Someone to Love Read online

  Someone to Love

  BOOKS BY JUDE DEVERAUX

  The Velvet Promise

  Highland Velvet

  Velvet Song

  Velvet Angel

  Sweetbriar

  Counterfeit Lady

  Lost Lady

  River Lady

  Twin of Fire

  Twin of Ice

  The Temptress

  The Raider

  The Princess

  The Awakening

  The Maiden

  The Taming

  The Conquest

  A Knight in Shining Armor

  Holly

  Wishes

  Mountain Laurel

  The Duchess

  Eternity

  Sweet Liar

  The Invitation

  Remembrance

  The Heiress

  Legend

  An Angel for Emily

  The Blessing

  High Tide

  Temptation

  The Summerhouse

  The Mulberry Tree

  Forever…

  Forever and Always

  Always

  Wild Orchids

  First Impressions

  Carolina Isle

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by Deveraux, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  ATRIA BOOKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Deveraux, Jude.

  Someone to love / Jude Deveraux. 1. Margate (England)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.E9273S66 2007

  813'.54—dc22 2006101700

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-7152-0

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-7152-3

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  Someone to Love

  1

  Margate, England

  The house was enormous, frighteningly ugly, and Jace Montgomery had just paid four and a half million dollars for it.

  As he drove his car slowly through the wrought-iron gates that were set inside square brick pillars topped by stone lions, he dreaded seeing the house. Priory House was his now, but he could remember little from his one-time viewing with the realtor. The graveled road meandered through parkland that was quite pretty. He’d been told that the gardens had been laid out in 1910 by some famous landscape architect. The trees were now mature, the flowering shrubs were well established, and the grass perfect. If Jace were a horseman, which he wasn’t, the parkland would have been a dream come true.

  As he neared a big oak tree, he pulled over, stopped the car, and got out. In a moment the house would come into view, and he needed to prepare himself for it. To keep himself solvent, he’d borrowed the purchase price from his billionaire uncle. Since the house had been on the market for over three years, Jace knew that when the time came to sell the house, it would be a pain to unload.

  He’d tried to rent the house, but the owner wouldn’t consider it. The man wanted to get rid of the monstrosity free and clear.

  “All right,” Jace said to the realtor, or estate agent as they were called in England, “what’s wrong with the house? Other than being ugly, that is.” He imagined plumbing that was perpetually clogged, low-flying jets, murderous neighbors. At the very least, dry rot.

  “It seems that there’s a ghost,” Nigel Smith-Thompson said with the air of a man who doesn’t believe in such things.

  “Don’t all old houses in England have a ghost?” Jace asked.

  “We were told that this ghost is particularly persistent. She appears rather often and it annoys the owners.”

  Scares the hell out of them is what you mean, Jace thought. “Is that why the house has changed hands so often?” When Jace asked to borrow the money from his uncle to buy the house, Uncle Frank had had it thoroughly researched. Since the late nineteenth century, the house had never been owned by anyone for more than three years. Uncle Frank’s conclusion was that the house was a bad investment and Jace shouldn’t buy it. Jace hadn’t said a word, just handed his uncle the envelope he’d found inside a book that had belonged to Stacy. Frank took the photo of the house out of the envelope, looked at it in distaste, then turned the picture over. On the back someone had written “Ours again. Together forever. See you there on 11 May 2002.”

  It took Frank a moment to put it all together. “Stacy died on…?”

  “The next day.” Jace took a breath. “On the twelfth of May, Stacy Evans, my fiancée, committed suicide in a room over a pub in Margate, England.”

  Frank picked up the envelope and read the postmark. “This was sent from Margate and the postmark is the eighth of April.”

  Jace nodded. “Someone sent that to her before we left for England.” He thought back to the trip that had changed his life. Jace had worked in the family business of buying and selling companies since the day he graduated from college. Less than a week before he was to marry Stacy, his uncle Mike, Frank’s brother, had called and said that the owner of an English tool manufacturing plant was pulling out of the sale. If that happened, three export deals would fall through and about a hundred people would be out of work. Since it had been Jace who’d negotiated the deal, he’d been the only one who could put it back together. He told Stacy he was sorry but he was going to have to fly to England. He promised that he’d work night and day and be back as soon as possible.

  But Stacy had surprised him by asking to go with him. “I told her I didn’t think it was a good idea for her to go,” Jace said. “The truth was, I didn’t want to have to deal with her stepmother. Stace had enough stress on her without a foreign trip thrown into it all.”

  “Yeah, I remember,” Frank said. “If Stacy said no to purple daisies then Mrs. Evans went on a campaign for masses of purple daisies. Anything to cause problems—and to put the attention on herself.”

  Jace looked away for a moment. There had been no love between the young, beautiful Mrs. Evans and her stepdaughter, who was just a bit younger than she was but a great deal more beautiful—and a great deal more elegant. Stacy was the kind of woman who could wear a sweatsuit and people would know she came from money and breeding. Her father was a self-made man, but Stacy’s mother had come from an old family: penniless, but with ancient bloodlines.

  It was only after Stacy’s death that her stepmother had professed great love for her stepdaughter, and she’d made Jace’s life miserable. At the funeral Mrs. Evans had screamed that Stacy’s suicide was Jace’s fault. “You killed her!” she screamed in front of everyone. “Did you find somebody you liked better so you took Stacy out of the country, away from her family, so you could drive her to death in secret?”

  It had all been absurd, of course, but it hurt just the same. Jace had loved Stacy with all his heart, and he had no idea why she’d killed herself just days before their wedding.

  “You think this house has something to do with Stacy’s death, don’t you?” Frank asked.

  “I have nothing else to go on.” Jace got up and began to pace the room. “It’s been three years, yet it’s all I can think of. That moment when Stacy’s sister threw the suicide note in my face and told me I had killed her sister haunts me every hour of every day.”