Regency Scandals: High Seas To High Society / Masquerading Mistress

Melanie.

His wife.

He fingered the ring that he wore on his little finger, the sapphires wrought in gold the exact shade of eyes he would never see again. Her wedding ring. His glance automatically went to the missing digits of his other hand. With good came bad.

He frowned and remembered his return to England after a good fourteen months of captivity. Any innocence he might have been left with had been easily stripped away. He was different. Harder. He could see it reflected in the face of his brother and in the eyes of his mother and aunt. Even his impetuous sister was afraid, sometimes, of him.

Running his hand through his hair, he frowned. Brandy made him introspective. And Emma Seaton touched him in places that he had long thought of as dead.

It was the look in her eyes, he decided, and the husky timbre of her voice when she forgot the higher whine. She gave the impression of a frail and fragile woman, yet when she had fallen against him at the ball he had felt an athletic and toned strength. The sort of strength that only came with exercise or hard work.

He was certain that the mishap had been deliberate and he tried to remember who else had been standing beside him. Lance Armitage and Jack’s father John Derrick, older men with years of responsibility and solid morality behind them. Nay, it was him she had targeted and now he had asked her to Falder.

On cue?

No, that could not possibly be. He was seeing problems where none existed. The woman was scared of her own shadow, for God’s sake, and unusually clumsy. She was also threadbare poor. A wilder thought surfaced. Was she after the Carisbrook fortune? A gold digger with a new and novel way of bagging her quarry? He remembered the countless women who had tried to snare him since Melanie’s death.

Lord, he thought and lifted a candlestick from the mantelpiece before opening the door and striking out for the music room. Melanie’s piano stood in a raft of moonlight, the black and white keys strangely juxtaposed between shadows. Leaning against the mahogany, he pressed a single note and it sounded out against the silence, a mellow echo of vibration lost in darkness.

Like he was lost, he thought suddenly, before dismissing the notion altogether. He was the head of the Carisbrook family and everybody depended on him. If he faltered …? No, he could not even think of the notion of faltering. Carefully he replaced the lid of the piano across the keys. Dust had collected upon the hinges and had bedded into the intricate inlaid walnut that spelled out his wife’s initials.

Ash unto ash, dust unto dust.

Tomorrow he would inform his housekeeper to instruct the staff to clean the music room again. It had been too long since he had forbidden its use to anyone save himself. And his wife would have abhorred the fact that her prized piano had sat unplayed for all these years.

Still, he could not quite leave the room, an essence of something elusive on the very edges of his logic.

Something to do with Emma Seaton. Her turquoise eyes. The scar. The sound of laughter against the sea.

The sea?

Was he going mad? He crossed to the window. Outside the night was still. Dark. Cold. And the cloud that covered the moon made his leg ache, shattered bone healed badly into fragments.

Fragments.

They were all that was left of him sometimes, a shaky mosaic of loss and regret.

‘God,’ he whispered into the night. ‘I am becoming as maudlin as my mother.’ Blowing out the candle, he resolved to find some solace in his library. At least till the dawn when he could sleep.

Azziz returned to the house in Park Street just before midnight, and Emerald hoped that this time he had been careful to scour the neighbouring roads to make certain he was unobserved.

‘I have heard word on the docks that McIlverray is on his way to London, Emmie.’

‘Then he knows about the cane—why else would he come?’ She frowned; this news put a whole different perspective on everything. Karl McIlverray, her father’s first mate, was as corrupt as he was clever and had a band of loyal men who followed him blindly. Any intelligence circulating the docks of Kingston Town usually ended up in his ears and Karl McIlverray had been with her father long enough to put two and two together. He would know exactly what was inside the cane.

Damn, it was getting more and more complicated and she wished for the thousandth time that her father had kept the treasure in the vault of a bank or in a safe where it could have been more easily accessed.

Time. It was slipping away from her.

How long before he arrives?’

‘A week or even ten days—the storms out in the Atlantic might slow them down, if we are lucky. I’ll leave a man in place to make certain we see them before they see us.’

‘And you?’

‘Toro and I will come to Falder. We can camp somewhere close and keep an eye on things.’

Emerald was not certain as to the merits of the plan for they would be easily seen in the English countryside around the house. But if McIlverray came, she would need to be able to summon help, and quickly. She imagined the aristocratic Carisbrook family coming face to face with any of them and her heart pounded. And if someone innocent got hurt because of her …! She could not finish.

She had to be in and out of Falder quickly and on a boat back to Jamaica, making sure in the interim that Karl McIlverray had word of her movements. Another more worrying thought occurred to her.

‘What if the cane is back here in London?’

Azziz frowned. ‘It wasn’t in the house a month ago when Toro and I searched it.’

‘But he may have brought it with him this time. The limp still troubles him.’

‘Have you seen him use a cane at all in public?’

‘No.’ She began to smile. ‘And I do not think that he would. Each time I have been in his company he is careful that others may not notice the ailment. A cane would only draw their attention to what he seeks to hide.’

Privacy. Sanctuary. She sensed these things were important to the enigmatic Duke of Carisbrook and her spirits lifted.

‘Miriam and I are due to leave for Falder soon and I can search the house easily under the cover of night.’

‘The Duke of Carisbrook does not strike me as a man who could be easily fooled.’

‘How does he strike you then?’

‘Tough. Dangerous. Ruthless. A man who would have little time for lies.’

‘Then I must be out of Falder before he knows them as such.’

‘Do not underestimate him, Emmie.’

‘You are beginning to sound like Miriam.’ She smiled and laid her hand on his arm, her fingers tightening as she remembered all the other times in her life she had depended on Azziz. If she lost him too …? If anything went terribly wrong …? As she tried to banish fear she was consumed by sadness. When was the last time that she had taken a breath in joy and let all of it out again?

She could barely remember.

Her father’s death, Miriam’s agedness, and a debt that was increasing with each and every passing day. She could go neither backwards nor forwards and the options of anything else were fast shrinking. What happened to people who ran out of money in London? She shook her head in fright.

The poorhouse took them.

The place of liars and cheats.

A liar. It was who she had become. If she could find the map, she could fashion a home. Not a grand one, but a for-ever place. A place to stay and grow and be. A place like St Clair. She closed her eyes against the pure thread of desperation that snaked itself around her heart, because she knew that the old house was gone, up in flames, the living embodiment of the McIlverray hatred for her father. And grounded perhaps on a sense of justice, for Beau had promised Karl McIlverray far more than he had ever delivered.

She let out her breath. Beau had promised everyone more than he had ever delivered and she needed to make it right.