Moonlight Mistress

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Victoria Holt

Minella Maddox grew up on a great English estate. But as the schoolmistress' daughter, her place was not, and never could be, at beautiful Derringham Manor. And that is where the trouble started, for Derringham's young heir thought he saw in Minella just the kind of wife he wanted. But a dark and cruelly handsome French count, who always got what he wanted, thought she was just the kind of mistress he had to have. Not for nothing was he called the Devil on Horseback. Yet Minella's humble heritage was to prove more precious that titles and riches, for it freed her to follow her heart, leading her into adventures and dangers she had never dreamed of. It put her directly in the path of another woman's hatred, swept her up into the deadly terrors of the French Revolution and, finally, carried her into the arms of the great and powerful man she loved.

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Barbara Cartland

Perhaps Olinda Selwyn's mother had been right after all. Olinda had accepted a job restoring embroidered tapestries for the Dowager Countess of Kelvedon. The Selwyns certainly needed the money. But Olinda's mother was afraid-afraid that her pretty, innocent daughter would fall victim to advances from worldly gentlemen. Olinda had laughed at her mother's fears. But she was not laughing now. The Dowager Countess's young lover was making no secret of his designs on Olinda's virtue. The girl felt helpless: she certainly could not turn to the Countess. Who would protect her?

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Arthur Golden

A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. We witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate makeup, and hair; pouring sake to reveal just a touch of inner wrist; competing with a jealous rival for men's solicitude and the money that goes with it. In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction--at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful--and completely unforgettable.From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Jonathan Wilson

In 1991 a fifty-year-old Englishman, Daniel Weiss, has come to Jerusalem to bury his mother, Esta Weiss, and to see what he can find out about the father he never knew. What he uncovers is the dramatic story of the life of Esta Weiss. In 1941, Esta, a young Jewish refugee from Hitler's Europe, meets and begins an affair with Archie Rawlins, a twenty-two-year-old army intelligence officer. Their relationship, mutually suspicious and tortured in the beginning, becomes in the end an affair of desperate passion. Esta tells Rawlins that she has been an eyewitness to murder and atrocity. Rawlins passes on the information to his superiors only to discover that they are determined to cover up information concerning the plight of the Jews in Europe. He is also told that Esta may belong to a group of Zionist terrorists responsible for the assassination of a senior British diplomat. Who and what should Rawlins believe? The decision that he makes brings fateful consequences to himself and Esta, whose own secrets turn out to be darker than anything Rawlins could have imagined.