The Return of the Earl

By Sandra Schwab

Can they overcome the betrayals of the past for a second chance at love?

On the Continent they call him the Ice Prince, icy of manner, icy of heart. Now, after thirteen years of exile, Con returns home to England and to Harrowcot Hall, a place haunted by memories of a long-lost friendship and past betrayals, a place where all of his dreams shattered and died.

But the past is over and done with, and can no longer touch him -- or so Con thinks. He certainly does not expect to come face to face with Bryn Ellison again, the man whom he once loved beyond everything and who repudiated their bond in the cruelest way imaginable.

As snow and frost close in on Harrowcot Hall, Con's icy demeanour starts to melt while he grapples with old hurts and newly awakened passions. Will he give in to the lure of the past against his better judgement?

WARNING:
This book contains a very grumpy earl, a dashing stablemaster, some ravishment in various places, several garden follies, a lot of snow, and a horse called Lancelot.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sandra Schwab
• Release date: Oct 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386059875

Book preview

Sandra Schwab - The Return of the Earl

THE EARL RETURNS

On the Continent they call him the Ice Prince—icy of manner, icy of heart. Now, after thirteen years of exile, Con returns home to England and to Harrowcot Hall, a place haunted by memories of a long-lost friendship and past betrayals, a place where all of his dreams shattered and died.

But the past is over and done with, and can no longer touch him—or so Con thinks. He certainly does not expect to come face to face with Bryn Ellison again, the man whom he once loved beyond anything and who repudiated their bond in the cruelest way imaginable.

As snow and frost close in on Harrowcot Hall, Con’s icy demeanor starts to melt while he grapples with old hurts and newly awakened passions. Will he give in to the lure of the past against his better judgement?

Warning:

This book contains a very grumpy earl, a dashing stablemaster, some ravishment in various places, several garden follies, a lot of snow, and a horse named Lancelot.

To the lovely reader who said,

I wish the author did more m/m.

Thank you!

Prologue

Winter had come to Harrowcot Hall in hues of white and gray and brown. Low-hanging clouds made the pale daylight wane even faster, and it was already quite dark in the upstairs room of the small folly, where the tall, big man stood. His gaze was turned to the large windows overlooking the lake, which seemed almost black at this time of year.

But the man saw neither the dark water nor the skeleton-like branches of the bare trees and bushes lining the banks.

No, his mind was turned to the past, to the time when he had been little more than a youth, to the memories that were swirling all around him here in this room.

He stood very still and let himself be battered by the echoes of the past that were bittersweet enough to turn a man inside out.

He took a deep breath, felt his chest expand.

So he would finally return, the earl.

Thirteen years of exile on the Continent were a long time, and the man in the folly couldn’t help wondering what kind of man the boy he had once known had become.

That prickly, lonely boy, at nineteen still as gangly as a colt.

The man snorted a little.

Well, he would have grown into his body by now.

He remembered those pale gangly limbs spread out for him here in this very room, the thin body quivering with need and lust, a flush flowing from chest to face, turning the skin a sweet pink. The lips, stung and shining from his kisses, a darker red. And the eyes…

God, those piercing blue eyes, filled with such vulnerability it had nearly broken his heart.

And across the years, he heard the refined, cultured voice, made tender from wanting and loving: You will always be in my heart, Bryn. Always, always…

The man took another deep breath.

On the morrow, or perhaps the day after, the earl would return, and then he would see what had become of the gangly boy he had once loved so very, very much.

Chapter 1

Frost had turned each tree and bush into bizarre white sculptures, and a dense fog lay heavily on the land.

The two men in the carriage were wrapped in thick blankets and tried to warm their feet on the now long cooled bricks on the floor.

We might have come at a different time of year, remarked Mr. Benjamin Ross, the private secretary of the Earl of Stanbury. The dimness inside the carriage made his skin appear even darker than it was.

