGHT © 2016 by Georgie Lee

  A Necessary Deception is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

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

  Published in the United States

  Table of Contents

  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 ONE

  Hampstead Heath, England - October, 1811

  "Mary, your husband is back. He isn’t dead!" Mr. Ogden called out from his place behind the bar. He pointed to a circle of cheering patrons surrounding a man in the center of the Marquis of Granby pub.

  It can’t be. Mary Thomas dropped the tankard she carried, barely aware of the beer wetting the tops of her shoes. The thrill of being innocent and in love, the pain of separation and unalterable mistakes, loss, disappointment and fear unraveled inside her like the rope the brewers used to move the heavy casks. She braced one arm against the post beside her. Captain Charles Beven had left. He wasn’t supposed to come back.

  She let go of the rough wood and picked up the empty tankard, leaving the beer to dry on the floor. With a shaking hand she set the pewter on a nearby table, struggling to gather her scattered wits. Emotion had carried her away once before with Charles, leaving her with nothing but regret and problems. She wouldn’t allow it to happen again.

  Through a gap in the crowd surrounding Charles, she caught her first proper look at him. He was leaner than she remembered, his cheekbones sharper beneath his longer brown hair, but there was no mistaking the joyful spark in his rich hazel eyes while he accepted the good cheer heaped on him. His optimistic nature had, for a time three years ago, lifted her out of the routine of helping her parents run the Marquis of Granby pub. Then he’d left to return to his regiment in Spain, and she’d ignored his letters until they'd stopped coming.

  "This will be trouble," Aunt Emily whispered as she came up beside her, leading Mary's two year old son John by the hand.

  "It's worse than trouble." Mary tugged at the stubborn knot of her apron, her fingers shaking too much for her to get it loose. Then her hands stilled as Charles finally noticed her. She braced herself, waiting for his vivid eyes to turn hard with accusations.

  I shouldn’t have pushed him away. After the lie she and her family had told everyone, she’d had no choice.

  He didn’t scowl at her but his smile stiffened as he stepped out of the center of the well-wishers and slowly approached her. She yanked the apron strings and they came apart, making the white garment billow out around her before she crushed it together and flung it down beside the tankard. In the fall of the fabric and the flicker of the lamplight above it, she could almost see his tanned skin against the sheets, feel the weight of his thigh on top of hers, and hear his deep voice caressing her in the dark. He wasn’t likely to speak so sweetly to her tonight, nor should he.

  She straightened to face him, settling her shoulders but not the tremor making her knees weak. She’d cared for him, but their time together had led to the first of many problems that year, some of which still threatened her and the pub.

  "Who’s the man?" her son asked in his small voice.

  He was someone who'd chosen a bad time to return from the dead.

  ~*~

  Charles fixed on Mary, ignoring the men clapping him on the back and welcoming him home. He’d pictured this moment so many times in Spain and during the crossing over when he’d stayed on deck to watch the shores of England come into view. The lantern light from overhead danced in the blonde streaks in her chestnut hair exactly as he remembered. The slight hue of red which graced her cheeks and the merry curve of her full lips were absent. There was no humor in her amber eyes, no teasing lowering of her lashes to brush her cheeks before she raised her gaze again, no softness in her movement as she removed her apron and set it aside.

  She doesn’t want me here. I shouldn’t have come back. Yet he couldn’t stay away. When she'd failed to respond to his letters, he'd railed at her inconsistency and then sworn to forget her. He never had. During the last month while he and his unit had struggled to rejoin the army after being stranded behind enemy lines, his regret over leaving her had haunted him. When he'd come home, grateful to have survived, he'd vowed to claim more from life than the hell of war, and if possible, to do it with her. There was no way to discover if they had a future together except to see her again.

  He stopped before her, towering a good head over her petite yet curving figure. She eyed him with the same hesitation mixed with longing as the night they'd slipped upstairs to her room and made love before he’d left for Spain. He yearned to caress her cheek and banish the uncertainty hovering between them like the smoke in the pub’s common room but he kept his hands at his sides, still uncertain if she’d welcome his touch or his return.

  “Mary, it’s wonderful to see you again. I thought about you while I was away.” The words were inadequate to express how he’d clung to the memory of her during the long and cold nights in the forest when he and his men had hidden from the French. But standing here before her at last, he tried to feel her out as he would a peasant whose loyalties in Spain were unclear.

  “I thought about you too.” She glanced at the small boy who clutched her aunt’s hand and studied Charles with wide brown eyes. His amber eyes and round face marked him at once as Mary’s child.

