The Wild Wellingham Brothers: High Seas To High Society / One Unashamed Night / One Illicit Night / The Dissolute Duke
‘Easy, sweetheart,’ he gentled, but she could not be still. The last trace of manners broke and she slid her fingers beneath his shirt and scraped her nails down the raised scars that marked his back. She was wild and free as he rubbed across the nub of hardness in the place where the swollen lips of her womanhood began, and when her head fell back the sunlight was bright upon her face.
She loved him.
‘I love you.’
Had she said it? He stilled.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
Not yet, not now, not when he would not want it.
Not when the clenching joy of sex took her over the top of ecstasy and wrenched her on to the dizzy shores of elation.
Asher took her down with him as he collapsed on to the floor of the summer house. What the hell had just happened? He had emptied himself into Emma Seaton with an intensity he had never known possible and in the near-open, where anyone could find them. And with no thought to the consequences. He swore in amazement and kept her head against his shoulder, not wanting her at this moment to see his expression.
I love you. He had heard her say it and the words had melted the cold hard mantle of ice that had coated his heart since he had lost his wife. Since for ever.
Melanie. The soft whisk of an almost-breeze above him made him smile.
‘I will have the banns read, Emma, and we can be married next month. At Falder in the chapel.’
When she looked up, tears magnified his face.
‘There are things about me that you do not know. Would not like to know.’
‘Tell me, then,’ he answered and in his words she heard soft amusement. The amusement of a man who would imagine small digressions, little feminine faults. Tiny flaws and imperfections.
Lord, why was this not easier? She knew the answer as soon as she asked it. Because she had fallen in love with Asher Wellingham. And the promise of it was as sweet as it was forbidden. Not just the loss of her virginity now, but the sacrifice of her heart, and she was getting more and more caught up by the second.
Tell him the truth.
Tell him the truth.
A voice chanted in the back of her head, but she could not do it. Could not stand to see what was in his eyes now turn to hatred.
‘Growing up in Jamaica was very different from here. The rules were very different. It was looser, less…moral?’ She left a question at the end.
‘Yet your father was strict?’
‘In some things he was.’
And in some other things, like the taking of life, he wasn’t.
The image of herself as a ten-year-old, standing on the deck of the Mariposa as her father slit the throat of a slave, impinged over illusion. She had never had a chance to become anything other than what she was and for a moment she hated Beau with such a loathing that she was shocked by it.
‘After my mother went, there were things that I should have learned…feminine things…that I did not know…do not know still.’
He laughed and moved closer. ‘I can see no glaring faults in your upbringing, Emma, and I do not demand a wife who excels in tapestry or singing or the mastery of an instrument. Besides had you been raised here, you almost certainly would not have swum naked from the beach or gone to a bishop’s house dressed in little more than a gown. Or come to my room in your night shift and offered me your virginity. I should be thanking your father for the way that he brought you up.’
He leaned across to pluck a bud from the bush next to him and tucked it in behind her right ear. ‘In the islands of the Pacific a woman promised to a man wears a bloom here.’
Promised?
Her fingers came up to feel the soft wetness of the petals and she made herself smile.
‘You cannot possibly know what it is you are doing, Emerald.’ Miriam’s voice quivered under the onslaught of anger and the remains of her cough. ‘Lord, child, but to bed him? To go ahead and actually fornicate with him…I cannot even contemplate what your parents would have thought of that.’
‘I suspect my mother may have understood, given that she was sixteen when she was pregnant with me.’ Emerald tried hard to hold on to what was left of her patience, though when her aunt went into another bout of a hacking cough she softened her voice. ‘In Jamaica twenty-one would be considered old to be unaware of the pleasures of the flesh.’
‘He must marry you, child. Surely he knows his duty as a gentleman…’ Shock mixed with utter dismay.
‘If I stood before the altar as Emma Seaton, I hardly think the marriage would be legal.’
‘So you would have a child outside of wedlock?’ Her aunt’s old face was pinched.
‘I am not certain if there even is a baby.’
