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  NEVER CALL IT LOVE

  Veronica Jason

  A SIGNET BOOK

  NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

  Times Mirror

  A BLAZING LOVE THAT WAS BORN IN SMOLDERING HATE

  When beautiful young Elizabeth Montlow lost her innocence, it was not on a night of romantic dreams. It was in an act of savage violence by a man seeking vengeance.

  Yet from this brutal beginning came an all-consuming passion that would take Elizabeth from the sheltered eighteenth-century English countryside to a lonely manor in Ireland, where she was forced to share her man with his ravishing and ruthless mistress... to a nightmare exile on a lush and licentious Caribbean island, where lust and murder went hand in hand... to the depths of the lawless American wilderness, where two men played a monstrous game of heart-wrenching deception with her as the stake....

  Here is a burning saga of a woman swept up in a whirlwind of desire that carried her to the ends of the earth in search of her destiny....

  CONQUEST

  Elizabeth lay naked before this man, as the cord he had tied around her wrists bit into her straining flesh.

  She felt his gaze moving over her body. Then with startling gentleness his hand closed over her breast.

  For perhaps a minute she stayed rigid, resisting the odd little thrills that seemed to travel from her breast to somewhere deep within. Then all the stiffness went out of her. Something was happening, something she had never experienced before, a sense of warm, liquid swelling. His hand left her breast, moved skillfully downward. Dimly she was aware that her hips were moving, as if her body had a will of its own...

  Later, as she lay there, spent, she tried to protest, "It was only my body."

  But even as Elizabeth spoke, she knew that no part of her now was safe from this masterful man's fiery passion.... NEVER CALL IT LOVE

  New American Library, Inc., 1633 Broadway, New York, New York 10019.

  Copyright © 1978 by Veronica Jason All rights reserved

  Signet, Signet Classics, Mentor, Plume, Meridian and NAL Books are published by The New American Library, Inc., 1633 Broadway, New York, New York 10019

  First Signet Printing, December, 1978

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  CHAPTER 1

  There were five of them cloaked and eye-masked, crouching below sidewalk level in the pitch-black area-way. Moments earlier, when one of them had seen the approaching figure, they had exchanged a few excited whispers. Now they waited in tense silence. They knew nothing about the woman moving along the sidewalk except that her footsteps were light and young, and that she was alone. But that was enough to know. It made her exactly the sort of prey they had hoped to find that night.

  To seventeen-year-old Anne Reardon, the London street seemed utterly deserted. She saw no movement, and heard no sound except that of a fitful November wind, rattling the leafless ivy vines that clung to the tall house fronts and making the widely spaced oil streetlamps gutter despite their protective glass lanterns.

  She quickened her steps. With a mittened hand she drew closer around her the hooded cloak that hid her reddish-blond hair and framed her small face. It was a somewhat plain face, thin and slightly freckled, but appealing in its youth and gentleness. There was no reason for her to be afraid, she told herself, even though long stretches of blackness lay between the dim patches of moving light cast by the streetlamps. This was a fine neighborhood. Only the rich and respectable lived in these tall stone houses, with their fanlighted doors that here and there spilled warm light onto front steps and areaway railings. Too, in only a few minutes she would reach her guardian's lodgings in Darnley Square. Nevertheless, she found herself wishing that she had stayed back there with Auntie Maude in the disabled carriage.

  The accident had occurred without warning. A barrel-laden cart, drawn by a scrawny horse, had rounded the corner from a side street and locked its left wheel with the right-hand rear wheel of their hired carriage. Sitting beside her plump chaperon, Anne had listened to the carriage driver and the carter exchange invectives so violent that she expected the men at any moment to come to blows. Finally, though, they had settled down to trying to disentangle their vehicles.

  It had proved to be a difficult task. Minutes passed, while the grunting, swearing men struggled with the locked wheels. Anne had felt a growing anxiety. It was now not more than a quarter of an hour to seven o'clock, the hour appointed for the signing of the marriage contract. They would all be waiting: Thomas Cobbin, the shy twenty-year-old she scarcely knew, but who nevertheless, in a few months' time, would be her husband; his middle-class, highly respectable parents; and Anne's Anglo-Irish guardian, Sir Patrick Stanford, fourth baronet.

