The Price of Honor by Susanne Matthews

What is the price of honor? For Isabelle de Caen Gaudier, it’s disobeying the king, leaving her home, and giving up her identity.

When King Louis orders Isabelle to marry the Chevalier d’Angrignon, she’s appalled. There is no way she can obey and wed the man she believes may be involved in her husband’s murder and her father’s poisoning. Add to that, the monster may be paving his way to the throne of France for the children she’ll bear him by killing all those ahead of her in line, something she can’t allow. For the sake of her honor, Isabelle de Caen must die.

Hoping everyone will believe she drowned in the millpond, Isabelle disguises herself and sneaks aboard the ship taking her beloved cousin Sophie to the New World. That’s where the charged of treason against her husband originated, and that’s where Isabelle hopes to find the answers to clear his name and implicate the chevalier. But her plans threaten to fail when Guy Poirier, an old friend and her first love, finds her hiding under his bed.

Guy knows Pierre Gaudier isn’t a traitor. The man was on an errand for the governor-general of New France, bringing him critical information, but he was killed before he could deliver it. Someone doesn’t want the king to know what’s really happening in the colony. When Guy finds Isabelle hiding under his bed, he jumps at the chance to help the woman he’s always loved and clear his friend’s name, and if Isabelle can some day return his affections, that would be the best reward he could get.

But things are far more complicated than either of them suspects. After examining information found aboard a vessel attacked possibly by pirates and a wampum belt pointing to an alliance between the Iroquois Confederacy and tribes to the south, Guy fears for the lives of all those in the colony. There’s more than one conspiracy afoot, and with Isabelle at his side, he seeks to find the men behind it all to save not only the woman he loves, but the place he now calls home.