Beguiled by Her Betrayer

by Louise Allen

  WHAT USE ARE DRAWING-ROOM MANNERS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DESERT?

  Falling unconscious in the Egyptian sand at Cleo Valsac’s feet is not part of Lord Quintus Bredon Deverall’s plan. He’s supposed to be whisking this young widow away from her father’s dusty camp and back to England—to her aristocratic grandfather and a respectable husband.

  Despite Cleo’s strong-willed nature, she can’t help but feel comforted by Quin’s protective presence. But she has no idea of this wounded stranger’s true identity…or of the passion that will begin to burn between them under the heat of the desert sun!

  “Allen reaches into readers’ hearts.” —RT Book Reviews on Married to a Stranger

  Cleo wriggled back a little and he opened his arms to release her, half thankful, half regretful.

  Then he realized she was simply putting enough space between them so he could kiss her. Who is seducing whom? he wondered. He bent his head and took the proffered lips. Just one kiss.

  Her mouth, hot and soft under his, opened without him needing to coax. She was willing, and yet, despite it all, shy. Quin took a firm grip on his willpower and kissed her with more gentleness than passion, his tongue sliding against hers, his palms flat on her back in the loosest of holds. She was trembling slightly, he realized, like a woman fighting emotion.

  Quin raised his head. “Cleo?” Her eyes were wide and dark and flooded with unshed tears. “Cleo—”

  * * *

  Beguiled by Her Betrayer

  Harlequin® Historical #1197—August 2014

  Author Note

  Several years ago I stood in the temple of Kom Ombo in Upper Egypt, fascinated by the graffiti left by French soldiers around 1800, very high up on the walls. I soon realized that the very tops of the monuments were all that Napoleon’s troops would have been able to see because the sand had covered many remains to within feet of the roof.

  Today, knowing so much about ancient Egypt, we still marvel at these monuments, but I began to wonder how they must have seemed to these men, right at the beginning of modern archaeology. The more I read about Napoleon’s savants, the group of scholars he left with his troops in Egypt to explore this mysterious civilization, the more I admired them for their courage and endurance.

  The Nile valley is so beautiful, and so romantic, that I knew I had to set a story there, and gradually the characters of Cleo and Quin began to take shape.

  I hope you enjoy reading Beguiled by Her Betrayer as much as I enjoyed writing it.

  Louise Allen

  Beguiled by Her Betrayer

  Available from Harlequin® Historical and

  LOUISE ALLEN

  *The Dangerous Mr. Ryder #903

  *The Outrageous Lady Felsham #907

  *The Shocking Lord Standon #911

  *The Disgraceful Mr. Ravenhurst #951

  *The Notorious Mr. Hurst #955

  *The Piratical Miss Ravenhurst #959

  The Viscount’s Betrothal #982

  ΔThe Lord and the Wayward Lady #996

  ΔThe Officer and the Proper Lady #1020

  §Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress #1052

  §Vicar’s Daughter to Viscount’s Lady #1056

  §Innocent Courtesan to Adventurer’s Bride #1060

  ¤Ravished by the Rake #1076

  ¤Seduced by the Scoundrel #1080

  ¤Married to a Stranger #1084

  Snowbound Wedding Wishes #1111

  “An Earl Beneath the Mistletoe”

  ~Forbidden Jewel of India #1121

  ~Tarnished Amongst the Ton #1137

  Rumors #1153

  From Ruin to Riches #1169

  Unlacing Lady Thea #1182

  Scandal’s Virgin #1189

  Beguiled by Her Betrayer #1197

  Other works include Harlequin Historical Undone! ebooks

  *Disrobed and Dishonored

  §Auctioned Virgin to Seduced Bride

  Harlequin Books

  Hot Desert Nights

  “Desert Rake”

  Together by Christmas

  “A Mistletoe Masquerade”

  *Those Scandalous Ravenhursts

  ΔSilk & Scandal

  §The Transformation of the Shelley Sisters

  ¤Danger & Desire

  ~linked by character

  Did you know that these novels are also available as ebooks? Visit www.Harlequin.com.

