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

His hand was warm against the cold of her own and she curled her fingers into his and held on. Anger she could deal with. Pity undid her. She felt the hot run of tears on her cheeks and hid her head against his jacket.

‘Lord, Emma.’ He used her old name, a small mistake as he pulled back her coat and his fingers were gentle against the wound, even as the roiling blackness claimed her and she fell into his arms.

Someone held her down. Hard. Hurting.

‘Keep still, Emma!’

Emma! Emma?

Not her name. Nearly her name? Asher’s face flew in and out of focus, the dark edges of a room behind, white candles burning on a desk.

Fragments. Memory. Her father mopping the blood from her brow and her mother in a corner. The same candles pushing back midnight.

‘I need some more whisky…’ The slurred voice of a drunk.

Her mother.

Evangeline.

Little angel.

Murderer.

In the blink of an eye she remembered everything that she had shut out as a six-year-old and, bringing the pillow across her ears, she began to shake. Hard liquor and the sound of screaming. The smell of whisky as a bottle broke. Shards of glass and the boozy face of Mother, close. Too close. Dangerous.

‘Mama!’ Her voice across the years. Young. Afraid. Unbelieving. She needed to get away. Out of the room. Into the dark of the trees around St Clair. Safety.

‘Emerald.’ Another voice. Softer. Huskier. Underlined with calm.

Asher was back. Against the shadows, his face impossibly handsome and the smell of drink receding against a different reality.

Falder. They were home.

‘Home?’ she whispered and watched as uncertainty kindled.

‘Azziz and Taris?’

‘Azziz is in the room next to this one, nursing three broken ribs and a sizeable lump on the back of his head. Taris escaped remarkably unhurt.’

‘How long?’ Full sentences were beyond her.

‘You’ve been here for a week. But you have had the fever. It broke this morning.’

‘Feel…strange.’

‘It’s the laudanum to take away pain from the wound in your side.’ He stood up and stretched. The dark rings under his eyes were easily seen.

‘Stay…please.’ Suddenly she was afraid. Her mother crouched in the shadows with her madness and beyond that her father beckoned, tears streaming down his cheeks.

‘James.’ Curly-headed James. She had seen his lifeless body buried in the fertile ground beneath the oak tree at St Clair before her father had calmly read the sermon and sent his wife away. Far from home. Far from them. Far from the grave of a son she had killed.

Emerald swallowed, trying to arrest the moisture that she could feel behind her eyes. Her childhood. The bones of secrets and lies. The product of falsity and hatred. Tears leaked out and fell down her cheeks, warm against a cooling skin.

She had lost them all. And now she was loosing Asher.

‘I always loved you…since the Mariposa… I thought…I think…you are the most beautiful man I have ever seen.’ She took the last of her pride and buried it. At least he would know. Her voice broke and she could not carry on.

Not just repayment, then.

When he said nothing, she turned over and shut him out. Shut them all out.

Just her.

She hated the way her chin wobbled as the strength that she always kept hold of broke into shattering sobs, but she could stop nothing.

It was over. Her life here was over and she could not even begin to imagine what she was going to do next.

The clock on the mantel marked the passing of silence as Asher watched her from above, her scar-traced hands linked across the pillow. Ruined hands like his own.

They had both been ruined by circumstance.

The thought knocked the breath from him. He had spent five days listening to her rambling memories of childhood. Memories no one should have, memories fractured by madness and drink and death and dissolved into…what?

Blowing out the candles, he sat in the dark and when her breathing shallowed out he was glad. Looking down at the nightgown her aunt had carefully dressed her in, he noticed things he had not seen before.

The frail thinness of her bones and the way her hair curled beneath the fragile lobes of her ears.

God. Emerald Sandford. He should be furious. More than furious. His mind went back five years to the sea battle off the Turks Island Passage and he remembered other things. The soft feel of her lips against the nub of his thumb, the laughing turquoise eyes, the warmth of the day and the cold of the sea. He frowned. He had drawn back from the fight the moment he knew her to be a girl, and as he had dropped his guard she had retaliated with the hard edge of her sword and flipped him over the side.

Down into the cold of an angry sea where he had caught hold of the barrel she had thrown in after him, the roar of her father’s anger loud on the air. Closing his eyes, he remembered other things. The circling sharks and a blood-red boiling sea. Thirty sailors on his ship and ten had survived.

Ten. He swore. Six by the time they had reached the coast and then only himself after a year in the pirates’ compound.

Emerald Sandford.

Lord. His eyes ran across her full bottom lip and he laced his fingers together to stop himself from touching.

He wanted to shake her and he wanted to climb in beside her and hold her against the demons of her past. But he couldn’t.

‘I love you.’ How many times had she said it? Would say it? The hollow shaft of memory held him bound by doubt.

As he let himself out of the room, he hated both her fragility and his intransigence.

She had lied, had continued to lie, her motivation based solely on the greed of treasure. Swearing, he walked down the hallway and out on to the balcony, relieved to feel the air on his face. Fresh. Clear. Cold. How long did it take for the sharp prick of vengeance to fade into a lesser ache? A quieter loss?

For ever, he decided, and felt a bone-deep shiver of guilt.

Emerald regained full consciousness just before the morning and lay very still, not wanting to waken the servant who sat dozing in a chair to one side of the bed.

Everything ached, but the mist that had consumed her was lessened.

They knew now. Knew who she was, knew who she had been. Asher. His mother. Taris. Lucinda. Her eyes fell to her hands. Gloveless. Exposed. Like she was. The scars red against the white of the sheet. She didn’t even curl them up to hide them but turned her head to the window and watched the first pink blush of dawn on the high clouds outside.

Thus far she was safe. They had not taken her to Newgate. Or sent her to the poorhouse. No, she was still at Falder. In her room.

A portrait of Asher graced the far wall, his eyes watching with velvet gravity and their unexpected dance of gold. Behind him the house was caught in the last rays of a summer sun, the ocean sparkling to his left.

Falder.

As much as she might have liked to, she didn’t belong here—she was a dangerous interloper from another world. A harsher world where the price of a life was measured in less than honour and where integrity and tradition were words other people used. I love you. She had said it again last night and wished that she hadn’t even as the door opened and he walked in.

He had been riding. His clothes were splattered with dust and when he shut the door behind the departing servant she smiled. His manners were far better than her own. Another difference.

‘I think we should talk.’

She nodded and looked directly at him. Beneath the façade of politeness she glimpsed a steely anger, held in check.

‘You are Emerald Sandford, are you not?’

She nodded.

‘Beau Sandford’s daughter?’