Gayle Wilson Read online

  Praise for RITA Award Finalist Gayle Wilson

  I want you to love me.

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Books by Gayle Wilson

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Prologue

  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

  Epilogue

  Teaser chapter

  Copyright

  Praise for RITA Award Finalist Gayle Wilson

  Honor’s Bride

  "A superbly crafted story...of a brave man who is willing to sacrifice his life not only for his honor, but for the woman he loves."

  __Romantic Times magazine

  The Heart’s Wager

  "This is the well written, well plotted gripping book that we’re always hoping for and don’t always find. I give it my highest accolades."

  __Rendezvous

  Lady Sarah’s Son

  Harlequin Historical #483-November 1999

  DON’T MISS THESE OTHER TITLES AVAILABLE NOW:

  #484 THE HIDDEN HEART Sharon Schulze

  #485 COOPER’S WIFE Jillian Hart

  #486 THE DREAMMAKER Judith Stacy

  I want you to love me.

  Justin had no reason to believe her. No reason to trust her again. Sarah had betrayed him. She had rejected what he had given her.

  She had borne another man’s bastard and then asked him to teach the child to be a man. She had lain in another man’s arms and then asked him to love her again.

  No explanation. No apology. His throat closed, hard and tight, aching with the force of what he felt for her. What he had always felt. His eyes burned with tears he had never shed, not once in the horrors of the past six months. He denied them now, but somehow she knew..

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome to Harlequin Historicals—stories that will capture your heart with unforgettable characters and the timeless fantasy of falling in love!

  There are few writers better than award-winning author Gayle Wilson when it comes to storytelling. Highly acclaimed for both her Harlequin Historicals novels and her Harlequin Intrigue titles, Gayle stays true to her powerful and emotional style with Lady Sarah’s Son. Set during the Regency period, this is the story of long-lost sweethearts who are brought together again by a marriage of convenience. Although a secret from Lady Sarah’s past still haunts them, the passion and love that they have repressed for so long will not be denied....

  Fans of medieval romance will no doubt enjoy The Hidden Heart by Sharon Schulze, Here, an earl on a secret mission for his country falls in love—again—with the beautiful owner of the keep in which he is staying. Jillian Hart returns this month with Cooper’s Wife, a heartwarming Western tale about single parents—a a sheriff and a troubled widow—who marry to protect their children, but find a lasting love. And don’t miss The Dreammaker by rising talent Judith Stacy, a feel-good story about two people who work side by side to realize their individual dreams, not noticing that the dream of a lifetime is right before their very eyes.

  Enjoy! And come back again next month for four more choices of the best in historical romance.

  Sincerely,

  Tracy Farrell, Senior Editor

  P.S. We’d love to hear what you think about Harlequin Historicals! Drop us a line at:

  Harlequin Historicals

  300 E. 42nd Street, 6th Floor

  New York, NY 10017

  GAYLE WILSON

  LADY

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

  PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  Books by Gayle Wilson

  Harlequin Historicals

  The Heart’s Desire #211

  The Heart’s Wager #263

  The Gambler’s Heart #299

  Raven’s Vow, #349

  His Secret Duchess #393

  Honor’s Bride #432

  Lady Sarali’s Son #483

  Harlequin Intrigue

  Echoes in the Dark #344

  Only a Whisper #376

  The Redemption of Deke Summers #414

  Heart of the Night #442

  Ransom My Heart #461

  Whisper My Love #466

  Remember My Touch #469

  Never Let Her Go #490

  The Bride’s Protector #509

  The Stranger She Knew #513

  Her Baby, His Secret #517

  Each Precious Hour #54]

  GAYLE WILSON is the award-winning author of over fifteen novels written for Harlequin. Gayle has lived in Alabama her entire life, except for the years she followed her army aviator husband to a variety of military posts. She holds a master’s degree and additional certification in the education of the gifted from the University of Alabama. Before beginning her writing career, she taught in a number of schools around the Birmingham, Alabama, area.

  Gayle writes historicals set in the English Regency period for Harlequin Historicals and contemporary romantic suspense for Harlequin Intrigue. She was a 1995 finalist in the Romance Writers of America’s RITE awards for her first historical, The Heart’s Desire. Her first contemporary, Echoes in the Dark, won the Colorado Romance Writers 1996 Award of Excellence and was awarded third place in the Georgia Romance Writer’s prestigious Maggie Award for Excellence.

  Gayle and her husband have been blessed with a wonderful son, who is also a teacher of gifted students, and with a warm and loving extended Southern family and an evergrowing menagerie of cats and dogs.

  For Angela Catalano,

  who rescued my very first book

  out of Harlequin Historicals’ slush pile and,

  through some time-warp miracle, is now my editor

  at Intrigue. And who, through it all,

  has always been my friend.

