The Charleston Chase (Phantom Knights Book 2) (24 page)

With a nod from Levi, the man with the sword struck
a blow to the back of Sam’s head. Sam swayed before dropping to his
knees. Charlotte screamed, but the sound was cut off by Levi’s hand
covering her mouth. The man jerked Sam back up and struck him in
the gut twice, and when Sam tried to fight back, the sword slashed
his arm.

My hands were shaking violently. I was so terrified
that they would kill him that I could do nothing but scream. “No!
Levi, stop this! I will do anything.”

Levi snapped his fingers, and they stopped their
attack on Sam.

“Perhaps I should go ahead and kill him now. You
will never do as I say.”

Slowly, I lowered my pistol to the ground. “I will,
only let them go.”

Levi smiled, and I wanted to
strike it from his face. “Therein lays your weakness, Raven. I saw
it with Jericho, and again with Sam. Love makes you weak, Raven. It
always has, and always will.”

Levi’s green eyes were narrowed in the familiar way
that told when the boy disappeared, and the Phantom appeared.

I held Levi’s gaze. “Let. Him. Go.”

“Levi!” thundered Jack from somewhere behind me.

Levi’s grin disappeared as he shoved Charlotte
toward me, turned, and ran. A gun went off, and the ball hit one of
the men near Sam in the forehead. I looked away, reaching down for
my pistol as Jack ran past me chasing Levi. I raised my pistol,
pulled back the hammer, and fired at the man trying to follow Levi;
the man who had beaten Sam. The ball hit him in the back between
his shoulders.

Charlotte was beside Sam when I reached them. He was
sitting on the ground.

“Are you all right?” he asked me when I knelt beside
him, his voice thick and slightly rough.

“No, you?”

“Not particularly.”

He reached out, and I took his offered hand, lacing
my fingers with his. Rose and Betsy reached us. After asking after
Sam, Rose told us what she and Jack had found. There were rooms
full of weapons on the third floor. As if the Holy Order were
planning a battle.

Jack returned, looking furious. I went to him, but
all he said was that Levi had escaped with a carriage he had
waiting for him on the road behind the factory. Charlotte cried
out. Jack and I turned toward them. Sam was out cold, his head on
Charlotte’s lap.

With a cry, I moved to his side and checked his
wound. My hand came away from the back of his head with blood. Jack
pulled out a handkerchief and placed it against the wound. He sent
Rose and Betsy to find a hackney coach.

We bound Sam’s head as best we could, and when Rose
returned, we lifted Sam between us. All of the muscles in my arms
were straining as I carried his legs out of the building, following
Jack to where the carriage was waiting. The driver looked
absolutely mortified as he climbed down to help us get Sam into the
carriage. Jack stayed at the factory while Rose, Betsy, and I
squeezed on one side of the carriage, and Charlotte sat on the
other with Sam’s head in her lap.

Once we arrived at Sam’s house, Abe and Leo carried
him inside, then Abe left to fetch a doctor. Rose and I tried to
clean Sam’s wound as best we could. He winced and moaned, but he
never opened his eyes.

When the doctor arrived, he allowed Leo to stay in
the room, since Leo’s father had been a doctor, but sent the rest
of us out. I sat on the stairs with my arm around Charlotte. Her
head was resting on my shoulder. Abe stood against the wall staring
at the door, Rose paced the foyer, and Betsy stood silent beside
her brother.

Fifteen minutes passed before the door to the parlor
opened, and the doctor came out followed by Leo.

“He will recover,” the doctor said. “He should rest,
but first he wishes to speak with Miss Martin.”

Glancing at Charlotte, I could see her envy, but she
nodded to me.

In the parlor with the door firmly shut behind me, I
fought tears. Sam was resting on the sofa; a large white bandage
wrapped around the top portion of his head and forehead. His eyes
opened, and he held out his hand. I rushed to him, taking his hand
and sinking down beside the sofa.

