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.
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,
