Tempted By Fire

by Thea Devine

  BRANDED BY DESIRE

  "Say my name," he demanded in a voice rough with emotion.

  She 'felt the heat rise between them, catching like tinder. "As . you wish, Nicholas."

  His fingers followed her lips as they shaped the words. "Say it again."

  "Nicholas," she whispered, and it seemed like an admission, ; that when she voiced his name, he then became real. And when he was real, he was not the enemy she was fighting with her very soul.

  His fingers moved, feeling the texture of her lips, the sensation of his name in the sound of her voice, testing the pliant shape of her mouth.

  And then he bent toward her as he moved his hand from the exploration of her mouth to her strong-willed jaw; he cupped it, and raised her lips to his.

  He had kissed her before, but not like this, with no acrimony between them, no duel of provocation, with the light so low and tender, and somewhere, caught between them, the burgeoning of something tenuous and strong.

  He melted into her, his heat defining her, his hands entwined now in her hair. And still they kissed, hungry for each other in this place where there were no boundaries, no strictures, no ties. The fire was glowing, the embers burning low and strong, banked like the passion between them . . .

  For editorial purposes, if you encounter the word "hi" and the sentence doesn't make sense, replace it with "in"

  For example, "it was hi the drawer" should read "it was in the drawer"

  Also, if you encounter "di" in any part of a word and the sentence and word make no sense, replace it with "th"

  For example, "diere were people diat dien went" should read "there were people that then went"

  Other possible replacements are "I" for "7" or "1" or "!" or "/" For example "1 am going to the store" should read "I am going to the store"

  Other possible replacements are "m" for "th" For example "that should be" for "mat should be"

  Sometimes, you may see the word "trie" which should be replaced by "the" For example "trie book" should read "the book"

  Sometimes, you'll see a capital U for double ll's For example "she'U go next time" should read "she'll go next time"

  Sometimes, you'll see an "m" all by itself which should read as "in" For example "it was m the store" should read "it was in the store

  Sometimes, you'll see the word "tune" when it should read "time" For example: "it was the right tune to see him" should read "it was the right time to see him"

  I also notice many words ending in tl are being replaced by d. e.g. silendy, gende, impatiendy, gendy, shordy, discreedy, flady and others should be silently, gently, impatiently, gently, shortly, discreetly, flatly, etc.

  Also, certain other words with tl are being replaced by de e.g. setde, batde should be settle, battle

  In addition, you may sometimes see Vm or Fm which should be I'm OR

  Vll Fll which should be I'll OR

  Vve Fve which should be I've

  POSSIBLE ERROR: "Til should read as I'll

  Some words have WT instead of Wh-->>>>WTiite, WTien should read as White, When

  POSSIBLE ERROR: "bu should be "You

  POSSIBLE ERROR: at the end of paragraphs or sentences, if the last word has a 1 at the end, then e.g. That is it1 should read That is it!

  Unfortunately, it's impossible for me to go through every sentence, so I'll leave it for you to figure out if you run in to them.

  P.S. If you think you're missing pages or there are really bad errors, send me a DETAILED message and I'll look them up and get back to you and correct the ebook before i put it back up for sharing. Thanx for your patience and your helpfulness.

  Zebra books, Kensington Publishing

  1992

  Prologue

  Paris — January, 1807

  "Let me assure you, Jainee, M. deVerville will be here. I expressly asked for him to come tonight, and I know the Emperor will not refuse me," Therese Beaumont said with more confidence than she felt. She turned away from Jainee then to examine herself in one of the many looking glasses that decorated the parlor walls, but she could hide nothing from Jainee. Behind her, Jainee stood, the living embodiment of herself when she was young, reflected like an echo of passing time and an indictment of the present.

  She sniffed and pulled her mobile face into an expression of disdain. "He never has, you know."

  Jainee said nothing. Therese fiddled with a lock of her hair. "Refused me, I mean," she added, as if Jainee did not know this as well as she. It galled her that everytime she sent to deVerville, Jainee reacted with the same vehemence and more, the same inexplicable anger.

  "Still, his tokens of affection have increasingly diminished," Jainee retorted, without caring whether this spiky little truth inflicted any pain, "and still you have not learned to control your passion for the cards."

  "A friendly game now and again," her mother snorted dismissively. "Just to lend a little pleasure to life. After all, they did say he was good to the women he had loved, but look at how stingy he has become with the passing years. Ah, men are fickle, Jainee. The best way to love them is to strike a bargain with them

  5

  and ultimately come away with something, because it is always women who must pay the price."

  "It seems to me that our dear emperor has been made to pay the price, Maman, and not only by you," Jainee said with no small edge of malice coloring her words.

  "And was it not wise?" her mother demanded. "Do we not have this conversation every time I send for deVerville? Truly, did you expect me to raise you and the emperor's bastard without a husband or any means of supporting myself? And then, when your father stole the boy away, did you really expect me to relinquish the income to which I was entitled? It is easy to spend grief, Jainee; I squander it daily. But you cannot spend what you do not have and so I have made sure that we have, and it is just our great good fortune that the emperor has no desire at all to see his son and that deVerville wishes to discharge his duty to the Emperor as quickly as possible.

