My Seductive Innocent

by Julie Johnstone

  “Well, we did not marry for love, but that does not mean he didn’t grow to love me. You heard his solicitor. Nathan planned so well for me because he expected me never to remarry. He had grown to love me.” It had to be so.

  “Grown to love you?” Incredulity mingled with cruelty and laced Ellison’s words. “Nathan loved no one, Sophia. As much as he hated his mother, he was just like her. Self-absorbed and self-indulgent. He didn’t think you would ever marry again because he thought you a pathetic-looking girl child. He told me so word-for-word when he came to ask Mother to witness your wedding.”

  “That is enough!” Lord Harthorne and Aversley thundered at Ellison simultaneously.

  “No,” Sophia didn’t recognize her own cold voice. “I will hear every word.”

  “Scarsdale’s grand plan for you was to leave you at Whitecliffe and visit you once, maybe twice, a year. He would live his life in London as he always had. And as for loyal, if you consider a man who instructed his mistress to go back to the London townhouse he kept her ensconced in for his visits, then perhaps we simply differ on what loyalty in marriage means.”

  Sophia grasped her throat, feeling as if someone had a hand around it and was squeezing until her air was cut off. “I can’t breathe!” she gasped.

  Amelia was at her side in a moment, begging her to come away and let them talk. Shaking and clammy, Sophia shook her off. “When?” She hated the hoarse, desperate sound of her voice. “When did he tell his mistress to stay in the London townhome?”

  “He rendezvoused with her the night before you were to marry and assured her their arrangement would not be changing. I only know because when I went to visit all the property on the list from the solicitor, she was still there, bold as brass. She claimed Nathan would want her to stay, and then she told me of their liaison the night before he wed you.”

  Sophia’s stomach twisted and turned. She slapped a palm over her mouth and ran blindly from the room. Behind her, voices called her name and clattering footsteps rose around her. Aversley caught up with her in the main hall and swiveled her toward him.

  Amelia rushed up behind him, tears spilling from her blue eyes. “Sophia, I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to lie. We weren’t even sure of what the truth was. And we thought perhaps he might have grown to care for you. And...”

  Sophia clutched her stomach because it felt as if her body was caving in on itself. “I understand why you did it,” Sophia choked out. “Please, I want to go home.” Home. Where she had built a future on a lie. Where the man she had thought kind and perfect turned out to be the cruelest man she had met by far. No amount of physical pain she had ever endured compared to the dizzying pain she was experiencing now. She’d never loved anyone the way she had loved Nathan, and she prayed to God she never would again.

  With his legs and arms chained, Nathan had no other way to try to rouse the American prisoner in the oarsmen row ahead of him but to spit at him, which he did repeatedly to no avail. Warren had stopped rowing some time ago, and any minute, the corsair guard, Murad, whose duty it was to walk the manned rows of the galley and make sure none of the slaves were slacking, would be coming by their section.

  In the past year of captivity on the ship, he had survived by doing three things: planning his escape, which meant knowing the exact times the guards came around to do their checks; reliving every second he had spent with Sophia; and imagining every second he had yet to spend with her. The last had delivered him from the edge of insanity and given him the strength to survive.

  Nathan counted down the seconds in his head until the guard would appear. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

  The guard stopped at the row in front of him and kicked Warren. The man’s head lolled farther to the right, but bound as he was by the chains, he did not fall over. The guard kicked him again, this time directly in the head with a sickening thud. Warren still didn’t move. Murad muttered the word for death in Arabic, and Nathan turned away and looked out to sea. He would not feel sadness for the man. Not now. He could not afford sadness for anyone.

  He forced himself to keep rowing, still staring at the lapping waves in the distance. Sometimes he imagined how peaceful it must be under the water. No pain. No sound. But no Sophia, either. He squeezed his eyes shut and exhaled a long breath. Damn sorrow was trying to creep in.

