Teresa Medeiros

by Once an Angel

  “It seems you’ll be staying until you’re well enough to travel.” He shook a finger at her. “But if you’ve any thoughts about slipping a snake into Penfeld’s pallet, be warned. There are no snakes in New Zealand.”

  Her cheek dimpled. “I shall endeavor to put forth my best behavior.”

  He sensed her best behavior might be more than he could handle. He strode to the door, then paused. He wanted desperately to question her further, but to do so would violate the unwritten creed of this land. Too many ships had dumped their secrets, their scandals, and their unwanted convicts on these shores. It had resulted in a privacy hard won and so jealously guarded that a man might honorably defend it to the death. At least his past would die with him. So Justin bit back his questions, knowing he, too, might die or kill before he let someone rake open his own raw scars.

  “You’ve no need to fear discovery here, Miss Scarlet. There are many who come to New Zealand to elude the past.”

  She inclined her head. A fall of curls veiled her expression. “And there are some, sir, who come to find it.”

  He realized he had become so accustomed to the island’s code of suspicion that he hadn’t even offered this small, bedraggled young woman his name. She hardly looked the sort of spy the efficient Miss Winters or his rigid father would dispatch.

  “You may call me Justin. Justin Connor.” He closed the door behind him, never seeing the bitter, triumphant twist of Emily’s lips.

  Justin couldn’t seem to put enough distance between himself and the hut. He strode through the cornfield, his long strides eating up the turf. Penfeld trotted along behind him.

  “Hell and damnation!” he finally exploded. “A girl simply shouldn’t go around looking at a man like that.”

  Penfeld plucked at his suspenders, more worried about being outdoors without a coat than about his master’s consternation. “Like what, sir? I hadn’t noticed anything unusual about her looks. A bit on the boyish side, perhaps.”

  Justin spun around, his voice rising on a note of disbelief. “Boyish? Compared to whom—Helen of Troy? Cleopatra? Besides, I wasn’t referring to her looks in particular. I was referring to the way she looks at me. That ridiculous sparkle in her eyes. That clever little trick she does with her bottom lip.”

  Justin tugged on his lip to illustrate, but Penfeld only blinked at him dumbly. A trickle of sweat snaked between Justin’s shoulder blades at the mere thought of it. As the sun beat down on his bare head, he realized he’d forgotten his hat.

  “Blast her anyway! She had no way of knowing what sort of men we were. What if she had given that look to some of those whalers or timbermen in Auckland? They’d have slapped her in a whorehouse so fast, it would have made her curly little head spin.”

  The valet paled. He became as nervous as a rabbit when anyone mentioned Auckland. Justin had found him in the teeming harbor town four years earlier, wandering the streets in a daze, his handsome suit in rags, a shattered teacup his only possession.

  Justin plucked a corn silk from Penfeld’s thinning hair. “Now you’re doing it. Don’t stick out your lip and go all quivery on me, because Auckland’s exactly where I’m taking her. She must think I’m a blithering idiot to have fallen for that old twisted-ankle ploy.”

  “I’ve never known you to blither without cause, sir.” Penfeld looked as downcast as if his master had announced he was taking the girl to Sodom with a side picnic to Gomorrah.

  Snorting with determination, Justin spun on his heel. “I’m going to march right back to that hut, make her gather her things—”

  “She has no things.”

  Penfeld’s quiet words halted him at the edge of the field. A hill studded with tussock grasses rolled down to the beach. The warm breeze teased the golden clumps into waving fingers.

  Penfeld was right, he realized. The girl had nothing. Not even the coat on her back. She had come into his world as bare and unfettered as on the day she had come into God’s.

  He was a grown man. Surely he could temper his lust with common decency for a few days. If she refused to leave by the end of the week, he would ignore Penfeld’s sulks and insist on escorting her to Auckland. Until then he would spend the long days working in the fields so he could collapse on his pallet at night, too exhausted to even dream of—

  He drove his fingers through his hair. It was hardly her fault that every time he looked at her he saw her as she had been in the moonlight, that each time he touched her he wanted to bury his fingers in her silky curls. All of them. Justin groaned.

