Deceived Read Free

saw that he had been reading, for he still had a book in his hand.
    Despite the jailer's description of him as surly, Isabella saw humor and vitality in his expression before it was quenched like a blown candle, leaving nothing but a grim austerity. In the dim light his face was hard, all clear-cut planes and angles beneath a dark tan that spoke of much time spent in hotter climates. His jaw was strong and square, and the uncompromising lines of his face were too harsh to be described as conventionally handsome. That seemed too soft a word. He emanated an attraction far more primitive and compiling than mere good looks. It was an attraction to take the breath away. Isabella had met many handsome men, men of charm and address. A princess tended to have such privileges. None of them, however, had driven the sense from her mind and the breath from her body in a way that made her feel slightly faint.
    John Ellis placed the book on the table in front of him and looked up at her for a very long moment. There was a stillness about him that was striking. He did not say a word.
    "Stand up when a lady enters the room," the turnkey snapped at him.
    The gentleman allowed his gaze to travel very slowly and insolently down Isabella's entire body, from the peak of her hood to the tips of her shoes. Then, with equal deliberation, he removed his booted feet from the table and sat up a little straighter, but still he did not stand. There was an insolent appraisal in his eyes that brought the blood to Isabella's face and her chin up in haughty defiance. His gaze fixed on her face and he did not look away for a single instant. His eyes were hard, his expression that of a man who has seen and done too much and will never again feel any emotion stronger than indifference.
    Recognition, shocking and instantaneous, hit Isabella in the stomach. The world closed in around her. She felt seventeen again and a heedless debutante, barely more than a child. She remembered how her eyes had met those of this gentleman, not across some romantically crowded ballroom, but prosaically, over the teacups in her aunt's shabby drawing room at Salterton.
    "Who is that young man?" she had asked her aunt, Lady Jane Southern, and Jane had smiled and replied:
    "His name is Marcus Stockhaven, my dear, and he is a lieutenant in the navy." Jane had frowned a little as she'd watched Isabella's expressive face. "Do not develop a tendre for him, Bella, for your mama would never allow the match. He is a nobody."
    She had spoken too late, of course. The tendre had blossomed instantly as Isabella had sat there, her gaze locked with the direct dark one of the man in the doorway. She had felt excited and faint and deliciously helpless to fight against her fate.
    "He has no money and no expectations and your mama wishes you to marry well," Jane had reminded her crisply, but her words of warning had been like an echo fading in the dark. Isabella had paid them no heed and had rushed headlong into first love. It had been a love that was going to end, quite properly, in a wedding. But then she had been obliged to marry Prince Ernest and everything had gone wrong. . . .
    Now, as her gaze met and held that of Marcus Stockhaven in much the same way as it had done in that faded drawing room twelve years before, Isabella felt a stunning sense of awareness and loss. A longing seared through her that made both the love and the heartbreak feel sharp and alive, as though all the feelings he had thought were dead had merely been sleeping and were awoken to instant life.
    Then Stockhaven spoke, and the shackles of the past were broken.
    "A lady," he said thoughtfully, his gaze still resting on her. "I think you mistake. What possible reason could a lady have for coming here?"
    One of the gamesters looked up and made a remark so coarse that Isabella winced. She raised a hand to stop the swelling indignation of the turnkey.
    "Thank you," she said crisply. "I will deal with this. Please show. . .Mr.