num_pages: 352
description: Sweeping from the dazzling court of Versailles on the eve of Revolution to the isolated castles of the Scottish highlands and Egypt under the avid eye of Bonaparte here is the gripping saga of a young and beautiful woman with a passion only one man can satisfy.Sheltered at Beaux Clervaux her family's vast vineyard estate in the golden Bordeaux country the innocent Nicole de Clervaux is ill-prepared for the snared and seductions of the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Her father's death places Nicole's destiny in the hands of her guardian England's ambassador to the court of Versailles the dark piratical womanizing William Duke of Falkland whose plan it is to make a suitable marriage for this little heiress come to court from the countryside.But from the moment their eyes meet in the boudoir of Falkland's mistress a passion ignites between the duke and his ward that sets Falkland's careful plans in shambles and burns as fierce and all-consuming as the flames sweeping Revolutionary France.Neither ordeal nor separation can dim their ardor. Unmasked as an aristocrat during the Terror and imprisoned in the infamous citadel of La Force Nicole dreams restless dreams of that one night at Beaux-Clervaux-the night of the harvest-when Falkland had taken her virginity and kindled in her an insatiable desire he alone could satisfy. And when fate brings Falkland to briefly share her prison cell the secret marriage celebrated by a fellow prisoner and priest sets the seal on their bodies' vows. When her star seems in final eclipse in the dread prison of the Coniergerie-known to its doomed aristocratic inhabitants as the antechamber of death where Marie Antoinette spends the final hours of her harrowing-Nicole's starved soul and body live on memories of Falkland.Not the determined suit of the self-made man of the Revolution who saves her from the guillotine's blade not even the courtship of an infatuated Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt can alter her heart from its fixed abode. Not torment nor deprivation nor exile is sufficient to quench Nicole de Clervaux's endless passion for her first lover who awakened her sleeping sensuality and whose son she bore.Akindle with romance alive with the ruthlessness of revolution and par PALACES OF DESIRE is a quintessentially romance novel that marks the debut of a greatly gifted storyteller.
language: English
title: Palaces of Desire
publisher: Coward McCann