“Thank you, Bess,” he whispered.

“I did little.”

“You did more than you know.”

His eyes closed, and his chest rose and fell
heavily, and I blinked back moisture that continued to rise to my
eyes.

“I never thought to see you again after
Philadelphia,” he said without opening his eyes, “but I wished it
would be so, if only to apologize to you.” When his eyes opened, I
could see how tired he was. “I knew who you were, and I apologize
for how I treated you.”

His eyes met mine, and there was an earnestness
there that filled me with love. I never truly knew what love felt
like, until I saw those men hitting Sam. Love was doing anything
and everything in your power to protect those you cared for, to
want to be with them every day, to love them despite their faults
and for all their quirks. It is to love all of them for whom they
are and how strong they make you by being near. I knew without a
single doubt that I loved Sam Mason, and I would for the rest of my
days.

“I need you
,
Bess. Say you will stay, even
after we find the Holy Order.”

The moisture filling my eyes was persistent to fall.
“I will stay for as long as you wish me here.”

“Then you shall stay forever.”

I watched him while his breathing evened out, and he
fell into a deep sleep. It was over an hour later when I rose from
his side. He was still sleeping, and Leo promised to tell him I
would return on the morrow, when I had every intention of showing
him the artifacts, and together we would discover their truth.

Bess

I
t had
not been possible to go over the artifacts until two days after Sam
was injured. When Charlotte and I arrived at Sam’s house, she ran
off to find Jack, but Jeffrey showed me into the book room. Sam was
not there, so I walked over to the bookcases and began to peruse
his extensive collection as I drew off my gloves. The first case
was entirely on agriculture with each book alphabetized by the
author’s last name. When I reached the third case, the one closest
to the window, I was wondering what kind of man I had fallen in
love with. Jack always said that you could discover anything you
want to know about a man by the literature in his library. If he
had no library that was all you needed to know.

Sam was the opposite. He had the
largest library I had ever seen, but such a diverse collection,
that I did not know where to begin trying to understand his
intellectual side. There were books on
Agriculture, Anthropology, Economics, Greek Mythology,
Medical Science, Nautical, Ontology, Zoology, and many more
research books in all categories.

Now that I knew I loved him, I wanted to know
everything about him; all of his likes, from his favorite books to
his favorite foods. A person’s likes were like the little touched
hidden in a painting that the onlooker would only see if they
stared at the painting long enough. They added depth to the main
focus; a silent beauty.

There were many things that I knew about Sam. He
liked to sit on his mother’s bench when he needed to think, and he
was both intellectual and business savvy, having succeeded in
growing a large shipping company by the time he was twenty-five. He
knew how to sail his own ships. He also liked to have his own way
far too often and was stubborn. He knew how to raise my ire, and at
times, I had a suspicion he was doing it to see how I would react.
He tended to enjoy baiting me, and he was annoyingly calm when I
was heated. How could you love someone so much and be annoyed with
them in the same breath? Love was complex indeed.

“All these books and no novels.” I murmured.

“Those would be in the upper stacks, Bess,” Sam said
from the corner of the library.

I jumped, bumping my shoulder into one of the cases.
He was standing on his rounded staircase, a book in his hand and a
smile on his lips.

“You should know that novels are a passion of mine,”
he said with a tone of complete seriousness. “My sister says I keep
them on the second story because they are closer to heaven.”

I lowered my hand from where it was resting against
my heart. “Were you standing there watching me this whole
time?”

He came down the last two steps. “Do you know that
you bite your bottom lip when you are deep in thought? On the left
side.”

“Do you know that it is rude to watch someone
without making your presence known?”

He laughed. “We are spies, Bess. That is what we
do.”

“A hit,” I said, laying a hand
over my heart
while returning his
infectious
smile.

