THE PLAYER Rockliffe #3

Wanting a change of pace after The King’s Falcon,��I decided to work on an idea I’ve had for some time for a novel in the Rockliffe series.

The result is THE ��PLAYER.

It is now available for pre-order at Amazon and will be released on March 6th.

 

Tragedy drove him into unwilling exile and death brings about his equally reluctant return. It’s time for the actor known to Paris as L’Inconnu to resume his true identity … if only he could remember who that had been.

He isn’t going back because he wants to. ��He’s going because he must.

He doesn’t expect anyone to welcome him.

 

Extract��

The dreams were back.

Dreams that remembered what his waking self only wanted to forget. Nightmares so bad that, once again, he dreaded sleeping.

And all because of the letter.

It was the night before his twenty-second birthday and three days before the wedding. At first, he wasn’t sure what woke him. Then he realised that the door to his chamber stood open and, outlined against the darkness outside it, was a still figure in trailing white.

For an instant, with sleep still fogging his brain, he thought it was a ghost but, even as shock propelled him upright, he recognised Evie’s husky, faintly unsteady laugh and saw her beckon him, then vanish like the apparition he’d briefly thought her.

The dream telescoped time as she led him through the semi-derelict north wing and out on to the roof. Then everything swung sharply back into focus.

She climbed on the low parapet, her body in its thin draperies haloed by the rising sun and the rippling rose-gold hair gleaming about her shoulders. Instinctively, he reached out to pull her back but she held him off saying, ‘No. If you wanted to catch me, you should have run faster.’

Her eyes were too bright and her voice too brittle. He’d seen her over-excited and highly-strung before – but never like this. She frightened him as much in the dream as she’d often done in reality.

He tried to speak but nothing came out.

And then, with a sudden dazzling smile, she said, ‘I’m not going to marry you.’

The words hit him like a punch in the stomach.

‘What?’

‘I’m not going to marry you. Don’t you want to know why?’

He didn’t. He wanted her to stop. He wanted her to laugh and say she was joking. He wanted the alarm bells ringing inside his head to fall silent.

He said, ‘I imagine you’ve brought me out here to tell me.’

‘Yes.’ The expression in the lovely eyes changed into something he didn’t recognise and she took her time about replying. Then she said baldly, ‘I’m pregnant.’

The sense of it was too far off to grasp.

‘You can’t be. We’ve never …’ He fought the hard knot that was forming in his chest. ‘Evie, if this is some game –‘

‘It’s no game.’ She took a graceful dance-step along the broad, flat ledge and pivoted to face him. ‘And it isn’t about you. I’m telling you that I have a lover and that I’m pregnant by him. I could have kept it to myself and married you anyway. Would you have preferred that?’

‘I don’t … I’d have preferred there was nothing to tell.’ His brain still couldn’t accept that this was really happening. ‘Who is it?’

‘Guess.’

‘I can’t. Who is he?’

‘Someone you know. Someone so very unlike you, he could be your opposite.’ Her voice grew rhythmically hypnotic, as if she either had no idea of the torment she was inflicting or simply didn’t care. ‘One so dark, the other so fair. One heir to a high-ranking title, the other already possessed of a lesser one. ��Need I go on – or can you guess yet?’

He could but he didn’t want to. Bile rose sickeningly in his throat and he said chokingly, ‘Say his name.’

‘I don’t need to, do I? You know.’

‘I shall know when I hear you say it.’

And so, with a smile and a shrug, she tossed him the name that ought to have been inconceivable but somehow wasn’t.

Sometimes, when he was really lucky, this was where the dream let go of him and he woke drenched in sweat, his breath coming in retching gasps.

Mostly, these days, it held him in its grip until the bitter end.

 

Readers of The Mesalliance��will perhaps enjoy meeting the Duke of Rockliffe again, along with some other old friends. ��The Player also introduces Rock’s brother, Lord Nicholas Wynstanton and sundry new characters … including our hero, Francis Adrian Sinclair Devereux, Earl of Sarre and Caroline Maitland, a manufacturing heiress from Halifax. ��Ah … and perhaps I ought to mention the highwayman. ��After all, his role in all this is crucial.