Sophia James - The Wild Wellingham Brothers - High Seas To High Society / One Unashamed Night / One Illicit Night / The Dissolute Duke

‘My aunt will not understand what is happening.’

‘Taris will speak with her.’

The lines between his nose and mouth were pronounced. He was exhausted, yet he still fought to have her stay. With him.

‘This cannot be proper—’ she began, but he broke across her words and smiled.

‘Proper? When was anything proper between us?’

When she did not answer he rang the bell on his bedside table. Sweat beaded his upper lip.

‘If you are in pain, I could help you.’

‘No. Just…want your promise to stay.’ His voice shook with exhaustion and his hair was dark and damp against the white of the sheets as he instructed his servant to see her to a room.

Emerald slipped through the kitchens into the garden. She had been at Carisbrook House for almost five days now, though she had not seen Asher since the day of her arrival. Her questions as to his state of health had all been answered perfunctorily by the servants, but had included no mention of an invite to see him and so she had stayed away.

Miriam had been installed in the room next to her and the cold her aunt was suffering seemed remarkably better with the ministrations of the Wellingham physician. This morning Emerald had sat reading to her, but now Emerald needed some space, some air and some exercise to temper the quiet edge of waiting.

The gardens, while not as large as those at Falder, were complex and the small sound of a boot scuffed against the shell path had her walking on further and turning a corner. Taris Wellingham sat on a wide marble garden seat, his hat in his lap and his face turned towards the sun.

‘Lady Emma,’ he said as he registered her presence.

‘You knew it was me?’ she said before realising the rudeness of such a question.

He smiled. ‘Lack of sight heightens the hearing and you walk with a particular gait.’ Tilting his head, he continued. ‘You walk your world like one who is not at home in England.’

Emerald was still as she considered a response, though he did not seem to require one as he continued talking.

‘If you sit with me for a moment, I would like to tell you a little about my brother.’

He waited as she rearranged her skirts and took a place beside him and when he started to talk she heard a reticence. ‘Asher thinks that you need…protecting.’

‘Does he?’ She could barely answer.

‘He thinks that you may be in trouble and he is a man who knows his responsibilities and sticks by them. Stability. Trust. Loyalty. All fine qualities, would you not agree?’

‘I would.’

‘And he is different since he met you, happier, for he has let few others close since his return from the Caribbean.’

Emerald frowned, uncertain now as to where this conversation was leading. Was it a warning?

‘He was held captive for a year after the pirate Sandford ambushed his ship off Turks Island. And when a ransom note came to Falder and we finally found out where Asher was, he was full of only one thing—revenge. He came home only to get better to go back again a year later.’

Oh, God. Emerald tried to stop the aching lump of guilt that congealed in her throat from spilling over into her eyes.

This was all her fault.

When she had thrown Asher into the ocean as a means of saving him from the wrath of her father, no one could have foreseen the consequences. And this very minute was one of them.

She had ruined his life. Irrevocably. Undeniably.

‘Emma?’ His hand covered hers. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’ She stood and forced a smile on her face.

Judas. Traitor. Liar.

If she saw Asher now, he would know.

Pleading a headache, she fled to her room and lay down on her blanket near the window, stuffing the fabric in her mouth to stop the sobs that gathered in the back of her throat.

All my fault…all my fault. The litany of guilt was like a mantra. His wife, his scars, Taris’s lack of sight and his lost years. Lord, she had done all this to him. Unknowingly. The serpent in the Garden of Eden.

Her.

She crept down the corridor and across the stairs to the landing on the first floor.

Asher’s rooms.

A spike of panic nearly had her turning away from the heavy door, but she made herself stand still until the fear had passed and then pressed on silently. Opening the door, she turned the key in the lock as she shut it behind her. It was dark inside and the glow from a fire in the grate of an adjoining room threw shadows over everything. A quick glance at the moon through the windows gave her a rough timing. Around three o’clock. She stood still until she had her bearings and listened until the scrape of a quill upon parchment drew her attention. He was writing at his desk? Her heart began to thud and the thin cotton shift she wore stuck to the moisture building across her skin. But she would not waver.

‘Who’s there?’ His voice was close, husky, and she could not quite find it in herself to answer.

Emerald.

Beau’s daughter.

Judas.

A chair scraped across parquet and then he was in the room, shirt-tails pulled from his trousers and wearing no cravat. Even in the lack of light she could make out the thick wedge of bandage beneath his shirt.

Was it too soon? Six days since the attack.

She placed her arms by her side and made herself relax.

‘Emma?’ A whisper of disbelief was underscored by soft puzzlement as his eyes came to rest upon her gloveless fingers. And, as if to give himself time, he asked a question.

‘What happened?’

‘They were burnt.’

‘When you were cooking?’

Smiling at his assumption, she knew that she could not give Asher even one more lie. But there was something that she could give him. Something precious.

Herself.

Lifting her hands to the ties at her bodice, she unlaced the ribbon and simply stepped out of her shift, nipples puckering hard in the sudden cold.

‘Lord.’ Asher breathed in, and the sensual haze in his eyes took the breath from her body in one heavy hit.

‘You once suggested a dalliance and I turned you down. I have come to think that was a mistake.’

She cursed the shiver that ran through her words and desperately wondered what was supposed to happen next. The growing thickness of his manhood was plainly seen, though she could not quite bring herself to lean down and open his laces. No, whilst she always swam in the nude and slept in the nude and was rarely hampered by society’s penchant for undergarments, the pleasuring of a man was something she had only seen at a distance in the brothels of many a dockside port.

Wetting her lips with her tongue, she tried to remember the less bold moves of the doxies who haunted the drinking houses between Savannah la Mar and Kingston and with precision ran her hand across her stomach and lower, gently swaying her hips in the way Molly’s girls did in the Golden Hind, a favourite drinking hole of her father’s.

And now what?

A sudden fright consumed her. Would he be gentle? Worse, would he refuse her?

Asher saw the panic in her eyes before she closed them, turquoise bright and shaded by some emotion he could not quite fathom. What game did she play at? Would someone discover them and insist that he do the right thing by her and offer marriage? Marriage? To a woman who posed as a lady, acted the harlot and had the body of an angel. His eyes skimmed across her breasts. Her waist was tiny and the long length of her legs gave her a grace that was…breathtaking. Lord, even at the salons of the select courtesans in London she would be exceptional, the tattoo on her breast and the scar on her thigh adding layers of mystery.

Lady Emma Seaton? Nothing about her quite added up but the sum total of all that she was drove him to the edge of reason.