A Season of Seduction (48 page)

Meg nodded. “Look at the sea. I thought I felt the ship being tossed rather more vigorously than usual.”

The sea was near black without the stars to light it, but gray foam crested over every wave, and up here on deck, the heightened pitch of the ship was more clearly defined.

“Do you think a storm is coming?”

“Perhaps.” Meg shuddered. “I do hope we arrive home before it strikes.”

“I’m certain we will.” Serena wasn’t concerned. They’d been through several squalls and a rather treacherous storm in the last few weeks. She had faith that Captain Moscum could pilot this ship through a hurricane, if need be.

They approached a sailor coiling rope on the deck, his task bathed under the yellow glow of a lantern. Looking up, he tipped his cap at them, and Serena saw that it was young Mr. Rutger from Kent, who was on his fourth voyage with Captain Moscum. “Good morning, misses. Right fine morning, ain’t it?”

“Oh, good morning Mr. Rutger,” Meg said with a pleasant smile at the seaman. Meg was always the friendly one. Everyone loved Meg. “But tell us true, do you think the weather will hold?”

“Oh, aye,” the sailor said, a grin splitting his wind-chapped cheeks. “I think so. Just a bit o’ the overcast.” He looked to the sky. “P’raps a splash o’ rain, but nothin’ more to it than that, I daresay.”

Meg breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, good.”

Serena pulled her sister along. She probably would have tarried there all day talking to Mr. Rutger from Kent. It wasn’t by chance that Serena knew that he had six sisters and a brother, and his father was a cobbler—it was because Meg had hunkered down on the deck and drawn his life story out of him one morning.

Perhaps it was selfish of her, but Serena wanted to be alone with her sister. Soon they would be at Cedar Place, and everyone would be angry with her, and Mother and their younger sisters would divide Meg’s attention.

Meg went along with her willingly enough. Meg understood—she always did. When they were out of earshot from Mr. Rutger, she squeezed Serena’s arm. “You’ll be all right, Serena,” she said in a low voice. “I’ll stand beside you. I’ll do whatever I can to help you through this.”

Why?
Serena wanted to ask. Serena had always been the wicked daughter. She was the oldest of five girls, older than Meg by seven minutes, and from birth, she’d been the troublemaker, the bane of her mother’s existence. Mother had thought a Season in London might cure her of her hoydenish ways; instead it had proven her far worse than a hoyden.

“I know you will always be beside me, Meg,” she said. And thank God for that. Without Meg, she’d truly founder.

She and Meg were identical in looks but not in temperament. Meg was the angel. The helpful child, ladylike, demure, and always unfailingly sweet. Yet every time Serena was caught playing with the slave children or running on the beach with Bertie Parsons, the baker’s son, or hitching her skirts up and splashing into the ocean, Meg stood unflinchingly beside her. When all the other people in the world had given up on her, Meg remained steadfast, inexplicably convinced of her goodness despite all the wicked things she did.

Even now, when she’d committed the worst indiscretion of them all. Even now, when their long-awaited trip to England for their first Season had been cut sharply short by her stupidity.

“As long as you stand beside me,” Serena said quietly, “I know I will survive it.”

“Do you miss him?” Meg asked after a moment’s pause.

“I despise him.” Serena’s voice hissed through the gloom. She blinked away the stinging moisture in her eyes.

Meg slid her a sidelong glance. “You’ve said that over and over these past weeks, but I’ve yet to believe you.”

Pressing her lips together, Serena just shook her head. She would not get into this argument with her sister again. She hated Jonathan Dane. She hated him because her only other option was to fall victim to her broken heart and pine over him, and she wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t sacrifice her pride for a man who had been a party to her ruin and then turned his back on her. That would show weakness, and Serena was anything but weak.

Serena turned her gaze to the bow of the ship. The lantern lashed to the forestay cast a gloomy light, revealing a muddy fog swirling over the lip of the deck.

Smiling, she turned the tables on her sister. “You miss Mr. Langley far more than I miss Jonathan, I assure you.”

Meg didn’t flinch. “I miss him very much,” she murmured.

Of course, unlike her own affair, Serena’s sister’s had followed propriety to the letter. Serena doubted Commander Langley had touched her sister for anything more than a slight brush of lips over a gloved hand. They danced exactly twice at every assembly; he’d come to formally call on Meg at their aunt’s house three times a week for a month. In the fall, Langley was headed to sea for a two-year assignment with the Navy, and he and Meg had agreed, with her family’s blessing, to an extended courtship. He’d done everything to claim Meg as his own short of promising her marriage, and Langley wasn’t the sort of gentleman who’d renege on his word.

Unlike Jonathan.

Stop!
Serena commanded herself.

She patted her sister’s arm. “I wager you’ll have a letter from him before summer’s end.”

Meg’s gray eyes lit up in the dimness. “Oh, Serena, do you think so?”

“I do.”

Meg sighed. “I feel terrible, you know.”

“Why?”

