Dark Temptation

by CHASE, ALLISON

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Teaser chapter

  Praise for Dark Obsession

  ‘‘The solid writing, riveting opening, and clever plot twists recommend this worthy debut.’’

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  ‘‘Following in the footsteps of Daphne du Maurier, Victoria Holt, and Phyllis Whitney, Chase delivers a classic Gothic, complete with a haunted house, an intrepid heroine, dark secrets, and grand passion that will enthrall readers.’’—Romantic Times

  ‘‘Allison Chase’s Dark Obsession dishes up a wonderful story in a charming, romantic tradition, complete with a handsome and tortured hero, real conflict, and a touch of mystery! Anyone who loves . . . a well-written historical romance will relish this tale.’’

  —Heather Graham, New York Times

  bestselling author

  ‘‘A compelling and exquisitely written love story that raises such dark questions along the way, you’ve no choice but to keep turning the pages to its stunning conclusion. Allison Chase is a master at touching your heart.’’—Jennifer St. Giles, author of Silken Shadows

  ‘‘Intriguing! A beguiling tale. Moody and atmospheric.’’ —Eve Silver, author of Dark Prince

  ‘‘A haunted hero and a determined heroine create sparks in Dark Obsession. With a nod to Daphne du Maurier, this sexy story weaves together irresistible romance and ghostly warnings that lead to the truth hidden in a wounded heart. Filled with adventure and danger, deception and desire, this is a book you won’t forget.’’—Jocelyn Kelley, author of Kindred Spirits

  Also in the Blackheath Moor Series

  Dark Obsession

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  Published by New American Library, a division of

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  First published by Signet Eclipse, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, November 2008

  eISBN : 978-1-440-60863-6

  Copyright © Lisa Manuel, 2008

  All rights reserved

  SIGNET ECLIPSE and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  This book is dedicated to my parents, who just

  happen to think I’m one heck of a writer. Thanks,

  Mom and Dad, for being my biggest fans!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A huge thank-you to everyone at NAL for the incredible launch you’ve given me, and special thanks to my editor, Ellen Edwards, and her assistant, Rebecca Vinter, for all the time and energy you’ve been willing to spend on my behalf. You are my dream team! Without you, well, I just don’t know . . .

  Prologue

  Cornwall 1829

  In the dark of the new moon, the Druid’s Lady veered hard to starboard, sailing at a good ten knots toward a cove ringed with towering cliffs. Though blackness spanned the coast in either direction, some half dozen torches lit a narrow beach and tossed flickering light onto the inlet’s sheer rock walls. Where the waves lapped the shore, three silhouettes hovered, waiting amid the dancing shadows.

  Watching from the quarterdeck, the midshipman felt his apprehensions leap with each lick of the flames. When he’d asked the first mate about this sudden detour from their journey home from the French coast to Penzance, he’d been told curtly, ‘‘Captain’s orders. Cargo to unload.’’

  The brigantine dropped anchor about fifty yards out. Hemp ropes creaked as the pulleys were used to hoist brandy casks and crates containing china, silks and a quarter ton of tobacco from the cargo hold. Men began transferring the goods onto a flat-bottomed lighter, while others waited to lower the ship-to-shore craft into the water. In the midshipman’s estimate, they would need to make three runs ashore before resuming their course. He wouldn’t breathe easily until a brisk wind filled the Lady’s sails.

  With a grin, the quartermaster approached him and clapped his shoulder. ‘‘Relax, mate. The devil himself couldn’t find this cove. The nearest coast-guard cutter is two-score leagues away, at least.’’

  A shout from above tore through the quartermaster’s assurances. Balanced on the crow’s nest of the mainsail, the watchman held a spyglass to his eye and gestured wildly to the port side. The midshipman followed his line of sight. At first he saw nothing, only black waves and midnight sky. Then, nearly all at once, the beams of countless lanterns speared the water.

  From bow to stern, havoc exploded on the Druid’s Lady. Scurrying deckhands collided in their haste to man their positions. A sudden blast knocked men off their feet. The midshipman hit the deck hard, bruising his hip, his shoulder. When he sat up he found himself enveloped in a noxious cloud of sulfur that propelled the crew into blind, choking chaos.

  A second explosion racked the ship. Blinking th
e stinging smoke from his eyes, the midshipman spied the sleek hull of a clipper as she glided alongside the brigantine. Brusque demands were shouted across that the Lady should prepare to be boarded.

