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another chance meeting in the Chateau Frontenac he had simply told her he wanted her.
    She had been shocked, angered, shamed—and intrigued by those pale-blue eyes whose depths, were openly candid yet as distant and unreachable as the night’s stars. She watched as he uncoiled his long body and rose to pull on his knee breeches. “Terence?” she called softly.
    But either he did not hear her or he ignored her. Bare-chested, his skin baked by the hot sun of India, he crossed to the French doors and threw them open to the pale September sunlight. Out on the balcony he braced his hands on the black wrought-iron grillwork and looked out upon the walled citadel. As the English General Wolf had breached that citadel, claiming the French province as England’s own, so would Terence breach London society to claim again the Manor House as his own—but not from a backwoods province like Quebec.
    Once more Robert Lennox of Wychwood had bested him. But Terence knew his own assets. His patience—and shrewdness—would bring about that for which he had been striving since he was sixteen. He was in no hurry.
    His transfer to Quebec that Lennox had effected—he might make it work for him, under the right circumstances. He considered the chaos erupting in the American colonies. Were he there, the opportunity could present itself for the object he sought—the total devastation of the House of Lennox.
    The Frenchwoman murmured his name again, and a patient, unruffled smile creased lines at either side of his mouth. He was already weary of her avaricious hands, yet she, too, would serve his purpose.
     
     
     
    CHAPTER FIVE
     
    A n early-winter gale chased the brig on its voyage across the Atlantic, so the hatches were battened down most of the journey. Mercifully, Jane was too ill to recall fully the five-week nightmare: the narrow slats that slept two or three people; the paltry food, if food it could be called; the lack of ventilation; and always, the vomiting. Every indentured servant had been ill with the bloody flux and ague, and some—like the five-year-old in the cramped bunk across from hers—had died.
    For Jane, who had been served tea and crumpets in bed every morning of her life, who had Meg to light the fire each morning before she arose, the cold and aching in her bones was a new and almost unbearable hardship. Yet the captain had been humane. He provided the passengers with lemon juice against the scurvy and periodically ordered the ship scoured with vinegar.
    As the brig put into Chesapeake Bay, the indentured servants were brought on deck to wash up and restore their clothing. The captain, who was to be paid for transporting the servants according to the price each was auctioned for, desired the haggled lot to look their best. A clean list was made of the names and accomplishments of the surviving passengers. Jane noticed that sometimes a little fraud was practiced—adorning convicts with wigs to increase their respectability and crediting fictitious abilities to some of the men.
    As for her own appearance, it was much altered from that of the tall, lovely Lady Jane Lennox. She had brutally shorn her ebony, hip-length hair with a butcher’s knife from the Lennox kitchen. The cropped hair now capped her head in oil-matted locks that had been hastily and spottily hennaed by her inexpert hand.
    Her brown cotton dress, buttoned to the neck, had sweat rings beneath her armpits. Five weeks at sea had left her creamy complexion a pasty yellow, and her seasickness had sunken her cheeks. Her father would find it difficult to trace his daughter if he described her as she had once been. Despite the unappealing woman she now appeared, there was still a certain sensualness in the set of the mobile lips, a husky quality in the assumed brogue of the voice. And the shapeless dress could not conceal the high, rounded breasts that taunted the thin cotton. And, of course, there was her unconscious queenly carriage that betrayed her