Sea Wraith
Page 26
The warmth on her cheeks was weak compared to the heat rising through her. “You would not rest then.”
“Quite to the contrary. I find our time together very restful. At least when I hold you afterwards.” His fingers brushed her face as he asked, “Trembeth?”
“It is over.”
“How are you?”
“Relieved. Maybe because it was not the first time I broke a betrothal.”
His laugh caught the attention of the others who came over to greet him.
“You are looking better, Lastingham,” Alexander said. “You did not have much color in your face when you removed your domino, but it appears you shall live to fight again.”
“Live, yes. As for fighting again, I could use a respite from that.” He smiled at Sian, and she wanted to seek ecstasy once more in his arms.
“It was well done, Lastingham.” Gideon smiled as he shook Constantine’s hand. “I knew you were the man for this job.”
“You knew he was Wraith?” asked Sian, shocked.
“Do you think I would have agreed to let my wife’s sister go with him, even in the midst of the battle on the cliffs, if I did not know who he was?”
Constantine stroked her shoulder, then ran his fingers down her arm to entwine with hers. “Bannatyne asked the Home Office to send someone here when he became concerned about reports of the surge in the wreckers’ attacks as well as how organized they had become. The Home Office sent me.”
“Thank goodness, they sent someone with your insight, Lastingham.” Gideon’s smile broadened. “Even though I doubt anyone—even you—had any expectation that you would trap your former commander.”
“I have my suspicions why he made the decisions he did, but his death prevents us from knowing the whole truth.”
She kept her reaction from showing. What he said was accurate, but she and Constantine had heard enough from the marquess to understand his choices. Constantine was trying to protect his one-time colonel’s legacy, leaving his brilliant military career untarnished.
“May I speak with Sian alone?” he asked.
“Certainly.” Jade herded the others back toward the mural. “You must come and see this section where she painted each tiny stone on the shingle.”
As soon as they were busy talking on the far side of the large room, Sian said, “You really should go and lie down. Whatever you have to say can wait.”
“I do not believe it can.”
“That is because you believe you are still Wraith the invincible. You are not invincible, and you are not invulnerable.”
He put his finger to her lips. “Will you hush a moment and let me speak? You make it dashed hard to say what I came up here to say.”
“What is that?”
He folded her hand between his and dropped to one knee. “That I love you, and I want nothing more than to have you as my wife.”
She pressed her other hand over her wildly beating heart as she looked down into his eyes. From the first moment she had seen them twinkling at her at the Duchess of Northborough’s house, she had loved losing herself in them. Whether he was Constantine or whether he was Wraith, they had beguiled her and lured her to him even as she welcomed him into her arms and into her heart.
“Your wife? Constantine, I—” She drew her hand out of his. “I wish I could tell you yes, but I cannot.”
“What?” He came back to his feet. “I thought you loved me.”
“I do love you, but I cannot marry you. It is too late.”
“You are making no sense.” He pressed his lips to her fingers. “Sweetheart, I have thought about this while lying in bed and waiting for this dashed shoulder to heal. If not for you, I would be dead now. I thought there was no place in my life for a wife while I do the work I do, but you have proved you could be both wife and partner.”
“You would take me with you?”
“Anywhere. Don’t you realize that?”
“It sounds wonderful, but it is too late.”
His brows lowered. “You keep saying that, but why is it too late?”
Before she could answer, a deeper voice said, “Because she believes she squandered her last chance to choose happiness.”
Sian saw the ghost appearing out of a cloud of mist in one corner of the nursery. Silence claimed the room as her eye—and five other pairs—all focused on the emerging ghost. It came into view exactly as it had each time before, the body forming and then becoming more distinct.
She drew in a sharp breath as, unlike in the past, the head began to take shape, too. A full head of hair, a strong jaw, eyes that were edged with lines from years of squinting at books and laughing at jests, a mouth that was more accustomed to smiling than frowning.
“Father!” She took one step toward him, but halted as Constantine put his arm around her shoulders.
It tightened as Constantine asked, “What did you say?”
“That is my father.” She stared at the face she had last seen gray and lifeless.
Now, even though his visage was so tenuous that they could see through it, the ghost was unquestionably her father. But the father she remembered from when she was much younger, for his face had been freed of the worry and grief that had been etched into his skin in the years after Mother died.
On the far side of the room, Jade’s cheeks were streaked with tears, and China’s face had lost all color.
“Greetings, daughters of Nethercott Castle.” His voice no longer sounded like the knelling of doom, but was filled with the laughter she remembered before he took ill for the last time.
“How. . .?” whispered China. “How can you be here?”
“You have seen other ghosts, have you not?” Father asked.
“Yes.”
“Those ghosts helped you to your destiny, but there was no ghost in Nethercott Castle willing to leave Yorkshire and accompany Sian here, so I happily accepted the task so I could be with my youngest and also be here for the birth of my first grandson.”
“Grandson?” whispered Jade, her eyes bright with excitement.
“The first.” He glanced at China who stood with her husband’s arm around her. “And the second will soon follow my first granddaughter.”
Lord Nethercott’s eyes narrowed as they met Constantine’s. “As pleased as I am to be here at Bannatyne Hall, I understood now why no one else wanted to come when Sian encountered a wraith on her way here.”
“My lord,” Constantine began.
The ghost waved him to silence. “They did not feel the need to come because they knew—as I did not, blinded by my sorrow that my daughter was unhappy—that the wraith here would watch out for her and find a place in her heart.”
“As she has found one in mine.”
“But isn’t it too late?” Sian asked. “Father, you said that the next time I made a choice for my heart, I would have to live with that choice forever. I did make my selection. I chose Arthyn Trembeth.”
“Which was a mistake.”
She nodded. “I know that, Father, and now I have fallen in love with Constantine, and I want to be with him.”
Lord Nethercott laughed, the sound like the rush of the wind sifting through the flowers. Spectral, but yet so warmly familiar. “You misunderstand me. Betrothing yourself to Trembeth was a great error, but your true choice has never changed.”
“Pardon me?”
Constantine grinned as he cupped her chin so she looked up at him. “What your father means is that you never chose Trembeth, sweetheart. You agreed to marry Trembeth because you thought he was Wraith. Now you know the truth, but one thing has not changed. You fell in love with Wraith. He is the man you chose, which means I am the man you chose.”
“Oh, my! That is true!” Joy danced through her soul.
Constantine tipped her chin toward him. “Will you marry me, Sian? Can you love both me and Wraith, or whatever name I must assume for our first mission together? Will you love the rogue who stands beside you now, and the rogue in spirit I w
as when I wore the domino?”
She answered him with a kiss while her sisters, their husbands, and her father’s ghost cheered.
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Sea Wraith. Copyright ©2009 by Jo Ann Ferguson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express permission of ImaJinn Books, Inc.
E-book ISBN: 978-1-61026-006-0
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cover design by Patricia Lazarus
Contact us at:
ImaJinn Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 74274, Phoenix, AZ 85087
Toll Free: 1-877-625-3592
http://www.imajinnbooks.com