Teresa Medeiros (21 page)

He crooked an eyebrow. Surely even the most noble gentleman allowed himself a few liberties with the woman he intended to make his bride.

Someone was stroking Emily like a kitten. She was afraid to open her eyes for fear they would stop. Her drowsy contentment was melting to a quicksilver shimmer of joy. The touch was completely unselfish. It demanded nothing of her, but gave only pleasure—pure, feathery strokes of pleasure. She tried to catch her breath but couldn’t.

Justin hadn’t played the piano in years, but he played Emily like a master, using the full skill of his long, tan fingers to bring her to the shuddering brink of ecstasy.

His lips caught her cry as his touch splintered her into a thousand shards of pleasure.

Her eyes slowly fluttered open. Justin hung over her, breathing hard, his slanted grin both proud and endearing.

“What was that?” she asked, gulping for breath.

“A hurricane? An earthquake?” he offered.

She blinked in wonder. “Was it legal?”

“Probably not. Immoral, too. I fear I just took shameless advantage of you.”

“Am I compromised?”

He laid his lips against hers in a lingering caress. “If I compromise you, you’ll know it. I promise.”

They rose with reluctance, hesitant to leave their sandy haven. Justin went in search of Emily’s bandeau, leaving her sitting in the sand, her hands pressed shyly over her breasts. The morning wind ruffled her curls. She stared out to sea, fighting off the panic that threatened to claim her. How could she have been so foolish as to believe she could take Justin’s soul without losing her own?

He reappeared, dangling her bandeau from his finger like a flag of surrender. He insisted on tying it himself, sneaking behind her to nuzzle the back of her neck. She moaned helplessly as his arousal nudged against her rump.

“A normal phenomenon of the morning?” she asked him.

He reached around to stroke her nipples beneath the thin calico. “That’s right. It has nothing to do with you.”

“Liar,” she whispered, wiggling against him.

“Tease,” he countered, nipping her ear.

Justin caught himself whistling as they strolled hand in hand down the gleaming strand of beach. Sunlight sparkled off crystals in the sand. A gull soared into the deepening blue of the sky.

“I’ve been thinking about building a house,” he shyly confessed. “Not a hut, but a real house with polished wood floors and scads of sunlight. I don’t want any shadows or gloom like the house I grew up in.”

Emily was strangely silent although she gripped his hand so tightly he was in fear for his fingers. He attributed her pensive mood to a new shyness. He grinned at that. Shyness was the last trait he would have associated with Emily. He would soon break her of it. He fully intended to keep his private vow of celibacy, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t give her a taste of what they would share once they were wed. The weeks of waiting to hear from his father might be agony for him, but it would be a sweet agony indeed.

As they rounded the bend and came in sight of their own beach, Emily gave his hand a squeeze that made his knuckles crack.

He winced. “Careful, dear. I might want to play the piano again someday. Or—” He lowered his head to whisper a more enticing suggestion, but his voice faded as he saw the massive steamer anchored offshore.

The sun gleamed off the two words emblazoned on its mighty hull.

WINTHROP SHIPPING
.

Chapter 13
 

T
he steamer loomed offshore, squat, ugly, and incongruous against the crystalline sea. Even at rest its towering stacks belched out smoke as if some serpentine beast snored within its belly. The black wisps fouled the air with their stench. Justin clung to her hand, squeezing it as hard as she had squeezed his own just a moment before. An icy knot hardened in Emily’s throat.

The Maori had fled back to their fortified
pa
at the approach of the foreign vessel, leaving only scattered clam shells and barren ashes to mark the site of their feast.

“Damnation,” Justin muttered. “I should have been here to reassure them.”

Down the beach a dinghy had been dragged up on the sand. Two sailors lounged beside it, smoking pipes and talking among themselves. If the steamer looked odd against the pristine background of sea and sky, the scene on the beach appeared positively ludicrous. Emily might have laughed if she could have choked any sound past the lump of dread in her throat.

A folding table draped in snowy linen and spread with gleaming china had been set up in the sand. Three men perched like black crows around it. In the middle of the table sat Penfeld’s teapot, dripping a steady amber stream from its inverted spout. The valet jumped to his feet as they approached, pinkening as if he’d been caught with his pants around his ankles at a bawdy house.

A fat man in a towering stovepipe hat rose with him, but his companion remained seated, in no apparent haste to abandon his leisurely breakfast.

“Good morning!” he called out, spearing something with a silver fork. “Care for a kipper?”

“No, thank you,” Justin replied. “May I help you gentlemen?”

“We certainly hope so,” the plump man boomed out. He offered Justin his hand. “Thaddeus Goodstocking at your service.”

Justin released her with obvious reluctance and allowed the man to pump his hand, but Emily noticed he did not offer his name. Wariness cut shallow grooves around his mouth.

“And I am Bentley Chalmers.” The seated man dabbed his waxed mustache with his napkin. “Your charming valet was kind enough to offer us a spot of tea to wash down our breakfast.”

Penfeld inched toward Justin as if sneaking out of an enemy camp. It was only too easy to understand how he’d been seduced by their creamy china, their salted kippers, their London gossip.