  LOUISE ALLEN

  has been immersing herself in history, real and fictional, for as long as she can remember. She finds landscapes and places evoke powerful images of the past—Venice, Burgundy and the Greek Islands are favorite atmospheric destinations. Louise lives on the North Norfolk coast, where she shares with her husband the cottage they have renovated. She spends her spare time gardening, researching family history or traveling in the U.K. and abroad in search of inspiration. Please visit Louise’s website, www.louiseallenregency.com, for the latest news, or find her on Twitter, @LouiseRegency, and on Facebook.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Historical Note

  Chapter One

  Early April 1801—Upper Egypt

  There was shade down there and water jars sweating themselves cool and the start of the green growth that ran from the desert edge into the banks of the Nile. Too soon. Quin lay flat on the hot sand of the dune’s crest and distracted himself from thirst, heat and the throbbing pain in his left arm by concentrating on the tent below.

  Tent was perhaps too modest a word. It seemed to consist of several interior rooms surrounded by shaded areas formed by poles and flaps of fabric which, he supposed, would collapse to make outer walls at night.

  It was an immaculately neat and well-organised encampment, although there were no servants to be seen. To one side was an animal shelter with hitching rail and trough, on the other a reed roof covered a cooking area. A thin wisp of smoke rose from the banked fire, there was no donkey tied to the rail and the only occupant appeared to be the man in shirtsleeves who sat at a table in the deep shade of an awning, his pen moving steadily across the paper in front of him.

  Quin narrowed his eyes against the dusty sunlight. Mid-fifties, burly, salt-and-pepper brown hair: that was certainly his quarry, or one of them at least. Sir Philip Woodward, baronet, antiquarian and scholar, neglectful husband, selfish widower and father and, very possibly, traitor.

  A flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye betrayed robes caught in the light breeze. Someone was approaching. Quin shifted his gaze to where the monumental columns of the temple of Koum Ombo rose from the enshrouding sand, dwarfing the mud-walled huts of the little village of fishermen and farmers beyond it. The person leading a donkey must be familiar with the area, for they spared no glance for the great ruins as they passed them by. It was a woman, he saw as she came closer, clad in the enveloping folds of a dark blue tob sebleh, but like most of the country women of Upper Egypt, unveiled. A servant—or the other person he had been sent to find?

  Madame Valsac, widow of Capitaine Thierry Valsac of Napoleon’s Army of the East, daug
hter of Sir Philip Woodward and, maybe, another traitor. But unlike her father, whose safety was of little concern to the hard-faced men who had briefed Quin, Madame Valsac was to be extracted from Egypt and restored to the custody of her grandfather whether she liked it or not, and regardless of where her loyalties might lie.

  That this might prove troublesome, hundreds of miles from the coast and the invading British army, in the path of France’s fearsome Mameluke allies who were believed to be heading north at that moment, and in the midst of one of Egypt’s periodic outbreaks of plague, had not concerned the gentlemen in Gibraltar. Quin was a diplomat who spoke French and Arabic and knew enough of antiquities to pass as one of the French savants, the scholars left by Napoleon to explore Egypt under the protection of his underpaid, diseased, poorly resourced army. That, so far as they were concerned, was sufficient qualification.

  ‘Classical antiquities, my lord,’ Quin had pointed out. ‘My knowledge of Egypt is virtually non-existent.’ Nor am I qualified in kidnapping females, he might have added, but did not.

  ‘Plenty of time to read it up on board ship between here and Alexandria,’ his unsympathetic superior had retorted. ‘Just remember, the Duke of St Osyth wants his granddaughter back, never mind if she’s taken an entire French regiment to her bed. Her father no one wants, but if he’s a traitor, then we need to know the ins and outs of it. Then you can dispose of him.’

  ‘I am not an assassin, my lord.’ Quin had said it with an edge missing from the protest about his lack of knowledge of Egypt. He might be ambitious, but he drew the line at murder.

