The Wild Wellingham Brothers: High Seas To High Society / One Unashamed Night / One Illicit Night / The Dissolute Duke

She had smelled nice. Neither perfumed nor powdered. Just clean. Strong. And she had particularly fine eyes. Turquoise, he determined, frowning as the same vague shift of memory he had felt on first seeing her returned.

She was familiar.

But how did he know her? An unusual face. And different. The mark that went through her right eyebrow and up under her fringe was strange. If he were to guess at its origin, he would have placed it as a knife wound. But how could that be? No, far more likely she had been whipped by a branch while riding or tripped perhaps in her youth and caught a sharp edge of stone. He liked the fact that she made no effort to conceal it.

The ring of the doorbell startled him and he checked his watch. Five o’clock in the morning! Surely no acquaintance of his would turn up here at this time and uninvited? Lifting a candle, he strode into the front portico to hear the quiet weeping of his sister.

‘My God. Lucy?’ He could barely believe it was her as she threw herself into his arms.

‘What the hell has happened? Why were you not in the bed you were bound for when you left the Derricks’ two hours ago?’

‘I…Stephen…met me…in a place…by the port. He said we would be married and instead…’

‘Stephen Eaton?’

‘He said that he loved me and that if I came to him after the ball tonight he would speak of his feelings. But the place he expected me to accompany him to was hardly proper and then he almost killed Burton…’

‘He what…?’ Asher made himself simmer down. Redress could come later and calmness would gain him quicker access to answers than rage. ‘How did you manage to get home?’ He was pleased when his sister did not seem to notice the pure strain of fury that threaded his words.

‘A man came with a knife and knocked Eaton out. He put us all in the coach and his driver brought us straight home. A Mr Kingston. He did not know you, for I asked, and his accent was strange.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Just gone. He followed us back in a rented hackney and said he would not stay, even though I tried to persuade him differently. He said something of another engagement and promised to send word as to how he could be contacted.’

Asher caught the eyes of his butler and indicated that someone follow the hackney. Blackmail was often a lucrative business and he did not want to be without the facts. Everybody in this world wanted something of him and he could not contemplate this Mr Kingston to be the exception. Still, at least he had brought Lucinda home. And safe. For that alone he would always be grateful.

Gesturing to a maid hovering by the staircase, he bid her take his sister up to bed. He was glad when Lucy went quietly and the sounds of her crying subsided.

It took twenty minutes for Peters to return and the news was surprising.

‘The gentleman went to the Countess of Haversham’s town lodgings, your Grace. Got out of the hackney and sent it on before disappearing into the house. He had a key, for I tarried to see how he gained entrance. I left Gibbon there to trace his steps further should he surface again.’

‘Very good.’ Dismissing the messenger, Asher went back into his own study. Emma Seaton and the Countess of Haversham. What did he know of them?

Both niece and aunt were newcomers to London. Miriam had been here for a year and Emma merely a matter of weeks. Both had gowns that had seen better days and the look of women who dealt daily with the worry of dwindling funds, and Miriam kept neither carriage nor horses.

Would they have a boarder living with them as a way of bolstering finances? Or could Emma Seaton have a husband?

And now a further mystery. A young man who would rescue the sister of a very wealthy man and wait for neither recompense nor thanks. A mysterious Samaritan who scurried away from what certainly would have been an honourable deed. In anyone’s eyes.

Something wasn’t right and in the shadows of wrongness he could feel the vague pull of danger, for nothing made sense. Instinctively his fingers closed hard against the narrow stem of his glass and he sucked in his breath. Harnessing fury. Calculating options.

Emerald pulled the curtain back from her bedroom window on the third floor and cursed. The man was still there and she knew where he had come from.

The Duke of Carisbrook.

He had sent someone after her and she had not bothered to check. Stupid, stupid, stupid mistake, she thought, banging her hand against her sore head and roundly swearing.

She should have sent the conveyance on to some other street and then made her way home undetected. She would have done so in Jamaica, so why not here? With real chagrin she stripped off the boy’s clothes and rearranged her blankets beside the bed, glad to lay her head down, glad to close her eyes and think.

What a day. Nothing had gone easily and she did not know the next time she might be in contact with Asher Wellingham.

Close contact.

She remembered the feel of his finger across her pulse. A small touch of skin that fired her blood. The trick of memory and circumstance, she decided. After all, she had gone to sleep every night for the past five years with those velvet-brown eyes and hard-planed face etched in dream.

The same dream.

The same moment.

The same beginning.

So known now that she could recall each minute detail, even in wakefulness. The sounds, the smell, the sun in her eyes and the wind off the Middle Passage of Turks Island at her back. And a thousand yards of calico luffing in the breeze.

She shook her head hard and made herself concentrate on the sounds of London and on the way the lamp on her side table threw shadows across the ceiling. She would not think of Asher Wellingham. She would not. But desire crept in under her resolution and she flushed as a thin pain entwined itself around her stomach and delved lower.

Lower.

She thought of the bordellos that had dotted the port streets of Kingston Town and wondered. Wondered what it would be like to draw her hands through night-black hair and beneath the fine linen of his shirt. Imaginary sinew and muscle made her pulse quicken and she turned restlessly within the bed-clothes, any pressure unwelcome on heated skin.

Her eyes flew open. Lord, what was she thinking? Dread and the cold rush of reality made her shiver.

Asher Wellingham.

Her enemy.

Her father’s enemy.

Anger and hurt surfaced and she reached for her wrapper. She would never sleep tonight. Adding another log to the fire, she took a book from the pile beside the chair, ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ in Latin, from Juvenal’s satires.

She remembered Beau teaching her the conjugations of complicated verbs from books bound in heavy velvet. Books he had been taught from when he was a child.

A half-smile formed.

Once he had been a patient man. And a good father.

And while she knew he was no angel, he had not deserved the revenge the Duke of Carisbrook had exacted upon him. A calculated retribution timed when the Mariposa limped home from a storm in the Gulf of Mexico. Asher Wellingham had come in quickly with three times the manpower and demolished the smaller boat with military precision. Boom-boom, and the masts had gone. Boom-boom, and the front of the brigantine had been holed with a volley of cannon fire.

Azziz had told her the story later when he had been returned to Jamaica on the Baltimore clipper that had picked them out of the sea. The English duke had not given her father the chance to jump, but had demanded a duel on the foredeck of the sinking ship.

And a minute was all it had taken. One minute to run her father through the stomach.

Emerald felt tears prick at the back of her eyes. Her father had lived by the sword and died by it, but there had been a time when literature and classics and music were more important.

When her mother had been with them! When the family had still been whole. When St Clair had been their home and the Mariposa was another man’s ship.

Gone. Long gone.