“Because it seems unfair that I should be so happy and you…” Meg’s voice trailed off.

“And I am disgraced and ruined, and the man who promised he’d love me for all time has proved himself a liar,” Serena finished in a dry voice. Nevertheless, it hurt to say those words. The pain was a deep, sharp slice that seemed to cleave her heart in two. Even so, Serena hid the pain and kept her face expressionless.

Meg’s arm slid from her own, and tears glistened in her eyes. Meg knew exactly how Serena was feeling, so it didn’t matter that she struggled so valiantly to mask her feelings. Meg always knew. She always understood. It was part of being a twin, Serena suspected.

Meg stopped walking and turned to face her. “I’ll do whatever I can… you know I will. There is someone out there for you, Serena. I know there is. I
know
it.”

“Someone in Antigua?” Serena asked dubiously. Their aunt had made it quite clear that she would never again be welcome in London. And Meg knew as well as she did that there was nobody for either of them in the island they’d called home since they were twelve years old. Even if there were, she was a debauched woman. No one would want her now.

“Perhaps. Gentlemen visit the island all the time. It could certainly happen.”

The mere idea made Serena’s gut chum. First, to love someone other than Jonathan Dane. It was too soon to even allow such a thought to cross her mind, and every cell in her body rebelled against it. Second, to love anyone ever again, now that she was armed with the knowledge of how destructive love could be. Who would ever be so stupid?

“Oh, Meg. I’ve no need for love. I’ve tried it, and I’ve failed, through and through. A happy marriage and family is for you and Mr. Langley. Me…? I’ll stay with Mother, and I will care for Cedar Place.”

A future at Cedar Place wasn’t something she’d been raised to imagine—from the moment they had stepped footon Antigua, Serena and her sisters had told one another that this was a temporary stop, a place for the family to rebuild its fortune before they returned to England.

But now Cedar Place was all they had left, and it was falling into ruin. Before her father had purchased the plantation and brought the family to live in Antigua six years ago, Cedar Place had been a beautiful, thriving plantation. Six months after arriving on the island, Father had died from malaria, leaving them deeply in debt with only their mother to manage everything. And Mother was a well-bred English lady ill-equipped to take on the work of a plantation owner. Serena had doubts Cedar Place could ever be restored to its former glory, but it was the one and only place she could call home now, and she could not let it rot.

Meg sighed and shook her head. “I just think—Oh!”

She stumbled, slid, and went down in a flurry of skirts, leaving a glimmering slick of grease in her wake.

And then the ship dipped down the trough of a wave, and Meg slid beneath the deck rail and disappeared over the edge. As if from far away, Serena heard a muffled splash.

With a cry of dismay, Serena lunged after Meg until her slippered toes hung over the edge of the deck and she clung to the forestay.

Far below, Meg flailed in the water, hardly visible in the shadowy dark and wisping fog, her form growing smaller and finally slipping away as the ship blithely plowed onward.

After living for six years on a small island, Serena’s sister knew how to swim, but the heavy garments she was wearing—oh, God, they would weigh her down. Serena tore off her cloak and ripped off her dress. She kicked off her shoes, scrambled over the deck rail, and threw herself into the sea.

A firm arm caught her in midair, hooking her about the waist and yanking her back onto the deck. “No, miss. Ye mustn’t jump,” a sailor rasped in her ear.

It was then that she became conscious of the shouts of the seamen and the creaking of the rigging as the ship was ordered to come round.

Serena tried to twist her body from the man’s grasp. “Let me go! My sister is out there. She’s… Let me go!”

But the man didn’t let her go. In fact, another man grabbed her arm, making escape impossible. She strained to look back, but the ship was turning, and she couldn’t see anything but the dark curl of waves and whitecaps, and the swirl of fog.

“Hush, miss. Leave this one to us, if ye please. We’ll have ’er back on the ship in no time at all.”

“Where is she?” Serena cried, sprinting toward the stern, pushing past the men in her way, ignoring the pounding of the sailors’ feet behind her. When she reached the back of the ship, she tried to jump again, only to be caught once more, this time by Mr. Rutger.

She craned her neck, searching in vain over the choppy, dark water and leaning out as far over the rail as the sailor would allow, but she saw no hint of Meg.

“Never worry, miss,” Mr. Rutger murmured. “We’ll find your sister.”

The crew of the
Victory
searched until the sun was high in the sky and burned through the fog, and the high seas receded into gentle swells, the ship circling the spot where Meg had fallen overboard again and again.

But they never found a trace of Serena’s twin.

THE DISH

Where authors give you the inside scoop!

From the desk of Jill Shalvis

Dear Reader,

When I started this series, about three estranged sisters who get stuck together running a beach resort, I decided I was out of my mind. I have a brother, and we like each other just fine, but I don’t have sisters. Then at the dinner table that very night, my three teenage daughters started bickering and fighting, and I just stared at them.

I had my inspiration! “Keep fighting,” I told them, much to their utter shock. I’ve spent the past fifteen years begging them to get along.