‘Pretend it, then. You are ruined already.’
‘Pardon?’ Emerald could not quite comprehend what her aunt meant, though the wily look in her eyes was familiar.
‘The Carisbrook name is powerful. Pretend there is a child and marry him. As Emma Seaton if you need to. Who would know? You are young and fit. If a child did not come this month, then with the grace of God it will come in the next one.’
‘I could not do that…’
‘Oh, pah. Your father took away the future you should have had when he dragged you to sea for his own gains, yet despite every handicap of birth and upbringing your heart is still in the right place. The Duke of Carisbrook would be lucky to have you as a bride’
‘Lucky? A marriage based on lies?’
‘Untruth is often the result of need and circumstance; if life has taught you nothing else, it should have at least taught you that.’
Emerald stared at her aunt, seeing clearly for the first time the ghost of her dead father. The change from the nervous and dithery old woman was amazing as, for a second, Beau shone forth in the lines of her face. Beguiling. Charming. Utterly selfish.
‘It is wrong…’
‘He is as lonely as you are and, if rumour is to be believed, has been since the unfortunate and premature demise of his wife.’
‘Which I caused.’ Emerald had had enough. She shouted the words, but as she dredged up the courage to explain further Miriam began to laugh. Not softly either.
‘Ahh, how the young torment themselves. You think Melanie Wellingham would not have died anyway from a bout of pneumonia after a cold long winter? You think a storm could not have whipped her husband’s ship to the ends of this earth and blown him off course to some other death?’
‘No. I think that if he had not met my family, he might be at Falder this very moment with a wife and children and a brother who could see. And if I told him the truth I could not bear to see the same thought in his eyes.’
‘Because you love him?’
Emerald was silent.
I love you. She had said it to him once.
She was quieter as she answered and a thousand times more resolute. ‘If I did as you bade me to, I would have to live all my life in a lie. Like my father did. Always careful, never honest with anyone, for ever looking over my shoulder for the past to catch up.’
Miriam sighed loudly as her hand came from beneath the bedcover. ‘It can’t have been easy on you, Emmie.’ Cold fingers played with the band of lace on her gloves. ‘I should have come out…insisted on some contact…for I knew my brother and he was not always such a biddable man to live with.’
Emerald shook her head. Biddable?
‘I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.’
For a moment Emerald was transfixed by the rawness of her voice travelling through time from childhood, and was stunned by the sheer memory of animosity and ill will.
Biddable? She almost laughed at the understatement. No. There could be no happy ending. No small apologies or little mistakes. Lives had been lost and years had been taken; if the scars on her hands and her leg and her face had taught her anything, it was the fact that risk only brought regret. She shook her head and felt her resolve firming. Honesty was a policy that wreaked havoc on the good souls of those who had the misfortune to believe in it, and when she left England at least this way she would leave with her pride.
Asher came to her room after midnight, when the house was quiet. He looked tired and when he reached out she moved away.
A quota of penance? One night of loving for years of pain? It didn’t quite seem fair somehow, but her withdrawal was fashioned from kindness. If he hated her, all this would be so much easier. For him.
‘Last night was a mistake.’ She couldn’t even find it in her to be subtle.
‘A mistake?’
‘I am a lady and I was a virgin. You should not have bedded me.’
She thought she heard humour in his reply. ‘Hard to determine experience with your robe pooled around your feet and the look of one well used to the art of lovemaking in your eyes.’
Reverting to character, she turned away and dabbed at her cheeks.
‘I was an innocent…’
‘To whom I offered marriage.’
‘Because you felt guilty?’ His silence confirmed all her fears and she was glad that he was not looking straight at her as she continued. ‘I would rather not marry out of guilt, your Grace.’
‘You think that is what my marriage proposal is?’ There was an edge of irritation in his voice.
‘Indeed I do. But do not worry yourself on my behalf—I shall be leaving for Jamaica soon to see to some property and I am not certain when it is I might return.’
‘So you saved your virginity for some quick and meaningless affair? You expect me to believe that?”
