Winning the War Hero's Heart. Mary Nichols

       Women, in his experience, were timid creatures who fainted at any sign of violence, who obeyed when told to keep out of it. They sat at their sewing, drank tea and gossiped about fashion and the latest on dit, and left the men to govern and keep order among the people for whom they were responsible. Helen Wayland was not a bit like that.

      She plunged in where others feared to go and spoke her mind when she would have done better to remain silent. How could you tame a woman like that? Why, in heaven’s name, did he want to tame her? She was not his wife. She was not even eligible to be his wife.

      Why, then, did he enjoy their meetings so much? Why did he savour the cut and thrust of her debate, even welcome her fiery temper? He remembered his mother looking sideways at him and asking him if he had developed a tendre for her and his sharp denial. Now, if she asked him again, he would not know how to answer. Miss Helen Wayland had him in thrall—so much so that he had been fool enough to ask her to dance with him. He had not danced since he had been wounded and did not know if he could. And what would she make of it if he found he could not? Why, in heaven’s name, had he said he would go?

      About the Author

      Born in Singapore, MARY NICHOLS came to England when she was three, and has spent most of her life in different parts of East Anglia. She has been a radiographer, school secretary, information officer and industrial editor, as well as a writer. She has three grown-up children, and four grandchildren.

       Previous novels by the same author:

      RAGS-TO-RICHES

      BRIDE THE EARL AND THE HOYDEN CLAIMING THE ASHBROOKE HEIR

      (part of The Secret Baby Bargain)

      HONOURABLE DOCTOR, IMPROPER

ARRANGEMENT THE CAPTAIN’S MYSTERIOUS LADY* THE VISCOUNT’S UNCONVENTIONAL BRIDE* LORD PORTMAN’S TROUBLESOME WIFE* SIR ASHLEY’S METTLESOME MATCH*

* The Piccadilly Gentlemen’s Club mini-series

       And available through Mills & Boon^® Historical eBooks

      WITH VICTORIA’S BLESSING

       (part of Royal Weddings Through the Ages)

       Did you know that some of these novels are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk

       Author’s Note

       Seditious Libel

      In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the libel laws were used to repress rebellion against the government, but their implementation was inconsistent. Writers and producers of newspapers and radical literature were under constant threat of prosecution and, when taken to court, were often faced with a hostile judge and jury. A defendant’s counsel could raise points of law, but could not summarise the case on behalf of the defendant until 1836. On the other hand, the Home Office lacked the means to prosecute everyone who published seditious matter and the writers often took their chances and got away with it. The prosecutions dwindled because defendants frequently managed to obtain an acquittal by exploiting the language in which the arraignment was made, and the legal authorities gave up trying for all but the most serious cases.

      The year of 1816 was known as ‘the year without a summer’, not only in England, but all over the world, particularly in Northern Europe and North America. The year before there had been a huge explosion in the Mount Tamboura volcano on the Dutch East Indies, which had been rumbling since 1812. Thirty-eight cubic miles of dust and ash was sent up into the atmosphere, the ash column rising thousands of feet. The debris, including vast quantities of sulphur, took a year to circulate, its sheer volume obliterating the sun. The result was a cold, wet and miserable 1816. It rained off and on from May to September and, without sunlight, temperatures dropped dramatically. In the English countryside crops rotted in the fields before they could be harvested and those that were gathered rotted in storage because of the damp. Farm labourers were put out of work and added to the unemployed soldiers returning from the war with Napoleon.

      

      

      Winning

      The War Hero’s Heart

      Mary Nichols

      

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      Chapter One

       1816

      Helen heard the hunt some time before it came into view. The dogs were yelping and the horn sounding a wild halloo, and there was the thunder of hooves which seemed to shake the ground at her feet. Surely they would not come galloping through the village? The road was narrow, flanked on either side by workers’ cottages and their small gardens. And there were people on the street: woman gossiping at their gates, children playing, a cat sunning itself on one of the few days in the year in which the sun shone. Hearing the commotion, the women snatched up their children and disappeared indoors. The cat, its tail a wire brush, fled. Helen drew in her serviceable grey skirt and pushed herself against the fence of one of the cottages as the fox streaked past her. It scrambled over the gate and into a garden where a little boy was playing. It nearly knocked him over as it flew across the garden and through the hedge on the far side.

      The dogs were in the street now, desperate to get at their quarry and the riders were not far behind. Afraid for the child, Helen moved swiftly into the garden, scooped him up and ran towards the house, but all she had time to do was press herself and the little one hard against the wall before the whole hunt was upon them. Dogs and horses milled about, trampling down rows of beans and cabbages and the currant bushes, wrecking the patch of grass and the few bedraggled flowers which had been growing each side of the path that ran between the rows and knocking over the hen coop and sending the chickens flapping and squawking to die under the horses’ hooves.

      And then just as quickly they were gone, flattening the neatly clipped hedge at the end of the garden—all except one rider, who pulled up beside her. ‘Are you hurt, madam? Is your little one injured?’

      Helen found herself looking up at the Earl of Warburton’s son, Viscount Cavenham. She knew who he was because a great fuss had been made of him in the district when he came back from Waterloo, a wounded hero. He did not look wounded to her, sitting arrogantly on a huge black stallion, looking down at her with what she took to be contempt. True, she was wearing her grey workaday dress, a wool spencer and a plain chip bonnet and the child she held so close to her bosom was filthy and bawling his head off, but that was no excuse. Still, he was the only one of the hunters to stop and enquire, so she ought to answer him.

      ‘No, we are not hurt, but the child is terrified. Have you no more sense than to come galloping all over other people’s property, ruining a year of hard work? This was once a productive garden. Now look at it.’ She waved an arm to encompass the mess.

      ‘The dogs follow the fox, madam,’ he said. ‘And the riders follow the dogs. And unless I am mistaken, the property is not yours, but part of the Cavenham estate. The Earl may go where he chooses.’

      ‘How arrogant and unfeeling can you be?’ she demanded. ‘How