“You cannot expect me to sit idly by and—”
“Idly?” Cary looked her up and down. “Somehow, I doubt you have been idle. Is that chalk dust I see on your skirt?” At her somewhat abashed nod, he shook his head. “How many times have I told you—?”
“Not to teach them? It’s only letters and numbers, Edward. What harm can it do?” she argued as she attempted to brush the evidence from her dress.
“In these days, with rumors of an uprising on everyone’s lips? It would do a great deal of harm if you are caught—both to them and to you.”
“Then I won’t get caught.” Failing in the attempt to improve the dress’s appearance, she straightened and clicked her tongue to the little brown monkey. “Come, Jasper. It seems we’re interrupting.” Cautiously, the monkey made its way down the drapery and onto her shoulder. Caliban strained against Andrew’s hold and snapped at the air in one desperate, final attempt to catch his tiny tormentor.
“A pleasure to meet you, Caliban,” she said with a smile for the dog. “And you, too, Captain.”
“Wait.”
With his free hand Andrew swept up the book she had dropped, a thin leather-bound volume that looked not old, but well-read. Nodding her thanks, she stretched out her hand so he could lay it on her palm.
“What are you reading?” he asked instead, lifting the cover with his thumb.
“Something really very horrid, you may be sure,” she answered as she tried to snatch the book from his grasp before he saw.
“A gothic tale?” He tightened his fingertips around the book’s spine, refusing to relinquish it. “Are you a devotee of Mrs. Radcliffe’s, then?”
“Not particularly.” She wrenched the book from his hand and tucked it against her bosom. “If you must know, this is Miss Wollstonecraft.”
“Ah.” Even a man who had spent years roaming the Atlantic could not remain ignorant of the controversy surrounding Miss Wollstonecraft and her books, with their support of the revolution in France and outspoken demands for women’s rights. So Miss Holderin was a radical? It was of a piece with the rest of what he had heard.
And none of it inclined him toward Edward Cary’s mad scheme. Six weeks at sea with a bluestocking who spouted Wollstonecraft? Not if he could help it. “ ‘Really very horrid,’ indeed,” he murmured.
Evidently suspecting she was being mocked, she parted her lips to reply. Before words could slip past them, Edward interjected. “Go home, Tempest,” he urged, walking with her toward the doorway, his hand resting at the small of her back. The gesture might have been permitted under the guise of brotherly affection, but to Andrew it looked more like staking a claim. “I’ll join you for supper, if I may.”
The offer of his company seemed to mollify her somewhat. “Like old times. I’ll have Mari make one of your favorites. But you won’t forget about the mill?”
“I won’t forget.”
The monkey shot one leering grin behind him as they left, sending Caliban into another flurry of barks and forcing Andrew to squat beside him to contain him.
“Hush, Cal,” he murmured, his heart not in the command.
“I haven’t much patience for Jasper either, old boy,” Cary acknowledged when he reentered the room, casting the dog a sympathetic look. “But that little monkey is a long way from home. A sailor on a slave ship captured him in Africa, intending him for a pet,” he explained to Andrew, who was rising to his feet. “When Tempest saw how cruelly the animal was being treated, she rescued him. It’s what the Holderins do,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
With such a fortune at her disposal, Andrew had imagined the sugar princess would prove pampered and elegant and probably cruel. He had not anticipated a chalk-streaked dress, radical sympathies, and a monkey. Tempest Holderin was not the sort of woman who ran away from trouble—she ran toward it with open arms. He had been wrong. And Edward Cary was wrong. She didn’t need to be rescued from this Lord Nathaniel character.
She needed to be rescued from herself.
Cary returned to the desk and riffled through the stack of papers he had set to rights mere moments ago. Selecting one sheet, he dipped a pen. “Name your price.”
Andrew shook his head. He had not been to England—home, some would say, although it would never be so to him—in more than ten years. A man in Cary’s position could never offer enough to send him back now. “I draw the line at kidnapping.”
