His Californian Countess. Kate Welsh

around him and he gave himself over to the wonder of the dream. Her cries of ecstasy tore through the little room and he gladly followed her. As he emptied his seed into her keeping, he cried out her name.

      Helena.

      Feeling as if she’d drained every ounce of strength from him, he rolled to his side to keep from collapsing on her. Chilled, he flipped the blanket over them both, and then pulled her along his side, settling her head against his shoulder. Exhaustion closed in on him, but he managed one more coherent thought. Who would have thought Helena would be so passionate a lover? This dream was better than any he’d had before he’d given up the idea of marriage between them.

      As the fog in his mind closed in on him, Jamie felt a tear drop on to his shoulder, then another. But he couldn’t manage to ask why she’d cry.

      Amber tried to hold on to her emotions, but one tear fell then another and another. How could a heart break and allow the owner to live with such pain? She would rather die than have him know the destruction one word—one name—had wrought within her.

      It had all seemed like a dream at first. Indeed, she had had similar dreams for days. With every fiber of her being Amber had believed this was a dream, as well. He’d been so sick and she’d been so afraid to believe he was on the mend that awaking in his arms had truly felt like a secret wish come true.

      A fantasy.

      A dream.

      Then, when things she’d never imagined or heard of began to happen between them, she’d fully awakened and thought the real Jamie had come to her, wanting to make their desperate unromantic marriage a real one. And God help her, after all her protestations that she wanted no man in her life, in her exhausted sleep-deprived mind she’d wanted him. She’d believed the beautiful act they’d performed together came from feelings in each of them that matched perfectly.

      Those traitorous emotions had grown against her will while she’d nursed him. Now she’d have to use all her willpower to obliterate them. Because he’d turned the dream she’d awakened to from beautiful reality to a nightmare with the shouted name of the woman he believed her to be.

      Not Amber. Not even Pixie.

      Helena.

      Beautiful, wealthy and proper Helena.

      So now Amber lay, silently weeping, unable to move away without risking his awakening and seeing how deeply he’d wounded her. The abyss of troubled sleep claimed her before she could stem the flow of her tears. While she slept in his arms, her dreams were full of confrontations that featured Jamie and Helena with Amber in the role of their child’s governess or some other lowly servant.

      Jamie stirred and Amber woke with a start. Morning light flooded through the porthole, illuminating the cabin and sending reality crashing in on her like a mighty wave, assaulting her heart and soul. Everything between them last night had been a fraud.

      She recoiled and tried to scramble away when Jamie’s gaze fell upon her face and anger marched across his features. He tightened his grip on her shoulder and pushed himself up on one bent arm, staring down at her with narrowed, furious eyes.

      It was then that she remembered she was ignominiously nearly naked in the arms of her counterfeit husband. He’d taken her body when he thought she was his high-society love. Or maybe it was she who was the counterfeit in this marriage. After all, it was she who was not the woman he thought he’d wed. She was not his precious Helena.

      Amber wished he’d say something.

      Anything.

      “What is this about? Was our meeting on deck an accident, Pixie?” His beautiful mouth twisted in a sneer and “pixie” ceased to be a sweet pet name. “I thought you were a disadvantaged innocent, forced to travel alone.”

      “I had my reasons for being alone.”

      “I must wonder if your reason was to lure me into this trap so you could then demand marriage. It worked for my late wife, but I won’t be trapped that way again. I care not about my reputation here in America.”

      Amber felt her temper rise. Now she scrambled away, dragging the blanket with her as she stood. What did she care if it left him naked and exposed? She’d bathed him and cared for his needs for days on end. She could look at his naked form all day and feel nothing but contempt.

      But then he stood in all his naked glory—bold as you please—and captured her gaze with his own narrowed, hard-as-amethyst eyes. It was she who broke away from their locked gazes. When her lowered eyes fell on to his manhood, her face heated in a betraying blush. She looked away quickly, but the damage was done. And that set fire to a temper few had ever seen.

      “Luring you into marriage?” she shouted. “You must still be suffering from delirium. Your uncle has apparently already done his worst by freezing your heart. I did not need to trap you into marriage. We’re already married. It was you who begged me to marry you to protect Meara. You promised an annulment if you survived the fever and I wished for one.”

      He opened his mouth to speak, but she rushed on, not caring what he planned to say. She had heard all she wished. “It was you who crawled on to my pallet last night and made annulment impossible. This is my thanks for caring for you all these long days? I should have let the captain toss you overboard. You endangered everyone on board just to follow your obsession with Helena!”

      She stormed out into the saloon, her shoulders and back stiff as the deck she’d been sleeping on. Still wrapped in the blanket, the neckline of her pretty silk shift peeking out, she was mortified to bump into the ever-present cabin boy. But she raised her chin and stomped by him, refusing to show her embarrassment.

      “Have my trunk sent to me,” she told the boy over her shoulder as she stalked across the wide, elegantly appointed companionway and saloon. “I’ll stay in my cabin under quarantine for the rest of the voyage, if I must, but I will not spend one more day in there. With him.”

      “Yes, ma’am,” the boy answered, staring at her as if she were mad.

      Perhaps she was.

      Because she was afraid she’d fallen in love with that … that obnoxious person whose miserable life she’d probably saved.

      Then her tears welled up again as she remembered all he’d revealed during his illness. He was a good man, worthy of her love even though he didn’t want it. It had been the scars of his youth speaking just now. She knew that, but she

      hardened her heart. She’d never wanted to care. To love.

      And she wouldn’t.

      She just wouldn’t!