  It would not do to arrive late on such an important occasion, especially since her prospective parents-in-law, a London ironmonger and his wife, had not seemed over-eager to have their son marry an Irish girl, even a baronet's ward. Only the generous dowry offered by Sir Patrick had brought them to the point of signing the contract.

  The carriage tilted slightly. From the suddenly relieved voices of the two straining men, she had known that the locked wheels were almost free of each other. Then the carriage horse, frightened by a scrap of paper blowing along the street, had backed up in the shafts. With a sound of rending wood, the wheels locked again.

  Desperately Anne had turned to her relative. "You stay here, Auntie," she had said, through the fluent curses of the two men in the street. "I'm going to walk the rest of the way. It's not far."

  Auntie Maude's round face was appalled. "At night? Through this wicked town?"

  Never before out of Ireland, Maude Reardon feared and hated London. The noisy traffic along the Strand. The dirty, ragged urchins who, if you stepped into St. James's Park to rest your eyes on a bit of green, would surround you, beg for coppers, and then reward your generosity by twisting a button from your best mantle or filching your handkerchief from your pocket. She hated the smart Oxford Street shops where the clerks sneered at her Irish accent. And she had been terrified one evening when a hired carriage, unable to get through a street where two houses were on fire, had taken her on a detour through Covent Garden. With horror she had stared at the painted bawds of all ages sauntering along the sidewalks, or calling, bare-breasted, from upper windows. She had seen gin-soaked men and women reeling across the cobblestones, and heard young boys hawking tickets for elevated seats from which to view the next day's double attraction at Newgate—the hanging of a fifteen-year-old girl pickpocket, and the drawing and quartering of a famous highwayman.

  Ireland was poor, true enough, and not unacquainted with violence. But no part of that isle, Maude Reardon felt sure, held anything to match the filth and danger and debauchery of London under the reign of His Gracious Majesty George III.

  Anne had said, "I must, Auntie. I can't be late. And this is a respectable street. As soon as the carriage is freed, you can join us."

  "I forbid you!" Maude Reardon's pleasant face did its best to look stern. "You know I cannot keep up with you, not with my asthma. And you can't go through the streets alone at night. What would Sir Patrick say?"

  "Please, Auntie! It's because of him I must hurry. I cannot bear to have him worried or... or annoyed with me." She had slipped out of the carriage, and ignoring the anxious cry her aunt sent after her, hurried away down the street.

  It was true that what distressed her most was the thought of displeasing, not the Cobbins, but Patrick. Always she had shrunk from the idea of doing anything to bring disapproval to his face, that rough-hewn face that some might consider cold and proud, but which for her had never held anything but kindness. And he had gone to such effort to secure her future. A month ago he had brought her and Auntie Maude over from
Ireland and settled them in lodgings near Grosvenor Square. Twice he had summoned them to his own Darnley Square lodgings to meet the Cobbins and their son, once for morning coffee, and once for supper. Behind the scenes, he had worked out the marriage settlement with the elder Cobbin.

  As always at the thought of her guardian, Anne felt a twist of hopeless longing. Only in her wildest daydreams had she pictured herself as Patrick Stanford's bride. At thirty-two he was almost twice her age. And obviously his emotion for her, compassionate and paternal, had not changed since she, an orphaned ten-year-old, had been brought to Stanford Hall as his ward. Besides, when he chose to marry, he would select a fine lady, either from the Anglo-Irish aristocracy or from among the English beauties he mingled with for a few weeks each year during the London season.

  But at least she had sometimes hoped that she would be allowed to live out her life at Stanford Hall, where she could see him almost every day. See him dismount from the rangy bay hunter in the cobblestoned courtyard after a run through the misty countryside. See him in his study, dark face frowning over the account books his half-brother, Colin, had spread before him. See him at the long, candlelit table in the drafty old dining hall, sometimes abstracted and silent, sometimes good-natured and teasing. Yes, it would have been wonderful if she could have stayed there always, silently loving him, and someday helping care for the children another woman would give him.