  He refocused his mind by concentrating on what the guard was saying. Arabic was a bloody complicated language, but he’d managed to learn a few words that were repeated often on the ship. Death, beating, starvation, fight, and the most pleasant one of all―the one he was waiting for―attack. Because when and if this ship ever came under attack by the privateers he knew to be out there somewhere hunting down the slavers, Nathan would escape. It was his only hope, unless they ever took him off the ship to work in the quarries or be sold in Tripoli or Algiers. He would try to escape at that time, as well, if it came, but success was even less likely then.

  The major flaw in his plan to escape when under attack was ensuring he was unchained. And the only time he was ever unchained was to fight. The captain was a predictable bloodthirsty man who liked to see a good fight every day, and Nathan had realized quickly that if he volunteered to fight, he would be unchained, which would keep him fit. The downside was he could very well be killed. Those who didn’t fight slept, defecated, urinated, and if they were very good, received a sip of dirty water or a scrap of food when they were not rowing. Those skeletal men died quickly or went out of their minds. In his year on the ship, twenty had died and at least that many had gone mad. But a man could still row while mad. The thought chilled him to the bone, despite the relentless sun that was beating down.

  The clanking of Warren’s chains being undone reached Nathan’s ear, but he did not take his gaze from the sea. Watching a dead man being dragged from his place sent Nathan to a dark place that hard to overcome. After a few moments, he heard a faint splash over the steady creak from the rowing. Dark thoughts of the relief death would bring beckoned to him like a siren song. He replaced the sweet whispers with memories of Sophia’s laughter.

  “Five minutes,” Jean Luc whispered beside Nathan as he rowed.

  Nathan offered the Frenchman a quick nod to acknowledge he’d heard him. He calculated how many times he had pulled the oars today and concluded Jean Luc was correct. They had five minutes until the call for fighting volunteers would ring out over the slapping of the ocean against the wood and the groans of the enslaved men.

  They had been sitting beside each other for an entire year, and Jean Luc was one of six men, other than Nathan, who volunteered to fight regularly. They didn’t ever have to fight each other because the captain, smug bastard that he was, always matched one of the corsairs against a prisoner. That was very lucky because one thing Nathan understood about himself was that he had lost whatever morals he had once possessed. He was now just as barbaric as his captors, and he wasn’t certain, if faced with the choice between his own death or Jean Luc’s, that he would not kill the Frenchman.

  The thought made his skin crawl, as if trying to get away from his mind. Killing had become a necessary part of living. Sometimes the captain would say the fight was to the death and sometimes until first blood. Six times it had been to the death when Nathan had fought. He had killed six men. As he rowed, his fingers tingled with the memory, making knots form in his gut.

  Would he ever be able to confess to Sophia what he had done? Her image appeared in his mind in perfect detail. She smiled her radiant smile and her cerulean eyes, which matched the color of the sky above him on many days, twinkled. She worried her lip for a moment before tugging on her short, dark hair with her slender fingers.

  He wanted to tell her that he loved her. She’d offered him her unconditional love, and he’d been too goddamn afraid to accept it. He’d feared that the moment he took what she offered, she would snatch it away or show herself to be someone other than who she’d portrayed. He’d been a fool. The only thing he truly missed other than freedom was h
er.

  If he ever had the chance to see her again, he was going to take everything she wanted to offer him. He was going to drink her in. Breathe her. Cling to her. Cherish her. And lavish her.

  He wanted to start his life over with her and see all the possibilities for happiness in the world, and all the promise of love between them, just as she saw it. She was stronger than he’d ever been.

  “It’s time,” Jean Luc rasped.

  Nathan blinked, clearing his thoughts as the call for a fighter rang out. He raised his hand, along with Jean Luc and four others, and they waited in tense silence to see who would be chosen. Nathan had not had a turn in four days and he desperately needed to stand up, but he gritted his teeth in an effort not to show his desperation. The guard stopped in front of him, then moved on to Jean Luc before turning back and smiling while saying the Arabic word for Killer.

