Irresistible Read Free

was a mere infant— her two sisters, and now Gabby's husband as well, were her family, as well as being the people she loved most in the world. The holiday had been the merriest she had known since wedding David, and she had enjoyed every minute of it. Then, a week after Boxing Day, she had reluctantly bowed to David's wish that she join him and a party of guests at the enormous, drafty anachronism that was Hayleigh Castle, her husband's family seat since the days of William the Conqueror, and set out. That had been two days ago.
    Shortly before dark her traveling carriage had neared its destination. She had been aware of a not-unfamiliar lowering of her spirits as the reunion with her husband drew ever closer. The day was gray, cheerless, threatening rain, its bleakness a perfect match for how she was feeling. Then, in a dense wood not many miles from the castle, her carriage had been attacked. Without warning a band of masked riders had appeared out of nowhere, surrounding them, forcing the vehicle to halt. The coachman, fumbling for his blunderbuss, had been shot from his seat forthwith. The horror of that had scarcely sunk in when the carriage door was wrenched open and two burly men peered in. With the best will in the world to show courage, she had screamed as hysterically as her maid, Alice, a sweet country girl from Gabby's household recruited to take the place of her own beloved Twindle, whom she had left behind to care for Gabby. Shrinking back into the plushly upholstered corner of the seat, she had tried to fight off the rough hands that reached for her. Her efforts availed her nothing. In an instant she was dragged from the carriage. She fuzzily recalled Alice being pulled out behind her; the maid's screams had abruptly stopped just seconds before a foul-smelling rag had been pressed over Claire's nose and mouth. After that, she remembered no more until she had awakened upon that bed in the room behind the farmhouse kitchen, quite alone.
    "'Tis your last chance to behave like a sensible lassie, milady," the leader called, bringing her back to the present with a jolt. Glancing up, Claire realized that she could no longer see him. He must have moved away from the edge of the cliff. Only his voice and the lantern's glow that limned the cliff edge in gold told her that he was still near. Obviously he did not know of the path's existence, or had forgotten it if he did. It was her good fortune that the crime had occurred in country she knew. She had spent the first months of her marriage at Hayleigh Castle, and David himself, in one of his even then increasingly rare charming moods, had shown her this path down to the windblown gray shale crescent of a beach.
    The sea was roaring in her ears now as, inch by perilous inch, she crept closer to it. Through the fog she could see the curvy white lines of foam where the waves broke against the shore. Beyond that, the black vastness of the ocean blended with the black vastness of the sky so well that one was all but indistinguishable from the other.
    She had only twenty or so feet to go, she calculated with a fresh surge of hope. Once on the beach, she would run as if all the hounds of hell were after her— which, by then, they might well be.
    A tiny pinprick of light, warm and yellow amid all the cold blackness, shone briefly on the surface of the sea. Her eyes widened and her step faltered. The light was there, and then gone even as she strained to see. So fast did it appear and disappear that she was not quite sure her eyes were not playing tricks on her— until it flashed again.
    Still staring in some perplexity out to sea, she at last arrived at the uppermost reaches of the beach, stumbling a little as she made the transition from slippery path to uneven ground. Frowning, she continued to probe the blackness for another glimpse of light. Then she gathered her sodden skirts in one hand to clear her feet and started to scramble over the rocks toward the beach proper. Had