  In a desperate maneuver, the brigantine thrust to starboard. Another blast followed. The screams of men clashed with the shrieks of firearms as bullets zinged back and forth. The Druid’s Lady tilted drunkenly in the water. Pulse pounding, the midshipman raised his gaze to the top of the clipper’s mainmast—where a small, square topsail, emblazoned with a black rose on a field of crimson, raked the night sky.

  Not the coast guard. The Ebony Rose.

  Hope abandoned him in a violent surge that slammed his heart against his chest. A thunderous shot reverberated overhead, sending down a cascade of splintered wood. Pain exploded at the back of his head, and all went black.

  Chapter 1

  Cornwall

  September 1830

  Where the stark expanse of Blackheath Moor met the rocky thrust of the Cornish coast, Sophie St. Clair hurried along a dusty road to the one place in the windswept countryside that was expressly forbidden to her.

  The air today shivered with an intense, startling light she had never experienced before coming to Cornwall, as crisp and sharp as springwater on a winter’s day, brightening colors, deepening outlines and rendering futile any attempt to be inconspicuous.

  Sophie knew she presented an all-too-apparent blotch on the nearly treeless landscape, a small, dark figure scrambling along a pitted road bordered by a patchwork of autumn-darkened heather and faded gorse, miles and miles of it, beneath a sky so thoroughly unblemished as to rival the brilliant blues of her mother’s most prized Sèvres porcelain.

  Only minutes ago, after calling out a quick reassurance that she was only going for a walk along the beach, she had put as much distance as quickly as possible between her and Aunt Louisa’s house. One hand gripped her bonnet brim to fight the tug of the wind; the other steadied the satchel slung over her shoulder.

  As she topped a rise, the sight of the gray slashes of four stone chimneys and a bit of peaked roof sped her steps. She was almost to Edgecombe, a sprawling property perched between the moors and the sea, abandoned these two years since the death of its previous owner. The fourth Earl of Wycliffe had tragically succumbed to a fire that had broken out in one of the rooms, and apparently his heir, having no desire to spend time here, had shut the place down.

  Sophie’s interest in the estate lay not in its recent history, but in the legends that connected Edgecombe to a married pirate couple who used the place for their headquarters three centuries ago. The tales of the Keatings had long since captured her fascination, and as a child she’d spent many a happy hour poring over the details of their exploits. Oh, but never had she thought she’d have a chance to see the rambling estate firsthand. Not until the incident last month that altered the course of her life.

  Her first glimpse of the place had been little more than a jagged shadow thrust across the evening landscape, framed by the window of her grandfather’s barouche, whose driver had conveyed her from London and summarily dumped her at Aunt Louisa’s front gate. But from that first glance, she had felt the somber stone gables beckoning with an invitation that could not be ignored.

  ‘‘Stay away from there, girl,’’ her aunt had warned when Sophie broached the subject yesterday. ‘‘Don’t you so much as point your toes in the direction of that old wreckage of a house. The place is abandoned, falling apart.’’

  ‘‘It appears solid enough from the road. And so dark and brooding, poised so precariously at the edge of the land. And the history . . .’’

  ‘‘Is one of violence, whether deliberate or no. An ill fortune hangs about the place. Some say . . .’’ Aunt Louisa had leaned closer and whispered, ‘‘Some say that sort of bedevilment never entirely leaves a place, even when its occupants have long since gone to their graves.’’

  ‘‘Are you speaking of curses, Aunt Louisa? Or ghosts? I know it’s said the Keatings haunt Edgecombe, but surely you don’t believe—’’

  ‘‘What I believe is that the place is best avoided. You’d do well to put it out of your mind at once.’’

  Sophie had tried questioning her cousins about the estate, but eighteen-year-old Rachel had echoed her mother’s admonishments, while Dominic, two years older, had merely scowled, grumbled something unintelligible and stalked away.

  The admonitions had only strengthened Sophie’s desire to see the house firsthand. Reaching the drive, she halted before a pair of wrought-iron gates—closed, locked, doubly secured by a boat chain coiled several times around and held by a padlock twice the width of her palm.

  KEEP OUT. The gate’s message echoed Aunt Louisa’s words of warning. The two flanking stone pillars and the high granite walls that marched away in either direction issued the same command: STAY AWAY.

  ‘‘I hardly think so,’’ Sophie whispered.