  But it was foolish and ungrateful of her to want that. As Patrick plainly realized, it was better for her to marry some quiet, decent man and have children of her own.

  It was apparent now that the distance between the disabled carriage and Darnley Square was greater than she had thought. Nor had she expected the street to be this deserted. Perhaps five minutes ago an old-fashioned sedan chair, its white-wigged occupant dimly visible through the glass, had moved past her along the street, with a torch-carrying linkboy running ahead of the bearers. But the sedan chair had soon disappeared around a curve. Since then there had been no street traffic and no other pedestrians. Only darkness, broken at long intervals by wavering yellow pools of light cast by the streetlamps. Only the cold wind tearing at her cloak and rattling the ivy branches. Only this vague feeling that had crept over her within the last minute or two, this presentiment that some terrible danger lurked nearby.

  A wild, inhuman scream from somewhere at her right. Heart lurching, she stopped short. A lean cat, white or light gray, shot between two pickets of an areaway railing and scurried across the street. Anne clutched the railing until her heartbeats began to slow. Then, smiling a little in her relief, she hurried onward. It could not be much farther now. A few yards ahead, the street curved. And beyond that curve, surely, she would see Darnley Square. She passed another areaway.

  Behind her, there below street level, one of the masked figures gestured silently. He led them softly up the stone steps. Then, sure that surprise and terror would render her voiceless for the necessary few seconds, they all rushed after her.

  At the sound of running feet, she whirled around. Two of them seized her arms. As she opened her mouth to scream, one of them who had moved behind her slipped a cloth gag between her jaws. Too paralyzed with terror to struggle, she felt herself lifted in someone's arms.

  A voice said, "Christopher! You've lost your hat." It was a male voice, and young.

  The man who held her said in a low, angry tone, "Then pick it up, you damn fool. And don't use my name like that."

  He had carried her down the areaway steps now. "Open the door," he said impatiently, "and strike some lights."

  She had begun to struggle. The arms holding her tightened their grip, pinioning her own arms to her sides. She heard a door creak open, and then, after she was carried into deeper blackness, close behind her.

  A sound of a scraping flint, and then candlelight, falling on a bare wooden table, on a huge fireplace hung with cooking pots, and on the dark, masked figures jostling around her. Two of them held candlesticks aloft to light the way as she was carried up steps, along a short corridor, into a formal entrance hall. Eyes bulging with fear, tongue trying to free itself from the painful gag, she gained a jumbled impression of a floor marbled in black and white squares, and of gilded nymphs holding candelabra aloft at the foot of a wide stair.

  She was borne up those stairs, along a corridor, and into a room. Evidently it had been unused for some time, because the air smelled musty. Her darting, terrified eyes showed her it was a bedroom, furnished in the massive style of the previous century. Across the room, near the bed canopied in dark red velvet, a huge gilt-framed mirror hung. In it she could see a dim reflection of hovering, dark-cloaked figures, and of her imprisoned self, mouth stretched into a grotesque grimace by the gag.

  Gathering all her strength, she turned and twisted. She got one arm free, and raised her hand to claw the face of the man who held her. Her curving fingers caught his eye mask, and the string that held it in place gave way. Then he again imprisoned her thrashing arm.

  She looked up into the face of a very young man, a face so beautiful it almost might have been a girl's. Very pale yellow hair hung to his shoulders in ringlets. His cleft chin, sensually full mouth, and straight nose were like those of a young Greek god. And his large eyes were the deep blue of the ocean on a cloudless day.

  The very beauty of that face heightened the impression it gave, an impression of overwhelming evil. She could see that evil—cold, inhuman, obeying nothing but its own appetites—looking down at her from behind those blue eyes.

  Annoyance had crossed his face when she pulled down the eye mask. But now he smiled and set her on her feet. He stepped back from her, as if waiting with amused curiosity to see what she would do.

