The Deception Read Free Page A

wish to return to England, Evangeline? I am not a blind man, you know, and I realize that since your return you have not been happy.”
    She hugged him tightly, her cheek against his, for she was very tall for a woman. “Papa, my place is here with you. I’ll grow accustomed. But I won’t marry Henri Moreau.”
    Suddenly there was loud banging on the heavy doors downstairs, and the sounds of boots kicking against wood. There was a scream. It was Margueritte. Then there was Joseph’s voice, loud and frightened. Another scream, the sound of someone being struck hard, and a man’s loud voice.
    “Don’t move,” Monsieur de Beauchamps said to her. He was at the bedchamber door, flinging it open.She heard the sound of heavy men’s boots thudding on the wooden floor of the corridor. It sounded like a small army.
    He suddenly backed away, and Evangeline rushed forward to stand beside him. Two heavily cloaked men appeared in the doorway. Both of them held guns.
    One of them, his face pitted and dark with beard stubble, stepped forward, his eyes on Evangeline. He said nothing, looked at her, not just her face but her breasts, her belly. She felt such fear she thought she’d vomit.
    He said to the other man, “Look at her. It is as we were told. Houchard will be very pleased.”
    The other man, fat, his face pale and bloated, stared at her. Guillaume de Beauchamps yelled as he managed to wrest away his gun and rammed it into his big belly. “You won’t touch her, you puking little pig.” A gun slammed down on his head. Evangeline rushed to her father, trying to catch him as he fell unconscious to the floor. She ended up half on top of him. The man with the pitted face raised the gun again. She covered her father’s head with her body.
    The other man was clutching his fat belly. He gasped with the pain. “No, don’t hit him again. He won’t be any use to us dead.” “The bastard hurt you.” “I’ll live.”
    “The old man will pay.” He turned to Evangeline. Houchard had taught him the value of fear and shock, particularly when it was deep in the night. He looked at her breasts, then said, “Take off that nightgown now. Hurry or I’ll do it for you.”

Chapter 3
    Chesleigh Castle
Near Dover, England
    T he bloody rain had finally stopped. The late afternoon sun was still bright. Seagulls whirled and dived overhead, then wheeled back to the ocean not a hundred yards away. The smell of the sea was strong in the breeze. It had turned out to be a beautiful day.
    Richard Chesleigh St. John Clarendon, eighth Duke of Portsmouth, turned his matched bays onto the gravel drive of his ancestral home, Chesleigh Castle, an old pile of gray stone that had held reign over this section of the southern English coast for the past four hundred and twenty-two years. He pulled his horses up in front of the wide stone portico. A gull flew close to the head of his lead horse, Jonah, and he laughed aloud at the look of utter outrage in that magnificent animal’s eyes.
    “It’s all right, boy,” he called out, and jumped down from his curricle to the gravel drive. His head stable lad, McComber, was standing there looking at the bays as if they were his own. He rubbed his gnarled hands together, then took the horses’ reins. “Beengood boys, have ye?” he said, stroking first Jonah and then Benjamin, feeding them bits of apple as he told them of their bloodlines, all unspoiled for at least five hundred years. The duke rolled his eyes.
    “Rub them down well, McComber. They’ve worked hard today. I wonder why the gulls are so aggressive all of a sudden?”
    “I hear tell it be a storm that’s coming,” McComber said.
    “We just had a storm. We have a storm every week, sometimes twice a week.”
    “Well, it do be winter and England, yer grace. Put the two together, and ye don’t have much reason for perkiness. Aye, I know. Meybe it be some smugglers and the gulls don’t like the smell of ‘em.”
    “We haven’t had