Australie, Tome 3 : Captif du passé

Résumé

Après deux ans passés en Angleterre pour parfaire son éducation, Jessica Corbett regagne enfin la Tasmanie où elle a grandi. Sa famille possède, près de l'océan Pacifique, un vaste domaine entretenu par une domesticité essentiellement composée de forçats.

L'avenir de Jessie semble tout tracé : ses parents l’ont, depuis l'enfance, promise à Harrison Tate, l'un des hommes les plus fortunés de l'île. Une rencontre va bouleverser ces projets.

D'origine irlandaise, Lucas Gallagher est arrivé en Tasmanie parmi un convoi de bagnards. Il n’a pas d’autre perspective que de travailler le restant de sa vie au service de ces colons britanniques qu’il hait et méprise. Affecté au service des Corbett, il s'occupe des chevaux, en attendant l'occasion de s'évader…

L'arrogance de ce rebelle irrite d'abord Jessie. La virilité de Lucas la trouble plus qu'elle ne veut le reconnaître. Comparé à lui, Harrison semble soudain fade. Mais quel destin aurait-elle auprès de ce paria ?

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Description en VO :

Tasmania, 1840: Jesmond Corbett returns home from school in London determined to conform to the expectations of her aristocratic family and marry the childhood companion to whom she is betrothed. But Jessie is a woman filled with restless longings and unacknowledged needs. And nothing in her sheltered life has prepared her for Lucas Gallagher, an Irish rebel doomed to a lifetime of suffering and humiliating servitude.

For Jessie’s island home is a place of brutal contradictions, its genteel lifestyle and gracious estates based on the soul-crushing labor of the convicts who toil under the British penal system. Haunted by a tragic past but fiercely proud, Gallagher has vowed to escape this living hell or die trying. But he can’t resist the dangerous desires stirred by the vital, troubled young woman to whose family he has been assigned. And although they know their love can have no future, the star-crossed lovers inevitably succumb to a forbidden passion that threatens to destroy both their lives and Gallagher’s last chance to reach for freedom.

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After years of schooling in England, Jesmond Corbett finds little has changed on her family’s estate along the sea-battered coast of Tasmania. Betrothed since childhood to a wealthy neighbor, Jessie comes home determined to conform to the expectations of her family and the society in which they live. But nothing in Jessie’s life has prepared her for the mysterious stranger who works in the stables, a man with searing eyes who haunts her dreams and awakens passions she never knew existed.

Irishman Lucas Gallagher arrived on the island in chains, a convict sentenced to a lifetime of slave labor for the English gentry. For four years he has lived a dead man’s existence, using every spare moment to plan his escape. But when he meets Jessie, she touches his cold, angry heart. And although their love has no future, he finds himself unable to deny the longings of his battered soul– longings that threaten to destroy what may be his last chance to reach for freedom. . . .