Undeterred, Cary scratched something on the paper. “Then think of it as a rescue.”
But if abduction was not Andrew’s game, neither was salvation. For much of his life, in fact, he had been bent on destruction instead.
And whatever amount Cary offered, the encounter with Miss Holderin left him even more determined to refuse it. Oh, she was tempting in her way, it was true, with that riot of red curls and those stormy eyes.
That, he feared, was the problem.
“Half now,” Cary said, thrusting the note toward him. “The rest upon her safe delivery to her grandfather in Yorkshire.”
Reluctantly, Andrew took it, at the same time raising his free hand to his eyes, some part of him hoping he could rub them hard enough to erase the afternoon entirely—hard enough, at least, to render the figures on the paper an illegible blur.
He must have been staring at the number longer than he realized, for Caliban gave a troubled sort of whimper and nudged his wet nose against his hand, confused by his master’s unusual stillness. The paper trembled.
He could not begin to imagine where Edward Cary could have acquired such a sum. Was he somehow stealing from Miss Holderin’s personal fortune to subsidize her abduction? For his own part, it still would not have been enough. But harder, much harder, to refuse it on behalf of his crew. Certainly Bewick and some of the others would be glad enough to glimpse old London town once more.
“Well?” Cary prompted.
The man had persuaded himself that he needed someone who was willing to break the rules, to save a woman who seemed quite indifferent to them herself.
Had he fully considered what might happen between his Tempest and such a man?
“Six weeks at sea. She will be ruined, you know.”
A muscle ticked along Cary’s jaw. “Only her reputation, I trust. And far more than that could be lost if she stays,” he added, sounding resigned.
Andrew’s fingers curled around the paper, crumpling it into a tight ball. Against his better judgment, he jerked his chin in a single nod. “I’ll do it.”
Chapter 2
What would Miss Wollstonecraft do?
It was a question Tempest asked herself often, particularly in moments such as these. She knew Miss Wollstonecraft faced a great deal of opposition from the world for her ideas about women’s rights, but she felt certain the author must never have met anyone quite like Edward Cary, someone who might agree with every principle her books espoused and then some, but who was nonetheless determined to swaddle certain women in cotton wool to keep them from harm. It was infuriating really, these constant reminders that Edward, who had known her almost forever, did not believe she was capable of taking care of herself. It had been one thing when they were children, but now that she was nearly three-and-twenty . . .
Her musings were interrupted by the sound of booted feet thundering down the steps of Edward’s house. Reluctant to face either Edward or his guest, she ducked around the corner, almost colliding with the stable boy, Hector. He stood in the shade, holding the bridle of Captain Corrvan’s hired mount, a magnificent bay gelding that defied the reputation of McGinty’s Livery for supplying only swaybacked mares.
The horse shied and tried to toss his head but Hector’s firm grip kept him in line, restricting him to a noisy snort of displeasure at Tempest’s unanticipated arrival. Thankfully, Jasper did not shriek or even chatter. Instead, he clambered onto Hector’s shoulder and began to search the boy’s pocket for lumps of sugar. Returning the boy’s grin, Tempest felt the horse’s hot breath as she slipped almost be
neath his nose.
At a man’s shout, Hector led the horse forward, and Tempest chanced a peek after them. Man of the sea he might be, but Captain Corrvan looked equally at home with horseflesh as he took the reins and ran one steadying hand along the bay’s quivering flank.
Edward was nowhere to be seen. The exchange between the two men must have wrapped up more quickly than Edward had anticipated. It was unlike him not to show his guest out. Had the meeting ended as he had wanted?
People did not generally get the upper hand of Edward Cary, a fact for which she was genuinely grateful. His oversight kept Harper’s Hill running smoothly—better, even, than it had been managed when her father had been alive. Without Edward, her father’s dream, and her own, might have collapsed around them.