  His agonized musings were interrupted by a joyous cry. “Pakeha! Pakeha!”

  A line of naked honey-skinned children streamed up the hill with Trini in tow. Justin squatted and a wiry little boy barreled into him with the force of a muscular cannonball.

  He faked a stagger. “Ho, there, Kawiri! You’re too strong for an old chap like me.”

  The children swarmed around him, chattering in Maori. A little girl with almond-shaped eyes crawled between Kawiri’s legs and held Justin’s hand. His face relaxed in a smile as their musical tones soothed his troubled spirit.

  “You can come out, Penfeld,” he called over his shoulder. “They won’t eat you.”

  Penfeld crept out from behind a cornstalk and gave the children a shy bow. Trini beamed proudly as several of the children bowed back. Justin knew his unflappable valet wasn’t afraid of cannibals, but children terrified him.

  I have no family.

  Emily’s words came back to haunt Justin without warning, echoing what he had said to Penfeld only yesterday. He hadn’t been completely truthful. The Maori were his family now. They had adopted him as their beloved Pakeha, sharing with him both their land and their trust, giving him the right and power to negotiate even the most delicate trade with other natives and whites. Justin ruffled Kawiri’s black hair. Perhaps they were all orphans beneath the stark blue bowl of God’s sky.

  The little girl tapped the watch case resting against his chest, muttering beneath her breath in Maori.

  “English, Dani,” he commanded. If he could teach more of the children English, perhaps someday they would have no need of a stranger such as he living in their midst.

  She popped her thumb in her mouth, then uncorked it and bellowed, “Claire!”

  Justin winced.

  Dancing around him, the other children took up the chant. “Claire! Claire! Claire!”

  “Oh, dear,” Penfeld murmured.

  Justin leveled a lethal gaze at Trini. “Have you been letting them play with my watch again?”

  The native lifted his palms in a universal gesture of apology, choosing in his chagrin simple English words rather than the longer ones he delighted in. “They’d never seen a white little girl before. They believe her to be a lost angel whose spirit is trapped in time.”

  Justin dropped his head in defeat. Was he to be haunted by orphans today? In his preoccupation with the girl, he had almost forgotten that other child. He made no protest when the tiny Dani reached up and slipped the chain over his head.

  Kawiri brushed the gold with reverent fingers, letting out a soft “Oooooh.”

  Justin knew he didn’t have to worry about the safety of his watch. Dani cupped it in her plump hands as if it were the most holy of relics.

  As the children trailed after her, he stood, absently flattening his palm against his chest. If Claire Scarborough was his cross to bear, why did he feel so naked without her image resting next to his heart?

  That night Emily kicked restlessly at her blankets. The island breeze had turned cool, but an icy fire burned in her veins, stoked by both disdain and fury. Her guardian lay on a pallet a few feet away. She pillowed her chin on folded arms and studied his sleeping features with hungry fascination.

  He was nothing as she had imagined him. Somehow she had always expected him to be blond with a neatly clipped beard and side-whiskers. A cap of shining gold hair complemented a suit of armor, did it not? Self-contempt at her own naïveté floo
ded her.

  “Wouldn’t have been able to cram his horns under the helm, would he?” she muttered.

  From his pallet beneath the window, Penfeld emitted a lumbering snore. Emily shifted to her elbow.

  Justin Connor more resembled a dark satyr than a noble knight. His lashes were too long, his lower lip too full. He hadn’t one perfect feature, but in combination they were devastating, giving his face a flawed male beauty that made her unwilling heart beat like the wings of a captive bird. She fought an absurd desire to crawl over to his pallet and run her fingers over him, to commit each feature to her memory in the fear she might awake in the morning to find him gone—just another elusive creature of her dreams.

