Slightly Sinful

Informationen zum Autor Mary Balogh Klappentext Meet the Bedwyns—six brothers and sisters—men and women of passion and privilege, daring and sensuality....Enter their dazzling world of high society and breathtaking seduction...where each will seek love, fight temptation, and court scandal...and where Alleyne Bedwyn, the passionate middle son, is cut off from his past—only to find his future with a sinfully beautiful woman he will risk everything to love. As the fires of war raged around him, Lord Alleyne Bedwyn was thrown from his horse and left for dead—only to awaken in the bedchamber of a ladies' brothel. Suddenly the dark, handsome diplomat has no memory of who he is or how he got there—yet of one thing he is certain: The angel who nurses him back to health is the woman he vows to make his own. But like him, Rachel York is not who she seems. A lovely young woman caught up in a desperate circumstance, she must devise a scheme to regain her stolen fortune. The dashing soldier she rescued from near-death could be her savior in disguise. There is just one condition: she must pose as his wife—a masquerade that will embroil them in a sinful scandal, where a man and a woman court impropriety with each daring step...with every taboo kiss that can turn passionate strangers into the truest of lovers. Chapter One Having spent almost all of his twenty-five years in England and therefore isolated from most of the hostilities that had ravaged the rest of Europe since the rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte, Lord Alleyne Bedwyn, third brother of the Duke of Bewcastle, had no personal experience of pitched battles. But he had listened with avid interest to the war stories sometimes told by his elder brother, Lord Aidan Bedwyn, a recently retired cavalry colonel, and had thought he could picture such a scene. He had been wrong. He had imagined neatly deployed lines, the British and her allies on this side, the enemy on that, flat land like the playing fields of Eton between them. He had imagined cavalry and infantry and artillery, all pristine and picturesque in their various uniforms, moving about neatly and logically, like the pieces on a chessboard. He had imagined the rapid popping of gunfire, disturbing, but not obliterating, the silence. He had imagined clarity of vision, the ability to see all points of the battlefield at all times, the ability to assess the progress of the battle at every moment. He had imagined--if he had thought of it at all--clean, clear air to breathe. He had been wrong on all counts. He was not himself a military man. Recently he had decided that it was time he did something useful with his life and had embarked upon a career as a diplomat. He had been assigned to the embassy at the Hague under Sir Charles Stuart. But Sir Charles and a number of his staff, Alleyne included, had moved to Brussels while the Allied armies under the Duke of Wellington's command gathered there in response to a new threat from Napoleon Bonaparte, who had escaped from his exile on the island of Elba earlier in the spring and was raising a formidable army in France again. Now, today, the long-expected battle between the two forces was being fought on a rolling, hilly stretch of farmland south of the village of Waterloo. And Alleyne was there in the thick of it. He had volunteered to carry a letter from Sir Charles to Wellington and to bring back a reply. He was thankful that he had ridden out from Brussels alone. He might have been unable to hide from any companion the fact that he had never been even half so frightened in his life. The noise of the great guns was the worst. It went beyond sound. It deafened his eardrums and pounded low in his abdomen. Then there was all the smoke, which choked his lungs and set his eyes to watering and made it virtually impossible to see clearly more than a few yards in any direction. There were horses and men mil...

Product details

• Authors: Mary Balogh
• Publisher: Dell Publishing Inc.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 27.04.2004
• EAN: 9780440236603
• ISBN: 978-0-440-23660-3
• No. of pages: 342
• Dimensions: 107 mm x 175 mm x 24 mm
• Series: Dell Paperbacks; Bedwyn Saga; Bedwyn Saga
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature