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 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,
