Nicola Cornick - Deceived

“The Earl’s Prize is a captivating Regency story with an interesting and engaging twist. Two wonderfully human characters are presented that are remarkably intelligent and a pleasure to get to know…. This is a purely delightful story, which I enjoyed immensely.”

—Romantic Times BOOKclub

(A 4½-star review)

“Nicola Cornick has written a merry romp about Regency London that will make you wish you had been there.”

—romance-cafe.com on The Season for Suitors

Deceived was the runner-up for the Romantic Novelists Association’s prestigious Elizabeth Goudge Trophy 2005, where it was judged to be:

“A masterclass…. A vivid range of emotions and sensations….”

Dear Reader,

When I was a child we used to go to the seaside every summer and stay in an old cottage with a wild garden. There were bent old trees to hide in, and stone statues, and the long golden curve of the sand to play on. It was this old house and garden that I remembered when I was writing Deceived. I wanted my heroine, Isabella, to have a place that she loved and could run away to. The old house at Salterton became the place of Isabella’s childhood memories—and the place where she first met Marcus and fell in love. In the story, when Marcus, in his quest for revenge, threatens to take everything from Isabella that she cares for, Salterton is the one place she is determined to fight for.

I love old-flame stories. I love reading them and I love writing them. There is something exciting about unfinished business and something poignant about what might have been. Can Isabella and Marcus overcome all the barriers and misunderstandings that fate has put between them and rekindle the love that they found in the house by the sea all those years ago? I hope that you enjoy reading Deceived and finding out!

With love,

To the Cornick family with my thanks

and all my love.

I recognize the marks of the old flame of love.

—Dante

Part 1–Revenge

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

Part 2—Seduction

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

London, June 1816

This newspaper is pleased to record the return to these shores of a certain notorious princess, whose arrival will be greeted with great glee by the gentlemen of the Ton. Rumor has it that the Princess IDC has not a feather to fly and is looking for a gentleman to ease her financial worries. Though whether the infamous lady will take him as lover or husband remains to be seen….

—The Gentlemen’s Athenian Mercury, June 12, 1816

IT WAS A HELL OF A PLACE to look for a husband.

Most discerning females, given a choice of marriage mart, would prefer the genteel familiarity of Almack’s any day to the rather more dubious qualifications of the Fleet Prison.

Princess Isabella Di Cassilis did not have that luxury. Princess Isabella was desperate.

She had explained to the jailer that her requirements were very specific. She needed to marry a man who owed so much money that to take on her twenty-thousand-pound liability would be a mere drop in the ocean of his debt. She needed a pauper—a strong one, since she did not want him dying on her and leaving her heir to his debts as well as her own—and she needed him now.

It was of no consequence to Isabella that she would be ruined if this escapade ever came to light. She was beyond ruin already. The more fastidious members of the Ton closed their doors to her, so what harm could a little more scandal do? She might even accomplish the remarkable success of being ruined twice over in one lifetime. It would be a considerable achievement for a lady of only nine and twenty.

Isabella Standish had not been born to be the princess of a European country, not even an insignificant one such as Cassilis. Her father had been a minor member of the Ton who’d aspired to be important but had never quite achieved his ambitions. Her grandfather had been fishmonger to King George III, ennobled by the monarch in one of his bouts of madness after he had partaken of a particularly tasty piece of rainbow trout. The family title was therefore not only newly created but also the butt of some hilarity, to the great mortification of the second Lord Standish, Isabella’s father.

It had been Isabella’s misfortune that at the age of seventeen she had been walking down Bond Street the day before her wedding and had caught the roving eye of the jaded Prince Ernest Rudolph Christian Ludwig Di Cassilis, who had been charmed by her prettiness and her unspoiled manners. Prince Ernest had immediately made a counteroffer for her hand in marriage. It was an offer that her father was not minded to refuse, as he was about to be bankrupted by his extravagance. Prince Ernest’s arrival was most timely, for Lord Standish if not for his daughter. The wedding that took place a few days later was not the one that Isabella had intended.

It was also entirely Prince Ernest’s fault that a widowed Princess Isabella, some twelve years later, was following a turnkey down the narrow stone corridor into the depths of the Fleet Prison. Ernest had died most inconveniently in the arms of his mistress, leaving his widow nothing but debts and a tarnished name. When she’d returned home to England, Isabella had discovered that her late husband’s infidelity had been financial as well as physical. He had run up debts in her name. He had used her to fund his debauches and she had been so happy to be on a different continent from him that she had not even noticed. So now she was driven to desperate measures of her own to extract herself from the disaster Ernest had brought on her.

Isabella shrank within her black cloak and pulled the hood more closely about her face. All her senses were under assault. It was almost as dark as night inside the prison. The air was thick with heat and the smoke of tobacco, but the scent did nothing to mask the deeper, more noxious smell of hundreds of fetid bodies pressed close. Raucous voices were raised in endless uproar, mingling with the scrape of iron fetters on stone and the wailing of babies and children in forlorn chorus. The floor was greasy and the walls ran with damp, even in the summer heat. Hands grasped blindly at the folds of Isabella’s cloak as she passed. She could feel the despair of the place like a living thing. It seeped from the walls and wrapped her about with misery. Shock and compassion thickened her throat until the hairs rose on the back of her neck and she shivered with horror. Before she had entered this hellhole she had thought that she was in desperate straits. She had not even known what desperation was. And yet the distance between her situation and this was perilously short. A man—or woman—could slip once from their comfortable path and end up forgotten and unlamented in this pit.

She paused at the corner of the corridor and fumbled in her reticule for her small collection of coins. She could not really afford to part with them, but there were some whose need was greater than hers. She thrust the money toward the jailer.