The Raider’s Bride

by Kimberly Cates

  Emily sucked in a deep breath. "I gained passage the only way I could, by indenturing myself. I would have done anything to get away. But for once it seemed the fates were with me. One of the people I had brought soup to was an old woman, wealthy but without friends. She knew of an English gentleman who had outfitted a milliner's shop for his wayward cousin in the colonies. Fortunately for me, the cousin preferred the attentions of an amorous blacksmith. On the day she was to be sent overseas, she announced to her family that she and her blacksmith had been secretly married and that she was carrying his child."

  Blackheath's mouth curved in a hint of his accustomed ironic grin. "I'd wager your English gentleman was not amused."

  "I suppose not." Emily shrugged. "He had wanted to set his cousin up in style, and so he had already invested a fair amount of money in the shop. After her announcement, he had only two choices. To take his losses and forget the whole affair or attempt to recoup his funds. To do that, he needed someone to run the shop in his cousin's place."

  "Why didn't he just sell it? That would have been the most logical path to take."

  "I don't know. Maybe Miss Higgins talked him out of it by pleading my cause. Or perhaps he wanted to do someone else a kindness. In the end, we met, and he bought my indenture. I was given passage to Virginia and told that when my time of service was through, he would give me the shop."

  "Damned generous of him. You'd think that even a rich gentleman would demand some price." There was a shadow of suspicion in Ian's tone.

  Emily drew away, not wanting him to see the flicker of unease in her face as she thought of the secret payment the man had demanded. She groped for a way to calm Ian's suspicions, an explanation that a man like Blackheath would understand. She felt a jab of embarrassment, but lifted her chin to meet his gaze. "If you are thinking he demanded a physical price, you are wrong," she said.

  Ian's cheekbones darkened in a guilty flush. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to offend you."

  "You didn't. Not really." Emily favored him with a soft smile. "It's just... I know it's hard to believe. But the whole proposition was such a miracle for a woman like me that I didn't question it, Ian. I just took it and was grateful."

  "So you took up your miracle and packed your ribbons and bonnets and buttons and boarded a ship and sailed to the colonies." Ian's eyes shone with respect. "You are a very brave lady, Emily Rose."

  "No. Not brave." She shook her head wistfully. "You cannot call someone brave when she is running away."

  Unease flickered across Ian's face, as if her words had touched something raw inside him.

  He bent close to her, his gaze touching her features as gently as his hands had moments before.

  "Poor lost angel, wandering alone," he murmured without a hint of mockery. "Are you waiting for someone to find you?" His fingertips were warm as they curved about her cheek.

  There was something like yearning in the hard angles of his face, something she didn't understand. She saw his throat work, his eyes hidden beneath a thick fall of lashes that only made the masculine lines of his face all the more appealing.

  His lips parted, as if they hungered to taste something sweet, something forever beyond his reach. She sensed him drawing back from that gentle hunger, and knew a fleeting sense of regret.

  He sighed, his lashes drooping over the misty blue depths of his eyes.

  "You should get some rest, Emily Rose," he said after a moment, his thumb tracing a delicate path along the bruised shadows beneath her eyes. "I have a feeling tomorrow is going to be a very long day."

  Emily climbed wearily to her feet, feeling somehow bereft. "I suppose it couldn't be any longer than today was." She felt the aching stiffness in her muscles and wondered how long they had been sitting there together, speaking of things she'd never spoken of, revealing things she'd kept hidden for so long.

  It seemed as though an eternity had passed since she had followed Ian Blackheath into this room. It seemed as if eternity had suddenly become too short a time.

  She was shaken from her thoughts by Ian's voice as he rose to stand beside her, towering over her, his dark hair a tumbled mane about his face.

  "I won't offend you by offering half of my bed to you again. Instead I'll just tell you to take whatever room you want for your own. Both of the chambers next door to Lucy are available, as are the ones across the hall."

