To Serena, sharing outrageous midnight adventures with Sir Adam Langthorne seemed the ideal way of proving to both of them that she wasn’t as staid and colorless as he thought.
Glimmers of the wild young girl she had once been, up for any mischief on offer, must still lie under Countess Serena’s sober facade after all. She reminded herself reckless actions led to uncomfortable consequences and managed to crush her inner hoyden for the time being.
‘Good luck then, Sir Adam,’ she managed to say cheerfully enough, and offered him her hand in farewell as she opened the front gate.
He bowed over it like a beau from a previous age and kissed it lightly. Fire shot through her, as if he had touched his lips to bare flesh instead of her supple leather glove. She snatched her hand back and looked about her.
‘Shall we say half an hour, my lady?’
Captain Langthorne’s Proposal
Harlequin®Historical
Author Note
The idea for Adam and Serena’s story came to me whilst I was wondering if a Regency heroine whose ideal match had proved the exact opposite, leaving her an older, wiser and more cynical widow, could fall in love again and this time forever. Surely it would take an exceptional hero to convince her to take another chance on love? And he would need to be even more stubborn than she was herself if he stood any chance of persuading her to actually marry him.
That hero turned out to be Captain Sir Adam Langthorne, and I have to admit to finding him rather exceptional myself. But Serena was never going to be such a pushover and fought her feelings for the handsome baronet every inch of the way. I hope you enjoy their story and their company as they clash, test each other’s passions and love, while also becoming entangled in a series of perilous adventures that threaten to bring their story to an untimely end.
Captain Langthorne’s Proposal
ELIZABETH BEACON
TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON
AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND
To the two Di’s: Diana Russell and Diana Singelton,
the best friends any author could wish for.
ELIZABETH BEACON
lives in the beautiful English West Country, and is finally putting her insatiable curiosity about the past to good use. Over the years Elizabeth has worked in her family’s horticultural business, became a mature student, qualified as an English teacher, worked as a secretary and, briefly, tried to be a civil servant. She is now happily ensconced behind her computer, when not trying to exhaust her bouncy rescue dog with as many walks as the Inexhaustible Lurcher can finagle. Elizabeth can’t bring herself to call researching the wonderfully diverse, scandalous Regency period and creating charismatic heroes and feisty heroines “work,” and she is waiting for someone to find out how much fun she is having and tell her to stop it.
Available from Harlequin®Historical and ELIZABETH BEACON
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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
Epilogue
Chapter One
Countesses didn’t hide in damp woods from handsome baronets, Serena Cambray told herself sternly. Once she had been too proud to hide from anyone—how her current cowardice would have been reviled. Well, people changed, and the widowed Lady Summerton perhaps more than most, Serena informed herself stoutly, and tried to sit as still and cool as an ice-sculpture on her slightly damp tree stump. Even as she tried to tell herself she was quite calm, her thoughts drifted to the man she was avoiding so assiduously. If only she had seen beneath his youthful arrogance and that annoying air of omnipotence to the man he would one day become, how different her life might have been.
The first time she had met Adam Langthorne he had threatened to tan her hide and send her home to her father, with a message informing him that his daughter would never be permitted contact with his sister again.
‘Only my grandfather’s sense of chivalry prevents me from packing you off right now, even if you have to travel all night,’ he had told her, and looked down his nose at her from the superiority of his lanky height and his new commission in His Majesty’s army.
Serena had glared back at him and refused to admit she had anything to apologise for—even if she and Rachel Langthorne had been within a whisker of causing a scandal and had put themselves in deadly peril. To be labelled ungovernable hoydens given to outrageous pranks like dressing up as coachman and postilion and stealing his grandfather’s carriage to