  She had spent years clutching her dreams of a noble savior to her child’s breast. But her dreams had been only phantoms, disappearing like smoke in the cold light of day. Reality lay on that pallet—six feet of reality, all refined sinew and muscle. She could reach out and touch it just as she had touched a stranger’s face in the moonlight.

  The light from the low-burning lantern gilded the chiseled planes of his face. She had expected him to be older, but he couldn’t be far over thirty. The same age her father had been when he died.

  Her eyes narrowed. Justin stirred, groaning low in his throat as if sensing her enmity. The lines etched around his eyes deepened. He twitched as if in pain. Pain? Emily wondered. Or guilt? Her guardian did not sleep the untroubled sleep of the innocent.

  She wanted to shake him out of his dream and demand he look at her. She had lived in his shadow for seven years. Every prank, each profanity, all the wasted fury of her tantrums had been played to an invisible audience of one—the man who had abandoned her then dared to hold her in his arms without showing even the scantest hint of recognition. His apathy touched an old pain in her, a pain she’d thought shoved to the farthest reaches of her heart. She could tolerate many things, but being ignored was not one of them.

  She flung herself to her side, forcing her gaze away from him. Questions buzzed through her mind like angry gnats. Why was he living in this dusty hut, and where were the riches her father had written of? Had he hidden the gold somewhere? Was he a smuggler using the pristine solitude of the beach to escape the stiff port taxes of the harbors? Perhaps he was still just a dirty swindler taking advantage of his reputation as the son of one of the richest dukes in England to bilk decent men of their inheritances, as he had done to her father.

  Against her will, fate had delivered Justin Connor into her hands. He didn’t realize who she was, but she knew him only too well. Surely somewhere in these musty stacks of books and papers she could find the sordid story of his life.

  Her ruse of an injured leg had given her time. Time to probe his secrets and discover the truth about the missing gold and her father’s untimely death. Time to make him sorry. Let him enjoy his dreams for now, because once she had gathered enough evidence of his foul play, he would come face-to-face with his worst nightmare.

  Drawn like a moth to a sizzling flame, she rolled back over and glared at the dark purity of his features until her weighted lids dragged her into a dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 4

  In your absence, God has sent me solace in that most precious of his gifts—a true friend.…

  “More tea, Penfeld?” Emily gazed wanly into the delicate china cup the valet offered. “What a delightful surprise. You must have read my mind.”

  “A fine New Delhi brew,” he pronounced, beaming proudly. “Justin procured it from the Bay of Islands for my last birthday.”

  “How dear of him,” she murmured.

  She waited until he had bustled back to the stove before tossing the contents of the cup over her shoulder and out the window. She’d trade all the fine teas in the world for one coffee bean to suck on. The mannerly valet had been very vocal in his opinion that coffee was simply too crude a drink to pass her dainty lips. Emily was beginning to wonder if the sly Mr. Connor was smuggling not gold, but tea.

  She smacked her lips on the cup’s rim, pretending to drain it. “Marvelous flavor. I’ve never tasted anything quite like it.”

  Penfeld clapped his plump hands. “It warms my heart to see a young lady enjoying tea.” He swept the cup from her hand. “If you like it so well, I’ll pour you another.”

  Groaning silently, Emily buried her face in her hands. The portly valet was killing her with kindness. Every time she’d wiggled in the past three days, he had been there—fluffing the blankets beneath her ankle and pouring tea down her throat as if it were the elixir of life. She would almost swear her wary host had sicced him on her out of spite.

  The mysterious Mr. Connor disappeared each day at dawn and did not return until sunset. After wolfing down some flat biscuits and a hot pasty stew consisting mostly of canned beans, he would collapse on his pallet with little more than a grunted good night.

  As attentive as always, Emily thought grimly.

  A cooling breeze wafted through the window, stirring the curls at the nape of her neck. Her nose twitched at the salty tang of the sea. A twilight paradise beckoned to her with a whisper of sunlight and surf, but thanks to her own lie, she was trapped in this musty hut, watching Penfeld polish his teapot. She ached to sink her toes into the warm sand, to feel the ocean spray mist her skin. She eyed the stacks of books longingly. She was also dying for a moment of privacy to dig through the hut for some hint of the treachery her guardian had worked on her father.

