Her golden eyes stared mesmerized into his sleepy gray ones with dark pupils that seemed to contract as recognition flared in them.
“You!” Suddenly he held her pinned down by the shoulders, his face staring down into hers. “How did you contrive it? Did you put one of your gypsy spells on poor Donald and my ship, as well? No wonder we’ve had such a bad voyage—a woman aboard ship always brings bad luck! What are you doing here?”
There was a cruel, dangerous look on his face, and sheer desperation made Marisa shout back at him.
“You—you threw me in here last night! And if I’m such bad luck, why don’t you just throw me overboard and have done with it? You’re such a rotten bully, no wonder all your men are so afraid of you! Well, I’m not. You can’t do anything worse to me than you have already—”
She was appalled at her own boldness.
He shook her, his fingers digging in to her bare shoulders.
“Don’t be too sure of that,” he muttered.
“This is exactly what her many fans crave, and Rogers serves it up with a polished flair.”
—Booklist on A Reckless Encounter
Also available from MIRA Books and ROSEMARY ROGERS
A RECKLESS ENCOUNTER
SWEET SAVAGE LOVE
SAVAGE DESIRE
Wicked Loving Lies
Rosemary Rogers
www.mirabooks.co.uk
To Bet with love
PROLOGUE
PART ONE: A WALLED GARDEN
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
PART TWO: DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
PART THREE: THE PERFUMED DAYS
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
PART FOUR: THE SURGING TORRENT
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
PART FIVE: THE ANGER AND THE PASSION
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER 62
As soon as the light began to fade, the mist crept in from the forest that bounded the far end of the great park. It was just as if it had lain hidden there crouched among the densely growing trees until the approach of nightfall sent it moving towards the huge house that dominated a rise in the gently sloping ground—sending long, exploratory grey streamers out at first to curl insidiously around the stone walls; and then, growing bolder, advancing like a gauzy cloud until soon the forest was quite cut off from view, and there was only the grey-white mass pressing against the windowpanes. It almost seemed to be waiting—angry because it could not penetrate stone and glass and wood, but patient, too….
Mrs. Sitwell hurried to pull the heavy velvet drapes together, shivering as she did so despite a roaring fire in the fireplace.
“Never did like the country very much! It’s almost like it was too quiet, you know? And then the fogs here—ain’t like the London fogs—at least you can see the street lights shining, all yellow and cheerful-like. But out here—” She lowered her voice as she glanced towards the vast, canopied bed that stood in one corner of the room. “Tell me, Mrs. Parsons, how is it that he—” a jerk of her head “—His Grace, I mean—well, it just don’t seem natural for him to be down there in his study, writing letters, with his own wife dying up here.”
Mrs. Parsons’s thin lips seemed to disappear into her seamed face as she pursed them. “His Grace has his own ways—and his own reasons. You couldn’t know, of course, you’ve only been here three weeks. But I could tell you—” The woman hesitated for a moment, her fingers tightening over themselves; but then, as the desire to talk to someone after all the lonely months proved too much for her, she burst out, “I could tell you—it’s a great deal stranger, all this, than anyone could guess! And of course I’ve been with the family—His Grace’s family that is—for years. I was here when he brought her here as his bride, and I was still here when he brought her back from the Americas. I could have told, even when I was a mere slip of a girl myself, that there was something wrong….”
The woman who lay so still in the depths of the big, dark bed heard them whispering by the fire. Over the sound of her own breathing—each breath more difficult to draw than the last—she heard words:
“Brought her here from Ireland, he did. He was only Lord Leo then, and no one ever dreaming he’d ever come into the title like he did….”
She was in that half-world that lies between coma and reality, and when she heard the woman say something about Ireland, her mind slipped back easily through time; reliving the beginning was so much more pleasant than waiting for the end. Whirling pictures slid through her mind, some of them all too clear, others seeming to curl and blur about the edges like old letters.
Ireland, and her girlhood, when no one had called her Lady Margaret or Your Grace. It had been Peggy or Peg then. Pretty Peggy, the young men had named her, bringing blushes to her cheeks. And after all, in spite of what all Irishmen referred to as “the troubles,” life had not been too unpleasant.
What did anything matter as long as she was young and pretty with all of her life still stretching endlessly and excitingly ahead of her? Even her brother Conal’s frowns and carping didn’t matter too much as long as she could escape from him to go down to the village for her stolen, secret confessions to Father MacManus or to visit some of her father’s old tenants. Things were different since her father, the earl of Morey, had taken sick and finally died—without, thankfully, knowing what Conal had done to keep the lands for himself. Turned Protestant, renouncing his own true faith—how could he?
“I have to think of myself now—don’t you see that? And of you too, sister, although you do not seem to appreciate that fact. Catholics cannot inherit land. Would you rather see all that is ours and has been ours for generations pass to the English Crown? Someone has to be sensible!”
And she tried not to dwell on the fact that Conal took to going up to Dublin Castle, the seat of the English Government in Ireland, spending far too much time with the English officers who were their age-old enemies and oppressors. She hated the English! They were cold, cruel and arrogant, and they acted as if they owned even the lush green Irish earth they walked on. Conal’s mother had been English, which perhaps accounted for his predilection for that hated race, but her mother had been French—a pretty, small, dark-haired woman who had always smelled faintly of lavender or verbena water.
Peggy had been thinking of her mother that afternoon when Conal surprised her crossing the brook barefoot, her faded skirts kilted up around her calves.
Why couldn’t maman have lived? It was lonely, sometimes , without another woman to talk to, with only the sound of the chill to keep her company at night. If only—
Conal’s harsh, angry voice had cut rudely across her thoughts then.
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