  "And so, you will await his arrival as usual, Jainee, and you will kindly give me the money as usual, and we will continue on as usual."

  "Unless you gamble it all away tonight,” Jainee said tartly. "Or if this is the one night that M. deVerville comes and refuses to pay the money. Or, if he brings word from the emperor that he wishes to dispense with this obligation to you. What happens then, maman? What will you do? What if he gets wind that you want the money to feed to the cards, what then?"

  Therese shrugged. Therese always sloughed off the little lies. "It will be simple," she had said in her artless way. "I will merely write a note pleading the urgency of the situation . . ."

  "The only urgency is the fact that you haven't got a thousand francs to put on the card table at the end of the week," Jainee pointed out stonily. How she hated this, begging charity from the man to whom her mother had willingly given her body and who, worse still, probably barely remembered her.

  She was desperate, Therese had written. Oh yes, desperate for one more bloody game with that scoundrel Le Breque.

  But Therese was never moved solely by the event of the moment. She needed money, she had access to a ready source, she had only to write a note and enhance the truth of the matter to achieve results.

  6

  "He will not refuse me," Therese said with childlike certainty. "This money supports his only living son."

  "Until he finds out there is no son, that your demands are a lie, that you suffer not except in your excesses, and that you care little or less about the child you bore him," Jainee shot back in anger, and perhaps a little fear.

  Therese's expression turned to stone. "And who shall we tell him handed the child over to her father willingly, despite all my precautions against even letting th
e man into my house?"

  She watched Jainee's defiant expression crumble with great satisfaction.

  "And who shall we tell him broke her mother's heart? Who mourned the most, Jainee? And who finally was able to find solace in an occasional harmless game of cards? And tell me then, who begrudges her mother any recompense in spite of what she did to her?

  "Yes, I think you now see the wisdom in assuming that things will remain as they always have been, and you will meet M. deVerville tonight, Jainee, and that will be that."

  Jainee turned her back on her mother as she finished speaking. It was one thing to be reminded of her great galling sin. It was quite another to let her mother see that she too still grieved the loss of the baby and her own innocence in the matter of the man who was her father.

  "The double-tongued devil," Therese called him, "so slippery and fine, du meilleur rang—aristocratic, so elegant, so English — "

  And yet Therese had not been able to resist him, so what could be expected of a fourteen year old girl who had not seen him in ten years and who had made him into some kind of hero?

  "A Judas," Therese spat any time Jainee wanted to know about him and she never would believe everything negative Therese said of him. In her heart, she believed—she had to believe—he had had a reason for taking the boy. But the fact remained that Therese had not been home and Jainee had allowed Luc to go, and it manifested itself in the tight guilty hold that Therese wielded over her.

  That, and her conscience. Such a delicate, binding chain, a conscience.

  7

  "Make sure," she began in a muffled voice, "make sure that there are no open curtains, no obvious lights, no noise."

  "Of course not," Therese said, and it was as if the previous conversation had never happened. "I am never careless."

  Nor, she thought smugly, am I ever wrong.

  ******************

  The clock in the hallway struck the hour. Nine. Nine-thirty. Ten. Jainee waited in the dimly lit library, pushing away the fierce feeling of dread that washed over her with each passing half hour.

  "Jainee— !" Therese cried in a querulous voice.

  Jainee eased open one side of the sliding doors and shook her head, not liking at all the desperate note in Therese's voice and the scent of disaster that seemed to hover over her.

  Therese bit her lip and waved Jainee back into the library, and she waited—ten-thirty, Eleven . . .

  "Jainee!" Therese's desperation had turned to panic and Jainee hardened her heart against the terror in her eyes.

  "Nothing, maman."

  "Dieu," Therese muttered, her expectations dying a fast death as she went down another rubber at picquet against the ruthless Le Breque.

  Jainee could not bear to watch. She sat behind the sliding door listening to the silence, the thick, edgy, deep silence that was broken only by the faint sound of one card slapping against another. She could not stop the game, and she never could stop her mother who was like some light flittery moth, always racing headlong into the singeing flame to be consumed by it and an appetite for gambling that never could be satisfied.

  All she had ever been able to do was lull Therese into thinking that their comfortable and somewhat fraught mode of living would go on forever.

  And steal from her. .

  Oh yes, and steal from her half of every purse delivered so punctiliously by the patronizing deVerville.

  That she had been able to do very well.

  The clock struck again—midnight—the last gong modulating down into a palpitating matte stillness underlaying the ripe

  8

  atmosphere of calamity that emanated from the room beyond.

  And then she heard the thunderous banging beyond the door, the clatter of scrambling feet and furniture as the front door crashed in, and Therese's voice, edged in raw horror: "deVerville!"

  And his voice, booming above the sound of receding footsteps: "So, Madame—No food, is it? Sold all your furnishings to make rent, did you? Starving, Madame Beaumont? Penniless? About to be thrown in the street? I think not, Madame—no, stay. That's better, Madame. Now tell me — where is the boy?"