  Prologue

  Ireland, 1809

  She had never before watched someone die, Lady Sarah Spenser realized, her eyes focused, almost unseeing, on her sister’s shallow breathing. The rise and fall of Amelia’s chest was now so slight it barely disturbed the bedclothes.

  Sarah had lost her mother when she was only a child, but that death had been something the women who came to help had talked about in whispers, their mouths carefully hidden behind cupped hands. The experience of her mother’s death had been vague and somewhat distant, the pain of it abridged because she had not understood until it was long over what had happened.

  She knew their mother was not there, of course, but perhaps she and Papa were away in London. She had thought Maman would soon come home, as she always had before. Laughing, her beautiful French mother would sweep into the nursery or the schoolroom, bringing an armful of presents and wearing a smart, new bonnet from the shop of London’s most fashionable milliner. By the time Sarah realized Maman was not ever coming home again, the ache of missing her was familiar and bearable.

  She wasn’t sure Amelia’s dying would be, and yet she had been forced to accept there was nothing she could do to prevent it. David had finally, at her insistence, called in a surgeon. Although the doctor had succeeded in delivering the baby, which the midwife had been unable to do, he had simply shaken his head in response to Sarah’s repeated entreaties that he stop the relentless seep of blood.

  So much blood, she thought. More than it seemed her sister’s slender, graceful body could have
held. Now that it was obvious, even to her untrained and inexperienced eyes, that Amelia could not live out the night, Sarah had been thinking of all the things the two of them had shared through the years. Laughter and tears and a thousand whispered secrets. The throes of their first infatuations. Dreams of their futures.

  Two motherless little girls, left in the care of an increasingly cold and disinterested father, they had comforted one another. Sarah, the older by a scant two years, had always tried to take care of Amelia. She had failed only once. And this—her sister’s lonely dying—was the result of that failure.

  So white and cold, Sarah thought, taking the thin fingers into her own, mindlessly trying to warm them. To hold death at bay a little longer. Just as she and the wet nurse David had found had tried to warm the mewling newborn and keep him alive. Now both appeared to be battles she was destined to lose.

  “Don’t be angry with me, Sarah.”

  The whispered words shocked her out of her despairing reverie. Her gaze lifted quickly from her sister’s hand to her colorless face. Amelia’s eyes, which had from childhood sparkled with an irrepressible gaiety, were wide and dark in their sunken sockets, the skin around them yellowed as old bruises.

  “I could never be angry with you, dearest,” Sarah said softly. She forced a smile, suspecting that her sister knew her too well to be deceived by its falseness.

  “I’m going to die, aren’t I?” Amelia asked, her voice so low Sarah strained to catch the words. They seemed without emotion. A request merely for information, devoid of fear or concern.

  Her throat too thick to push words past its constriction, Sarah nodded. It was too late for lies and deceits. There had already been too many of those. And Amelia deserved the chance to make whatever peace with their Heavenly Father was necessary.

  Of course, there had been little in Amelia’s sixteen years that might have displeased Him. No sin other than loving David Osborne enough to bear him a son out of wedlock. No sin other than being young and therefore vulnerable to Osborne’s ruthless machinations and flattery .

  “Poor Papa,” Amelia said.

  A tear slipped out of the corner of her eye. It traced a path across the bridge of her nose and down the cheek that rested against the white pillowcase. There was little difference now in their color.

  Sarah wiped the moisture away with her thumb, aware again of the unnatural coldness of her sister’s skin. “Don’t cry,” she whispered.

  “Where’s my baby?”

  “Asleep,” Sarah said, wondering if that might be true. Even if it were not, even if that poor scrap of an infant had already crossed the veil her sister was approaching, there seemed no point in burdening Amelia with that knowledge.

  Sarah and the wet nurse had taken turns holding him, trying to warm the fragile body with their own. The nurse had managed to berate the landlord vigorously enough to procure a bucket of coal for the fire, so that the rooms David rented had at least a modicum of heat. Not enough to warm the baby into activity. Or to keep the cold breath of death away from her sister’s bedside.

  “David?” Amelia whispered, her eyes searching Sarah’s face.

  Out, Sarah thought bitterly, remembering the single word he had flung at her when she dared to question where he was going. She had begged him to stay, but her pleas had had no effect. Despite how she felt about him, her mind tried to formulate an acceptable excuse for Os borne’s unacceptable behavior.

  Why not another lie? she reasoned, meeting those entreating eyes. What could it matter now? Osborne had done nothing but lie since they had met him. Since she had met him, she amended, and had introduced him to her sister. A fatal introduction.

  The Spenser line had run exclusively to females in the last generation, and there was not even a distant male cousin to lay claim to her father’s extensive holdings. It had long been accepted that Sarah and Amelia would be heiresses, and since their father had married so late in life and was almost seventy, their inheritance might not be so far away.

