The Model Master Read online

  The Model Master

  Book Eight of The Rakehell Regency Romance Series

  Sorcha MacMurrough

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  SYNOPSIS

  REVIEWS

  COPYRIGHT

  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 THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  FREE PREVIEW: The Model Mistress

  MORE TITLES BY AUTHOR

  A CHANCE AT REDEMPTION?

  Handsome and fierce warrior Michael Avenel has been to hell and back during the Peninsular War. Now paralysed from the waist down, he is convinced his life is over until a desperate young woman comes to his door seeking help one fateful night.

  Beautiful Bryony Wells was forced to endure an abusive marriage at the hands of a depraved husband for the sake of her sons. Now widowed, with her eldest boy set to inherit their father’s property, she grows ever more fearful for the children’s safety at the hands of her evil in-laws.

  Fleeing from their family mansion to start a decent new life where they can grow up happy and loved, she stumbles into Michael’s life…and heart.

  Working as his secretary, Bryony finds him a model employer, with his mastery soon extending to her body and soul. For as their intimacy increases, she is certain she is falling in love with her enigmatic employer, and that her feelings might actually be returned.

  With Bryony working by his side, Michael has a reason to try to recover his health. The beginnings of hope that the woman he has come to love above all else might actually be his for the asking.

  But once he has Bryony, he will do anything to keep her, as Bryony's evil brother in law Derek will stop at nothing to secure the family fortunes as his own.

  Can Michael ever be the man Bryony needs him to be? Or will their love become just another casualty of Michael's dreadful long war he has fought so hard for, and nearly died for?

  Can Bryony ever escape the ghosts from her past, and through her love for Michael, help him escape from his own?

  Michael’s eyes flew open and he snatched at her wrist, sorely tempted by her caress, but petrified of his own reaction. Of ruining everything he had built between them, everything he had come to love about his new life with her as his companion. "This is madness. You can’t possibly-"

  "I do. I do want you, Michael," she protested, her voice trembling with urgent need. "You’ve been kind, generous, tender with me. Tender with the children. Why should I not feel attracted to you? Desire you?"

  Michael gave a snort of self-mocking laughter. "You can have your pick of any eligible and successful man about Town. How can I ever compete with that?"

  Bryony stroked his face lovingly. "You’re right. There is no competition. I went for eligible and successful once before, and look at the disaster which befell me.

  "It wasn’t love. It was infatuation. The product of the idle fantasies of a young girl with no understanding of the world, or men.

  "I’ve learned some hard lessons since then. One of them is that true love exists. In all of the most unlikely places, true, but it does exist. I know because I’ve found it here with you."

  "Bryony—"

  She shook her head. "I’m not asking you to love me in return, Michael. Just let me love you. Let me move our relationship forward to the final physical one. We’ve shared everything else. Why not that? I need to know. Need to be one with you. I find I long for you so badly, I can barely stop my hands from shaking when I touch you. The thought of you touching me arouses my body so, I can scarcely breathe."

  He stared at her, hardly daring to believe her words. "No, it’s not possible…"

  REVIEWS

  "Wow, can this author ever write the most remarkable heroes, and sensual love stories. She particularly excels at wounded heroes home from the Napoleonic war. I thought Alexander Deveril and Will Joyce were brilliant in two of her previous novels in the series, so memorable I can recall them by name!

  "But Michael has whole new dimensions and challenges, and the heroine is amazingly feisty without being a shrew. She has a real sense of her power as a woman, and uses it to heal, not harm. Through her love, Michael is able to develop into the perfect family man, and a hero on the domestic front as well as on the battlefield.

  "Also noteworthy is her command of the history of the period, with many exquisite little details that bring us right into the enthralling world she creates.

  "As for the love scenes, well, the heat between Michael and Bryony scorches the pages in this wonderful Regency romance. Sheer brilliance, from the remarkable opening scene, to the shocking conclusion and wonderful happily ever after ending."

