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  "Faith, 'tis my angel!" he murmured in disbelief. For this lovely piquant face that looked up at him half-expectantly, half-arrogantly, was the face he thought he'd dreamed. Those wide Delft-blue eyes with their dark-rimmed irises, shadowed by long dark lashes, were those that had looked down into his own that night he'd lain half-drowned on a strange beach. Those softly curving lips that smiled provocatively at him now had then been a straight worried line, and those wings of brows now so slightly lifted, perhaps by disdain, had been lost in a curtain of long tumbled hair that had streamed down, fair and wet as a mermaid's.

  Stephen Linnington, the rake who had held so many women lightly in his arms and had left them all, looked into those lovely blue eyes and was lost. He seized her hand in his strong fingers and swept her away without asking into the dance.

  Looking up at the stranger, Imogene, too, remembered that moment on the beach and trembled partly from her intense response to him and partly from the memory of the terrifying dream she'd had the night of his rescue ...

  Novels by Valerie Sherwood

  This Loving Torment

  These Golden Pleasures

  This Towering Passion

  Her Shining Splendor

  Bold Breathless Love

  Published by WARNER BOOKS

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  Valerie Sherwood

  BOLD

  BREATHLESS

  LOVE

  WARNER BOOKS

  A Warner Communications Company

  WARNING

  Readers are hereby specifically warned not to use any medications or cosmetics or exotic food or drink mentioned herein without first consulting a doctor. For example, the cosmetic ceruse contains white lead, which is lethal—even so, it was a popular cosmetic of the day and widely used!

  Valerie Sherwood

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright® 1981 by Valerie Sherwood

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Art by Elaine Duillo

  Warner Books, Inc.. 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10019

  A Warner Communications Company

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing: August, 1981

  10 98765432 1

  Table of Contents

  BOLD BREATHLESS LOVE Author's Note

  Prologue The North River,1658

  BOOK I Imogene

  PART ONE The Desperate Lovers

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  PART TWO The Golden Temptress

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  BOOK II The Sea Rover

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  BOOK III The River Bride

  PART ONE The Patroon’s Lady

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  PART TWO The Prisoner of Wey Gat

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  BOOK IV The Buccaneer’s Lady

  PART ONE The Lost

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  PART TWO The Golden Lover

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  BOOK V The Choice

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  Epilogue

  DEDICATION

  In loving memory of Silk, my lovely long-haired cat, big, gentle Silk with his thick shining black fur and clear green trusting eyes and great plumelike tail—Silk, who curled up and slept confidently by my typewriter no matter how it thundered.

  Author's Note

  Although this novel is entirely a work of fiction and all the Characters and situations herein are of my own invention (save for obvious historical events, or personages such as Peter Stuyvesant), insofar as possible the places are either real or typical of their place and time. There really is a Star Castle in the Scilly Isles and a Castle of Ennor, there really are two tall standingstones there called Adamand Eve, New Amsterdam really had its Perel Straat and its windmill, and magnificent Wey Gat was suggested to me by a photograph of a multichimneyed stonehouse that to this day frowns down upon the Hudson.

  And because this Novel is a toast to a romantic world that is gone, it seemed appropriate to propose a toast to match each section. And as you join me for a little while in the turbulent, swash buckling world where water spilled clean and sparkling down the brooks and the air was bracing as wine and whole continents waited to be explored and conquered—as you share with me the fabled Hudson Valley of the early Dutch settlers from quaint New Amsterdam to far Wey Gat, as you sail with me from the flower-filled Scillies to wealthy Holland and across the scented waters of the Spanish Main to Barbados and Tortuga and other sunny isles where fair women awaited their lean adventurers, let me propose another toast:

  A toast to the wayward, the jaded,

  The willful, the winsome, the lost,

  Whose memory ne'er will be faded,

  For they loved—and cared not for the cost!

  Valerie Sherwood

  A toast to the girl-turned-woman

  Whose “great marriage’’ is a sham,

  For she would be hardly human

  If she did not desire a man

  Prologue

  The North River,1658

  Rising in the moonlight from the river’s snow-covered eastern bank, the steep-roofed, high-chimneyed hulk of the half-completed great house frowned down the low bluff, silently warning all who plied the river that this was Wey Gat, the Wind Gate, stronghold of the great patroon Verhulst van Rappard, wealthiest man in all New Netherland.

  No lights shone from the big stone structure, for even the kitchen servants had long since gone to bed. But behind the dark window of a second-floor bedchamber a thin young man, richly dressed in black and gold in the somber Dutch style, watched with narrowed eyes through the small frosted panes.

  His lip curled as he thought of the maidservant Elise, whom he had personally bound and gagged and thrust into a tiny dressing room, hardly larger than a closet, down the hall. She at least would not be able to circumvent this night’s work!

