Page 1 of How the Earl Entices

Prologue

On the English Channel

April, 1823

“Where are the documents?”

Ross Carlisle, Earl of Spalding, spat out a mouthful of blood onto the midnight-black deck of the pitching ship as the storm intensified around it. “Go to hell!”

A fist slammed into his stomach. He doubled over in gasping pain, coughing and struggling for breath, yet thankful for the pouring rain that cooled the bruises the men had already put on his ribs and face.

The two Frenchmen holding his arms jerked him up straight.

Their leader grabbed him by the hair and yanked back his head. “You are a murderer and a traitor. No one will care what happens to you.”

Ross gritted his teeth against the pain.

“So I will ask you one more time before I cut off your kneecaps,” the thug threatened in street French, having to yell even at such close range to be heard over the wind and driving rain. In his free hand he brandished a knife. “Where are the documents?”

Ross glared at him, refusing to answer.

So it all came to this…a decade serving the crown as a soldier and diplomat, an unblemished reputation without a hint of scandal, more recently a dangerous pursuit in which recognition would never have been possible—only to end ingloriously on a fishing boat being tossed about on the Channel.

He’d been running for the past week, fleeing for his life from Paris to the coast with hired henchmen on his heels. First on horseback, then on foot, changing identities as easily as other men changed clothes. But he’d been unable to throw them off his trail, and always they’d been less than a day behind. Then a handful of hours. By the time he’d reached Calais and found a captain brave enough to take him across the Channel in this storm, they’d caught him. In a matter of minutes he’d be dead.

And damn the world that the last person he thought about was Christopher! Not one of his French mistresses, not one of his first loves as a boy, not even his mother—but his brother. How the last thing Ross did in life was prove Kit right, that eventually he’d be discovered and that even his post at the Court of St James’s wouldn’t be able to save him.

The Frenchman released his hair and stepped back, struggling to keep his footing on the wet, rolling deck. With a menacing gleam in his eyes, he lowered the knife toward Ross’s legs. “Where are the papers?”

The knife tip sliced across his left thigh and through the rough work trousers he’d donned in his last attempt to hide, biting into the flesh beneath. Ross sucked in a pain-filled gasp through clenched teeth and bit back an ironic laugh—hisleftthigh.

The boat rose on the swell of a wave, then dropped with enough force that the men holding his arms wobbled to keep their balance. His interrogator stumbled backward—

Now.

Ross lunged toward the closest railing, tearing his arm free of the man on his right and catching the one on his left off-balance. He lowered his shoulder and rammed it into the man’s chest to push past. All went dark as he tumbled over the railing and into the black sea below.

Chapter 1

Sea Haven Village on Winchelsea Bay

East Sussex, England

Grace Alden lay in her bed, staring at the dark ceiling and listening to the storm raging around her. The wind and rain roared so loudly that she couldn’t hear her own heartbeat. But she knew it was racing because it jumped into her throat each time she heard something bang against the cottage. The wind howled like a banshee over the cliff tops, screaming through the eaves and bringing with it a torrent of black rain that fell with the force of a hurricane.

“Please God, let the roof hold.”

Around her, the old limestone and timber cottage groaned beneath the fierce battering of the storm.

“And the walls, too,” she whispered in afterthought, “if not too much trouble.”

After ten more minutes of staring at the ceiling, she slid out from beneath the covers. Sleep was proving impossible tonight.

The cottage was dark as pitch as she made her way slowly across the main room to the hearth, where a bed of coals hissed and snapped angrily against the few drops of rain that found their way down the chimney from the force of the wind. She stirred the ash bed with the iron poker to raise a flame, tossing in a few more chunks of coal to feed the fire enough to last until morning. Normally, she never would have burned a fire through the night, but tonight, she sought its comfort.

Taking a brass candleholder from the mantel, she bent over to light the wick in the flames and let out a soft sigh when it caught hold. After nearly ten years of fearing things that bumped in the night, would she ever grow comfortable in the darkness? But the most frightening things weren’t the unseen. She’d learned the hard way that the worst were the ones a person knew well.

She lifted the candle to read the storm glass fixed to the wall. The water in the spout had been rising during the past two days, and now it stood higher than she’d ever seen it. She bit her bottom lip. It could be hours before the water level dropped and the temperature fell, before the clouds rained themselves dry.