But at the moment, her frustration with him made her hope, rather selfishly, that Captain Corrvan had refused to do Edward’s bidding.
Not that she felt any great need to see the sardonic captain satisfied, either.
While she watched, he offered Hector a coin for the care of his mount. He did not toss the money into the air for the pleasure of watching the boy scrabble in the dirt for it, as so many men would have done—if they had thought to give a slave anything at all.
Then, in a seemingly effortless motion, he swung one long leg over the saddle and wheeled the bay about. Caliban, who had been nosing something in the scrub, followed without being called. In a spray of gravel and crushed seashells, the threesome swept down the drive.
As Captain Corrvan disappeared from sight, Tempest jerked herself out of the shadows. Hector still stared after horse and rider, wide-eyed, and she feared her own face wore a similar expression of awe. What would Edward say if he caught her gawking after the captain like some green girl? Once upon a time, he would have laughed at her, but in the last year or so he had turned into such a stick in the mud.
Oh, she hoped Edward’s absence and Captain Corrvan’s dramatic departure meant that their business had concluded in mutual dissatisfaction, neither side getting what it wanted. That would just suit her mood.
With a self-satisfied nod, she set off toward the main house, choosing to ignore the fact that her destination smacked of compliance with Edward’s earlier command—for really, where else was there to go?
As she climbed the north-facing steps of a dual staircase leading to a wide veranda, she could hear footsteps on the other side, echoing her own. Probably Edward, come to give her another scold. “Haven’t you made your point already?” she asked as she reached the top and could at last see who was coming from the south.
But it was not Edward.
“I beg your pardon?” Although he was nearly fifty, Lord Nathaniel Delamere trotted up the remaining steps with the sprightliness of a far younger man, his crimson chintz duster swirling around his ankles. He bowed when he met Tempest at the door.
“Forgive me, my lord,” she said with an answering curtsy as the door swung inward, opened by unseen hands. “I thought you were someone else.”
As he ushered her inside, she glimpsed the displeasure that flitted across his face. “Now, Tempest, I thought we were agreed?”
On the occasion of his first proposal of marriage, he had asked—no, ordered was the better word—that she give up the formal title. But what alternative was there? With a shudder she recalled how, as a child, she had called the man “Uncle Nate.” Any pretense of a familial bond between them had long since been abandoned.
As she untied her broad-brimmed bonnet and laid it on a table beside a lavish arrangement of hibiscus flowers, the movement startled a gecko camouflaged in the greenery. With a flick of its tail, it scooted down the wall and across the floor, where it met its fate beneath the heel of Lord Nathaniel’s boot.
“Pestilential creatures,” he muttered, as Jubal, the ancient butler, stepped out of the shadows and stooped with rheumatic stiffness to clean up the mess. “May we speak privately?” he asked, indicating the doorway to their left.
Papa had always called it the receiving room, although it was neither so grand nor so formal as such a name implied. The furnishings were dark, heavy, English. But no one entering the room would imagine themselves in England. A wall of tall windows let onto the veranda, and they stood open now, their gauzy draperies swaying in the salty-sweet breeze.
As soon as they had crossed the threshold, Tempest turned to face Lord Nathaniel. “What is it you wish to discuss?” She remained standing, hoping to avoid the sort of pleasantries that might prolong the visit.
But when he stepped closer, so that they were almost touching, she longed suddenly for the relative protection of a chair. “I think you know, Tempest,” he said, reaching for her hand.
He was not an unhandsome man, despite his years. His dark hair had only just begun to silver at the temples. On occasion, Tempest forced herself to acknowledge how easily she might have been taken in by him, if she had not known what she knew.
“If you have come to renew your offer, sir,” she began, but her words were interrupted by Lord Nathaniel’s discovery that his way to her heart was blocked by the book she still held.
Prying it from her grasp, he glanced down at the blue leather boards. A cursory glance at the contents of the pages between them caused him to throw the volume aside with an oath. “Your father was a fool to have indulged such nonsense.”
