Read Face to Face (The Deverell Series Book 2) for Free Online

There were expertly tended walks and carriage roads. The shear vastness of the land he owned, and the wealth it contained, was unthinkable in scale in England.
    This was a house where happiness could dwell.
    What dwelled inside of Winderly were the Devereaux sisters. Aline and April were small, round, blond, and impetuous. Two more unworldly and harmless women, Merry was sure could not be found anywhere. They swallowed the lie that she was the Captain’s wife, as effortlessly as they had swallowed the lie a decade ago that Varian was their cousin.
    This was an impossibility since Varian Devereaux was nothing more than another of Morgan’s fabrications. A fabrication he wove to perfection, with the trust of two spinsters and what they termed his gallant rescue of them from their poverty.
    Her first morning at Winderly found Merry sitting on the back porch, skirts hiked up over knees like the sisters had instructed to catch the cooling breeze, sipping apple cider as the women tried to explain the Devereaux family history.
    Aline smoked a pipe when Varian couldn’t see her and paused over it, staring through the swirl of smoke at Merry. Her expression was partly perplexed and partly child-like. “It was such a sudden thing, Merry,” she said. “So long ago, it is hard to remember it all exactly.”
    April nodded. “Sudden or not, it saved us sister.”
    “Yes, indeed it did. You see, Merry, we were unmarried and without protection when our father died. And the care of the estate was left quite properly in our nephew’s hands.”
    “Jeffrey was quite without character, we soon discovered,” April chimed in.
    “Then one day we found ourselves without family, without wealth and without hope,” Aline recalled sadly. “We thought we’d be forced to leave Winderly, and then, as if by miracle, there on our doorstep is a Charleston cousin we know nothing about. Cousin Varian was the new and rightful owner of our home here, and more than willing to permit us to remain.”
    “Our father was not one to worry over much about the future care of his daughters,” April put in grimly. “We rarely saw him in our childhood, no more than once a year at that, and knew nothing of his family. Not that we had a cousin and not that he would come to our aid.” A frown gathered on her face as she looked up from her sewing. “Though that is the part that always confuses me, Aline. Exactly how Varian is our cousin. What is he? Second? Third? I always get lost in the theology.”
    Trimming a thread from the Tambour, which April had left dangling overly long, Aline said, “I’m never at all clear about the connection. It only makes sense when Cousin Varian explains it. Such an intelligent young man.”
    Young man? Merry stifled a smirk over that. The sisters doted on him, as though he were a beloved younger brother, and somehow were unable to see the man he was before them.
    “He is nothing like Charles,” said April firmly. “Such a dissolute man.”
    Merry looked up from her task of shelling peas. “Charles?”
    April had a blank look on her face. “Charles? Did I say Charles? Who is Charles, Aline?”
    Her sister patted her hand. “Our father, April. Father, my dear. Go back to your sewing.”
    It took only a single day for Merry to learn there were times April was not all there in her faculties. Her memory came and went with spurts, and she was dependent, in many ways, on her sister’s care. They were the perfect unwitting fools to participate in Morgan’s deception.
    She would have been furious with Varian for taking advantage of the goodness of these harmless women, if the sisters didn’t adore him, and if he were not the only thing standing between them and poverty.
    April did not go back to her sewing. She sat there gnawing on her lip in that way she had, when her confused memory frightened her. It was then Aline tapped the Richmond paper she was holding, and exclaimed, “Ah, sister, there is a story here of our