  Evelyn Trimborn, Harlequin Hearts

  "Absolutely gripping, from the first sentence, to the way the couple meet, to the incredible ending. The hero is quite unique, as is the author's Gothic Regency atmosphere, both brooding, with secrets aplenty in the dark corners.

  "Bryony Wells has some shocking secrets of her own, and through the power of love, all is revealed and healed. The Rakehells are in top form as usual, and we also meet some wonderful secondary characters I feel sure we will be meeting again.

  "But as always, the romance takes center stage in this movingly erotic story of love against all odds. The Model Master is truly unforgettable."

  Annabelle Stevens, Love's Sweet Song

  DEDICATION

  To everyone who has fought this long war.

  The Model Master

  Book Eight of The Rakehell Regency Romance Series

  Sorcha MacMurrough

  Copyright USA, UK and Worldwide the author 2003

  With additional material, 2009

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information and storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-58345-127-4

  Published by HerStory Books

  NY, NY

  http://www.HerStoryBooks.com

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  Please note:

  The author uses British spellings throughout the novel.

  October 31, 1815

  CHAPTER ONE

  The fierce October wind howled like a banshee, rattling the window panes. Lightning flashed and thunder pounded overhead, almost as if the storm were situated directly above the old house. The rain lashed down unmercifully, the clicking against the mullioned windows indicating it was already beginning to turn to sleet.

  Michael Avenel, stoking the fire in the guest room he had been occupying, shuddered at the eerie ululations of the wind. He smiled sardonically. Really, it was too absurd. Anyone would think he was afraid of the storm. Or afraid to be alone. In fact, that was his usual lot in life.

  He sighed. He knew his shudder was due to the enormity of the act he was about to commit. It was a horrendous thing to do to his best friend Blake. The doctor had been so kind to him. He had done everything in his power to help him get back his life, and the use of his legs after the war.

  But it had been a year and a half now since the battle of Toulouse, and Michael had had enough. He was so inexpressibly weary of the daily struggle. He just wanted it all to be over at last.

  Thus it was that he was sitting alone in an empty house in the spacious ground-floor bedroom his friend had allocated for his visit. He looked at the fine bottle of claret in one hand, and the bottle of laudanum in the other.

  Blake and his wife Arabella were safely out of the way for the night at an All Hallow’s Eve house party over at Jerome Manor with his cousins. As soon as they had gone, Michael had persuaded the lone servant not already on his half-holiday to go join the others at the village dance.

  On the morrow, everyone would be shocked and sad to discover his corpse. But Blake was a man of the world who had looked death in the face many times before. He would be saddened, but would understand.

  Michael gave another wry grin as he finished uncorking the wine. Committing suicide in his friend’s house was of course the height of bad manners.

  "This is indeed social death, old chap," he said in his best aristocratic accent, a bitter reminder of his once-happy and prosperous past. But no, he would not think about his brothers, his parents now, of all times. It was best this way for everyone.

  He toasted himself with another twist of his lips, his best effort at a smile, and drank deeply of the wine. He might as well enjoy it. And he had a second bottle at the ready. Not to mention the champagne. After all, it wasn’t as if he had to worry about a killer hangover the next morning.

  At that thought he laughed again. At least his black sense of humour hadn’t deserted him, he reflected with a sigh.

  Michael shook his head. To be fair, no one had deserted him. He had taken himself out of the world ever since he had been shipped back to England last year when the war had ended.

  He'd allowed the report that he’d been killed to remain unchallenged. He had sworn Blake and the rest of his set, the Rakehells, to secrecy. What was the point in telling his family he was still breathing, but imprisoned in a living death?

  He cursed the fates once more in the roundest terms, though the foul imprecations gave him little relief. To think he had gone through almost the whole of the war without a scratch, only to be wounded so terribly in the final battle. A battle that need never have been fought, for Napoleon had actually abdicated in Paris several days before. The momentous news had not filtered through to the front lines until almost a fortnight later. What a tragic waste of all those young lives, French as well as English.