  The house itself stood but a stone’s throw beyond a short drive that opened onto a cobbled forecourt. An imposing pair of gargoyles guarded either side of an elaborate portico topped by a Gothic arch. The windows were shuttered, emphasizing the air of abandonment permeating the property.

  A property likely to have more than one entrance. Sophie set off to search.

  Past the carriage house along the south boundary wall she discovered another, smaller gate half-hidden behind a tangle of hawthorn. She shoved the spiky branches aside and found the latch. No chains barred her way. With a fluttering breath of excitement, of refusing to take no for an answer, she slipped inside.

  A slate path took her through a narrow gap in a box hedge, past a gardener’s shed and onto the slopes of a tiered garden. A hothouse stood not far away, an octagonal structure that resembled a giant gazebo, much of its paint peeled away to reveal the wood beneath. At the apex of its steep roof, a weather vane in the shape of two crossed swords topped by a sail whimpered on its rusty pin.

  The path led her past a dry fountain and across a wooden footbridge. Bushy fern and tall, bristly spikes of bulrush choked the narrow brook below. From there she made her way beneath a stand of fruit trees and up the garden slopes. A set of steps mounted a grassy surge to a terrace, onto which several sets of French doors opened from the house. Sophie climbed the steps and enjoyed a private laugh at Aunt Louisa’s superstitions. Edgecombe was only a house, after all. Filled with history and misty legend, yes. But ghosts?

  She perched on the top step, removed the satchel from her shoulder and reached inside for her quill, pot of ink and leather-bound writing tablet. Tucking a windblown lock of hair beneath her bonnet, she flipped to a blank page.

  A house crouched at the edge of the world, she wrote, defying the elements—wind, storms and sea—to attempt their worst and be damned.

  Well. She’d need to modify that last word, of course. Grandfather St. Clair, owner and editor in chief of the Beacon, one of London’s most popular weekly newspapers, would never set it to print. Just as he never published any of Sophie’s feature pieces under her true, decidedly feminine name. No, if she wished to continue writing occasional articles for the Beacon, she must do so under the pen name of Silas Sinclair and, furthermore, must stick to such topics as her family deemed appropriate for a lady.

  Sophie St. Clair, nice girls do not ask bothersome questions. . . . Nice girls leave news reporting to men. . . . Nice girls spend their time in appropriate endeavors, such as needlework, sketching and playing the pianoforte. . . .

  Sophie, can you not, for once, behave like a proper young lady?

  How she loathed proper. Despised appropriate. Detested nice. Despite a lifetime of trying to emulate all three concepts and more, she had always fallen a lengthy stride short of success. If curiosity killed the cat, as her mother always warned, then Sophie had flirted with death all her life.

  Besides, she was no lady, certainly not in the strictest sense. The St. Clairs could boast no titles, and owned no land other than what had been purchased in
recent years with the fortune Grandfather had amassed through his newspaper and business investments. The St. Clairs were working people, hawks in peacock feathers, and Sophie saw no shame in that.

  Pen hovering above the page, she studied the house. A quick count of the shuttered windows suggested fifteen or so rooms, laid out on either side of a square tower that had, three centuries earlier, served as the seaside fortress of Sir Jack and Lady Margaret Keating.

  According to the legends Sophie had read as a child, the pair had ruled the seas for ten years, from Cornwall to northern France to Ireland and back, dispersing goods among people who could not afford the excise taxes. In reality, their methods had not always been benevolent. The Keatings brutally attacked any who opposed them, naval vessels included, employing the horrific practice of tying wounded victims together and throwing them overboard to drown.

  Finally Sir Jack’s luck ran out. After his death just off the coast here at the hands of the Royal Navy, Lady Meg snapped. In a ship of her own she embarked on an indiscriminate, high-seas rampage of murder and pillage until she was caught, tried and hanged.

  Be a nice girl, Sophie.

  Oh, very well. Today she would try to think architecture, not violent pirate history. She set her pen to paper.

  A gaunt sentinel whose granite walls seemed quarried from an ancient haze, with mysteries and memories trapped within each chiseled block . . .

  The whirling breezes abruptly dropped, replaced by an utter stillness that immediately felt . . . unnatural. A weighty silence fell over the trees, while the birds roosting in their boughs seemed caught in a state of hushed expectancy.

  Uneasy. Apprehensive. She glanced up at the house.

  A cloud covered the sun, plunging the stones and timbers into gloom and raising prickles down her spine. A sense of nervous expectancy quivered in her stomach. Had the shutters on the bay window in the far corner been open all along?