Both of the strangers looked hot and stifled in their quilted waistcoats. The leaner man had been smart enough to drape his heavy frock coat over the back of his chair. Emily pitied Mr. Goodstocking. Sweat dripped into his bushy whiskers, and the points of his starched collar cut into his heavy jowls.

“You must forgive our interruption,” he said. “We do so hate to draw you away from your native delights.” Her
sympathy vanished as his piggish eyes raked her in leering curiosity.

She was suddenly and painfully aware of her appearance. Her curls were tangled, her feet bare and sandy. With her scant garb, tan skin, and sun-burnished freckles, she must appear to these proper English gentlemen as the basest of whores. Her first instinct was to shrink behind Justin, but she had too often endured shame and condemnation from forbidding figures dressed in black.

Justin was not oblivious to the exchange. He stepped in front of her, his jaw hardening with the glacial dignity she had glimpsed before. “You didn’t come all the way to New Zealand for a good cup of tea.”

Mr. Goodstocking retreated from Justin’s frosty stare even as Chalmers rose with a placating smile, taking a thick leather packet from beside his plate. He refused to even acknowledge Emily, which was somehow more cutting than Goodstocking’s leer.

“No,” he admitted. “We didn’t come for the tea. We came as agents acting on behalf of the Duchess of Winthrop to seek a man calling himself Justin Connor.”

Justin hesitated; Emily could hear her heart pounding in her ears.

“I am that man,” he finally replied, his New Zealand brogue as flat as she had ever heard it.

Goodstocking’s gaze traveled from the ragged knees of Justin’s dungarees to his bare feet. He cleared his throat and exchanged a long look with his companion.

Chalmers handed Justin the leather packet, then swept off his neat bowler in a deferent bow that might have belonged to another century. “Your Grace.”

Penfeld gasped. Emily took a step backward without realizing it.

Justin stared down at the packet in his hands. Chalmers’s benign address had conveyed a wealth of meaning. His father was dead. He was now the Duke of Winthrop.

He ran his fingers over the pitted leather, desperate to
feel something, anything at all. But all he felt was a vast emptiness. David Scarborough had been more father to him in six months than his own father had been in a lifetime. His grief was not the sharp pain of loss, but an overwhelming sense of regret for the moments they might have shared, moments lost forever to them now.

Chalmers gestured. “Within that packet you will find several letters from your mother. She would like you to return to London immediately to assist her in the matter of settling your father’s estate. She needs you.”

Those three words tightened the noose around his neck. For a terrible moment the old choking pressure returned. He was now the owner of that crude vessel anchored offshore and a fleet of sailing ships and steamers strewn from the English Channel to the Bering Strait.

Not this time, he thought. Things were different now. He was no longer a helpless child or even a rash, rebellious young man. He was lord of the manor now. There was no one to stop him from returning to New Zealand and running his empire from the sunny coast of the North Island. He could hire men to take care of the mundane details of the business while he used his wealth and influence as he chose. He slapped the packet against his palm, seeing it not as a warrant of execution, but as a golden ticket of opportunity for both him and Emily, his chance to make amends to his family and to David’s daughter.

Chalmers droned on. “It would have taken us much longer to find you, but we had the good fortune to stumble upon a detective who had located you while employed by a Miss Amelia Winters.”

Justin didn’t even hear him. He was already dwelling on his first meeting with Claire Scarborough, praying he would have the courage to look her in the eye and tell her the truth about her father’s death. His jaw tightened with resolve. With Emily by his side he could do anything.

He turned, eager to share his plans with her.

Emily was gone.

Chapter 14
 

E
mily tossed the little blue journal on the stack of books and bound them together with a leather strip. Her hands worked separately from her brain, knotting and neatening, tying and folding in a soothing stream designed to numb both mind and heart. She bundled a pile of blankets into two bedrolls and began to wrap what was left of Penfeld’s tea set in soft scraps of flannel. Her hands did not falter until they ran across the box containing her father’s watch. Justin would have no need to send it to Miss Winters now. He would soon discover that all the gold in the world couldn’t buy him Claire Scarborough.

She padded to the table and eased Justin’s symphonies from their hidden drawer. The embossed document she had seen once before slid out with them, but she tossed it aside. She had no more interest in grants or deeds or mysterious maps. The gold mine was as dead as her father’s dreams.

All that remained in the drawer were Justin’s letters to
Claire. Emily drew them out, crumpling them in her clumsy fingers. Justin had never shared them willingly, but they still belonged to her. They might be all she ever had of him.

Justin’s shadow fell across her like a caress.

Shoving the letters into the waistband of her skirt, she spoke without turning around. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to take all the books. You’d sink the dinghy. Perhaps even the steamer.”

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

“Packing,” she replied, jamming the sugar bowl into a wicker basket. She folded the tablecloth, refusing to halt her frenetic activity long enough to look at him.

She heard the betraying shuffle of claws across the dirt floor. Fluffy had taken advantage of the open door to skitter in.

She picked up another teacup, praying her clumsy motions would not betray her. “You’d best leave the lizard with me. You’d look odd walking him on a leash in Kensington Gardens. I suggest you buy a nice English bulldog instead.”

Justin’s footfalls sounded behind her. The cup slipped from her hand and struck the edge of the table, shattering.