  Now he leaned forward, straining to see through the windswept darkness. Did he see—? Yes! A figure had slipped from the house. There she was . . . Imogene, darkly cloaked and with a sable-lined blue velvet French hood obscuring her riotous golden curls. She had slipped out through a side door and was furtively making her way through the snow down the steep slope toward the sheet of gray ice that was the river.

  His young wife, Imogene, on her way to meet her lover.

  Van Rappard swallowed. God, how graceful she was, moving through the snow. How the rich cloak billowed about her as she swayed like a reed against the wind. Even at
this distance her loveliness could still strike him like a physical blow; that this should be so made his thin elegant body tremble with fury. This night, this night he would teach his reckless English bride a terrible lesson.

  Anger roiled in him as he watched her dainty progress down the slope. He had given Imogene everything—everything! Except one thing, of course. He had not pleasured her in that way. But jewels, lavish laces, imported silks, rich velvets, fine furs, servants—true, they all spoke Dutch, which Imogene did not, but they had all been hers to command. He had even imported a virginal from Holland for her to play (she had refused to do more than run her fingers listlessly across the keyboard) and one of the new blue and white tea sets from China (preferring coffee, she had not bothered to unpack it). And was he not building for her a great stone house finer than any on the river?

  Yet here before his very eyes the faithless jade was slipping down through the snow to meet her lover and run away with him! She, the wife of a patroon! The black-and-gold-clad figure shook in a great burst of fury. Verhulst was totally unaware that he was cursing Imogene in a low bestial rumbling undertone that would have made a listener’s hair stand on end.

  Terrible visions were flitting through the young patroon’s dark head. In his imagination he could see Imogene strolling through a forest glade with Stephen Linnington—for all these months past he had known his rival’s name. He could hear jays and bobolinks singing overhead and—so vivid was the vision—he could feel the heat of the sun as it struck down through a canopy of rustling green. Could hear Imogene’s soft sigh and see her give the tall Englishman—for Verhulst’s spies in New Amsterdam had reported the Englishman was tall and copperhaired and well favored and wore his hat at a jaunty angle—a long languorous look and sink down among the wild flowers and soft summer grasses. There, in a pattern of light and shade that made her seem half witch, half woman, she unloosed her golden hair and then the hooks of her bodice, her fingers moving in a tantalizingly hesitant way, fluttering over each as if she could not make up her mind whether to undo that hook or no.

  In the holocaust of his mind Verhulst could see Stephen Linnington’s turquoise eyes light up as his gorgeous lady shrugged gracefully out of her tight bodice and then her fragile lacy chemise so that her fair white body rose up before him like Venus from the foam. Then she lounged back with another soft tantalizing sigh into the grasses, the gleaming mounds of her pink-tipped breasts rising up to taunt him.

  She looked—as she had looked through the keyhole when Verhulst had watched her disrobe nights here at Wey Gat! Watched and been afraid to enter, watched and felt a pain that caught and twisted in his groin but which he knew from bitter experience would come to naught. How many nights he had watched her standing there in her bedchamber in the candlelight, a magnificent woman, pale as the dawn, with her thick golden hair falling in a silky cloud down around her torso to caress her gleaming hips. He had watched, breathless, as she had strolled to the open casements on summer nights and stretched out her arms to the moon. Was she making a wish? he had asked himself. And—the thought struck at him painfully—was that wish for a lover? And he who owned her, possessed her as a husband must his wife, he the patroon who ruled these broad river acres as any feudal lord—he had pressed his damp forehead against the door in the darkness, clenched his sweaty hands with their heavy rings, and admitted the truth to himself.

  Whatever else he could be to this bewitching golden temptress, he could never be her lover. Since his early teens he had known he would never be a man as other men. That childhood accident with the iceboat had done for his manhood—yet left him eaten up with desire. He wanted the woman in that bedroom next door, wanted her with a passion and fury he would not admit even to himself, that woman who was his by right and law, and who was separated from him only by an oaken door to which he had the key.

  Always his hand would tremble on the latch—and always it would withdraw.

  For the young patroon was separated from his English bride by more than an oaken door. He was separated from her by a wall of fear and pride. Fear that she would learn his secret and despise him. Pride—desperate pride—that kept him from letting anyone understand him.

  Now, cut off from human sympathy, alone in his aching world, a groan rose from deep within his tortured body. For the searing visions that rode his heart in gripping nightmarish fashion were with him again and he was seeing that imaginary woodland glade once more.

