The Greatest Of Sins. Christine Merrill

not his Evie. When she opened the box, her face lit as though he had handed her a casket of jewels. Then she pulled out the glass, gave it a hurried wipe against her skirt to shine it and extended it and put it to her eye. ‘Oh, Sam. It is wonderful.’ She pulled him to the nearest window and peered out through it, looking as she always had, into the distance, as though she could see the future. ‘The people on the other side of the square are as clear as if I was standing beside them.’ She took it away from her face and grinned at him. The expression was so like the way he remembered her that his heart hurt. She was standing beside him again, so close that an accidental touch was inevitable. He withdrew quickly, ignoring the flood of memories that her nearness brought.

      She seemed unmoved by his discomfort, sighing in pleasure at her improved vision. ‘I will take it to the country, of course. And to Hyde Park and the opera.’

      He laughed. ‘If you actually need a glass in town, I will buy you a lorgnette. With such a monstrous thing pressed to your eye, you will look like a privateer.’

      She let out a derisive puff of air. ‘What do I care what people think? It will be so much easier to see the stage.’ She gave a sly grin. ‘And I will be able to spy on the other members of the audience. That is the real reason we all go to the theatre. Nothing in London shall escape me. I share the gossip the next day and show them my telescope. In a week, all the smart girls will have them.’

      ‘Wicked creature.’ Without thinking, he reached up and tugged on one honey-coloured lock. She had not changed a bit in his absence, still fresh faced, curious and so alive that he could feel her vitality coursing in the air around them.

      ‘Let us go and watch something.’ She took his hand, her fingers twining with his, pulling him back into the house and towards the doors that led to the garden that had been their haven.

      And he was lost.

       Chapter Two

      He ought to have known better. Before coming, Sam had steeled himself against temptation with prayer. His plan had been to resist all contact with her. Just moments before, he had assured her father that he would be gone. And yet, at the first touch of her hand, he had forgotten it all and followed her through the house like a puppy on a lead.

      Now he sat at her side on a little stone bench under the elm as she experimented with her new toy. It was just like hundreds of other happy afternoons spent here and it reminded him of how much he missed home, and how much a part of that home she was.

      Evie held the spyglass firmly pointed into the nearest tree. ‘There is a nest. And three young ones all open mouthed and waiting to be fed. Oh, Sam, it is wonderful.’

      It was indeed. He could see the flush of pleasure on her cheek and the way it curved down into the familiar dimple of her smile. So excited, and over such a small thing as a nest of birds. But had she not always been just so? Joy personified and a tonic to a weary soul.

      ‘You can adjust it, just by turning here.’ He reached out and, for a moment, his hand covered hers. The shock of connection was as strong as ever. It made him wonder—did she still feel it as well? If so, she was as good at dissembling as he, for she gave no response.

      ‘That is ever so much better. I can make out individual feathers.’ She looked away from the birds, smiling at him, full of mischief. ‘I clearly made the best bargain out of your empty pockets today, sir.’

      ‘I beg your pardon?’

      ‘If you had reached in and pulled out a snuff box, I’d have had a hard time developing the habit of taking it. But a telescope is very much to my liking.’

      ‘Was it so obvious that I did not bring you anything?’ he asked, sighing.

      ‘The look of alarm on your face was profound,’ she admitted and snapped the little cylinder shut to put it back into its case. ‘But do not think that you can get this away from me by distracting me with a necklace. It is mine now and I shan’t return it.’

      ‘Nor would I expect you to.’ He smiled back at her and felt the easy familiarity washing over him in a comfortable silence. With six years, thousands of miles travelled and both of them grown, none of the important things had changed between them. She was still his soul’s mate. At least he could claim it was more than lust that he felt for her.

      She broke the silence. ‘Tell me about your travels.’

      ‘There is not enough time to tell you all the things I have seen,’ he said. But now that she had asked, the temptation to try was great and the words rushed out of him. ‘Birds and plants that are nothing like you find in England. And the look of the ocean, wild or becalmed, or the sky before a storm, when there is no land in sight? The best word I can find for it is majesty. Sea and heaven stretching as far as the eye can see in all directions and us just a spot in the middle.’

      ‘I should very much like to see that,’ she said wistfully.

      He imagined her, at his side, lying on the deck to look at the stars. And then he put the dream carefully away. ‘Wonderful though some times were, I would not have wished them on you if it meant you saw the rest. A ship of the line is no place for a woman.’

      ‘Was naval life really so harsh?’

      ‘During battle, there was much for me to do,’ he admitted evasively, not wanting to share the worst of it.

      ‘But you helped the men,’ she said, her face shining when she said it, as though there was something heroic about simply doing his job. ‘And that was what you always wanted to do. I am sure it was most gratifying.’

      ‘True,’ he agreed. He had felt useful. And it had been a relief to find a place where he seemed to fit, after so much doubt.

      ‘If it made you happy, then I should like to have seen that as well,’ she said firmly.

      ‘Most certainly not!’ He did not want to think of her, mixed in with the blood and death. Nor did he want to lose her admiration, when she saw him helpless in the face of things that had no cure.

      She gave him a pained look. ‘Have you forgotten so much? Was it not I who encouraged you in your medical studies? I watched you tend every injured animal you found and dissect the failures. I swear, you did not so much eat in those days as study the anatomy of the chops.’

      ‘I could just as easily have become butcher, for all I learned there,’ he admitted. ‘But working over a person is quite a different thing.’ Sometimes, it was its own form of butchery.

      ‘You learned human anatomy in Edinburgh,’ she said. ‘Through dissection.’

      He suppressed a smile and nodded. Evie was as fearless as she had always been, and no less grisly, despite her refined appearance.

      ‘You did many other things as well, I’m sure.’

      ‘I observed,’ he corrected. ‘It was not until I left school that I could put the skills to use. Now I am thinking of returning to Scotland,’ he said, to remind them both that he could not stay. ‘I still have many friends at the university. Perhaps I might lecture.’

      She shook her head. ‘That is too far away.’

      That was why he had suggested it. She was clinging to his sleeve again, as though she could not bear to have him taken from her. He considered detaching her fingers, but it was very near to having her touch his hand, so he left them remain as they were. ‘You will be far too busy with your new life to waste time upon me. I doubt you will miss me at all.’

      ‘You know that is not true. Did I not write you often in the last years? Nearly every week, yet you never answered.’ Her voice grew quiet and, in it, he could hear the hurt he had caused her.

      ‘Probably because I did not receive your letters,’ he said, as though it had not mattered to him. ‘The mail is a precarious thing, when one is at sea.’ He had received it often enough. And he had cherished it. In the years they’d been apart, her correspondence