Teresa Medeiros (44 page)

“Keep your filthy hands off her,” Justin snarled, taking a step toward him.

The footmen backed away, more than a little leery of the duke’s reputation for unpredictable savagery.

Nicholas drew a pristine handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his lip. He eyed the results distastefully, then tossed it to a trembling maid.

He favored Emily with a patronizing smile. “You’ll have to forgive my old friend, Miss Scarborough. I should have expected such a welcome. Guilt can have an odd effect on the human brain. I dare say he’s been quite unhinged ever since he murdered your father.”

A gasp traveled through the crowd.

“What are you talking about?” Emily cried. “Are you completely mad?” She grabbed Justin by the lapels. They were still damp from her tears of joy. Her frantic gaze searched his face. “What is this man saying? It’s ridiculous. Tell him to stop making these absurd accusations.”

Justin stared straight ahead.

She gave him a hard shake. Her voice rose on a hysterical note, ringing through the silent room. “Tell him, Justin. Tell him now. Tell them all you didn’t kill my daddy!”

He looked down at her then, his gaze so fraught with pity that she wanted to die right there in his arms. He reached down to gently disengage her fingers from his coat, then turned and walked away. The murmurs and cries of shock swelled, but Emily could hear nothing but the merciless roaring of the sea.

She found him in the conservatory at Grymwilde. The late afternoon sun slanted through the west wall of frosted glass, staining the flagstones amber. A low, pebbled fountain sprang from the exotic tangle of flowers and vines. Justin sat on its edge, slowly plucking the petals from a fat winter rose. A puddle of scarlet surrounded his boots.

The damp heat of the winter garden had molded his shirt to his shoulders and tightened the hair at his nape to
boyish curls. Emily realized with a shock how much it had grown since he had cut it.

She sank down on the pebbled ledge behind him, smoothing her bloodstained frock. A petal fluttered from his fingers. Emily stared, transfixed by the grace of his beautiful hands. A murderer’s hands.

He lifted his head and she knew his gaze was fixed not on the shiny leaves of the aspidistra twining around the miniature trellis, but on a moonlit beach. His ears, like hers, were tuned not to the trickle of the fountain but to the primeval roar of the sea.

His voice was strangely flat. “Nicky had been missing for almost a week before I went to search for him. At first we thought nothing of it. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d disappeared without explanation. But then the rumors started trickling in—rumors of conflict between the Maori and the whites.

“All I found of Nicky was the bloody rag that had been his coat. The Maori ambushed me less than a mile from our encampment. I fled for my life. They weren’t like the Maori you met on the North Island. These were Hauhaus—a fanatical cult who despised all whites. They did things to their captives in the name of their religion—unspeakable things.”

Emily knotted her fingers in her skirt to keep from touching him.

“I’d emptied my pistol of all but one bullet.” A black laugh escaped him. “I was saving that for myself in case they caught me.

“By the time I reached the beach. I couldn’t hear them anymore. I could see the lantern burning in the tent and I knew David was waiting for me. If we could just launch the boat, we had a chance of escaping with our lives. God knows, the Hauhaus had left us little else.” He bowed his head. “I crouched in the bush for the longest time, afraid to brave that open stretch of sand. But then I thought about you.”

Emily trailed her fingers through the cool water of the fountain.

“I thought of how David had traded his precious kid gloves for a piece of polished amber to send you. Somehow that thought gave me the courage I needed. I sprinted down the beach and stumbled up to the tent. David caught me as I fell.”

My God, boy, what is it? Where’s Nick? Is it worse than we feared?

“At first I couldn’t convince him. He was dazed. He couldn’t believe it was all gone—Nicky, the gold, your inheritance. I had to shake him, curse him.”

Goddammit, David! There’s no time for this. We’ve got to launch the curricle. It’s our only chance
.

A tear rolled off the tip of Emily’s nose and plopped into the water, disappearing without a trace.

“I dragged him down the beach toward the boat. But he broke away from me and ran back to the tent. I’ve never felt as alone as I did at that moment. Standing on that beach, I felt as if I were the only man alive. The only white man.

“Then I heard them. They swarmed out of the rain forest and over the tent like tattooed spiders. I screamed a warning and ran toward the tent.

“Before I could reach it they dragged him out by his arms and legs. He was fighting them with every ounce of his strength. Then he started to yell something at me, but they were all screaming and I couldn’t understand what he was saying.”

Emily stared at Justin’s profile, mesmerized by its bleak purity.

“I waved the pistol wildly, not knowing whom to fire at. There were too many of them, and I had only one bullet. Then I realized what he was saying. What he was begging me to do.”

Shoot me! For God’s sake, Justin, shoot me!

“He cursed and howled and begged. And I just stood
there, crying so hard I couldn’t even aim. They were dragging him into the bush.” His head dropped. “So I shot him.”

Emily closed her eyes, flinching at the echo of the explosion. Her nostrils twitched at the acrid stench of gunpowder. Then, in the conservatory as on the beach, there was nothing but silence. Silence forever binding them together. Silence forever tearing them apart.

“When he slumped in their arms, the Hauhaus got very quiet. They just stared at me. I knew they’d come for me then. I taunted them.”

Come get me! Come on, you miserable sons of bitches! What the bloody hell are you waiting for?

“Then they just dropped him and melted back into the forest.” His shoulders slumped. “That was the worst of it, you know. When they didn’t come back and kill me.

“When I lifted David in my arms, the chain was still dangling from his fingers. He’d never let go, not even in all his struggles. I knew then why he’d gone back to the tent. To get the watch—the watch with your photograph in it.”