  She stood swaying. Her eyes flew to the doorway. Three of them, grinning below their masks, stood there beside a small table upon which the lighted candles had been placed. But across the room, beside that huge mirror, she had seen another door.

  Because she had no other hope, she ran to the door, tried vainly to turn the knob, pushed with all her frail strength against the panels. They stood as solid as the wall itself.

  She turned then, with the blood surging in her ears like the pound of distant surf, and stared at those nightmarish figures. When the blond youth began to move leisurely toward her, she pressed her back against the door, as if in some insane hope that her body would melt into it.

  He stopped before her, and while she stood paralyzed, undid the button that held her cloak closed at the neck. His hand reached down inside her bodice until he grasped, not only her gown, but the top of her shift, too. Stepping backward, he ripped both garments to their hems. Then he stepped even farther back, the torn lengths of material trailing from his hand. As if again curious to see what she would do, he looked at her, smiling faintly, head tilted to one side.

  Her torn clothing dropped from his hand. Someone— not he—gave a low, excited laugh. And then, like a pack of animals, the blond youth and all the others closed in upon her.

  CHAPTER 2

  In the lamplit room on an upper floor of the Darnley Square house, a tension filled the air, almost as palpable as the ticking of the ornate gilt clock on the marble mantelpiece or the snapping of flames in the grate. Sir Patrick, replacing in its stand the poker with which he had just prodded the logs, broke a silence of several minutes. "I cannot understand what is delaying Anne and her aunt."

  Seated in an armchair beside the fire, fat stomach stretching his fawn-colored trousers and embroidered waistcoat, red face frowning beneath his glossy brown peruke, Jeremiah Cobbin said, "Nor can I." His wife, sitting tight-lipped beside him, sharp features shadowed by her richly plumed hat, gave an audible sniff.

  Thank God, Patrick Stanford thought, that a domestic crisis—a small fire in the scullery of their house near the Strand—had caused the Cobbins themselves to be almost half an hour late. Otherwise, dowry or no dowry, they might long since have taken their offended selves and their son down the stairs.

 
Patrick glanced at Thomas Cobbin, who sat stiffly on a straight chair a little apart from his parents. He was an ordinary-looking young man, short of stature, dark-haired, and sallow-complexioned. In Patrick's estimate, he lacked the shrewdness and energy of his successful father. But on the other hand, Patrick had detected in him none of the cruelty that sometimes lurks beneath the surface of seemingly meek men. He had no reputation for debauchery. And most important of all, he would someday inherit the Cobbin ironmongery. Yes, it would be a remarkably fine match for an Irish fisherman's orphaned daughter.

  It never occurred to Patrick to wonder if the two young people would ever come to love each other. Marriage for love was a luxury reserved to the poor. For the middle and upper classes, marriage was a practical business, a means of advancing one's family status, socially or financially or both. True, Patrick had known a few fortunate couples who had found love within marriage. But usually love was something a man felt for a mistress, or that a woman felt for a lover, admitted by some trusted servant to her house and to her bed during her husband's absence.

  "Anne's aunt sometimes gets things muddled," he said. "Perhaps she lost the message I sent this morning, and then recollected the appointed hour as eight o'clock, rather than seven."

  "Perhaps," Jeremiah Cobbin said shortly. He looked at the mantel clock. Its hands pointed to ten minutes of eight. "Very well. We will wait until the hour strikes."

  Patrick felt a growing uneasiness. Could Anne and Maude Reardon have met with an accident? The thought made him realize how fond he had become of the reddish-haired girl who had been in his charge these past seven years. He recalled the night she had arrived at Stanford Hall, a thin child, motherless since two days after her own birth, her small face set in a mask of grief that made her look almost old. He had felt compassion for her then, and a sense of deep responsibility, because it was at his orders that Tim Reardon had gone to his death. In Patrick's opinion, it had been a hero's death, but his small daughter did not know that. Only Patrick and his half-brother, Colin, and a few others would ever know why Tim's fishing boat had caught fire and sunk in the Irish channel one moonless night.