  And so, charming and devastatingly handsome, the Irish ex-soldier had first courted Sarah. Finding her heart irrevocably engaged, Osborne then turned his attentions to Amelia, who was not yet out. Despite his limited opportunities, David swept Mellie off her feet before Sarah or her father had realized what he was doing, far too late to prevent what happened.

  After all, there wasn’t a deceitful bone in Amelia’s body. Or so Sarah would once have said. That was, of course, before her sister had willfully planned an elopement with an Irish adventurer twice her age. Amelia’s note, its script large and unformed, reminiscent of the schoolroom she had so recently abandoned, had been left on the pillow of her bed.

  The marquess of Brynmoor, driving his favorite team to blood-frothed exhaustion, had attempted to stop them, of course. Osborne, however, had been too clever to be caught by an enraged father. Instead of following the Great North Road to Gretna, the couple had made for the coast to board a ship bound for Ireland. And had disappeared.

  It was then Sarah’s world had come crashing down, all the stability she had known wiped out in an instant. As a result of Amelia’s elopement, an enraged Brynmoor had declared to the world that his youngest daughter was dead. He had even held her funeral, having an empty coffin interred in the family vault.

  Stunned by her father’s insane rage and the bizarre nature of his reaction, Sarah had attempted to tell the cleric that her sister wasn’t dead, only to be assured that Amelia was indeed alive in Christ and that she would see her in heaven.

  The only other person in whom she might have confided was too far away to help, fighting with Wellington in Spain. And committing the sordid details of her family’s situation to paper had seemed impossible—even when her fiancé’s letter of condolences arrived. Justin’s brother had written him about Amelia’s death. By the time Justin’s response reached her from Iberia, Sarah had already decided that her sister was truly lost to her forever.

  Then, almost two months ago, Amelia’s own frantic missive had arrived, begging Sarah to come to her. Sarah never considered refusing the appeal, although in order to fulfill it, she had been forced to lie to her father for the first time in her life.

  She had invented an ailing relation of her mother’s who had supposedly invited her for a prolonged visit. Her father, slipping further into madness with each passing day, accepted the story without question.

  When Sarah arrived in Dublin and found that Osborne had not even married her sister, she knew she couldn’t leave Amelia to bear her child alone. Not even when confronted with Osborne’s quickly rejected attempt at renewing his flirtation with her. Such was the man who had lured her sister to her death.

  “David’s gone to buy more coal for the fire,” Sarah said, telling the lie without a quiver of remorse. She was becoming too adept at lying, she thought, so she added another for good measure. “He was worried the baby wouldn’t be warm enough.”

  Her sister’s fevered eyes held hers, wanting to believe, Sarah supposed. Still wanting so desperately to believe in the man on whom she had thrown away everything, including her life.

  “Take care of him,” Amelia said.

  Osborne? Sarah thought in disbelief, and then she realized what her sister was asking. Mellie wanted Sarah’s promise that she would care for her child, that wizened speck of humanity, whose hold on life seemed as precarious as his mother’s.

  “I will,” she vowed softly.

  “Don’t ever tell...”

  Amelia’s voice faltered, and her eyelids closed as her breathing shuddered, the ominous rattle in her throat audible. Then her lids slowly opened again, her dark blue eyes more focused than they had been in some hours.

  “Don’t tell them,” Amelia begged. “Don’t tell anyone. Not even Papa. I could not bear for them to know what I’ve done.”

  “No, I won’t,” Sarah said quickly, gripping the icy fingers in her own. But there wasn’t enough strength left in them to allow Amelia to respond. Another tear slid weakly acr
oss the path the first had followed.

  “They’ll think so badly of me,” her sister whispered.

  “No, dearest. No one will ever think badly of you. I won’t let them,” Sarah promised fiercely. “No one will ever know.”

  Again Amelia’s eyes held hers, assessing the depth of that fervent vow. “Swear it to me on Maman’s grave,” she said. “Swear to me no one will ever know what I’ve done.”

  “I swear it,” Sarah said quickly, still clutching her fingers, which seemed to be growing colder. More lifeless.

  “On Maman’s grave,” Amelia demanded, something of her old spirit in the too-bright eyes. They appeared almost as they had always been—sparkling with life and promise.

  What did it matter, Sarah thought, what promises she must give, as long as they eased this passage? She would never betray Amelia’s trust. Never spread gossip about her own sister. Or destroy her family’s good name. It was a pledge easily made, and so she took a breath and gave Amelia the oath she had demanded.

  “I swear it on Marnan’s grave,” Sarah vowed.

  Amelia nodded, the movement of her head barely discernible. Then her eyes closed. And she never opened them again.

  “Because I can’t possibly take him with me,” David said. His pleasant features were not even strained or angry as he repeated his refusal, unmoved by any of her arguments.

  “He’s your son,” Sarah said, cuddling the infant against the softness of her breasts, far more secure now in that maternal role than she had been two weeks ago when he had been born. “You can’t really mean to abandon your own son,” she said.