When she woke again it was morning and the indent of where he had slumbered was still warm. He has only just left, she thought and sat up, running her fingers through her hair to try to straighten it. What should she do next? How many nights of loving constituted absolution? Rising from the rumpled bed, she was pleased to see that a basin with water and a towel had been left on the table. Wetting the flannel, she brought it across her forehead, her face in the mirror showing the struggle of wanting. Wanting to be with him. Wanting to be gone so that he might never know any of it. Today the blue in her eyes was overshadowed by dark, dark green and her hair was a wild array of wayward curls.
Not the face of a duchess.
She could not imagine a portrait of herself above the Carisbrook baronial fireplace to last down through the centuries. The scar that dissected her right eyebrow was reddened and visible and she brought up her finger to touch it. This was the sum of who she was and no amount of wishing it otherwise could preclude her past.
She had just dressed when he returned, and ridiculously she blushed. If he noticed, he gave no word of it—for that she was grateful.
‘Would you walk with me? We have much to say to each other.’ He did not touch her at all as she went past him and kept his distance still as they descended the stairs. Outside in the sun he seemed to relax more as they ambled between the stone walls, the lush green of summer in the leaves of trees that stood as sentinels on each side of the garden.
When he stopped she looked up at him. The brown of his irises was darker today and his hair slicked back as though he had just bathed.
‘Who were the men who attacked me?’
So he wanted answers. She hoped that she might give him at least a version of the truth. ‘The McIlverrays of Kingston Town. They want the map inside the cane. They believe that it should belong to them.’
‘And you think it prudent to hold on to a treasure map that might indeed in the end kill you?’
She almost laughed at that, but stopped herself.
‘My family has debts.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Tell me how much you owe and I’ll place it into an account tomorrow.’
Her mouth fell open. ‘No.’ She couldn’t do it, couldn’t escape from here with a fat payment in her pocket after a quick toss in the sheets. That would make her—what? A whore? And every bit as on the game as the ones she had seen peddling their bodies in Jamaica. ‘I can’t take money from you like that.’
She was unprepared for his laughter. ‘And what if you are pregnant?’
She had not even considered that.
‘If you are pregnant, the child will be the heir to the Carisbrook fortune. I would not want him, or her, to be brought up on an empty quest for treasure or a hollow prophecy of greed. And Falder would welcome the promise of a child.’
‘A child you would risk everything for?’
He shook his head and turned her towards him, peeling away restraint with a quick easiness. ‘It is you I am trying to help.’
‘Help me, then, by giving me the map.’
‘And then watch you disappear?’
She reddened and felt his breath on the soft skin at the top of her ear and her insides twisted in longing. So simply done. So effortlessly won. A throbbing shot of warmth spread as she turned into his lips, groaning when his fingers flicked at her nipples. Even here, in the garden in the full view of the windows along the back end of Carisbrook House, she would let him have her, down on the ground amid the flowers and damn the consequences.
He was hers like no other person had ever been. She felt his familiarity with an ache, and was gasping as he drew back.
‘This is not the place to…Come with me.’ He led her to a summer house at the very bottom of the garden and stripped off his coat. The shirt he wore beneath was snowy white. After he loosened his breeches he stopped and smiled, the wind lifting his hair away from his throat and throwing a shadow into amber-lit eyes.
He was so beautiful. So masculinely perfect. With care she laid her palm against the rough stubble on his jaw and drew one finger across the fullness of his top lip.
‘We could be seen—’
He stopped the words with a quick shake of his head.
‘No. Not here.’
Suddenly she did not care. With a slow grace she undid the buttons at her throat, excited as he watched her lift the fullness of her breast above their protection of lawn and lace.
Wanton. Heedless. Immoderate.
She felt his fingers lifting her skirt and the wind on her shins and thighs and bottom as she accepted him with a sigh. Tipping her hips forward to get a deeper thrust his hands anchored her and she bit into the cotton of his sleeve to smother a scream.
‘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