  Charles opened and closed his fingers at his side as all the dreams he’d carried through the darkest nights in Spain shattered. No wonder she hadn’t answered his letters. He’d lost her to another man while he’d been away.

  Covering the crumbling of his imagined future beneath a shield of good natured confidence, he smiled at the boy and bent down to greet him. "And who is this fine lad?"

  Mary exchanged a wary look with her silver-haired aunt. The noise of the pub patrons rushed in to fill the pause before it seemed to recede with her answer.

  "He's your son."<
br />
  CHAPTER TWO

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me I’d gotten you with child? I had a right to know, to take responsibility for him and you.” Charles thundered as he strode back and forth across the empty private drinking room.

  Mary’s cheeks burned with shame. She wasn’t proud of having deceived him, and everyone, but it’d been necessary. “In a way you did. When I discovered I was with child, father and mother decided to tell everyone we’d married before you’d left and that you’d died in Spain. They said it would keep us from having to explain your absence in case you never came back.”

  “Which is why you didn’t answer my letters. You didn’t want me to reappear and ruin your ruse.” At the far end of the room, Charles stopped and whirled to face her. The men’s laughter in the common room drifted through the closed door. “No wonder they cheered when I walked in. It’s not every day a woman’s husband is resurrected. Were you hoping the French would shoot me and guarantee I didn’t return?”

  “No!” To imagine him lying lifeless in a Spanish field made her shiver. “I didn’t want to lie but I had to pretend we were married so the customers wouldn’t call John a bastard or shun the pub because of me. We couldn’t afford to lose business, especially not after father died.”

  Charles’s stern expression softened. “I’m sorry about your father’s passing, and your mother’s.”

  She nodded her thanks. It’d crushed her to burn his letters and with them the comfort of his affection. In his arms, she’d forgotten herself for a while, but their time together had been as big a mistake as her mother's poor choice of Paul, her second spouse. “I also had more freedom as a widow than a wife to protect the pub. If I’d decided to marry later, the right to pass it on to John without a husband interfering would have been mine.”

  “Then why didn’t your mother do the same and give you the Marquis of Granby to run instead of remarrying?”

  “I begged her to, but she wanted someone to take care of her and the business, and she didn’t trust me to do it. She said if I was weak enough to get myself with child out of wedlock, I was too weak to run the pub.” She lowered her head as the old failure seared her.

  Charles strode to her and with two fingers tilted her face up to his. His touch lit up her cold soul and brought back the peace she’d experienced during their night together. Regret shone in his eyes as much as it tortured her heart. “I would’ve helped if you’d let me.”

  “It wasn’t possible.” She lifted her chin off his fingers and took a step back, refusing to succumb to the same false promise of security which had trapped her mother in her disastrous second marriage. “As your wife, I would’ve had to follow you to Spain, and my mother would’ve lost everything to Paul. He had gambling debts and used money from the Marquis to pay loans and secure more for continued nights at the tables. Thankfully, the fever claimed him a week before it did my mother. If it hadn’t, Paul’s son would have inherited the pub and with it John’s legacy. Since their deaths, I’ve worked hard to clear what’s owed and keep from losing it, but there’s one more sum outstanding.” And it was the worst. Mr. Pratt held Paul’s last and largest debt. With payment due in days, it was about to consume everything unless she could find a way to raise the money. Charles was a complication she didn't need.

  "And now that I’ve returned?"

  “You must keep pretending until you go back to Spain.” She couldn’t make their marriage legal and risk losing control of the pub, and John, to a man she barely knew. Nor could she saddle him with her debts and problems.

  Charles leaned back against one of the round tables and rested his large hands on the scarred wood, something of the carefree officer she’d adored flickering in his cocksure smile. It made her toes curl in both desire and worry. “I’m not going back. Major Wilson is speaking with Lord Beckwith about a posting for me in London. I’m home for good.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “I’ll marry you and we’ll make this charade of yours real,” Charles announced. His father had taught him to meet his obligations and he had, joining the Army to support his mother and sister after his father had died in debt and the creditors had seized the family bakery. John and Mary were his responsibility and he’d see to them too. “Together, we’ll find a way to deal with the remaining debt.”

  “No.” Mary lifted her chin like a defiant enemy soldier, the loose strands of her hair falling back to caress her neck. He wanted to tuck them behind the delicate curve of her ear, and then crush her to him until her stoic stance softened into the languid embrace he used to cherish. “I’ve solved my problems on my own before, I’ll do it again.”