  He tensed at the moniker the guards had given him. They meant it as a compliment, yet it destroyed another piece of his humanity every time they said it. Within moments, he was released and standing away from the galleys, holding a chain for a weapon and facing his opponent. He stepped from foot to foot, awakening his body. The time the captain was giving him to get used to standing was close to gone. The captain never gave more than four minutes.

  Nathan stared at his opponent, a bald-headed, hulking giant. He didn’t know the man’s name, but that suited him just fine, especially since the captain had called for a fight to the death. During these fights was the only time the slaves were allowed to talk, and like a faint hum that came from somewhere far off but increased as it neared, the chants from the galley grew until they seemed to vibrate the salty air and the slick deck. The thundering cry to kill burrowed through his flesh and into his bones. His heartbeat sped as his muscles tensed and rage thicker than blood flowed through his veins.

  The captain called out to begin, and Nathan surged to attack. Waiting was futile and showed weakness. His opponent was surprisingly agile for his size and managed to almost avoid Nathan’s first swing of his chain, but the clattering metal caught the giant at the last second and wrapped around his right ankle in one full circle. Nathan barred his teeth as he yanked the chain with enough force that his biceps strained painfully and burned as if torched from within. But he did not relent. He welcomed the pain because it meant he was still alive.

  With pull after grunting pull, he dragged the corsair to him as the man growled and struggled to get free. But the guard’s bulk hampered his flexibility and made twisting to reach his ankle impossible. Nathan took full advantage of his downed opponent, stepped toward him, and stomped down on his head with all his burning, searing rage. The brittle sound of something snapping pierced through his rage. He’d broken the man’s neck. Bile immediately rose in Nathan’s throat, but he forced it down as he always did. He could not afford a conscience when it came to the corsairs. They would be happy to kill him or sell him to a lord who wanted to use him in ways that he refused to contemplate.

  He stepped back from his dead opponent, expecting to be rewarded with the usual cup of ale, but urgent shouts came at him from all directions. Nathan looked around, not understanding what they were saying. The corsairs scrambled across the deck toward their guns, and the word attack rang in his ears. For a moment, he thought he was hallucinating, but when he glanced across the shining, shimmering sea, a ship waving the British flag came into view. And in seconds, Nathan was darting toward the edge of the slave ship, ready to jump into the water as the British fired upon them.

  Sophia spent days alternating between huddling under her coverlet and pacing the floor of her bedchamber. The thing both situations had in common was that crying, wailing, and bemoaning herself for her stupidity accompanied them both. She continuously replayed the last year in her mind, how she had thrown herself, heart and soul, into becoming a duchess worthy of Nathan.

  “Saint Nathan!” she muttered. She’d made him faultless in her mind. He was so perfect he could not imagine loving a woman like her. Bitterness clawed at her.

  He’d pitied her. He’d not wanted to be around her. He’d planned to leave her at Whitecliffe while he carried on with his mistress in London. He’d lied to her face about bedding the woman, and she’d drunk in the lie as if it were a delicious cup of steaming chocolate. He’d been cuckolding her before they were even married.

  She pounded the walls, the bed, and the floor with her fists until they throbbed with pain. Good! Pain in her fists meant less pain to travel to her heart.

  He was a...he was a...pre-cuckolder! Yes, that’s what he was. She didn’t give a damn that there was no such word. He truly was a blackhearted devil. No, that was too good. He had no heart!

  He saved you, her hated inner voice shot back.

  She screamed until the voice faded. She screamed so long that Mary Margaret rushed to her bedchamber and begged her to take laudanum. She refused and sent her lady’s maid away.

  She wore a path in her carpet and thought of the millions of ways Nathan had likely been laughing at her.

  I love you, she had said like a supreme fool.

  You do not love me, he had replied. You desire me. There is a difference.

  She didn’t stop there. No. She had persisted like a naive country girl who’d never encountered a sophisticated, acerbic libertine. Because she’d foolishly hoped for love.

