From the Publisher

Beware passion's tangled net . . .

Racing along the rocky coast of Cornwall, on a night fit for neither man nor beast, Verity Collier's coach is attacked by the notorious highwayman plaguing the Cornish countryside. The villain's commanding strength and cloak of dangerous sensuality haunt the young governess even after she arrives safely at the home of her new employer, Lord Jagger Ransley, Earl of St. Aubyn.

During the weeks that follow, she quickly grows fond of his two children. But events at the manor house cause her to grow suspicious of Ransley himself. Could he be the dastardly highwayman — a gentleman by day and a criminal by night? Worse, she has fallen in love with the handsome, enigmatic Ransley, and so decides she has but one course of action: discover the truth for herself.

Descending into the dark world of espionage against Napoleon's most ruthless spies, Verity becomes a pawn in a deadly game of cat and mouse, where traitors and gentleman are equal masters of disguise and the only true intentions lie within a noble heart.

Product Details

• Read an Excerpt

Read an Excerpt

The Love Knot

Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.

Chapter One

The Highwayman rides no more the hightoby, The hightoby no more he rides,

With silver rapier a'gleam in the pale moonlight And two pistols at his sides.

He lost his heart to a fey silkie lass, Who danced 'neath the rise o' the moon, Sealskin hair a'tangling in the wind, As she played her haunting tune.

From the mist and the sea, she crept to the shore, At the stroke of the midnight hour. With oil paints and brush, she cast her spell In her dark, enchanted bower. She burned a bright candle for her love, Sought his image in the mirror, where She braided a crimson silk love knot Into her long brown hair. So the Highwayman rides no more the hightoby, For his heart was stolen away. Now, he dwells forever in the Otherworld With his dark silkie lass so fey. The Mist and the Sea Of what is't fools make such vain keeping? Sin their conception, their birth, weeping: Their life, a general mist of error, Their death, a hideous storm of terror. The Duchess of Malfi (1623), act IV - John Webster From want of regular rests, I have been rather narvus, And the passage in Lear -"Do you not hear the sea?" - has haunted me intensely. Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds - John Keats

Frightful Cliffs of Fall O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.

Poems (1918). No. 64, Carrion Comfort - Gerard Manley Hopkins Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. Thus Spake Zarathustra - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? Songs of Experience (1794). The Tiger - William Blake * * *

The Cliffs at the Edge of the Sea Cornwall, England, 1802

Sometimes, on a wintry eve years later, when the wind was high and blew like a torrent among the rustling trees of the park, and the moon was hazily ringed and tossed among ghostily drifting clouds; when the ocean along the treacherous rocky coast maddened and roiled, and swept, white-foamed, over the deceptive reefs and shingled beaches, the gray rain came hard, and the gossamer mist cloaked the hills, the moors and the marshlands of Cornwall, there were those who would remember this perilous night when Verity Collier stood poised at the edge of the precipitous black cliffs that crumbled down to the sea far below, staring, petrified, into the hideous dark abyss that had always haunted her - and that bore the face of her own terror.

Always - ever since she had been a child - she had been absolutely terrified of heights.

She did not know why - for who can explain the fears, often irrational, that lurk in the mind of a child, some of them, to be sure, to be sheepishly laughed at in later years and easily cast off, but others never to be outgrown and left behind. Rather, these last - the worst of all - seem only to slither like serpents through the dark, labyrinthine chasms of the adult brain, there to conceal and entrench themselves even more profoundly and securely in their hiding places, whence to strike viciously and poisonously when least expected.

Those evil fangs that now pierced Verity sank deeply, their venom surging like a fever through her blood, leaving her dizzy, disoriented and faint. Her head swam sickeningly; her heart pounded as though it would at any moment burst from her breast; and her nerves stretched as taut as harp strings, vibrating rackingly with fright. Her mouth and throat were so dry that she could not swallow, while, conversely, the rest of her body sweated so profusely that, more than once, she unwittingly wiped her palms upon her skirts buffeted by the rising wind that whipped and tore mercilessly at her hair and garments.

Her knees shook violently, weakened until, at last, they completely gave way beneath her, and she slid down heavily upon them, bowing her head and closing her eyes, the blood roaring in her ears and the earth tilting wildly, nauseatingly, all around her, as though it had somehow spun out of control upon its very axis.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Love Knot by Rebecca Brandewyne Copyright © 2003 by Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---