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

Emerald saw him from above first, and even through her sheer terror and from this distance she recognised the style of his swordsmanship. My God, she thought as she scrambled down the incline, no wonder he killed my father, no wonder he cut a swathe through the men on the Mariposa like no others before him.

His was not an English style of fighting, but a foreign one. A style learnt not in the polite fencing salons of London, but in the world’s godforsaken places, where fair play shattered in the face of sheer and brutal force.

She could barely look away. Already he had downed two men, but the others were circling closer and one held a gun.

They hadn’t shot him! Hope blossomed. They wanted him alive as a pathway to the treasure. She shouted as a slice of steel creased the folds of the fabric on his jacket and red blood oozed through.

Asher heard the cry from one side and the flash of white petticoats had him turning.

Emma? With a sword in hand and a dirty bandana wrapped around the bright gilt of her curls? Memory turned, and against the dull grey sky he suddenly remembered what she must always have known.

‘You!’ He could barely believe it.

The girl from the Mariposa. Emma Seaton? He blinked twice just to make sure the image was real. And the turquoise eyes that looked back at him were dark in anguish.

A slash of steel to his right centered his focus and he waited to see whether she would raise her sword against him too. God. Could he kill her? For the first time in all his life he was afraid.

‘You’ll be wanting the map no doubt, Emerald.’ The man nearest to him spoke, gesturing to those beside him to cease for the moment.

Emerald? Asher glanced sideways. Emerald? What sort of a name was that? Fragmented shards of memory clicked into place.

Emerald!

Emerald Sandford?

‘The Duke has Beau’s map hidden at Falder, Karl. If you kill him, you’ll lose it.’ Her voice was hard, distant, indifferent, as if the taking of his life was a meagre thing against the possession of what they both sought. In the pale light of a rapidly approaching dusk, the blood at her temple ran dark red, and the pallor of her skin made her look immeasurably older than the twenty-one years he knew her to have.

‘You lie.’ The older man opposite took up his sword and brought it down, fast. Quick reactions saved the blade from eating into her leg as she parried.

‘If I had the map, do you think I’d still be here in England?’

With little effort she pushed his blade back and stood like one without a care in the world.

Like father, like daughter.

How easily they ruined lives. How little they thought of the consequence.

Pure untrammelled rage ripped through Asher.

Melanie. His brother. The aching remains of his right hand and the years they had stolen. Lunging forward, he scattered the circle, another man crumpling under the wicked sharpness of steel and all hell broke loose. In the moment of chaos he felt the small tickling whisper of a voice as Emma edged around behind him.

‘Hate me later. I can help you now.’

With a well-timed quickness she plunged her blade through the closest renegade and turned to meet the next one and she fought as if a sword had been born in her hand. He frowned at the thought. Lord, it probably had been. The quick report of a gun close up made him stiffen, the smell of powder acrid in the air. In one movement he pulled his knife from his boot and hurled it before the man could reload, pleased when the blade easily found its target.

He kept her at his back, their paired position creating a circle of safety, the thrust and counter-thrust of the two men left easily beaten back. He heard the rasping of her breath and the quick noise of steel against steel. And then a lightly worded curse. She was tiring. He could see it in the way she held her blade. Parrying no longer, but defending. Why?

Gritting his teeth, he finished the fight. Quickly.

When silence again filtered through the clearing, Emerald found in her the strength to look up. And wished that she had not. Asher was furious and the clamp of his hand hurt the top of her arm. She swayed and would have fallen had he not steadied her. The sting in her side left her breathless and she didn’t dare to look down to see the damage. Not yet. Not now.

He was sweating and in the last yellow light of the fading day the fury in his eyes glittered. ‘You are the damn pirate’s daughter? Beau Sandford’s daughter? It was you on the ship…?’

‘You have remembered?’

‘Damned right I have.’

‘I tried to make it up to you. Here and in London. In the bedroom. It was the only way I knew how.’

Even words were hard to say. Beneath the fabric of her jacket she felt the steady drip of blood. She looked down surreptitiously to make certain the white of her petticoat was not stained with red. If she could just be alone, she could remedy it. With the last surge of energy she pulled her arm away.

‘My God.’ Censure coated his curse. ‘You saw our bedding as some sort of a sacrifice?’

‘A payment. For my father. For me. We wronged you.’

‘Wronged me? Lord, Emerald.’ He rolled the name again around on his tongue. ‘Emerald. Is that what I should call you now?’

‘Some people call me Emmie.’

‘But never Emma?’ She shook her head as he waited.

‘So everything was a lie?’ The swollen flesh at the top of his lip creased into a humourless smile, and she refrained in the face of his anger to tell him the whole of it.

A lie?

To lie in the moonlight together and watch the way the light played off the hardened angle of his body. To feel his lips against her own, melding all that had once been into what now was.

Just a lie?

If he felt even a fiftieth of what she did for him, he could never have asked the question. Tears sprung to her eyes.

‘Everything.’

One word and it was finished. She almost welcomed it when he turned away, for she could not see the hatred in his beautiful velvet eyes.

Laying her arm hard against her side, she followed him through the forest, pausing at this tree and that one to recatch her breath. He did not wait for her, did not look around to see her progress and for that small anger she was glad. Everything ached and the dizzy rush of blood in her ears was becoming louder. Lord, if the bullet had pierced her stomach…She shook her head, refusing to think about it, and was pleased when she saw Azziz standing against the upturned bulk of the carriage, his fingers rubbing the knot of a gash on the back of his head. Taris stood beside him, looking dazed.

‘Where’s Lucy and Miriam?’ Asher’s voice was hard as he looked around the clearing, and Emerald replied as Azziz stayed silent.

‘In the woods. I told them to hide there.’ She half-turned so that the right side of her body was hidden from him.

‘Which way?’

‘Over there.’ It hurt to even lift her arm and point, the dragging red-hot pain worsened by movement. Let him go and find the others. Let him go soon before she was sick, before the whirling lightness overtook everything.

When he didn’t move, she looked up.

‘God.’ he said roughly. ‘My God,’ he repeated and stormed towards her. ‘What the hell has happened to you?’