  He’s not a libertine, that dreaded voice whispered.

  She began to hum to tune it out. She would hate Nathaniel Ellison, Marquess of Deering, the fifth Duke of Scarsdale until the day she died. She would hate him because he had made her love him. And then his death had nearly destroyed her. And now he had humiliated her more from the grave than any of Frank’s beatings, verbal attacks, and withheld love ever had. She’d never expected more from Frank, but Nathan... Sobs wracked her body. She’d dared to hope as her mother had encouraged her. More the fool, she was.

  Sophia stormed across her bedchamber, ripped open her dresser drawer, and yanked out her mother’s letter. She tore it into tiny pieces and watched them flutter to the ground in a mess at her feet. The bits of foolscap blurred as she stared and remembered.

  I do desire you, but I love you, she had said.

  She didn’t want to remember how he had answered but there was no way to hold it back.

  It will fade, he had replied.

  She raked her hands through her hair until her scalp stung, and she forced herself to stop. She could not even properly hate him because he had warned her. There was no denying it. Her blasted memory would not let her forget what he had said: You need to know I have no desire for love.

  He had not lied about that. He had been very clear, and she had refused to listen.

  She cried until there were no more tears, and then she sat and stared out the window, unsure what to do with herself and the rest of her life, now that she no longer had a mission to be the perfect duchess.

  On the seventh day of her self-imposed isolation, among the dozens of notes from Amelia, Aversley, Lord Harthorne, and even Jemma, begging her please to allow them to see her, she received a letter from Harry:

  Dear Sophia,

  I hope you are cheerier now. I think of you often and of Scarsdale. I miss him still, as I’m sure you do. Guess what? I have been invited to be part of a prestigious club here, and I was told that Scarsdale used to be the head of it. I have to confess, I get special treatment because you are his widow. I don’t even feel guilty because of all the years of terrible treatment we had. I decided this just evens things out a bit. Do you think that’s wrong? I am looking forward to seeing you soon. I’d like to invite a school friend to come home with me, if that’s all right. He says his mother will not care, as you are a duchess.

  Your loving brother,

  Harry

  Something about the letter did what her week of carrying on had not. She read it, and she knew what she had to do. She had to get up and go on with life for Harry’s sake, and for her sake, as well. She had been given th
e chance to provide Harry with a grand future, and she would not ruin it by having people whisper that she was the mad duchess or by neglecting to make the social connections that would help him.

  She picked herself up and smoothed her hair. She would attend the house party Amelia had planned and she would make friends. But she would never, ever again, allow herself to fall in love with a man. Love was a wretched thing, and she wanted no part of it. If Nathan could train himself not to feel love, then so could she. She didn’t need love to be happy.

  In fact, the sooner she took a lover the better. She wanted to wipe the memory of Nathan’s body from her mind, and what better way than to replace it with the memory of another man’s? Her cheeks heated at her thoughts, but she simply fanned herself. She knew widows of the ton took lovers without being ostracized. It was practically fashionable.

  She marched across the room and yanked the bell cord to summon Mary Margaret. She would become an Incomparable. She would be happy. No man would ever look at her again and think her pathetic or unworthy of his love. She was going to amaze the ton. And when she was finished bedazzling the most eligible gentlemen, she would pick the coldest-hearted rake as her lover, for he would not desire that which she no longer cared to give―her heart.

  Nathan stood on the open deck of Queen’s Splendor with his face toward the oncoming wind. The simple joy of being free to move his arms and legs made him smile. He took a deep breath and turned to Jean Luc, who stood silently beside him, clasping his friend on the shoulder. Nathan had almost died trying to break the Frenchman free of his chains when the slave ship had been under attack, and while he may have saved Jean Luc, the act of doing so had saved him. He had not been sure he had enough humanity left in him to care about anyone but himself, but he had. Nothing had ever felt as good to learn.

  Jean Luc raised an eyebrow at him, and Nathan chuckled, realizing he’d been staring at the man. “I smell England.”