Now, eighteen-year-old Ceci meets and falls passionately in love with a handsome young northerner, Trent Sinclaire. Trent is a cadet at the West Point military academy. He acts as if he knows Ceci. They begin a torrid affair, even as the southern states begin to secede from the Union.
Only weeks before their wedding, the Confederate army attacks Fort Sumter and the civil war begins. Trent is called to active service in the north, leaving Ceci heartbroken in the south. Swearing vengeance on the union, after the untimely death of her family at the fall of New Orleans, Ceci meets with infamous spy master, Henry Doucet. He initiates her into the shadowy world of espionage. After her failure to avert the catastrophe at Gettysburg, Ceci infiltrates the White House.
There, she comes face to face with Abraham Lincoln, a man she’s sworn to kill. Forming a reckless alliance with the actor, John Wilkes Booth, she is drawn deeper into the plot to assassinate the President of the United States. A Confederate spy in love with a Union officer, her next decision will determine whether she lives or dies...
EXTRACT
Trent was lucky. The Confederate musket ball that was
intended to kill him merely grazed his brow. He lurched violently back in his
saddle. His horse reared wildly, throwing him, unconscious to the ground,
directly into the path of his own cavalry advancing only yards behind him. At
the far end of the field, Sergeant Nathanial Pike and his men, engaged in the
hasty formation of a skirmish line, watched helplessly as the scene unfolded.
As Trent hit the ground, a Confederate soldier appeared out of the shadows.
Small and slight, little more than a boy, he lunged forwards, grabbed the
officer by the lapels of his coat and dragged him out of the path of the
galloping horses. Throwing himself across the man’s prone body, he shielded him
from the pounding hooves. The cavalry thundered past oblivious, in the
half-light, to the fate of their captain.
As the danger passed, the rebel rose to his knees and
appeared to search the unconscious man. “God damn thieving rebs,” Pike snatched
his pistol from its holster, his thumb wrenching back the hammer. Before he
could take aim, the rebel stopped searching. He leaned forwards and, cradling
the officer’s face in his hands, bent down and kissed him, full on the lips,
long and hard. Pike’s pistol, arm and jaw dropped simultaneously. Something,
some noise, some movement, made the rebel look up and glance furtively around.
He jumped to his feet and, with a final backwards glance at the fallen man,
melted into the shadows, like a wraith. It was some moments before Pike’s jaw
snapped shut, his teeth meeting with an audible click. He rounded on his men.
“Did you see what I just saw?” he demanded. His question was answered with
shrugs and scowls. Not one man there could swear he hadn’t dreamed it. Then
suddenly, they heard it, far off, plaintive and eerie, the cry of a
whippoorwill.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With Historical Romance as his preferred genre, Robert has
continued to write for several years. Many of his short stories have appeared
in various national periodicals and magazines.
His debut novel “Dance
the Moon Down”, a story of love against adversity during the First World
War, gained him considerable critical praise, being voted book of the month by
“Wall to Wall books”
His second novel “Whippoorwill”
tells of a passionate affair between a young southern woman and a northern
man at the beginning of the American Civil War.
He is single and lives and works in Hertfordshire.
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