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SWEPT AWAY is an action-packed adventure set in Regency England. A half-naked man has washed ashore. He is badly beaten, with no memory of who he his or how he came to be there. Is he a spy or a traitor? Is he working for the English, or is he in Napoleon Bonaparte’s inner circle of conspirators? Who tried to kill him and why is there an assassin trying to hunt him down and kill him before the English can find him and arrest him for treason?
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Click here to read a brief excerpt of Swept Away
A brief excerpt of SWEPT AWAY:
With a threatening whoosh, the surf swirled forward, clattering across the sand and shingle to surround the still form. The blue-gray lips opened with the fresh incursion of salt water and it was there, in the expelled rush, she saw the silvery foam of bubbles.
Annaleah Fairchilde gasped and jumped quickly back. Her gaze darted around the jumbled rocks on either side of the body as if she half expected to see a dozen more corpses scattered among the boulders, but the beach was deserted as always. A treacherous fog had blanketed the coastline through the night; the last of it was just burning off in the early morning sun, but she had not heard any alarms to signify a ship blown off course, nor any church bells tolling to call out the villagers to help with a shipwreck.
Yet the body must have come off a ship. Torbay had become an important seaport during the two decades of hostilities with France and the entrance lay just to the east beyond the jutting promontory of Berry Head. There were always vessels in these waters--along with periodic stories of a body washing ashore that had not been properly stitched into a weighted shroud.
But this one was alive.
She looked down again. Thick, wet strands of dark hair lay across his face, obscuring most of his features from view. His eyes were closed, the long black lashes spiked against his cheeks. His upper torso was broad and well-defined with muscle, his thighs lean and hard as those belonging to the men she had seen climbing nimbly up the tall masts of sailing ships. The one hand that lay palm up in the sand was square, the pads of the fingers white with waterlogged calluses; the other was clenched in a fist, the arm folded under his head. It was this meager bit of leverage that had probably saved him from drowning.
If it had saved him.
Annaleah glanced over her shoulder, the panic rising in her chest again, this time because she was alone on the beach. The cove was small and isolated, the beach less than a half mile in length and curved around water that was too shallow for anchorage, too turbulent beyond the breakers for fishermen to set their nets. The inlet itself was ringed by steep limestone cliffs, the cracks and crags populated by colonies of screaming gulls, most of which were in the air now, circling in white flashes above as if they too were waiting to see if this tempting morsel of fleshy driftwood would live or die.
Widdicombe House sat at the top of the cliffs, accessed by a steep path that had been worn into the face of the rock by a few thousand years of high winds and blowing sands. It was not a conceivable thought, even if Annaleah had been a man, that she could manipulate the dead weight of a body to the top on her own. She would have to go back for help, although she strongly doubted, in the time it would take her to reach the house and tell them what she had discovered, that the sailor would be there when she returned.
The tide was inching higher up the shingle even as she took another step back to avoid staining her shoes with salt water. Further out, beyond the jagged breakers, the surface of the sea was a calm, undulating sheet of liquid pewter beneath the hazed sky, but she knew that calm could be deceiving. Many a ship had made the mistake of sailing too close to shore and having their hulls cracked open when the currents pulled them into the rocks.
Knowing she had to make some kind of a decision, Annaleah wiped her hands on the folds of her muslin skirt and ventured close to the body again. She jumped as the icy water of the Channel scrabbled over her shoes, but there was nothing to be done for it. The hem of her dress was dragged backward and, as uncharitable a thought as it might be, she felt a momentary surge of resentment toward the unmoving body as well as the circumstances that had brought her here this day.
“Some time away with your Great Aunt Florence will do you good,” she muttered to herself, misquoting her mother’s words of a week ago. “The sheer calmness and boredom of the seaside should help sedate your own thoughts.”
Bracing herself, she reached down and gingerly curved her hands beneath the man’s shoulders, testing his weight. She was not a frail wisp of a creature by any measure, but he seemed gigantic by contrast, an utterly limp mass of bone and muscle. It took three grunted attempts and a near spill head-first into the encroaching waves before she discarded the notion of dragging him out of the sand by his arms. By then her feet were squeaking inside her soaked shoes and a good measure of her skirt was wet and dragging.
“Damnation, hell, and bother!” she said, citing three of her brother’s favorite oaths.
With one eye on the next wave scrolling over the breakers, she slogged around beside the body and tried pushing him, rolling him front over side over back until he was a few feet higher on the shore.
She stopped, her hands braced on her knees, to catch her breath, and noticed for the first time the ugly, blotched egg at the back of his skull. The skin was swollen almost to bursting, mottled blue and black, riddled with spidery red veins. It must have taken quite a blow to cause such a lump and Annaleah, feeling even more helpless than before, knelt gingerly beside him. Her hands hovered over the contusion several more seconds before she found enough nerve to lift the tangled mass of wet black hair off his neck. Assured the skin was not broken and his brain was not leaking out, she took an additional moment to study his profile but was no further enlightened. She did not recognize him, though that was hardly a surprise. In all of her nineteen years, she had visited Widdicombe House perhaps ten times, none of them made with the intentions of retaining any memories of the local fishermen and farmers who gawked openly at the well-heeled visitors from London.
A slap of cold water against her ankles served to break the spell and, with her skin hot and her breath dry in her throat, she pushed and rolled and heaved again until he was lying in the soft, powdery sand well above the scalloped tidewater mark. With a final shove, her hands skidded forward onto his chest and she fell forward, sprawling half across his body.
It had the same effect as falling over a rock and the air left her lungs with a loud whoomf.
Conversely a similar breath left his mouth with a small fount of seawater, followed by a shallow gasp and a much larger rush as his body began to violently reject the notion of drowning. Annaleah grabbed his jaw and turned his head while he wretched and spewed salt water through his mouth and nose. His eyes remained closed and his body clenched tight around each spasm, but eventually the heaving stopped and he collapsed limp on the sand.
Able to draw unimpeded breaths again, a faint hint of color began to seep back into his skin. His lips remained blue, but the dreadful yellow cast began to fade, revealing the true shading of his bronzed skin. The sand had caked over much of his face and as Annaleah brushed some of it off his eyes, the long lashes shivered and opened a slit. For the briefest of moments she found herself staring into eyes so dark they looked like holes burned into the center of his head. For those same few seconds she held her breath, for there was so much anger and pain in their depths, she almost missed hearing the harsh croak of words that were forced through his lips.
“They have to know the truth.”
“Wh-what? What did you say?”
A hand, with fingers like iron bands and a grip that threatened to snap the fine bones in her wrist, reached up and grabbed her. “They have to know the truth. Before it is too late.”
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