  ‘Then introduce him to a hungry crocodile or lose him in the desert.’

  Quin blinked to clear his vision and realised that the black dots swimming before his eyes were not flies.

  The woman and the donkey were close now. She spoke as she passed the man sitting under the awning, but he made no reply. A servant, then.

  She halted the donkey and began to heave the water jars from its back with the economical strength of someone accustomed to manual labour. She filled the donkey’s bucket, poured more water into the large storage jars and finally carried a pitcher to one of the open-sided shaded spaces facing the dune where Quin lay.

  Through the insistent throbbing in his head it took him a minute to realise what she was about. The woman pulled the cotton folds of the tob sebleh over her head, removed the twisted cloth that tied up her hair and was unfastening the sash around her waist before he assimilated not only the colour of her hair—honey-brown, waving and most decidedly not Egyptian—but the fact that she was about to strip off her under-tunic and bathe.

  He did not ogle women in their bath like some Peeping Tom, any more than he fed inconvenient baronets to the crocodiles. Quin rose to his feet, surprised at how unstable the shifting sands were. Now was the time to put his plan, such as it was, into effect.

  One step down the slope and he knew it was not the surface that was making him so unsteady. Hell, I’m sick, he thought, getting his legs under precarious control as he half-slid, half-ran. He hit the flat ground at the foot with a force that jarred his spine and took six weaving steps towards the woman. She made no move and no sound, simply stood there, her hands arrested on the knot of her sash, staring at him.

  Quin halted a yard from her. ‘Bonjour,’ he managed before his knees gave out and the ground came up to meet him. ‘Mada—’

  * * *

  Cleo regarded the sprawled, bareheaded figure clad in a dusty galabeeyah for a long moment, sighed, then raised her voice. ‘Father!’

  ‘I am working. Is it time to eat?’

  ‘No. There is a man here, unconscious.’

  ‘Leave him.’ Her father sounded irritated at the interruption and not in the slightest bit curious. But then this slumped heap of humanity was a person, not a ruined temple, or an inscription, let alone a fresco, so his lack of interest was only to be expected.

  ‘He will die and then he will stink,’ Cleo retorted. Only a direct threat to her parent’s comfort and convenience would shift him, she knew that very well.

  There was a muttered curse, then her father appeared. He poked the recumbent figure with the toe of his boot. It shifted slightly. ‘Not dead. And not Egyptian. Frenchman, no doubt. Where do you want him?’

  ‘I do not want him at all, but on the other bed frame in my room, I suppose.’ Cleo pushed aside the hangings and stripped the spare sheets and her few clothes from the bed, leaving only the thin cotton padding over the crossed ropes. By the time she got back her father had the man under the armpits and was dragging him in, still face-down.

  An unpleasant possibility struck her. ‘Are there swellings?’

  ‘What?’ Her father let the limp figure fall back with a thud.

  Cleo winced. Now she’d have a bleeding, broken nose to deal with. ‘In his armpits. If he has the plague, there will be swellings.’

  ‘No. No fever either, he’s as dry as a bone.’ He went back to dragging the man inside. Cleo lifted the long legs when he reached the bed and they hefted the stranger up and on to his back. By some miracle the assertive nose was unbent.

  ‘Heatstroke, then,’ Cleo diagnosed. There was a dark dried mess on his left sleeve. ‘And a wound.’ Her father was already turning away. ‘I need to get these clothes off him.’

  ‘You were a married woman, you can manage.’ His voice floated back from behind the hangings. He would be lost in his correspondence again until she pushed food under his nose.

  ‘I might have been married,’ Cleo muttered, laying the back of her hand on the wide, hot forehead, ‘but I was not married to this one.’ She took off the man’s sandals, the easy part, then rolled and pushed the limp, heavy body and dragged at the cotton robe until it was over his head. The cord keeping up the thin cotton drawers snapped in the process, so she pulled those off too. There was a belt around his waist with a leather bag, heavy with coin. She set it aside, then stood back to survey the extent of the problem.