  There was something sad about this man offering her any room in his vast house. Beautiful empty spaces with no one to love them. She started at the echo of Lucy's words, and was surprised at the fleeting vulnerability that ghosted across the sensual curve of Ian Blackheath's mouth—this Ian Blackheath who somehow seemed more frightening than the rakehell she had known before, because of the haunting quality in his eyes.

  Catching her lower lip between her teeth, Emily laid the towel she had dried him with on the foot of his bed then turned toward the door.

  "Good night, Emily Rose."

  She stole a glance at him and knew she would never forget how he appeared, his body gleaming all gold and tan and velvet-dark shadows in the candlelight.

  "Thank you," he said huskily, "for... warming me."

  "You're welcome." She gave him an uncertain smile and took a candle from a sconce. Quietly she slipped through the door.

  "Emily?"

  There was something in his voice, almost an urgency, as he called her back, and she turned, hesitating there in the doorway.

  "What was her name?"

  Her brow creased in confusion. "Whose name?"

  That fallen-angel face was wreathed with a solemn light, reluctance darting in his eyes, as if he didn't want to ask but couldn't help himself. "Your daughter's," he said at last. "What was your little girl's name?"

  Emily's throat constricted, her fingers tightening on the candlestick. "Her name was Jenny."

  "Jenny." He repeated it, soft, like an echo.

  She turned away, walking down the corridor.

  This time he let her go.

  Chapter 9

  Ian stretched out naked on the rumpled sheets of his bed, the breeze from the open window feathering over his bare chest, his thighs, the curve of his arm that lay crooked above his head. A thin sheen of sweat clung to every sinew, as if he'd just finished with passionate love-play, but his muscles were as taut as iron bands, his limbs restless as he stared at the dark canopy above him.

  How long had he lain here listening to the night sounds and the unsteady beat of his own heart? How many hours had he attempted to steel himself against a hundred sensations that would give him no peace?

  Emily Rose...

  Even her name was like a prayer, soft, sweet. Far beyond his touch.

  But she had touched him... with those desperation-tinged hands as she peeled away his sodden clothing. She had touched him with the haunting sorrow in those wide violet eyes as she whispered to him of tragedies so crushing he was stunned by her courage in the face of such pain.

  It was as if she had pressed the feel of her into his flesh every place her fingers had brushed against his skin, as if she had stripped away things far more dangerous than the wet linen that had covered him.

  She had peeled away his protective layer of cynicism, the biting edge of humor he'd used for so long to keep people at a distance. She'd stripped away the image of the arrogant, selfish bastard who cared for nothing, no one. She had made him say things he knew he shouldn't say, ask things he knew he shouldn't ask.

  And when she had answered—sweet God, when she had answered him in that halting angel's voice, trusting him with secrets he sensed she'd confided to almost no one before—Ian had felt more exposed than he'd ever been in his life. Vulnerable to a woman with eyes like a wounded Madonna, bewitched by hands as soft as gardenias, enchanted by a smile so lovely, so fragile, it had pierced his heart.

  Ian tossed his head against the pillow and flung his arm over his eyes as he remembered what she had said about the husband she had buried in England years ago.

 
He was a good man. Gentle. Sensitive. Kind.

  Why had those words twisted inside Ian, forming a hard knot of pain? He had never wanted to be any of those things. He had fought to crush those traits in himself since he was fifteen, a boy on the brink of manhood, who had watched his father destroy his mother and watched his mother willingly sacrifice herself to his father's appetites.

  From that time on, Ian had wanted to be the kind of man who inspired only lust in women's hearts, fleeting rushes of pleasure with no chains of responsibility, no duties or obligations, no hideous swelling of their stomachs with his seed, to be followed by hours of screaming and agony giving birth.

  It had sickened Ian to watch his father sob time after time as the echoes of his wife's travail battered at him from the bedchamber above. It had infuriated Ian to see him kneeling at his wife's bedside time after time, swearing he would never put her through such torture again.

  But his father had been a good man. He had loved his wife. And he was far too sensitive and kind to commit adultery against her.

  No. Ian had made certain he was not a man like his father.

  But now the true extent of Ian's own debauchery was being revealed.

  He wanted Emily d'Autrecourt.