His employer shot him a quelling look from piercing blue eyes. Have you not reminded me numerous times that I need to see after my affairs? Well, I’m doing it now, and I want it over and done with by the start of the new year. You know that, Ross. Besides, we’ve had clear roads all the way, so I don’t see the problem.

With that he turned his head to look through the carriage window at the world outside, to see if he could discover any familiar landmarks. Yet if there were any he would have remembered after thirteen years spent abroad, the oppressive fog shrouded them all in white and hid them from view.

With a disgusted snort, the earl leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

Not quite the homecoming he had imagined.

If he had imagined any kind of homecoming.

Had he? he wondered.

Well…

Alan Dormer, 7th Earl of Stanbury, Viscount Conway had spent the past thirteen years in exile, banished from home by his late, unlamented father. Sometimes, Con wondered if his father had hoped his only son would simply vanish amidst the strife on the Continent. Would disappear, a nameless man gutted by a bayonet somewhere in Spain. Or perhaps, the old earl had imagined the deed might be done with a broken bottle during a tavern brawl in Vienna. Shot without questioning as a foreigner in France.

Again, Con snorted.

Whatever the old earl had thought, he must have been sorely disappointed that no report of his son’s death had ever reached him. Instead, the old bastard himself had died seven years ago. A miserable death, by all accounts, from some lung disease or other.

Mr. Bunce, the watchdog the old earl had hired to ensure his son would stay away from England, had tried to talk Con into returning home for some kind of deathbed reunion.

But for the first time in his years of traveling with Bunce, Con had refused. He had felt no pity for the old earl.

Truth to be told, he had felt nothing. Nothing at all

And when news of the earl’s death had reached them, and Bunce had once again urged him to return home, for the funeral at least, Con had very nearly laughed.

Harrowcot Hall was no more his home than one of the ruined castles along the river Rhine.

No, Con had not returned to England to pay his last respects—respects, ha!—to the man who had felt nothing but hate and disdain for his son. Con had fired Mr. Bunce, and had instead hired Benjamin James Ross, whom he had known from his days at Oxford, to see after his affairs.

Ross was the youngest son of a wealthy creole landowner from Monmouthshire. The immense wealth Ross senior had inherited from his English father had opened up the door to polite society for him. Very much like Con himself, Benjamin Ross detested his father, for the man still owned a plantation and slaves on St. Kitts, that very same plantation where his own mother had been a slave and had died a slave, even while her owner had emancipated the son she had born him.

Ross had accepted Con’s offer of employment eagerly, full of glee that he would thus be able to thwart the plans of his father, who had wanted him to enter the church—which was not something that suited Ross’ nature or his inclinations. So when Con as the new Earl of Stanbury had sent a note to Ross, he had come happily. The man thrived on organization, so sorting through the papers and estate books of Harrowcot Hall must have made him feel fully in his element.

Here are the gates to the estate, Stanbury, Ross now said quietly.

Con’s lips twisted a little.

Ah, very proper Ross. At Oxford, Ross had known him as ‘Conway’, of course, but when they had met again and he had entered Con’s employ, Ross had insisted on calling him by his new title.

Ah, well, better than ‘my lord’, Con supposed.

He opened his eyes and caught sight of the imposing main entrance to the grounds of Harrowcot Hall looming in front of them. He could hear the coachman speak to the gatekeeper, and then finally the heavy iron gates swung open and the carriage rumbled through them onto the Long Drive.

Here, too, the trees were encrusted in white, and frost made the grass glitter. Even without the fog, it wouldn’t have been possible to see the house from here. No, like a malevolent spider, it nestled in a shallow valley in the middle of these landscaped grounds. The Long Drive led the carriage past frost-white meadows and bare trees, and yes, there on the right, the fake ruins of a fake chapel one of Con’s ancestors had erected in the past century.

The bleakness of those gray ruins and the skeleton-like trees surrounding them seemed quite apropos to Con.

As was this deuced fog, which made it seem as if they had reached the end of the world, as if this place was haunted by wraiths and other nightmare beings.