  Michael sighed and took another sip of the wine, rolling it around his tongue. Perhaps he should have taken this irrevocable step in his own home at Bath? Got himself a paid companion or two, or even more? Really made a night of it?

  Not that he was up to much with his bad back and crippled legs, but still, he could just about manage. He wouldn’t even have to worry about the clap where he was going.

  He gave another wry laugh, then sighed. A nice handful of warm flesh, a last kiss on the lips would have been fun… A night he would never forget. Because he would never remember anything again. Not joy, and certainly not pain.

  He could hear his friends the Rakehells telling him it was wrong, a waste, a sin to give way to despair. He knew he himself would say the same to anyone he cared about. But Michael was also sure he would help a friend along if he knew someone were suffering as much as he. He’d hinted to Blake more than once. His old school friend had either pretended he didn’t understand what he was driving at, or had looked so furious Michael had taken his reaction as a point-blank refusal.

  Since Michael had always staunchly rejected anything for his pain, treating it as a much-deserved penance for all of his sins, he couldn’t even ask for the medicine and then stockpile the drug for one final fatal dose.

  So Michael had bided his time, and waited. And planned. So he had watched. Waited. Schemed. Until finally he had seen that if he couldn’t steal the laudanum out of his friend’s drug cabinet, always kept locked and with only one key, he would have to pilfer it from Blake’s medical bag.

  But that would mean emptying the bottle, or convincing the good doctor that it had broken, or leaked. In the end he had managed to set up an ‘accident’ in which a badly-corked bottle had seemingly spilled its contents into the lining.

  He had just shut the bag and stuffed the small second bottle into his pocket when Arabella had entered his room to wheel him into supper.

  She was a lovely woman, Blake a dashed lucky man. Michael hated to think of her being the one to find him dead and it marring her young life forever.

  However, he could not afford to think about that at this point in the game. The clock was ticking fast. Now that he had secured his prize at last, it was time to use it. All of his papers and affairs were in order. He had planned everything down to the last letter. All he had to do was pick the right moment.

  At the end of this bottle, he told himself, taking another hefty swig of wine. He twirled the phial in his hand, marveling at how something which looked so ordinary and innocent could be so deadly.

  He stroked the brown glass with an almost lover-like caress. How had the rough draft of that strange poem by that young surgeon friend of Blake’s read?

  "Darkling I listen; and for many a time

  I have been half in love with easeful Death."

  Yes. Poor young Keats. Not much of a surgeon by all accounts, but his poetry seemed rather interesting.

  It would be over, finished. No more pain. No more pleasure either, of course. But no more struggle, no more remorse over the life he’d led. There would be an end at last to the nightmares which had haunted him ever since that fateful battle. Since he had looked Death in the eye and quailed.

  Death was his gift, which he had delivered day after day with his hands and weapons to the deserving. Perhaps even the undeserving at times. But he had been a soldier, and never questioned for a moment the reasons he had fought in the Iberian Peninsula. To save lives. Remove tyranny and oppression.

  To slaughter anyone who disagreed with his notions of justice…

  He felt the bile rise in his throat as he relived that horrific day in southern France. The crash and bang of the guns, the roars and screams of the dying. The cheering of the British troops egging each other on as they’d reaped corpses in that bloody field.

  It had seemed so easy at the time, until one boom of the guns had sent searing pieces of shrapnel into his back and legs, melting through him like a hot knife through butter.

  Michael almost cursed the luck that had given him his closest friend Blake as his doctor when his battered body had been brought into the hospital tent.

  Anyone else would have just given up and left him to die. Operated on other wounded with a better chance of recovery. Blake had moved heaven and earth to save him, and now here he was. Wheelchair bound, in constant pain, for the most part
impotent, not able to go back to his old life even if he wanted to.

  He thought of Antony’s speech in Antony and Cleopatra.

  "I will be

  A bridegroom in my death, and run into’t

  As to a lover’s bed."

  One last pat on his little friend, and…