  He felt the primal pull to mate with her as certainly as did his stallion when he scented an exquisite mare. The urges were just as primitive. And there could be little doubt that once the coupling was over, Ian would forget about her just as quickly as Mordred forgot the filly that had caught his fancy for such a wildly passionate moment.

  Ian had sampled more women than he could count. Enjoyed their beauty, their wit, their bodies. Then he had left them. It was a game. They had all understood that before they began.

  Why should he be stricken with this damned inconvenient case of scruples now?

  It was not as if he would ruin the violet-eyed governess with his attentions. Emily d'Autrecourt was no naive virgin guarding her maidenhead. She had shared a man's bed before. Then why should his feelings toward her be any different from his feelings toward the other experienced women who had caught his eye? Why did these new, uncomfortable emotions chafe at him, make him feel somehow unclean? Unworthy?

  Ian grimaced. That was what came of not downing enough claret with dinner. He was being absurd.

  What kind of madness had he been afflicted with in that hour when he had stared down into Emily d'Autrecourt's delicate face? Why did he suddenly feel as if the fates had decreed that he make amends for his degenerate past? Go off like some knight of old in quest of the Holy Grail? And bathe in a blessed waterfall to cleanse himself of sin? Embark on some pilgrimage so he could be worthy to offer himself in humble devotion to a princess in a tower?

  No, it was too late for that. He was far beyond redemption, already the devil's own. He could only hope to take as many of his fellow damned souls down to hell's gates along with him as possible.

  And tomorrow at dawn he would put the devil's calling cards into the hands of hard-eyed men who knew how to use them. Weapons. Nearly a hundred of them were hidden in lethal perfection at Pendragon's lair. In the morning he would sort through them and ready them for shipment north. North, to belligerent Boston, where pugnacious colonials had been thumbing their noses at English authority for so long. Boston, that bed of hot coals that King George's soldiers had been dancing upon.

  What better way to forget a heart-shaped face blushed with the most subtle rose? What better way to forget the shivers of sensation that had jolted through him at a touch so innocent, so potently stirring, it seemed to thrum through him still? What better way to remember the very things he had said to Tony on the night Lucy had arrived, bringing a whirlwind of chaos with her?

  Ian froze, suddenly struck with the memory of his argument with Tony the night they had abducted Lemming Crane. The echoes of his words haunted him.

  What if Atwood and his dogs captured someone you loved? Ian remembered demanding of his friend. What would you sacrifice to save her? How far would you go...?

  With an oath Ian levered himself upright in bed. This torment he was feeling was ridiculous. He hadn't even known the Englishwoman for an entire day, and as for Lucy, he had not even known of her existence before last night. Why the devil was he feeling so damned raw? Why did his own words seem to mock him?

  Ian flung his legs over the edge of the bed, stood up, and paced to the window. Cooled by the storm, the breeze caressed his face like the touch of a familiar lover.

  But even the night, with its dark promise, couldn't banish the taste of Emily d'Autrecourt's kiss from his lips. Even the night couldn't drive the pulsing emptiness from the core of Ian's soul.

  * * *

  The afternoon sun was coasting down the sky, trailing ribbons of mauve and gold behind it, like bonnet strings in the wind. Ian tossed the reins of his stallion to the young groom standing at the foot of the steps and strode up to Blackheath Hall.

  Triumph surged inside him, filling him with hope. The Bostonians' patriotic fervor alone would have been more than enough payment for the weapons he had sold them. The words they had carried from the radical Samuel Adams, and his more sedate cousin, lawyer John Adams, had fed the hunger for freedom in Ian's own soul.

  By Jove, it was going to happen. The dream. The miracle. Revolution and ultimately independence would be here in time. The knowledge was a gift beyond price. A fearsome, festive feeling raced through Ian as he burst through the door.

  "Priam!" He greeted the youth enthusiastically. "I can only hope that your day was as enjoyable as mine."

  "It was quiet. Very quiet." The youth looked both relieved and a little dazed, totally unaffected by Ian's own mood. Ian's brow creased in puzzlement over the absence of Priam's usual guarded questions about his patriot missions.

