Louise Allen – Regency High Society Vol 2: Sparhawk's Lady / The Earl's Intended Wife / Lord Calthorpe's Promise / The Society Catch (страница 23)

Asleep, she lay curled on her side beneath a coverlet, one hand lying with the palm open beside her face. Her hair was loose and tangled about her shoulders and her lips were parted, and relaxed like this she looked both young and vulnerable.

How, he marveled, had she held onto that appealing innocence after living the life she did? He knew from how long she’d been married to Frederick that she must be close to thirty, but by the shifting candlelight she could have been ten years younger. With him it was the opposite. Experience and hard living had weathered him beyond his years, and some mornings he feared that the face he saw in the shaving mirror belonged to some old man he didn’t know.

She sighed and shifted in her sleep, and he caught a tantalizing hint of her scent, jasmine and musk. At Desire’s suggestion they traveled with their own linen, and Caro’s pillow slip was trimmed with elaborate cutwork lace that matched her pale, gossamer-fine hair. As incongruous as that pillow slip was against the rough pine bulkheads of the tiny cabin, Jeremiah was glad she’d brought it. Frederick was right: she didn’t belong in black.

Still watching her sleep, he shrugged his coat from his shoulders and unwrapped his neckcloth. Regardless of how she looked now, she really wasn’t as helpless as he’d first thought, and she probably didn’t need half the protection he was determined to give her. To confront him the way she had today took more courage than most men had. Certainly more than Bertle. Likely more than he himself. And that time when she’d spoken up before the lieutenant with the press-gang: he’d been too caught up in his own misery then to thank her the way he should have, but she’d fought like a terrier on his behalf. So much, he thought wryly, for the dainty, delicate Lady Byfield.

Shaking his head at how besotted he’d become, he climbed into the lower bunk, lying on top of the coverlet in his shirt and trousers. He didn’t know what she was wearing to bed, but he wasn’t going to tempt fate or himself by shedding any more clothes than he had to, at least not this first night.

Would Caro be tempted, too? The longing in her eyes had been unmistakable, and the way her lips had parted had begged for his kiss. Innocent though her face might be, she was a worldly, experienced woman. She’d know both how to please a man and how to be pleased in return, and he almost groaned aloud with frustration.

With his head pillowed in his hands, he closed his eyes and tried to forget the woman lying so close above him. Instead of the soft, measured rhythm of her breathing, he forced himself to listen to the sounds of a well-ordered ship: the thrumming of the wind through the standing rigging, the rush of the waves against the hull, the creaks and groans of the timbers and the calls of the men on the watch overhead.

The sounds were so familiar that he almost didn’t hear them, and gradually he let his body relax with the rocking of the ship’s motion. It had been so long since he’d been at sea, endless months landlocked in his sister’s house, and yet now he felt as if he’d never left.

He lay on his back, still comfortably full from dinner. Instead of the salt pork that had seen them clear across the Atlantic, there had been fresh meat, for this morning the cook had slaughtered the hog Jeremiah had bought for the crew when they’d touched briefly at Gibraltar. Because the meat wouldn’t keep in the hot Mediterranean sun, they had all eaten their fill, relishing the plenty after weeks of dwindling rations. Along with the pork had been bread, real bread, and not the dry, flat crackers that passed for it at sea, fresh green peas, sweet oranges, and a custard pudding made from cream and eggs.

Davy had joined him in his cabin, and together they’d drunk to the fastest passage they’d ever had between Providence and Marseilles. If this wind held steady, thought Jeremiah as he drifted off to sleep, they’d reach the French port by tomorrow evening, in time for him to call on that saucy little innkeeper’s daughter he’d met last year. Bernadette, or was the name Antoinette?

With a jolt he woke to the crack of splintering wood, then the crash of his cabin door as it gave way and slammed open against the bulkhead.