When he came forward she meant to deny him, meant to hold up her head and plead the wrongness of it, but she couldn’t. Instead her fingers fitted into his and she laid her head against his chest, feeling the careful touch of his thumb on her bare skin as it traced a line around the wings of her butterfly.
‘Did it hurt?’
‘No.’ She smiled at the ridiculousness of the question in the whole face of what was between them.
‘I want you, Emma. Now. Here. Tonight.’ A breathless entreaty that set off an aching throb inside and took away denials.
‘Just tonight, Asher. After this—’ His finger rubbed across her lips and stopped the lies that were forming. And then she forgot everything that she had meant to say as the heat of his body seared into the answering warmth of her own.
She could barely look at him in the morning in the face of what they had shared until the dawn. Lord, even the thought of it drew a blush with the wetness of his seed on her thighs.
His seed. His lips against her and the promise of more in his eyes.
I love you.
She had said it again when her fingers had threaded through his hair and the clenching throb of her sex had made her arch away from the unfamiliar softness of the mattress, and again when he had held her afterwards. Neither of them had slept even as the dawn broke against the windows and flooded the room with the light of day.
A perfect, balanced if-only love to remember when she was old and grey. The one moment to make every other subsequent second bearable.
When he left, she was glad that he went without giving her words that could bind them, badly, into a future.
Chapter Eleven
Asher parried with his sword, quickly, against the thrust of Jack’s blade and brought the buttoned point to an unprotected throat.
‘Touché.’
Even his voice sounded stronger and with the sun on his face and the image of Emma entwined around him he felt…unassailable, invulnerable, absolute, all feelings he had not known since…when? It was Emma Seaton’s lack of need, her strength of purpose and an underlying will that bent to no one that made him like this.
‘More practice, I think, Jack, if an ill man can beat you…’
‘Hardly ill. You look better than I’ve seen you look in a long time.’
Asher turned away as guilt sliced into him. There were days now when he barely remembered the past, days when what had happened was blurrier, less real. All that seemed true now was centred about Emma and her laughing turquoise eyes.
‘I’m going back to Falder tomorrow.’ He gestured to his arm, freed now from its bandage.
‘Because you think they could try again?’
‘If they do, I’ll be ready this time—no one could surprise me there.’ He slashed his blade through the air as if to underline intent.
‘I’ll see to my affairs and come up and join you before the end of the week.’
‘I am not certain as to the safety of it.’
‘You think it’s that dangerous?’
‘I do.’
‘It’s Emma Seaton, isn’t it? All this has happened since she came. And now she’s here under your wing? And her aunt, too, I’ve heard. Take care, Asher, for there are whispers.’ A question lay in the air between them.
‘Whispers?’
‘Some say she is a fortune-hunter who targeted the largest fortune in London with her well-timed faint.’
‘And what do you say, Jack?’
‘I’d say, if she makes you happy who gives a damn about anyone else; besides, I like her too. She’s different.’
After Jack had gone he stood in the gardens at the back of the house and lit a cheroot, pulling on it gratefully after the afternoon of exercise.
He had bedded Emma every night since shortly after the attack, and every night she had told him that she loved him.
My God. Loved him. If he had any guts he would have given her the words back. But he couldn’t. Not yet. Not until he knew exactly who she was.
He screwed the sapphire ring on his finger around and around and made himself think.
She loved him, but she would not marry him. Why? When they arrived back at Falder, he would get the truth from her for London and the smaller house here hemmed them into properness.
Apart from the night time!
Grinding out the burning end of the cheroot beneath his feet, he wished he could go to her now and smiled as he looked at his timepiece. Four o’clock in the afternoon. For years he had dreaded the dark and now he welcomed it. Just another change she had fashioned in him. Another way she had made him different.
They lay on the covers, the fire in the grate sending flickering shadows across the walls and tingeing Asher’s body with the soft glow of orange. His back was to her and her fingers traced the marks that stood up in knotted pearly welts.
She noticed how the skin on his forearm tightened at the contact and chanced a question.