  "Quiet?" Ian echoed.

  "Yes, sir. There was not a peep all day from the little missy. Cook, she's wondering if Miss Lucy has murdered the poor lady, or the other way around."

  "You mean to tell me you didn't check to see?"

  Priam bristled, drawing himself up with the hauteur of a house servant asked to do some menial chore. "It's not my business to go poking around after children—not even demon children like that one! I've more important things to do."

  "Coward." Ian grinned as the servant's dark eyebrows lowered into a scowl.

  "I don't see you chasing off after the child, either, Mr. Ian." Priam crossed his arms over his narrow chest. "No, better not to know what mischief she's about, that one."

  "Possibly." Ian chuckled. "Unfortunately I've always been plagued by an overabundance of curiosity. Perhaps I shall head up to the nursery myself."

  "They're not in the nursery," Hettie, a wide-eyed housemaid lisped, peeking shyly from behind the silver urn she was polishing.

  "Is that so?" Ian asked.

  "Yes, sir. Cook said so. She took some biscuits and cream out to the garden for Miss Lucy and Mrs. d'Autrecourt two hours ago. We've not heard a word since. Cook, she says Mrs. d'Autrecourt casted a spell on that child. She be in a trance."

  "Of all the ridiculous—Tell Cook to quit spreading such nonsense before I cast a spell on her!" Ian tossed his riding cape to Priam. "I believe I'll go out into the garden and see for myself what Lucy and Emily Rose are about."

  "You'd best have a care, sir," Priam warned. "Just because that child's quiet don't mean you should trust her! I've heard tell alligators are quiet, too, when they slipping up on their prey. Next you know, you got a bite right out of your hinder parts."

  Ian laughed and headed for the rear of the house, then out the door to the walled-in garden.

  It was huge and pretentious and perfectly tended. And it was as foreign to Ian as the garden of a stranger. Only rarely had he come here during the day, and at those times he had either been on his way out the back gate to the stable or had been attempting to get Tony off somewhere free of eavesdroppers so they could discuss secret business.

  He spent undistracted time here only when he was
hosting fetes and musicales, balls and entertainments. Then night had spread its dusky wings over the garden. Lantern lights had picked out winding paths, illuminating the way for lovers who were stealing away to their trysting places. Of course Ian hadn't given much scrutiny to the vegetation during those times, for one never knew which guests one would see bedded down among the hollyhocks, their clothes in disarray as they stole sips of honeyed pleasure.

  But today as he walked the paths, Ian was vaguely surprised to see how pretty the garden was. Cascades of purple and pink, scarlet and primrose yellow were splashed across a canvas of green. Precisely trimmed hedges formed intricate designs, while stone paths wound like silver ribbons through lush grass. On either side of the garden, and along its rear wall, lovely arches of beech trees had been trained to weave together like an upturned basket, making cool tunnels in which to spend stifling hot summer afternoons.

  But as Ian rounded a copse of yews, he saw something far more breathtakingly beautiful, far more inviting. Something that made him hesitate, his fingers clenching, as he held himself back, just out of sight.

  Emily sat on a curved stone bench in a new gown she seemed to have pulled from thin air. Cascades of apple-green satin trimmed with snowy chiffon flowed around her. A silver galloon stomacher pushed her breasts high, making them swell just a few delicious inches above the ruffled edge of her bodice. A bonnet of yellow straw crowned her dark curls, the ribbon tied to one side of her chin, accenting her soft smile as she leaned close to the little girl who sat beside her.

  It was Lucy, all but unrecognizable in a froth of white muslin, her waist tied up in a wide pink sash. Her head was bent over something she held in her hands, every line of her body a study in concentration.

  "There you are! You are becoming better at it all the time!" Emily's praise drifted to where Ian stood. "This is beautiful work, Lucy."

  Something about the scene pained Ian, the little girl without her mother, pressing so close against Emily. Emily, whose arms still ached for the child she had lost, bending so near to the lonely little girl.