Prince Of Secrets. Paula Marshall

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      He had a strong desire to be with his wife.

      Not to make love to her, not to talk to her, but to enjoy her stillness. Cobie went looking for her in the grounds.

      He found her at last, seated in the shadow of a stand of cedars, quite alone. Dinah was half dozing over a book.

      Cobie stood and watched her for a few moments. Her face was tranquil, but something told him she was dreaming. He bent forward to kiss her gently on the cheek. He was beginning to worry even more about his feelings for her. They were like nothing he had ever experienced before.

      Dear Reader

      What’s more natural for the grandson of Tom Dilhorne, the founder of the Dilhorne Dynasty, than to come to London, then the rich hub of the largest Empire the world had yet seen, and find excitement there? So Cobie Grant, freebooter and financial pirate, becomes the latest rich American to take his place in London society, where he meets Lady Dinah Freville. This brings about an adventure which started in THE DOLLAR PRINCE’S WIFE and reaches its climax in THE PRINCE OF SECRETS, each of which is a complete story in its own right.

      I trust you’ll enjoy Cobie Grant’s adventures, and his marriage into a noble family, secure in the knowledge that his exploits have a strong foundation in fact. I hope they entertain you.

      Paula Marshall

      Prince of Secrets

      Paula Marshall

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      Paula Marshall, married with three children,

       has had a varied life. She began her career in a large

       library, and ended it as a senior academic in charge of

       History in a polytechnic. She has traveled widely and has

       been a swimming coach. She has always wanted to write,

       and likes her novels to be full of adventure and humor.

      Contents

      Introductory Prologue

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

       Introductory Prologue

      ‘Appearances often deceive.’ Cobie Grant

       T he young, handsome, and clever American financier, Cobie Grant, arrives in London high society in early 1892. Because of his immense wealth he is nicknamed The Dollar Prince. Haunted by his own secret illegitimacy, he tries to protect the helpless. By chance he saves two young girls from misery and ruin. The first, the aristocratic Lady Dinah Freville, ill-treated by her family, he tricks into marriage. He tells her that he cannot love her but will look after her. In doing so, he transforms her from an ugly duckling into a swan. From fearing him, she comes to love him, particularly after he initiates her into passion.

      The second, Lizzie Steele, is a little girl who has been sold to a nighthouse and he secretly rescues her before she can be sexually abused by Sir Ratcliffe Heneage, an apparently respectable MP and Cabinet Minister. With the help of the Salvation Army, Cobie places her into a home he funds for other similar waifs and strays. He also pursues Sir Ratcliffe in order to see him punished for his wickedness. Using a false name, he bribes the police to raid the nighthouse. They arrest the madame and her accomplices, but Sir Ratcliffe and his sidekick, Hoskyns, have been privately warned to stay away that night.

      However, Cobie continues to watch and pursue Sir Ratcliffe and, in doing so, he is himself pursued by the honest Inspector Walker, who (wrongly) suspects him and his motives, particularly when he thinks that he has discovered that Cobie, as a young man, had a criminal past as a gunman in the American West.

      Meanwhile, Sir Ratcliffe, through Hoskyns, has Lizzie Steele traced and kidnapped, after which he abuses and kills her. In turn, Cobie tracks down and disposes of Hoskyns, setting fire to the house which he was running—but is still unable to implicate Sir Ratcliffe who remains at large and whom he meets in society. In his crusade he has the help of his friend from his Western adventures, Hendrick Van Deusen. Like Cobie, he is now outwardly respectable, and both are active participants in the social scene around the Prince of Wales.

      Dinah has become the season’s latest success. She is unaware of her husband’s secret life, but, being a clever girl, is suspicious that there is more to him than meets the eye. She has embarked on a campaign to persuade him to love her as passionately as she loves him. Indirectly, she helps him to evade the police at the time of Hoskyns’s death and the fire. Cobie, who has always previously refused to involve himself emotionally with anyone—even his parents—has already begun to feel the pull of her many attractions, and is trying to resist them.

      This part of their story ends with them having become the favourites of the Prince of Wales and they are about to visit Sandringham, his Norfolk home—together with Sir Ratcliffe, who is still at large and is beginning to suspect that Cobie is after him. Will Cobie corner him? Will Inspector Walker corner Cobie first? Will Dinah’s campaign succeed? Now read on…

       Chapter One

      August 1892, Sandringham

       A fterwards, Lady Dinah Grant was to think—no, to be sure—that all of the events of that eventful autumn and winter were set in motion during the week that she and her husband, Cobie, spent at the Prince of Wales’s Norfolk home of Sandringham. After that, nothing was ever going to be the same.

      At the time, though, they—or perhaps it might be more true to say that only of herself rather than of Cobie—were simply under the impression that they were going to take part in an ordinary country-house party. If, of course, any house party at the home of a member of the Royal Family could ever be called ordinary!

      ‘We are going there to enjoy ourselves,’ Cobie told her in the train on their way there.

      ‘Really?’ said Dinah, in her best teasing mode. ‘Really, Cobie, just to enjoy ourselves? From all that I have experienced so far, pleasure seems to be something one has to work at. It could scarcely have been more difficult to have gone to Oxford and studied under my father than to survive the London Season successfully!’

      ‘True,’ he conceded. ‘But better to succeed than to fail, do admit.’

      ‘Oh,’ she told him airily, in exactly the manner in which he usually spoke to her, ‘I certainly intend to succeed—for your sake, if for no one else’s. It would hardly do for our marriage to be seen as a failure since you went to such pains to get me to the altar.’

      This sly reference to the way in which he had tricked her half-brother, Rainey, into allowing him to marry her, amused, rather than annoyed, her husband. It was proof, if proof were needed, of how far she had travelled since she had married him. The shy, defeated child he had rescued no longer existed. Instead he was the husband of a charming young woman with a delicate wit, which she exercised on him as well as others.

      He might have been proud of his handiwork in transforming her, if he didn’t also think that a lot of the credit was due to her own sterling character.

      ‘I noticed that Giles packed your guitar,’ she said, looking at him over her cup of tea—they were travelling in luxury in