Regency Scandals: High Seas To High Society / Masquerading Mistress

She reached into her pocket for the shell she had collected and wished that she could find the map and just go home.

Chapter Seven

He was drunk.

He knew he was by the way the portrait of Melanie that he sat in front of swam in and out of focus. He hated this painting. Hated the sheer memory of it. A brutal reminder of all that he had lost.

He should not have kissed Emma Seaton. Not like that. Not with the raging want in his blood and the sure damned knowledge of duplicity in his head. She was not as she said she was. She was a liar and a would-be thief. She was dangerous to his family. To him. To the world he had spun around himself ever since he had returned home, a slim wedge against chaos. He should kick her out, right now, before the calmer shifts of reason took hold and her turquoise eyes reeled him in like the sirens of Circe, haunting, familiar and undeniably false.

And yet he couldn’t. He couldn’t. He sighed and leant his head back against the wall wondering just why it was that he couldn’t. Not just the warm willingness of her body or the sharp raw hit of lust that had floored him when her lips had met his. No, there was something else too. Something he had felt unexpectedly as he had held her on the beach against him. Something close and safe and right. Something that took away the cold for ever etched into his very bones and left a question of possibility.

‘I thought that I might find you here. And drinking.’ The heavy censure in Taris’s words jarred his thoughts and Asher closed his eyes against it. Tonight his more usual reserve was lost under the fiery belly of too much whisky.

‘When I was with Emma Seaton today … I forgot Melanie. For just one moment … I forgot her.’

He felt the stillness of his brother rather than saw it, but he was strangely relieved by the confession. Saying the words lessened the strength of them. Tonight he needed absolution.

‘She is a beautiful woman, Asher, and Melanie has been dead for over three years. Why should you not admire her?’

‘Because she’s a liar. Because she was here the other night. Right here. Dressed as a boy. And because I think she and Liam Kingston are one and the same.’

‘Lucinda’s knight in shining armour? The one who bested Stephen Eaton? Lady Emma?’

‘She has a tattoo on the soft skin of her right breast.’

‘A tattoo?’ Intrigue was plain in his brother’s question.

‘Of a butterfly. Done in blue.’

Taris began to laugh.

‘I want her to stay here. At Falder. I want to protect her …’

The laughter abruptly stopped.

‘Someone has hurt her,’ Asher continued and stood, tripping over a low stool in front of him as he did so and veering towards the wall. Leaning against it, he was pleased to regain his balance. ‘And she’s frightened. I can see it in her eyes … sometimes … often … and I can hear it in her voice.’

A clock chimed in the next room and Asher counted the hours. Three o’clock. Two more hours till the dawn and the promise of sleep. Tonight it was all he could do to keep from closing his eyes and let slumber overtake him.

But he mustn’t.

He knew he mustn’t. Not until the dawn when the voices were softer and memory did not cut his equilibrium to the quick.

He slid down the wall, his knees drawn up before him. In defeat. The stubs of his severed fingers rested against his knee and he brought them up into his vision as if seeing them for the first time.

‘Sometimes I can feel these fingers … ghost fingers touching things, feeling things. I used to think they’d gone to the place where Melanie was, a little part of me waiting with her till the rest could follow … and now … I don’t want to follow them.’ As he leant his head back, his eyes went to the uncurtained window, where he could see only an unbroken darkness and he hated the lack of control he could hear in his voice.

‘Melanie would have wanted you to be happy again. Laugh again. Feel again.’

‘Would she?’ He stroked his finger down the thin crystal stem of his glass and almost laughed. ‘I remember once in Scotland when she nearly fell into a raging river and I caught her and pulled her back. She said that if anything ever happened to me, she would be sad for ever. For ever. Such a long time … for ever.’

Taris was quiet. Asher noticed he had removed his glasses and put them into his pocket. Seeing with memory. All that his brother was left with now. Sometimes he hated Beau Sandford with such a passion that it worried him. The smarting scars across his back. Taris’s loss of sight. Even in death the pirate haunted him.

‘Go to sleep, Taris. I will be all right.’

‘I could stay …’

‘No.’

He was pleased when his brother left him to his familiar demons.

Emerald strolled back towards Falder after an early morning walk, and caught sight of a light burning low in the little salon off the library as she mounted the front steps. If Asher Wellingham was already up, she would speak with him about yesterday. She should not have kissed him, should not have been alone with him, could not believe what she had done. She, who had always been so circumspect in dealing with the opposite sex. Well, it needed to stop before she did something she knew she would regret and she meant to tell him so right now.

The Duke of Carisbrook was slumped on the floor when she pushed open the door, his back against the wall and an empty bottle beside him. Taris sat asleep in an armchair. Like a sentinel.

Turning back to Asher, she saw that he watched her, the intensity of his gaze startling. He made no move to stand up; with his cravat askew and with the stubble of a twelve-hour beard upon his face, he looked like some dark and dissolute angel.

‘I am sorry,’ she managed. ‘I saw the light from outside and thought I might speak with you. About yesterday.’

‘Perhaps another time would be better,’ he returned softly, and she was relieved to hear a hint of something akin to humour in his voice.

‘You are well?’ She could barely just leave it here.

His eyes flicked to the window where the beams of a new day flooded in.

‘Very well. Now,’ he replied and pushed himself up. Emerald resisted an impulse to help him as he bent over, his hands clamped tightly about his head and holding everything together. She had seen enough hangovers to recognise that this was a bad one.

‘Did you sleep at all last night?’

He shook his head, squinting against the light that caught him squarely from this angle.

A new thought struck her. He never slept. Her mind ran over the times she had found him up, fully dressed, in the small hours just before the dawn.

After the ball. The first night she had searched Falder. This morning. Each time with a glass in his hand and the look of the damned in his eyes.

‘My father had a remedy for too much drink.’ Her resolve to confront him faltered under his vulnerability this morning and his eyebrows arched.

‘A man of many varied talents, then,’ he chided and crossed the room to replace a blanket across his brother that had fallen on to the floor. Taris barely moved as he did so, well wrapped in the arms of Morpheus.

What had they spoken of, Emerald wondered, in the dead of night? What kept them from warmer beds and a more comfortable slumber? Memories? Secrets? Her?

‘Could you concoct this remedy for me?’

She was more than surprised by his request. ‘I’d need herbs and sugar and milk.’

‘We could find those in the kitchen. It’s this way.’

He edged his way around her, careful not to touch, and opened the door. She saw he used the solidness of it to retain his balance.