  In Verhulst’s burning imagination, lmogene was entirely stripped now. Her naked body lay invitingly relaxed, arms outflung, one knee bent. Verhulst’s face contorted as his mind envisioned that silvered knee. She was looking up at the Englishman through dark, shadowed lashes. And now Stephen Linnington was naked too and he had fallen upon her. He was ravishing her! With inner agony the young patroon watched those demonically beautiful pictures flit by in his mind. There in that woodland Eden, Stephen’s bright hair fell in a copper shower to mingle with the girl’s tossing golden tresses. For a moment the ropy muscles of the man’s back, the pale gleam of his naked buttocks obscured Verhulst’s sight of the girl. Then he moved, luxuriously, and Verhulst could see that he was caressing her lovely naked body with strong, exploring hands, teasing, stroking—Verhulst in his agony could see her slight convulsive movements as the pressure within her built. Now . . . now he was nuzzling her trembling breasts with his lips. Now—oh, God, now he was entering her and she moaned as she received him. Verhulst could see the flash of her white legs, silvered by the rippling light, as they slipped alongside the Englishman’s strongly muscled limbs, flailed weakly—and relaxed in abandonment. Her slender arms, wound around Stephen’s neck, tightened as she surrendered herself completely, utterly. Through a red film Verhulst could see their bodies blending, arching, moving to some silent inner music that he would never know, moving to a beat that drummed and heightened to a frantic pace as the rapt pair strained and tumbled on the grass.

  Verhulst, alone in the night at that window above the icy river, choked sobbingly. Heat like a fever surged through his blood and great beads of sweat stood out on his swarthy brow.

  It had all happened! He was sure of it! All this time she had been deceiving him, laughing at him. And in the carved hickory cradle in a room down the hall was the living proof of Imogene’s unfaith! The child had been christened Georgiana van Rappard, but she was not his—could not be his. Verhulst had never had a woman—any woman. God knew he had striven with chambermaids and dairymaids and strumpets from New Amsterdam’s docks, but it had all come to nothing, he was unable. Those foolish wenches, with their sleek bare bodies, who had dared to laugh at him, he had struck with savage force across the face, splitting their scornful lips so that they spurted blood.

  What Imogene had told him at first was a lie. The child was not premature. He had not come to her room drunk and taken her by force!

  He had never taken anyone—by force or otherwise.

  With his hands twisted cruelly in her hair, she had admitted the truth at last and named her lover. But she had insisted he was dead and no threat to Verhulst.

  He had believed her. And now she was attempting to run away with that lover!

  Sweat glazed the young patroon’s forehead now as he returned from his searing private dreams to the stark winter of reality. He crouched forward, pressing his nose against the cold pane, the better to view the woman moving down the slope below. He could see that she had swept up skirts and cloak. Impeded by the snow, she was trying to run, and her slight figure, bent against the wind, cast a long blue shadow across the white moonlit expanse as she made her silent way toward the gray glimmer of the frozen river. The young patroon studied the cloak and hood of that flitting figure with bitter irony. He had ordered both for her from Paris as one of his marriage gifts to her. Lavishly embroidered, the cloak was lined with sable and had buttons of pure gold from neck to hemline. That rogue she had lain with—and whom she now slipped out furtively to meet—would give her no such cloaks, he told h
imself savagely.

  His face contorted and then cleared, leaving it bleak. The rogue she had lain with would buy no cloaks for anyone after tonight. For Verhulst had spent those hours as he waited for Imogene to make her move in devising a variety of horrible lingering deaths for Stephen Linnington. He would make Imogene watch. It would be a valuable lesson for the young wife he had brought from across the sea to Wey Gat. Those innocent looking, snow-laden trees and dark clumps of bushes near the bank concealed his men, waiting patiently and half-frozen for him to give the signal to spread out and take the happy couple into custody. And then he, Verhulst, would part them—this time forever. Although there was a pistol stuck in his own broad belt, he had given orders that no firearms were to be carried by his men this night, for he wanted no quick death for the imprudent Englishman. He wanted to drag out his triumph, to savor it. He was the patroon; over these vast acres, stretching ever away, he held sole sway. At Wey Gat, he told himself, fingering the pistol lovingly, he was the law—he alone.

  Now he frowned. Imogene’s dark flitting shape, wind-whipped, had disappeared behind a tree, she had vanished temporarily from his view. Ah, there she was—he felt relief as the cloaked figure stepped out from behind the sheltering bole of a tree and cast a swift look back at the blank windows of the dark house on the bluff. She would see nothing, nothing, he told himself almost with delight, for his men lying in ambush well knew they would feel the patroon’s wrath if they robbed him of his pleasure in tormenting her.

  Imogene had reached the river’s edge now. Suddenly she stiffened as she saw a movement on the ice. Verhulst saw it at the same moment—a dark shape, reddish in the moon’s glow—a fox, crossing the frozen river by night. He wondered that the dogs—that fierce pack of hunting dogs trained to hunt men—did not see the fox and set up a baying. Then it came to him that Groot, who was Wey Gat’s kennelmaster, would have the dogs well secreted in the brush along the bank so they would not warn the approaching Englishman. His orders had been to have the dogs waiting downriver to the south—in case the Englishman escaped him.