“What the hell—”

But the man was already on him, hurtling across the dark cabin like a huge cat to land on Jeremiah’s chest. He was nearly as large as Jeremiah himself, and he fought with the strength of one who relished killing. In the inky blackness of the moonless night, Jeremiah struggled for his life against an attacker he couldn’t see, only feel, pressing down on his heart and lungs like the darkness itself: muscles that were lean and hard, a stiff, curling beard, folds of rough linen that tangled around them like a woman’s gown.

And then Jeremiah felt the blade of the knife, cold and curving, pressed so close against his throat that each breath was a risk. On the deck overhead he heard running footsteps, a strangled cry of terror, and the guttural voices in a language that wasn’t his own.

“Ye bloody infidel,” said the man with the knife, breathing hard, his face so close to Jeremiah’s that he could feel the hot hatred on his skin. “Ye shall die like the other lowly swine ye slaughtered today.”

“Infidel be damned,” rasped Jeremiah. “You’re a bloody Scots pirate!”

“I am Hamil Al-Ameer, and praise Allah that ye have the chance to die in his name.” The knife pressed still closer into Jeremiah’s throat, and he knew then that the man was right, he would die. But he didn’t want to, not like this, not now, and he struggled vainly against Hamil and the darkness and the pain that seared like fire.

“Hush now, they can’t hurt you any longer,” murmured the woman’s voice. “You’re here with me, and you’re safe.”

Shaking and disoriented, he turned toward the sound of her voice. Kneeling beside him was a woman dressed all in white, bathed in soft light like an angel. Was he already dead then, beyond life and death?

“Jeremiah, look at me.” Her voice was gentle but firm. “Look at me, darling. See? It’s Caro. Whatever happened is done, and you’re here with me.”

“Caro?” He searched her face desperately, his breathing still ragged and his voice trembling as he fought for his own sanity. “Caro, you don’t know what I did, what happened.”

She saw the terror grow again in his eyes as the nightmare returned and swiftly she put her hand to his cheek, determined not to lose him. “What was your mother’s name, Jeremiah?”

He turned his head away, confused. “Mama?”

“You all lived together on the farm on the island, didn’t you, Jeremiah?” she said softly, coaxing him to trade the terror for happier memories. She wasn’t sure it would work, but she wasn’t going to sit by and let him drop back into the black torment again without trying. “Your Mama and your father and your little sister Desire?”

“No.” He covered his eyes with his hands and the deep, shuddering sigh that racked his body was almost a sob.

She leaned closer, her voice more urgent. “I know you remember the farm, Jeremiah. The grand house on the hill near the water? You told me before it was the grandest house in the colony when you lived there.”

“But not with Mama.” He took his hands from his eyes, stretching his arms out over his head, and for a long time stared, without seeing, at the rough planks of the bunk above him. “Father took us to live with Granmam and Granfer at Crescent Hill after she died.”

“Oh, Jeremiah, I’m sorry!” She’d meant to turn his mind down more pleasant paths, not to this.

“At least she didn’t live to see what the British did to Newport during the war. She died soon after Obadiah was born, from the fever, I think.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“I don’t, at least not anymore.” His voice was flat, wrung clear of emotion, but at least the blind panic had left his eyes and his breathing had slowed. “The English killed Obie, just as they killed my father. They’re all dead now. Desire and I are the only ones left. And, of course, the children she has with Jack, though because of him they’ll be raised English, not American. In England there’s more to being the son of a lord than a Sparhawk.”

His regret touched her. “You never thought to marry and have children yourself?”

“Never found a woman mad enough to take me.” He sighed and tapped his fingers against the bulkhead. “My mother’s name was Elizabeth Pattison Sparhawk. She had red-gold hair and clapped her hands when she laughed.”

“She laughed often?” asked Caro wistfully.

“All the time when Father was home. She loved him, said Granmam, as much as any woman could. He wept at Mama’s burying, the only time I ever saw him do it.”

He rolled over onto his side, propping his head on his elbow to look at her. He was, she knew, trying very hard to look as if nothing had happened, as if his face weren’t still pale and lined with suffering, and though she’d never humiliate him by saying so, her heart went out to him for wanting so badly to hide his weakness from her.