His laughter was deeper as he
moved to his desk and sat on the edge, crossing his feet at the
ankles. He was not wearing a coat over his white shirt and black
waistcoat. I did not know where to look, for his state of undress
was not considered proper around any but men or his own family.
Then again, we were spies; we knew
how
to be proper, but when you lived
without conventions dictating your way of life, it was a battle to
reform to what was considered acceptable living.

There was something I had wanted to ask him for the
last month, and it seemed like the most sensible moment since we
were alone.

“Did you know that the
Queen’s Reward
belonged
to my mother when you sailed on it?”

Sam’s dark brows rose, but he
shook his head. “Not until after the war. Captain Carter is the man
who taught me how to sail. I was his first mate on the
Queen’s Reward
. The
success of those voyages through the blockade helped me to increase
my company. So, truly, I have your family to thank for my
success.”

Warmth flooded me that not only did Sam help to
bring my family back from the brink of ruination, but that my
mother’s ship also helped him. “It is by your skill and fairness
that you have your success, Sam, not my family.”

A knock fell on the door, and when Sam called entry,
Jeffrey was there to announce the midday meal.

“Shall we?” He held his arm out to me and escorted
me into the dining parlor.

Jack and Charlotte were awaiting
us. As we ate, Jack told some stories from our childhood, like the
time
Jack broke his leg when he jumped off
the barn roof with some ‘wings’ he had made strapped to his arms.
He spoke about the time I released our neighbor’s cows because I
thought they should be free, and when Jericho, Mariah, and I fought
our way off of a smuggler ship after having dumped the captain’s
clothes overboard. He had Sam and Char laughing until tears
streamed down Char’s cheeks. When Jack asked about their parents,
they each grew quiet. Jack did not know that their parents had
died.

Charlotte looked at Sam. “I would like to tell
them,” she lowered her voice, but I heard when she said,
“especially if Bess is going to be a part of our family.”

Biting my bottom lip, my face and heart filled with
heat. It was not a certainty that I would be a part of the Mason
family, but I had hope of one day calling them my family.

“You must do as you wish, Charlotte,” Sam replied,
but I could see the brooding storm in his eyes.

“Sam and I are only half blood related,” Charlotte
said, looking between Jack and I. “The man responsible for my
existence was a plantation owner up north, and Sam’s father was a
minister in the nearby town.

“Our mother, you must understand,
was the most beautiful, sweetest woman ever to walk the earth. She
was revered wherever she went, and Sam’s—
our
—
father
loved her very much. But so did my blood father—in his own demented
way. He was a parishioner, but was sick with the gout that kept him
from attending many church services.

“One day our father was away, and one of that man’s
servants came to say that her master was sick and needed the
minister. Our mother thought that she might be able to help, as she
was a healer and knew a way to lessen the pain of gout, so she went
to him.” Charlotte looked down at her hands.

“Charlotte, you do not need to go on,” Jack said
quietly.

I reached out and squeezed his hand in thanks for
his words; words that I could not speak, for my voice would not
work. I felt like I knew what she was going to say.

She looked up, meeting Jack’s eyes. “Yes, I do,” she
said. “That man was sick in his mind. When our mother arrived at
his home, she thought that his nurse would be there. She did not
know that he had turned her off, and there were no servants
left.

“He raved about how much he loved
our mother, how much he knew she loved him because she had gone to
him in his time of need. He—” her voice cracked, then lowered, “he
attacked our mother.”

Jack pressed my hand.

“I was the product of that attack. When our father
discovered what had happened, he went to that man with the
constable, but in his lunacy that man had taken his own life before
they ever arrived.”

Charlotte leaned forward, gripping the edge of the
table until her hands were blanched. “Our mother died giving birth
to me, and our father lived in grief until it finally took his life
when I was six.”

She looked at Sam, who was staring out of the
window, not looking at any of us. “For that reason, did I persuade
Sam to let me join the Phantoms; for that reason, am I determined
to right the wrongs of the world. For, as my father always told me,
I may have come from a wrong, but to him I would always be a
right.”