  And it was extensive. Six foot, broad-shouldered, blond and lean with the look of a man who had recently lost whatever slight reserves of fat he might have had, leaving the muscles across his abdomen sculpted as though by the hands of a master carver. And he was very definitely male. The carver might have had the decency to provide a large fig leaf while he was at it...

  Widow she might be, but she was certainly not sophisticated enough to gaze unmoved on a naked stranger. Not one who looked like this. Cleo fixed her gaze on his arm where a ragged wound was cut like a groove from shoulder to elbow, gave herself a little shake and concentrated on priorities.

  Gunshot, not a blade, she concluded, eyeing the inflamed edges of the red, weeping mess. Removing the outer robe had torn it open, although it had obviously not been healing healthily. The first thing was to get some water into him, then reduce his temperature and then she would see what she could do with his arm. There was no doctor or surgeon with the small detachment of French troops camped on the far side of the next village, so she could expect no help there.

  The man sucked greedily at the cup when she lifted his head to drink. The smell of water seemed to revive him a little.

  ‘Slowly, you cannot have too much at once,’ she began, then recalled that he had spoken in French before he collapsed. ‘Lentement.’

  He moved his head restlessly when she took the water away, but he did not open his eyes. Now to get him cooler and covered up. She could start work on his arm once she had put some food under Father’s nose.

  ‘You, monsieur,’ Cleo said in French as she shook out a sheet and dropped it into a bucket of water, ‘are a thorough nuisance. Believe me, if my fairy godmother flew down and offered me whatever I wanted, another man to look after would be the lowest on my list of desirable objects.’ She pulled the linen out and draped it dripping over the distractingly naked body. ‘There. That’s better.’ For me, at least.

  * * *

  It was his favourite fantasy, the one that came when he was half-asleep
, the comfortable, yet arousing, one about being married to his perfect woman. There was the rustle of skirts, the soft pad of feet, the occasional faint waft of some feminine perfume as she moved about the room close by. Soon he would wake up and she would come to his bed and smile at him, her blue eyes warm and loving, her face—he could picture it very clearly—sweet, with neat little features and a soft, pink mouth.

  ‘Caroline.’ He would hold out his arms and she would unpin her long blonde curls and begin to undress with an innocent coquettishness that made him hard and aching before they even touched.

  When she came to him, her curvaceous body would fit against his big frame as though she had been made for him. ‘Oh, Quin,’ she would murmur and run her hands over his chest, lower, lower...

  The smell of roasting meat distracted him. What were the staff doing to allow kitchen odours to penetrate to his bedchamber? He was the ambassador, damn it. His dream wife’s fingers stroked down, exploring. Her blonde ringlets, unaccountably wet, fell on to his chest as she pulled him back from that distraction with impetuous little kisses that dotted his face. His body reacted predictably, hardening, his balls tightened, lifted. Soon he would enter her, love her, caress her into ecstasy. And afterwards they would talk, rationally and intelligently. They would be interested in each other’s thoughts, respectful of the other’s opinions. It would be peaceful, harmonious...

  ‘Hell and damnation!’ It was a woman all right, but that was all that meshed with his dream. A string of idiomatic expressions in Arabic confirmed that the speaker was no lady.

  Quin realised he was conscious, in pain, devilishly thirsty and decidedly confused. ‘Wha...?’ he croaked. His blasted eyes would hardly open but, mercifully, a cup was pressed to his lips.

  ‘Slowly,’ a voice chided in French. The same woman’s voice, clear, crisp, definitely unseductive. Definitely unsympathetic. The water was removed.

  ‘Merci,’ Quin managed to say and squinted up through sore lids. And definitely not my fantasy woman, he thought, some shred of humour emerging amidst the general misery. Tall, slender, brown haired, she regarded him down a long, straight, imperious nose with an air of tightly controlled impatience. Intelligent, certainly. Cuddly, sweet and pliant...no. ‘More?’ he added, hopefully. ‘Er...encore?’ He needed to keep his mouth shut except for drinking until his brain stopped boiling.