All at once, it seemed even colder in the carriage than before.

Con lifted his chin in that arrogant tilt that was well-known throughout the drawing rooms and ballrooms of Europe.

They had called him the Ice Prince on the Continent, and he had been proud of the sobriquet. Icy of heart, icy of manner.

He would be damned if he let this deuced place shake his composure.

He had worked hard to turn himself from the green boy he had once been into the man he was today: supremely confident of his own abilities, of his good looks, and of his place in the world.

Harrowcot Hall would not be able to change that.

The road dipped and curved—and there, in front of them, it was: Harrowcot Hall.

The current version of the house presented to the world an imposing neo-classical façade, done some seventy years ago by Robert Adams. While the interior had also been extensively remodeled over the years, there were still places which revealed bits of the original Tudor stonework.

The north façade, where the main entrance was and where the carriage came to a stop, looked forbidding at the best of times, what with the tall columns towering over man and animal alike, and the jagged embellishments of the balustrade along the roof. Yet in this dreary weather the house seemed downright hostile. A vicious, gray animal, tensed and ready to spring on the attack any moment.

Con pressed his lips together.

Be damned, you sodding pile of stone. You won’t get me down.

The door to the carriage was flung open by a footman outside, and Con stepped out onto the drive. He took a few steps and, for the first time since he had been banished from the place at age nineteen, looked up at the house that starred in so many of his darkest memories.

He heard his secretary get out of the carriage and was dimly aware of a ripple of reaction passing through the lines of footmen and maids. Was it because of his own hair, prematurely turned gray? Or was it because of the dark color of Ross’ skin? But then, most of them must have seen Ross before when he had come here to check on the estate on Con’s behalf.

Compressing his lips, Con felt his disdain grow, like a hard, cold stone in the pit of his stomach.

This damn place!

There was a flurry of activity as the footmen took down the few pieces of their luggage stored at the back of this carriage. The other carriage with Con’s valet and the majority of luggage would have arrived a few hours earlier, he supposed.

Welcome home, my lord, a familiar voice said at Con’s elbow.

Con glanced at the man. So old Higgins was still butler at Harrowcot Hall, was he?

The coachman clicked his tongue, and the carriage rumbled off to follow the drive all the way to the stables.

For a moment, Con glanced after it.

For a moment, he allowed himself to wonder.

But no.

Straightening his shoulders, he gave his butler a cool nod. Thank you, Higgins, he said curtly, and then strode past the long, long row of household staff that had come out to welcome the new earl.

Welcome…

That must be some kind of bitter jest.

He marched past the servants without seeing any of them.

Then he was across the threshold and in the great entrance hall, which the pale winter sun failed to light properly, despite the large windows and the arched doorway leading to the corridor and the French doors opening up into the inner courtyard.

The entrance hall was a remnant of the Tudor house and at one end still featured a large fireplace from the days of Henry VIII. Centuries of remodeling had not been kind to the room, and it didn’t help that Con’s father had had Adams’ color scheme from the past century replaced by a dark green and dark wooden paneling.

Swords and spears decorated the walls along with the heads of deer and mountain goats his father had hunted down during his youth. There was even a whole snarling bear, whose carcass had been fashioned to stand upright as if ready to attack each visitor stepping through the door. As a child, Con had been scared witless of the bloody thing, which the old earl had met with sneering condescension. Con’s tutor had been instructed to discipline him each time he so much as winced while walking past the bear.

For one dizzy heartbeat, it seemed to Con he could still hear the slaps of the wooden ruler on the back of his hands. How old had he been? Five? Six?

He had been five when he had got his first pony, and he remembered that Bryn had cared—

Abruptly, he turned to Higgins. I want the bear gone. Today.

Yes, focus on that. Focus on the damn bear rather than on—

The butler blinked, for a moment nonplussed. Y-yes, my lord. He cleared his throat. Do you wish to partake in a small repast after you have freshened up from your journey? Dinner is served at half past six.

Con’s lip twisted. Of course.