‘I saw marks like these once in Jamaica?’
She felt his interest.
‘The man who sported them had seemingly lost his mind in a pirates’ colony on Turks Island off the Silver Bank Passage. The law never took his ramblings seriously and so nothing was done, but I heard a few years later that the ship of an English lord had levelled the place clean away, blown it from the face of this earth with every last person standing in it, as revenge for what he had suffered there.’
‘A fine tale,’ he replied evenly.
‘Your tale?’ she questioned just as smoothly.
‘I am a duke of the realm, Emma.’
‘You are a man who keeps a blade hidden in the folds of his sleeve. I saw it at the Bishop’s party and wondered why you should have a need of it here?’
‘I had thought it well concealed.’ His voice held the hint of respect. ‘And besides…’ His finger brushed over the puckered skin on her thigh. ‘There are times when the childhood that you profess to does not quite add up. The mark of a sword and an indigo tattoo, flame-scarred hands and an excellence in the Chinese art of acupuncture. Truth be known, your secrets are probably every bit as heady as my own.’
She laughed to ease the tension, feeling his observations permeate the space between them. A hollow sort of sound that had his eyebrows rising.
‘I said to you once before that I could protect you—’
Before he could finish she placed her finger across the smooth and full line of his lips.
‘And I said to you once that there is nothing that you need to protect me from.’
He rolled on top of her so that she felt the hardening ridge of his manhood against the juncture of her legs.
‘All my life I have been around women who have needed…protecting. My mother, Lucy, Melanie. But you…you are different…stronger…’
Their eyes were at a level and the truth was suddenly important.
‘I cannot marry you, Asher.’
‘Why?’
‘Because…because I cannot.’
‘And yet you can be my mistress?’
She nodded before she could stop herself.
‘Every night you tell me you love me. And sometimes when you sleep you speak in your dreams and you say it again.’
A single tear slipped from her eye and trailed its way down her cheek.
‘If you would trust me.’ He whispered it into the quiet of the night beneath the swathe of heavy curls under her right ear and she turned away, her fingers skimming across the dark red scar on his forearm. Still healing. A reminder of how fragile life really was and how easily it could be taken away.
If she lost him…
If she caused any of his family harm…
No, she would travel to Falder for the map and then she would be gone. It was the only honourable thing to do.
Chapter Twelve
The birdsong had only just started in the trees beside Carisbrook House when they left London. Robins, sparrows and finches, vying each other for the one perfect note. A quiet refrain, Emerald thought, compared with the ear-splitting cries of the birds back home in Jamaica.
Miriam, Lucy, Taris, Asher and herself sat in the second coach. In the first coach, full of the Wellingham servants, Toro sat on top with the driver. Emerald had seen the outline of the weapon concealed beneath his jacket as she had come down the steps to the street; she guessed that Azziz on their coach would be as well armed. It pleased her that Asher was taking the threat of the McIlverrays seriously and was allowing little chance of attack.
Feeling the warmth of him next to her, she looked across as he pulled the lush and ample furs over her knees. Today he was preoccupied, the brown in his eyes sharper than it usually was and blood from an ill-taken shave seen on his jawline.
‘Are you warm enough?’ He addressed the query to them all and refrained from catching her eye. She frowned. When he had come to her room last night, he had been slick with heat and want and need, but today the shadow of uncertainty lay between them, unspoken questions and impossible answers. Easier indeed to lose oneself in the promise of flesh, the darkness adding another layer of distance.
Lord, the whispered memories of night were like a shout in this confined space. Looking down, she saw the knuckles of his hand between them whitened to the bone. He felt it too, then? How could he not? She coughed to clear her throat and hoped that he did not hear the racing beat of her heart.
It was colder out of London, and the drizzle from yesterday had turned into a hard beating rain, the windows already fogged up from their breaths.
Emerald tried to see outside across the shoulders of her aunt and wished that she had made certain she was by the window. She had three knives concealed on her person and would have strapped her sword through her belt if she could have. But how? The shape of it could hardly be explained and this way her silent weapons held an element of surprise.
