the paler ring of brown flaring golden. And she had felt it in the sudden rush of blood beating in her throat, though her father’s shout had broken the spell as he advanced upon them, murder in his eyes. In a quick protection she had rammed the hilt of her sword hard across Asher Wellingham’s temple and upended him into the sea. A chance at least to cheat death. Ten summers of sailing with Beau had at least taught her that.
‘Lord,’ she said aloud and banished such memory, running her hands across the knife tucked into her belt.
Right. Wrong.
Good. Bad.
Aboard the Mariposa she had been her father’s daughter. But here she was no longer sure of anything at all.
‘Asher.’ She whispered his name and held her fingers up against the warmth of sound.
A home. A family. Responsibilities. Accountability. Unlike her father, the Duke of Carisbrook took these things seriously and she admired him for it, the questionable morality they had lived by in Jamaica less certain here.
Stepping back into the shadows, she cursed her father and headed to the sanctuary of her room.
Asher paced up and down and remembered the sight of Emma Seaton coming unclothed towards him, the water slick upon her body and the sand marking her feet.
She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
His eyes flicked to the painting of his wife in the small alcove and for the first time he found it difficult to remember her face in life. The exact colour of her eyes, the sharp line beneath the bridge of her nose.
Instead the image of Emma Seaton walking from the water towards him kept replaying in his mind, the butterfly tattoo as surprising as the deep curling scar upon her right thigh. He had enough wounds on his own body to know the mark of a sword when he saw one.
Where had she got it? When had she got it? And why, despite taking everything else off, had she not removed her gloves? What was she hiding there?
He began to smile as he lifted a glass of water to his lips.
Water?
Today even his choice of beverage was different. Emma Seaton made him different. More alive. She made the very air of Falder ring with a vibrancy long missing.
And what might have happened had he followed her into the barn? He would have taken her hard and fast without a care for who was around or what the consequences might have been. She did that to him with her sun-browned skin and her turquoise eyes. Made him careless and reckless. Brought out the man he used to be. The man who had loved and risked and lost.
Lord. What the hell was happening to him? He had to stop it, for she was dangerous to everything he had made himself believe in.
Rules. Regularity. Carefulness. Control.
In chaos came loss. Of all the men in the world, he should be the best to know it.
He flicked open the casement of his timepiece.
Four o’clock. Outside the wind was mounting and the quarter-moon was high. He glanced down at the atlas in front of him and traced his fingers across the ragged outline of Jamaica. Emma’s home. The place where she had been formed. His eyes wandered further west into the shoals of the Yucatan Channel.
His ship had come through the mist there on to the Sandford vessel with remarkable speed and silence and no trick of intent, either, just the cold hard slice of revenge and then an ending. He thought he would have felt more than he did as he had run Beau Sandford through the guts with the sharp point of his sword. But he hadn’t. God. After a year of captivity and another year to recover, he should have allowed himself to feel more. He stretched out his right hand and swore, the stumps of his missing fingers outlined against the light of the lamp. Even now the hate still festered.
Looking at the reflection of himself in the window, he frowned. He had been so certain of his course in life until lately…Lately, the sharp focus had dimmed and another reality had brightened.
Emma. She was taking up all his waking thoughts and sliding into his dreams. Effortlessly.
And he could not let her with her mystery and secrets. Balling his right fist, he closed his eyes. The only way to protect himself was to never feel again.
Emma Seaton would be at Falder for three more days and then she would be gone. He resolved to spend as many of those as he could well away from her.
They tiptoed around one another at breakfast the next morning with polite smiles and bland words.
‘Is the food to your satisfaction?’
‘Would you mind passing the strawberry jam?’
And beneath it all ran an undercurrent of mounting desperation.
Emerald was glad Taris and Lucy were both at the table.
‘I saw Malcolm Howard yesterday at the Red Lion. He said you had been swimming, Asher, down in Charlton Bay.’
‘I took Artemis for a jog along the sand. Perhaps it was that he meant.’ His voice and eyes gave absolutely nothing away as he reached across the table to help himself to some toast.
Taris changed his tack. ‘Do you swim, Emma?’
‘She does,’ Asher answered for her, brown eyes flinting a warning, and Lucy, who caught neither the amusement of one brother nor the irritation of the other, jumped into the fray.
‘Then you absolutely must teach me, for I have always longed to swim. What do you wear in the water?’
Emerald flushed deep red at the question and bent to cut up the omelette on her plate. ‘The temperature of the water in England is a lot colder than that of Jamaica. If I were to venture in here, it would be merely a case of testing the water to the ankles,’ she said finally when she had her heartbeat in some sort of check. She did not dare to chance a look at Asher.
Lies were one thing when the recipient had no notion of their falseness or otherwise. But Asher had been there. He had seen her, touched her, run his fingers across the bare skin at her shoulder…The heat in her cheeks did not abate and she took in several breaths to at least try to calm herself.
Damn it. She barely recognised this shrinking violet she had suddenly become and Lucy’s puzzled frown only added to her discomfort. Suddenly the day stretching before her seemed indeterminably long. When Asher rose from the table and pushed his chair back, she was glad for it.
‘I will be in Rochcliffe till the evening, Taris, and if I stay the night I will send word. Ladies.’ His glance barely encompassed her and then he was gone, striding darkly through the dining-room portal. The sun slanting in from a nearby window gave the black of his hair a bluish light and highlighted the hard planes of his face.
She was in her bed by the window by ten o’clock that evening after spending an hour or so in the library with Taris, playing chess. Asher’s absence had been a godsend, for under the simple pretext