  Jainee cringed at the sound of Therese's quavering voice. "I —"

  deVerville's voice again, harsh, commanding: "Don't move. You, Durand, make sure she does not move one step from where she stands."

  Jainee froze as the sound of his footsteps echoed up the stairs at the front of the house and pounded down the upstairs hallway from room to room above her. "Boy, come out now," he shouted and tossed furniture every which way and slammed closet doors in the resultant silence.

  She didn't know which way to move as his footsteps veered to the back of the house and the rear stairwell so close to the library where she stood her ground. In five steps, she could be out the window and free—and leave Therese to pay for her follies.

  "Where is the bloody boy?"

  And then there was no choice whatsoever. Just as deVerville burst into the library, she flung open the sliding doors and darted into the parlor.

  "Jainee!" Therese, folded into a chair, cringing in fear, dissolved into helpless tears. The masked man beside her wheeled and trained his pistol on Jainee. Behind her, deVerville's voice: "The boy . . . ," and she whirled to face him and the deadly pistol in his hand.

  "There is no boy," she said defiantly, even as she began backing away from his menacing figure inch by inch.

  There was no getting away from that pistol. He held it steady as a rock and she knew he could hit her a hundred feet away, let alone five.

  "The boy is not here," deVerville amended smoothly. "Where is the boy?"

  9

  There was another heart-stopping silence, and then Therese said suddenly, desperately, "He's gone."

  "Gone? Where, Madame?"

  Jainee made a movement, almost as if she thought some physical barrier would deflect her mother's pointless confession. It didn't matter to deVervilIe where—as the right arm of his Emperor, who had thought he was supporting a son all these years and not a vain and capricious woman, the fact the child was not in the house was enough reason for him to mete out punishment.

  "His father took him," Therese said finally, and was emboldened to elaborate at deVerville's polite, attentive silence. "To England. Where in England, I cannot tell you, but he took him to England, of that I am sure."

  Ever rash, imprudent Therese. Whatever he expected to hear, deVerville's expression did not change. "England, Madame? The blood of the emperor resides in England?"

  He motioned with his head almost imperceptibly, and Durand moved away from Therese, and toward the front door, as he himself backed up against the sliding doors so that Jainee and her mother were between him and Durand.

  His face hardened visibly as Therese wailed, "His father stole him away," and Jainee reached out to take her hand.

  And the first shot rang out — deVervilIe surely, and Therese's bosom stained with blood.

  "Maman," Jainee screamed, throwing herself at her mother's body; the second shot ripped through her arm as she fell onto Therese's lap. A third, a fourth . . . she had to have died, there was only blackness . . . and footsteps, a curse, a door slamming . . . and a thick, blood-letting silence.

  And pain, indescribable, soul-tearing pain. Dear God, her mother. . . "Therese! Therese!" She couldn't see . . . she was blind, panicked; no—blood congealing on her face, she couldn't even cry. "Maman!"

  Her mother's body, lifeless under her own, and she was so tall, so heavy, she could be hurting her, making it worse . . . she held her breath and reached out her hand: Therese felt warm still, her arm, lifeless against the side of the chair.

  She dragged a limp hand across her face. It came away wet, sticky. Tears streamed down her cheeks. "Maman!"

  10

  Now she could see . . . her mother's face, white, drained of life, so beautiful, heedless Therese, covered in blood, defended by a body as limp and mortal as her own. There was nothing a daughter could do for h
er now.

  "Maman!" Her anguish shrieked up from the earth. Her mother was dying; she was dying. She felt the blood draining from her, from places she could not feel, could not touch, and the blood of the mother and daughter mingled, became one, had always been one . . .

  ". . . Jainee . . ."

  It was the faintest of whispers.

  "Maman," Jainee cried brokenly.

  ". . . better thus," Therese breathed. "Listen . . . find the boy."

  ". . . I'm dying," Jainee cried.

  "Live, and find the . . . boy. Promise me, promise . . . They'll kill him. Repay me . . . the gold you stole, Jainee. Find the boy. . ."

  "I'm bleeding," Jainee sobbed. "How can I promise?"

  "Swear it to me, on my dying body . . ."

  "Oh, Maman," she whispered, wrapping her arms around Therese's limp body. "I swear, I swear . . ." Oh, what did it matter what she promised when her lifeblood was trickling out of her, a rivulet of red to flow with her tears. She felt weaker, she felt Therese's body shudder with the effort to say more, to keep awake, alive to tell her more, more that would not matter fifteen minutes from now.

  "Shh, Maman, shhh ... I will find your son, I promise, I promise," and she chanted the word like a litany over her mother's dying body until she surrendered to the promise of the light and the night beyond her pain.

  11

  Chapter One

  Brighton, England: January, 1809

  This was the part she hated the most, the moment when she paused in the doorway at the top of the stairs, her body silhouetted against the light, her damped-down underdress molded tight to her curves like a second skin, the moment when all conversation stopped and every man in the room turned to look up at her and then the sibilant sound of her name rose up to enfold her like an undulating wave: "Ah, Jainee, Jainee, Jainee," they murmured, the word passing from one to the other as if with her arrival the real event of the evening had finally begun.