‘You seem well recovered, Miriam.’ Lucy leaned forward to speak more on the topic and Emerald used the moment to question Asher.
‘How long do you expect us to take till Wickford?’ she asked. The town was the first stopover point, a place where the horses could be rested and watered and where there was a fair lunch served.
‘Three to four hours in this weather,’ he returned. ‘More if the front to the west passes over us.’ He rubbed at his arm as he spoke, giving her the impression that it was paining him. But she did not dare voice her concern with the others sitting so close.
‘I noticed that Azziz and Toro were armed?’
He did look at her then. ‘I can protect you, Emma. Do not worry.’
She almost laughed.
Worry.
My God.
She hoped he would not see the quick burst of temper. She had instructed Toro to make certain the inhabitants of the first carriage were safe before returning to help the second carriage should anything go amiss in their travels; although she could see that he did not care for the idea, she was sure that he would do as she had asked. Lord, this was all her fault and she prayed to God that they would need none of it and would journey to the Carisbrook property without mishap.
It was mid-afternoon when she noticed Asher turning in his seat to get a proper view of the land outside. Miriam was asleep, her gentle snores filling the silence of the coach. Taris dozed also and Lucy was reading a book. A romance about pirates, Emerald determined from the title and smiled at the cover.
Visions of the Mariposa came to mind, but she shook the memory back, into the folds of time. Here in England the image was unsettling. A few short weeks had given her a taste of what her life could have been like and for just a second she was overcome with the loss of it all.
Asher’s hand slapping against the roof shocked her back to reality.
‘Riders to the left,’ he shouted, ‘and they don’t look friendly.’ When he flipped open the catch of the window, light rain and wind slashed in, but he was already crouched across the seat, prying open the wooden box beneath the feet of his brother.
Three flintlock pistols lay nestled in a leather case and his fingers grasped the one nearest to him.
‘Asher?’ Taris’s voice was flat and Lucy’s book slid to the floor as she caught sight of the armoury.
‘Get back against the seat. All of you.’ He gave little notice to his family’s fright as he opened up the door and lent out, his body arching against the force of wind and motion, the violent burst of gunfire loud even against the rushing noise of hooves and wheels and speed.
Lucy began to cry, and Miriam to cough and then the world as they knew it turned over, for the carriage, already hard-pressed in its escape, caught an edge and veered into nothingness, the screams of the women eerie in the slow-motioned silence.
Emerald came to on a bank not far from the carriage, the wheels still spinning against a muted sky. She put her hand to her head to feel the hurt there. Bright blood stained her fingers and she winced as they explored a cut across her temple. Asher was some five hundred yards away from the carriage drawing the riders towards him. She heard him shouting something about the map and urging them to follow him before he disappeared into the undergrowth. Leading the McIlverrays away. From them.
Miriam and Lucy were huddled nearby and Azziz and Taris both out cold against a small embankment. Crawling across to them, she checked their pulses. Fast but steady.
Shots further off had her scrambling up and she grabbed her aunt’s arm and entwined it around Lucy’s.
‘Run to the woods. Don’t stop until you are far in and then dig down into the undergrowth and stay still.’ When the girl didn’t answer, Emerald shook her. ‘I’ll cover you from behind.’ Lucy was sobbing in fright. Miriam said nothing, but the wide horrified stare of her eyes told another story.
Taking Azziz’s blade, Emerald began to run, egging the two others on as she did so, the cool greenness of the forest dulling panic, and when a number of shots rang out across the glade she tried to pinpoint movement. Where was Asher now she thought? Where the hell had he gone?
Miriam seemed greatly recovered as she joined them and she instructed her aunt to take Lucinda further into the grove, though Asher’s sister took hold of her arm as she finished speaking. ‘No. You mustn’t go. There is nothing any of us can do. Highwaymen are not to be—’ She clapped her fingers to her mouth as a man broke cover not twenty yards from where they stood, the gun at his hip pointed at them, and murder in his eyes.