AllFreeNovel
Share Us
DO YOU WANT MORE ROMANCE?
If you’re a true fan of the steamy Regency romance genre, here are the first chapters of my previous best-selling story, and it’s called:Lord of All Charms
Marco has sworn to avenge everything he lost. When he finds out that the Duke responsible is now gone, he vows he’ll find another way, no matter the cost. Soon, the opportunity arises. He joins a draw for the old man’s daughter. She will be his. She will pay for her father’s crimes. But his feelings are about to clash with his thirst for revenge. And it will cost him his heart…
* * *
LORD OF ALL CHARMS
CHAPTERONE
“Thomas!” Marco screamed, staring through the blaze of fire around him, tears streaming and throat burning. “Thomas, where are you?”
“Sir!” A frantic voice called back, thin and reedy through the smoke. “I am trapped, sir!”
Marco tied his handkerchief around his face and fought through the thick smoke of his burning factory, forcing himself to keep moving despite his lungs screaming to run out into the fresh air. He saw with horror that a large wooden beam had fallen across the door to the office. Marco launched forward, desperately using all of his strength to pull the beam away. The wood was burning hot, and splinters lodged into his palms, but he gritted his teeth and prayed to God that he could save his friend. With a strength he didn’t know he had, he pulled the heavy beam away and wrenched the office door open. When he crossed the threshold, he almost gasped in shock. It seemed that the office had been close to the blast's epicenter, and his long-time foreman, Thomas Cromer, was curled on the floor, his clothes blackened and his face red and bloody with gashes and horrible burns. Half of his hair seemed to have been singed away.
“Sweet Jesus,” Marco muttered, dropping to his knees. His foreman looked in his direction with bloodied and swollen eyes.
“I cannot see, sir,” Thomas coughed in a gravelly voice. “My eyes…”
Marco's heart clenched for his friend and devoted worker, a man on whom he'd relied to keep an eye on the factory floor. Marco's factory was on fire around them, and Thomas was seriously injured, possibly evenblinded. Hefelt despair rising within him, but pushed it away. They had to leave the building before the roof collapsed.
“Thomas, I am here,” Marco said, pressing his hands to Thomas’s chest to try to staunch the flow of blood. “We must get out of here.”
“God bless you, sir,” Thomas groaned, heaving himself to a seated position with a cry of pain. Thomas heard a menacing creak in the ceiling beams above them and knew they had no time to lose.
“Forgive me, Thomas,” Marco said as he swept his friend up and tossed him over his shoulder. Thomas let out a gurgling groan, but Marco knew they needed to get out of there fast. He held Thomas' body steady as he lurched through the factory, blinking away tears from thesmoke. Marco inhaled fresher air as he approached the factory yard. He noticed men swarming around, throwing buckets of water through broken windows in a desperate attempt to save the structure.
“A physician!” Marco croaked as loudly as he could before lowering Thomas to the ground some distance away from the blaze. “Someone send for a physician at once!”
“Right away!” one of workers shouted, racing away.
Thomas’s head lolled against the cobbled stones, slick with a dirty muck of fallen ash mixed with mud and water from the buckets.
“Do not trouble yourself, sir,” Thomas coughed. Marco was horrified to see blood around his friend’s lips, and he sent up another desperate prayer for him to survive. “I must tell you what happened.”
“Not now,” Marco said. "Save your strength, my friend."
“You have to know. This was no accident, sir,” Thomas coughed again, clutching his bloody chest. The man fumbled in his coat pocket as his body shuddered.
In a cotton factory, accidents were common. No matter how cautious the workers were, disaster struck occasionally. Because the materials were so flammable, there was always the risk of fire. Marco would not hold that against his foreman.
“I'll get it.” Marco reached into Thomas’ pocket; the wool of his jacket scorched and bloody. He took out a wrinkled piece of parchment and unfolded it. Despite the block lettering designed to conceal any identifiable features, the handwriting was somehow familiar. The words were simple but menacing:THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE.
“Another threat, sir,” Thomas whispered, his voice becoming weaker by the minute. Still, he kept going. “I read it… before I could do anything, there was a… a terrible explosion.”
Marco looked down at Thomas’s battered body as the man struggled for breath. He remembered the first time his foreman had come to him with a hostile letter.
“You have received a threat, sir,” Thomas said as Marco strolled into the factory office, closing the door, so the sound of the cotton spinners’ work did not disturb them.
“A threat?” Marco asked and was quickly reminded of his cousin, Giovanni, who worked closely with Silas Klane, also known as Lucifer of London. Giovanni regularly incurred threats against himself and his family, especially since becoming the Marquess of Bath. Marco had anticipated reuniting with his cousin would impact him, but he had not expected to be in danger. “Against my life?”
“No, sir, against your business,” Thomas replied. He handed over a piece of parchment with the message, "CLOSE YOUR FACTORY OR I SHALL BE FORCED TO TAKE ACTION. YOU WILL REGRET IT IF YOU IGNORE MY DEMAND" boldly printed on it.
“Who could have sent this?” Marco asked in consternation. “How was it delivered?”
“I do not know, sir,” Thomas said, shaking his head. “The note was tacked to the door when I arrived this morning.”