  Her wish was granted when Penfeld pulled a wicker basket off a peg and trotted out the door, mumbling something about a “tidy pinch of mint.” Praying mint did not grow in this hemisphere, Emily jumped to her feet and whirled in a giddy circle. A teetering stack of books blocked her way. She steadied them with her heel, torn between the books and the window. The warm breeze was too strong a temptation. She thrust her head out the window, savoring the salty bite of the sea air.

  The wicker hut crouched at the very edge of a sundappled forest, huddled beneath the sweeping boughs of two trees that resembled gigantic ferns. The murmur of the sea was a distant sigh, luring her toward freedom. She ought to climb out that window and never look back. But how far could she get before the truth would catch up with her? She’d spent far too long eluding it.

  She tightened her jaw in determination and turned back to the books. Her daddy had always said you could divine a man’s soul by reading his books. Somewhere among them might be a deed, a map, or a journal holding clues to the whereabouts of her father’s gold.

  She picked up a leather-bound volume and blew the dust off its cover. “Mozart: The Master and His Music,” she read aloud. She thumbed through the pages, then tossed it aside and plucked out another. “The Polyphonic Symphonies of Beethoven?”

  Emily frowned. She had been hoping for Machiavelli’s The Prince or perhaps the Marquis de Sade’s Les 120 Journées de Sodome. She examined book after book, only to discover weighty biographies of Mendelssohn and Rossini, fifteen volumes describing the rhythms and meters of the world’s greatest operas, and a mildewed treatise pleading the case of the viola against the violin. She pawed through the stacks, swearing under her breath as the precious minutes ticked away.

  A hefty libretto of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde slowed her progress. She gave it a vicious yank. The entire heap weaved dangerously. She threw her arms around it, bracing the books with her chest. Dust tickled her nose. She swallowed a sneeze. All she needed was for Penfeld to return and find her buried beneath a pile of musty tomes, her skull crushed by The Encyclopedia of West Indian Dance Rhythms.

  The shift had revealed a tiny cavity between two larger books. Emily drew out a slim volume bound in morocco. Although the leather had worn well, the gilt-edged pages had tarnished with age. It was almost as if the book had been tossed aside and forgotten. Or carefully hidden.

  Emily’s hands began to tremble as she stroked the unmarked cover. Perhaps now she would learn her guardian’s dark secrets.

  She sank down cross-legged on th
e floor and opened the book. Inscribed across the frontpiece, not in the strong, measured script of a man, but in the clumsy scrawl of a child were the words: This book is the property of Justin Marcus Homer Lloyd Farnsworth Connor III. (Peek at your own peril.)

  “Homer?” Emily whispered, smiling in spite of herself.

  Her finger traced the ominous skull and crossbones sketched beneath the warning. She turned the page, already suspecting what she would find. But instead of hasty jottings about how many frogs he’d caught or plum puddings he’d pilfered, she found wavering lines connected into grids and splotched with ink.

  She held the book up to her nose. “Why, the clever little brat was already writing his nasty secrets in code!”

  Her vision blurred; the lines danced, then steadied into a recognizable pattern. Her mouth fell open as she fanned the pages, turning them faster than her eyes could follow. Not a code after all, but wavering bars connected by blots of ink. Music. Bar after bar, note after note, transcribed with a patience that should not have belonged to any child.

  Baffled and oddly touched, Emily let the little book fall shut. She almost didn’t hear the warning creak of the door.

  She made a diving roll for the pallet, praying Penfeld’s coat would follow. Losing it could have dire consequences. Apparently no one had thought of offering her the valet’s long underdrawers.

  As Justin ducked beneath the lintel, Emily realized with horror that she was still clutching his journal. She shoved it under the blankets, faking a tremendous yawn.

  “Hello, Emily,” he said, his voice notably devoid of warmth.