  He drummed his fingers on his crossed arms, the warmth of her chin still vivid against his fingertips. He admired her determination and spirit but not when she turned them against him.

  “I’m willing to take them on to help you and John.” He pushed away from the table to stand over her. The faint scent of rosewater and the bready tang of hops surrounded her, bringing back all the nights he’d come here to buy ale he hadn’t drunk simply to speak to her. Every male patron had admired her, but she’d favored him as she’d swept through the tables, matching his teasing word for word when she’d set down the tankards in front of him, the curve of her white arms as alluring as her hips beneath her dress. It hadn’t only been lust which had drawn them together, but a joining of similar souls. During their single night together, when they’d lain satiated and languid in each other’s arms, she’d listened to him describe the struggle to take care of his mother and sister, and how hard it’d been to be away when his mother had died. He’d told her his worries of being killed and leaving his sister to fend for herself in a difficult world. Mary’s life back then had been secure, but still she’d understood his worries, not placating him with shallow reassurance, but comforting and heartening him. If he hadn’t been called back to Spain so suddenly, he would have proposed. If he hadn’t been so enraptured by her, he wouldn’t have been careless during their night together and added to the problems which had turned her from a lively young woman to one overwhelmed with woe. “I realize things haven’t been easy for you, but you can trust me as you did before.”

  If any of what they’d shared three years ago still lingered in her heart, she hid it well, revealing little as she answered him. “I don’t know if I can.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “You’re being as foolish as your mother.”

  Mary turned from the barrel in the taproom to frown at her aunt. “How can you say such a thing?”

  “It’s true. Like her, you’re not considering the consequences of your decisions.”

  “Such as when I bedded Charles?” Unlike her mother, Aunt Emily had never condemned Mary for her mistake. It stung to have her do it now.

  Aunt Emily tugged at the gold locket with the miniature of her deceased husband. “I don’t blame you for what you did. Captain Beven gave you a chance to be young and impetuous after years of working here with your folks. It was a mistake to allow your mother to talk you into pushing him away. Don’t do it again. Accept his proposal and his help.”

  “And give Charles legal control of everything including the Marquis and John?”

  Aunt Emily laid a steadying hand on Mary’s arm. “Don’t think about what you’ll give him but what you’ll gain. You’ll have the love and support of a husband and John will have a father who’ll teach him to be a man.”

  Mary stared at her aunt’s thin fingers clasped tight on her sleeve. Aunt Emily was right, a son needed his father but she wasn’t sure she needed a husband, or love. The word had never passed between Mary and Charles, not even in the darkness when he’d touched her as if she’d been everything to him. She’d fed on the memory during the difficult days when she’d worried about losing the pub or in the middle of the long nights when she’d soothed a fussy John, but hurrying Charles to the altar in the hopes he might solve her problems was as bad as her mother’s rush to wed Paul. “Mother thought Paul w
ould take care of her and look how that ended."

  “She was foolish to trust him, and you can learn from her mistakes, but don’t let them rule you. Captain Beven is no Paul.”

  “What if you’re wrong? Paul was kind, and tricked us all until after the wedding, then it was too late. Captain Beven could do the same.” Her worries overruled the urging of her heart to accept him. “We spent so little time together before he left. I hardly know him.”

  “Come with me.” Aunt Emily tugged Mary to the slightly ajar door behind the bar. “Look there.”

  Mary peered into the near empty common room where Charles sat with John. She whirled on her aunt. “You left John with a stranger?”

  “I left him with his father.” Aunt Emily gently turned her back to the scene.

  Charles blew dust off a small horse he’d whittled from one of the tinder sticks and handed it to the boy. John squealed with joy and Charles ruffled his son’s unruly hair. His genuine delight in John touched Mary’s heart as deeply as his flattery used to when he’d first come here three years ago, standing out among the dully dressed farmers and laborers in his red uniform. While her father had filled tankards, Mary had served them, taking every opportunity to pass by Charles’s table and revel in his charming smiles and witty remarks. Many men had tried to woo her between pints of beer, but none had entranced her like Charles had then, and now. His uniform might be faded but the lightness of spirit which had drawn her to him, the sense of duty, honor and strength which marked every word and movement still existed. It showed in the deftness of his fingers on the knife as he laid it aside, and in the strength and width of his shoulder as he sat straight on the bench.

  “If Captain Beven treats his son, who he hadn’t met until this morning, with such care, and while his mother isn’t looking, imagine how well he’ll treat you,” her aunt whispered.