Surrender to a Stranger by Karyn Monk

powerful member of the Committee of Public Safety who was a major force in purging France of her enemies through terror and bloodshed. “Although I must confess the image of it does give me a certain amount of pleasure. The vengeance I seek is on a far more personal level.”
    “Who is it?” he asked, his curiosity piqued.
    “His name is Nicolas Bourdon.” She spoke the name harshly, bitterly, as if it was acid on her tongue.
    “The man who attacked you in your cell?”
    She nodded and turned her attention back to the window. “He was a friend of my father’s,” she ground out, her voice filled with loathing. “Or at least that is what he led my father to believe. He came from absolutely nothing. He must have thought himself very clever indeed to fashion a friendship with a man as great and powerful as the Duc de Lambert.”
    “That matters a great deal to you, Mademoiselle, doesn’t it?” he observed. “The background a person comes from.”
    “Until my father became involved in philosophy and politics, I never thought about it very much,” she informed him brusquely. “There was a system in place that had been created by God, and everyone knew where his place was. I am no more responsible for the fact that God made me the daughter of a duc than for his making another the daughter of a peasant. That is simply the way of things. It certainly isn’t my fault they are poor.” She realized her tone was defensive, but years of revolutionary rhetoric had made her sick of constantly feeling she should apologize for her birthright.
    “Mademoiselle, have you ever met a peasant?” he asked curiously.
    “Of course I have,” she shot back. “What would you call those foul pigs who have watched over me in prison these past few weeks?”
    “But before the revolution,” he qualified. “Did you ever leave the grounds of the château and see how the families who rented land from your father and paid dues to him actually lived?” His tone was not accusing, merely one of genuine interest.
    She thought for a moment. “Not really,” she admitted indifferently. “Once a year my father would have a party on the grounds for all the peasants, and they would come with their wives and children and eat and drink and celebrate the arrival of spring. And sometimes Antoine and I would go riding in the fields and that would take us past their cottages, but we were usually in too much of a hurry to stop and talk to them.”
    “And while you were out enjoying yourself by riding through their fields, did you ever stop to consider that two horses trampling at great speed through a planted field might destroy part of its crop?” he demanded.
    “In the first place, they were my father’s fields,” she pointed out defensively. “And seigneurial law permits the landowner access and right of way whenever he chooses. Secondly, with crops planted for miles around, there was more than enough to compensate for the small amount of damage we may have done.”
    He shook his head. “No, Mademoiselle. There was not more than enough. Between the harshness of the weather, the inefficient farming techniques, and the constantly increasing rents, dues, taxes, and tithes collected by your family, the church, and the state, the peasant farmers barely had enough left over to keep their family in a state of semistarvation and seed their fields the following year.”
    “I did not create the system,” she informed him bitterly. “God did. And it seemed to work well for hundreds of years.”
    “From the point of view of the nobility, I suppose it did,” he agreed, his tone blatantly sarcastic.
    “Citizen Julien, you have been hired by my father’s friend to rescue me, and I will not tolerate a mere employee lecturing me on the perceived evils of my class,” she snapped furiously.
    His jaw tightened and his expression grew dark. It was obvious she had insulted him, but she did not care. There was a moment of taut silence, and Jacqueline