Emily rose, unable to bear any more.

Justin waited until she was at the door, her hand on the crystal knob. “Emily?”

He looked her straight in the eye, his golden gaze more searing than the sun. “Always remember one thing. I never lied to you.”

She stiffened her chin to still its quiver. “Nor,” she said softly, “did you tell me the truth.”

As she pulled the door shut, the last thing she saw was the crumpled bloom falling from his limp fingers.

Justin slipped through the darkened house in absolute silence. He knew which creaking boards to step over, which occasional table to dodge so as not to rattle the silver-framed photographs clustered on its top. The thick carpet
muffled his footsteps. The clock on the landing below bonged twice.

He felt as if he’d tumbled into one of his own nightmares. The endless corridor rolled out before him, a corridor with a door that grew farther away with each measured step. He feared he might walk forever and never reach it.

But, at last, there it was before him. He wiped his damp palms on his trousers before touching the knob. He’d never before noticed how cold it was. The chill seemed to shoot up his arm to his thundering heart. He forced his rigid fingers to close and slowly turned it. It moved a quarter of a turn, then stopped. He twisted harder. Nothing.

“Emily?” he whispered hoarsely. “Emily, please …”

His other hand clenched into a fist. For one crazy moment he wanted to slam his shoulder against the door, to splinter it beneath his weight. But he knew he’d only find another door behind it—a door thick and impenetrable with suspicion and betrayal.

His hand fell away. Despair washed over him in inky waves. He had hoped, foolishly, even wildly perhaps, that the darkness might lower the terrible cost of his silence. That Emily might relent and allow him to spin his regrets in the tender, forgiving cocoon of her embrace. He should have known he couldn’t steal with his body what the truth should have bought him. Images from the past night assailed him with fresh grief. Could he have loved her any better if he had known it was their last night together?

He would have held her, just held her in his arms all night long, memorizing the tilt of her snub nose, the ethereal softness of her curls beneath his fingertips, savoring the warm aroma of her skin for all the cold, lonely nights to come.

“Good-bye, my love,” he whispered. He pressed his open palm to the polished mahogany of the door, his hand lingering in reluctant farewell.

•    •    •

Emily huddled against the door, her knees drawn up to her chest, and listened to Justin’s footsteps fade into silence. She shoved her hair away from her face with shaking hands, pressing hard against her temples as if she could somehow muffle the agonizing whispers of the ghosts in her head.

He don’t want you. Nobody wants you
.

I said I didn’t like you. I never said I didn’t love you
.

 … since he murdered your father
.

I’ll be back for you. I swear it
.

Trust me
.

Shoot me
.

She rocked back and forth in a knot of aching misery. Tears rolled silently down her cheeks. One by one the ghosts reared their heads in visions seared like photographs onto the blank plate of her memory. Doreen thrust a coal bucket in her hand, taunting her. Nicholas’s elegant lips curled in a sneer. Justin emerged from the waves, his dark hair whipping in the wind, his bronze skin misted with sea drops. Her daddy folded his tall frame to kneel before her so he could button her coat and straighten her bonnet before sending her out in the snow to play.

Yet, even those spirits were tolerable. The ghost who haunted her now was a child. A child dancing with sweet abandon through the darkened room, her petticoats layered with moonlight. She paused in her dance and bent to peer into Emily’s face, her dark eyes softened with empathy as if she couldn’t quite comprehend that anyone could hurt so much.

Emily recognized her then. She was the child she might have been had her father not died at the hand of her lover. Trusting, loving, convinced the world was a bright place filled with people of good heart. Believing that someday a man would come, a man as fine and handsome as her daddy, who would love her forever.

It was that child Justin had touched with his love, that child Justin had wounded with his silence. The woman she
might have become could have found it in her heart to forgive him. That woman would have been free of rancor and cynicism, free of the bitterness that raged within Emily now, burning their love to crashing ruins.

She reached out a trembling hand toward the child’s luminous face. She vanished without even a good-bye, leaving Emily in utter darkness.

Chapter 32
 

I
t was midmorning the next day when Penfeld knocked on Emily’s door. “His Grace requests your presence in the study,” he announced.

Did the valet’s voice sound strangely thick, or was it her own overwrought imagination? she wondered.

“Tell His Highness I shall hasten to answer his summons,” she replied.

She stole a look out the window as she dressed. The same underfootman who had been lurking in the shrubs all morning was still there, whistling under his breath and studying the slumbering foliage as if his life depended on it. Emily took her brimming pitcher from its basin, eased up the sash, and poured a stream of wash water down on his unsuspecting head.

“Damn it all!” he sputtered, shaking himself like a sheepdog. “What in the deuced hell—”

“Hello, Jason,” Emily called out. “I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t realize you were down there.”

His gaze shot up to the window; a sheepish smile transformed his freckled countenance. “Quite all right, Miss Emily. I was just inspecting the roses for—”

“Blight?” she suggested.

“Aye, blight!” he quickly agreed. “Been a bad year for it.”

“Let’s be thankful I discovered you before I emptied my night convenience,” she said airily, slamming the window shut.

When she glanced out again, the dripping Jason was watching her window from the safer distance of the drive. She opened the door to find Penfeld still standing stiffly outside of it.

“I waited to escort you, miss,” he explained.

She gave his starched collar a brittle flip. “They’re dressing the prison guard with a bit more flair these days.”

Refusing to rise to her bait, he accompanied her down the stairs to the study, where she marched in and stood in military posture before Justin’s massive pedestal desk. He glanced at her over his spectacles, then went back to his scrawling.