Inhaltsangabe
Bryson le Fort, the last Duke of Marchfield, is engaged by his mother against his will to marry a commoner in order to save the family estate, but his ire turns to pleasure when he meets the singular Annalise. Original.
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Aus dem Klappentext
ed out the castle window as a tall, shackled stranger was pulled from the carriage below. In his face was a terrifying beauty, chiseled features that bespoke an aristocratic lineage, fathomless eyes that promised revenge. <i>This</i> was Bryson le Fort, the last Duke of Marchfield. <i>This</i> was the man she'd been summoned to marry. They said he'd spent years in a monastery. They lied. One glimpse of his pale face and she'd seen into his darkest heart, felt his ice-blue eyes melt her innocent soul.<br><br>His only weapon was silence. But rage gave him strength. Now he was a prisoner again, this time in his scheming mother's gilded cage. This girl was his price for freedom. She, a commoner, would bear his heirs and save the Marchfield estate from Mad King George. They were both trapped. But even as Annalise plotted her escape, Bryson knew he could never let her go
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Castle Marchfield was growing cold with twilight, and colder still with the chill of death. It permeated the stone walls like wisps of damp fog that hovered over the heather and gorse on the distant moors. Servants moved like specters from duty to duty, their voices hushed to escape the notice of their mistress. Grief had its sting, but it did not consume the duchess. Her son's passing only proved what she had spouted these many years past: Marchfield was a cursed place.
With a wail that had sounded as evil as many claimed her to be, Eleanor had sent her lesser servants fleeing from the room in terror. Only a trusted few remained, hardened souls accustomed to both the wild rantings and blade-sharp intellect of their mistress. From the head butler to the lowest scullery maid, they knew clearly that Lady Eleanor was not demented, more the pity, just unpredictably volatile and exquisitely cunning. Robed in a gown of deep crimson velvet, she paced the chamber, purpose beneath each embroidered slipper. The death of her sixteen-year-old son was a grievous detriment to her plans, but she was not undone. She would get around this as she had all else in this damned keep.
She pulled a cashmere shawl tight around her shoulders and turned a resentful glance on the shriveled bedclothes. Young Richard's shrunken body lay beneath, still now, at peace from the six-night struggle that had finally claimed him. She would not give in now. Had she a weaker constitution, she would have collapsed decades ago.
She must think, must plan. This latest tragedy would be her downfall if she did not. Soon a message would arrive from the king, a sickeningly warm condolence on her latest misfortune, tinged with an underlying note of triumph. Then an offer for protection.
Marchfield stood on the blood of its ancestors, and Eleanor would not hand it over. Using truth or trickery or whatever means necessary, she would hold her lands a little longer, fight the relentless tide of time a little more strongly, until there was no fight left in her. She would die herself before allowing everything she possessed to revert back to the Crown simply because Fate had seen fit to take every male of value from her.
She spun away from the deathbed, repulsed. Weak, all of them! All the Marchfield men had proven to be weak from the cradle. Ten offspring she had carried within her body in wretched agony only to bring eight babes to full birth. One she had lost to a frail constitution before his seventh birthday, two to mishaps the year they were sent away for schooling, and three just on the verge of adulthood. One other the one for which she'd harbored the most hope had managed to survive the raging fever of his eighteenth year only to recover as an idiot. And now even this last child had played her false, gone in his prime before securing legitimate male issue.
She stood on the brink of collapse, straddling the razor-sharp dividing line between truth and treason. Tied by birth to France and by marriage to England, she found herself bound to neither. With Napoleon rising to power and the king and queen imprisoned in revolutionary France, she could not chance a return to her birthland, but with her son's death, reversion of her English lands was automatic.
Napoleon wanted her Bourbon blood. The King of England wanted her Catholic soul. Mad George felt the Revolution was Divine Punishment of the House of Bourbon for its unnatural support of the rebels in the Thirteen Colonies. He would like nothing better than to marry a Bourbon descendant off to one of his landless favorites in order to control her possessions.
With Richard's demise, there was no one to save Eleanor now. No one save herself.
She snatched up her ornamental walking stick and marched to the bedchamber door. Her steps were sure, the cane with its carved and gilded lion's head a symbol of the power she still narrowly wielded.
Bedamn the English king his false protection and Napoleon his heresy. Both might want her holdings, but they would not get them, not while the Duchess of Marchfield had breath in her body to plot a course trickier than the rulers' own to assassinate her last healthy child.
She flung open the chamber door. "Max," she demanded in a deceptively mild voice. "To me."
A spare man of distinguished bearing slid from the shadowy end of the corridor and regarded his mistress coolly. He hated death, would not be in its presence, and was grateful she had allowed him to remain in the hall. With equal portions, Maximillian de Chastenay both despised and admired Eleanor. Without question, he feared her.
He moved toward her calmly, an illusion of attending her command while keeping his distance. Even in her fiftieth year, her beauty was unsurpassed, rivaled only by her wealth in terms of a woman's worth. Long before she married the Duke of Marchfield, she had been a woman of independent means, a countess in her own right with the exquisite beauty to accompany her bloodlines. Now, even in advancing years, her body was lush and graceful, the lines on her face few. Though her eyes told a haunted story, the rest of her remained untouched by the tragedy her life had become.
In years past Max had lusted after her, an utterly beguiled young secretary in the throes of overripe lasciviousness for his master's wife. To his moral condemnation, his passion for her lingered still, long after he discovered that he could never trust her.
"Your Grace," he said, and bowed his obeisance.
"Attend me," she repeated and strolled from the room.
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ANNALISE
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