Desire and Deception Read Free

or the backbreaking work she found so hard to bear; in truth, she had been used to little better. It wasn't even the beatings. It was the way she'd been punished for breaking rules she hadn't even been aware of. . . locked in the root cellar despite her pleas and screams . . . left there in that awful blackness till her terror was so great she'd lapsed into merciful unconsciousness . . . She would have done anything to escape that. And George Burroughs had offered her a way. In return, she was to help him save the shipping line her father, Jonathan Carlin, had built.
    She had never known her father, nor wanted to. She could never forgive him for what he'd done to her mother. Lauren hadn't been born on the wrong side of the blanket precisely; the blanket had slipped. Jonathan Carlin had married her beautiful, frail mother in a sham wedding ceremony—a common sport of wealthy young bucks at the time—and then abandoned Elizabeth DeVries , leaving her to face the shame of bearing an illegitimate child and the misery of constant and grinding poverty.
    How terrible those final days of her mother's life had been: the pale face ravaged by hardship and illness, the thin form wracked by fever and pain. Though only a child, Lauren had continued to take in washing and mending as her mother had done, but the pittance she earned couldn't pay for the medicine Elizabeth so desperately needed to ease her suffering.
    Lauren still clenched her fists whenever she remembered her helplessness; somehow that had been harder to bear than even grief and loneliness. Even as young as she'd been, she had vowed never to know such poverty again, and her time in the parish workhouse had only strengthened that vow. That was why she had been willing to listen to George Burroughs's strange proposition.
    He'd revealed that for some years he had been a partner in her father's shipping firm, and that Jonathan Carlin had married again shortly after abandoning her mother. Jonathan had wed Burroughs's sister, Mary—legitimately this time— and a child had been born to the couple, a daughter, scarcely six months after Lauren's birth to Elizabeth. The child had been named Andrea. But ten years later tragedy struck.
    Burroughs had not gone into detail, but he'd told Lauren that Jonathan and Mary had been murdered by pirates, and Andrea tortured and left for dead. Though the child recovered physically, she was never the same mentally. Still, as Jonathan Carlin's daughter, she had inherited his tremendous wealth.
    Burroughs, as her uncle, had taken over her guardianship and continued to run the Carlin Line. But the following year Andrea had succumbed to pneumonia, and so he had sought Lauren out.
    She would come to live at Carlin House, which overlooked the sea atop the craggy cliffs of Cornwall, and live in the manner that Jonathan Carlin's daughter ought . . . so long as she pretended to be Andrea. There should be no problem in getting away with the impersonation. There was only one person who might know the difference—Jonathan's sister, Regina Carlin, who stood to take over the Carlin Line should it become known that Andrea was dead. Regina had never liked Andrea; indeed, she had labeled her niece a lunatic and tried to have her committed to Bedlam. But Burroughs was determined to protect his ward, just as he was determined to keep control of the shipping line out of Regina's hands. He had forbidden Regina access to Carlin House and hired men to see that she was kept out—so there should be no problem with her, he said.
    And after all, Lauren and Andrea had been half sisters . . . only six months apart . . . both with fair curling hair, green- gold eyes, and delicate features promising great beauty. The only remarkable difference was Andrea's mental instabil ity .. . New servants would be brought in. No one but Lauren and himself and her governess would know the truth.
    Nor would the impersonation last forever, Burroughs promised. She could have her