Tempest watched as the book landed, facedown and open, and slid across the floor, stopped at last by the unforgiving corner of the stiff rattan mat that took the place of a wool rug. In the stillness, she heard something tear.
“How dare you?” she demanded, moving to retrieve it.
But the fingers that had at first sought her own now wrapped themselves in a vise-like grip around her upper arm. “You will not speak to me in that insolent way.” His dark eyes flashed, and for a moment, she almost feared he was going to strike her. But then, as he studied her face, his expression shifted and softened, though his grip did not. “Ah, my dear, you are the very image of your lovely mother, although regrettably sharp-tongued—proof that it does not become a young lady to spend all her time giving orders. Your father would not have wanted you to bear the burden of running this plantation alone, Tempest. Else he would not have asked me to keep an eye on you.”
Papa had said it, it was true, although his words had come so near the end, Tempest felt certain they had been meant for another, someone only her dying father had been able to see.
“I am not alone,” she insisted, refusing to give him the satisfaction of struggling to get free. “I have Edward.”
Lord Nathaniel’s lips curved upward at the corners, but no one who saw the expression would have mistaken it for a smile. “I have reason to believe that Mr. Cary’s . . . inefficiencies in the running of Harper’s Hill will not be allowed to continue much longer.”
With Tempest’s support, Edward had done everything in his power to supply adequate food and clothing and shelter for the plantation’s slaves. He had hired a physician to care for them. He refused to whip them, or allow another to do so in his place.
Inefficiencies, Lord Nathaniel called those small acts of mercy, and she supposed in most people’s eyes they were. Other planters maximized profits by treating their slaves worse than beasts, starving them, lashing them, using them up and then replacing them when they soon died. Sir Barton’s income had undoubtedly been reduced over the years by first her father’s and now Edward’s unusual management. But so far as she knew, he had never complained—perhaps had never even noticed.
Tempest had the sinking feeling all that was about to change.
“I took the liberty of writing to your grandfather about my concerns,” Lord Nathaniel continued, his expression just shy of smug. “Perhaps you would like to see his reply?”
Without releasing her, he reached inside his coat and withdrew a folded letter. The worn paper and broken seal suggested he had been carrying it there for some days. Willing her fingers not to tremble, Tempest took it from him.
I thank you most sincerely for your last. As the mail packet leaves in an hour, I have no time for more than a note in reply. In the morning, I travel to Crosslands and will consult my solicitor there. Expect formal word that Mr. Cary has been removed from his post, forthwith. In my absence, I shall rely on you to choose a suitable successor.
Hastily,
B. Harper, Bt.
As she refolded the note and returned it to him, Tempest managed to hold her tongue even as her mind raced. The letter was undated. How long ago had Lord Nathaniel written? And when had this reply come? Her grandfather was a notoriously poor correspondent. In twenty-three years, she had had one letter from him, on the occasion of her father’s death. In it, he had acknowledged that he was now her guardian, but he had not invited her to come to him—to say nothing of coming to her, to Antigua, where he had never been, despite his extensive holdings on the island. He had offered a few pat words of comfort, and promised to write again. But he had not. What ought she to expect now? The letter bearing his solicitor’s orders might arrive within the month. Or never.
And if it did come? Oh, that did not bear thinking of. Edward gone. The people of Harper’s Hill at the mercy of some tyrant. She half-wondered whether Lord Nathaniel might not take on the job of overseer himself. It required no stretch of imagination to picture him with a cowhide in his hand.
“Why would you do this?”
“I could not allow him to continue to take advantage of your grandfather’s generous nature,” he replied. “Why, the damage he might do—nay, has already done to your inheritance . . .” With a melancholy shake of his head, he at last released her arm.
She had always known it was about her fortune. Men had been clamoring after it for four long years, before the life had even left her father’s eyes.
To Tempt an Heiress Page 2
