Regency Scandals: High Seas To High Society / Masquerading Mistress. Sophia James

minutes for Peters to return and the news was surprising.

      ‘The gentleman went to the Countess of Haversham’s town lodgings, your Grace. Got out of the hackney and sent it on before disappearing into the house. He had a key, for I tarried to see how he gained entrance. I left Gibbon there to trace his steps further should he surface again.’

      ‘Very good.’ Dismissing the messenger, Asher went back into his own study. Emma Seaton and the Countess of Haversham. What did he know of them?

      Both niece and aunt were newcomers to London. Miriam had been here for a year and Emma merely a matter of weeks. Both had gowns that had seen better days and the look of women who dealt daily with the worry of dwindling funds, and Miriam kept neither carriage nor horses.

      Would they have a boarder living with them as a way of bolstering finances? Or could Emma Seaton have a husband?

      And now a further mystery. A young man who would rescue the sister of a very wealthy man and wait for neither recompense nor thanks. A mysterious Samaritan who scurried away from what certainly would have been an honourable deed. In anyone’s eyes.

      Something wasn’t right and in the shadows of wrongness he could feel the vague pull of danger, for nothing made sense. Instinctively his fingers closed hard against the narrow stem of his glass and he sucked in his breath. Harnessing fury. Calculating options.

      Emerald pulled the curtain back from her bedroom window on the third floor and cursed. The man was still there and she knew where he had come from.

      The Duke of Carisbrook.

      He had sent someone after her and she had not bothered to check. Stupid, stupid, stupid mistake, she thought, banging her hand against her sore head and roundly swearing.

      She should have sent the conveyance on to some other street and then made her way home undetected. She would have done so in Jamaica, so why not here? With real chagrin she stripped off the boy’s clothes and rearranged her blankets beside the bed, glad to lay her head down, glad to close her eyes and think.

      What a day. Nothing had gone easily and she did not know the next time she might be in contact with Asher Wellingham.

      Close contact.

      She remembered the feel of his finger across her pulse. A small touch of skin that fired her blood. The trick of memory and circumstance, she decided. After all, she had gone to sleep every night for the past five years with those velvet-brown eyes and hard-planed face etched in dream.

       The same dream.

       The same moment.

       The same beginning.

      So known now that she could recall each minute detail, even in wakefulness. The sounds, the smell, the sun in her eyes and the wind off the Middle Passage of Turks Island at her back. And a thousand yards of calico luffing in the breeze.

      She shook her head hard and made herself concentrate on the sounds of London and on the way the lamp on her side table threw shadows across the ceiling. She would not think of Asher Wellingham. She would not. But desire crept in under her resolution and she flushed as a thin pain entwined itself around her stomach and delved lower.

      Lower.

      She thought of the bordellos that had dotted the port streets of Kingston Town and wondered. Wondered what it would be like to draw her hands through night-black hair and beneath the fine linen of his shirt. Imaginary sinew and muscle made her pulse quicken and she turned restlessly within the bedclothes, any pressure unwelcome on heated skin.

      Her eyes flew open. Lord, what was she thinking? Dread and the cold rush of reality made her shiver.

      Asher Wellingham.

      Her enemy.

      Her father’s enemy.

      Anger and hurt surfaced and she reached for her wrapper. She would never sleep tonight. Adding another log to the fire, she took a book from the pile beside the chair, ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ in Latin, from Juvenal’s satires.

      She remembered Beau teaching her the conjugations of complicated verbs from books bound in heavy velvet. Books he had been taught from when he was a child.

      A half-smile formed.

      Once he had been a patient man. And a good father.

      And while she knew he was no angel, he had not deserved the revenge the Duke of Carisbrook had exacted upon him. A calculated retribution timed when the Mariposa limped home from a storm in the Gulf of Mexico. Asher Wellingham had come in quickly with three times the manpower and demolished the smaller boat with military precision. Boom-boom, and the masts had gone. Boom-boom, and the front of the brigantine had been holed with a volley of cannon fire.

      Azziz had told her the story later when he had been returned to Jamaica on the Baltimore clipper that had picked them out of the sea. The English duke had not given her father the chance to jump, but had demanded a duel on the foredeck of the sinking ship.

      And a minute was all it had taken. One minute to run her father through the stomach.

      Emerald felt tears prick at the back of her eyes. Her father had lived by the sword and died by it, but there had been a time when literature and classics and music were more important.

      When her mother had been with them! When the family had still been whole. When St Clair had been their home and the Mariposa was another man’s ship.

      Gone. Long gone.

      In the depths of longing and promise. And false, false hope.

      And it had been a struggle ever since.

      With care she replaced the book on the shelf and stood back, distancing herself from the pain of memory, regathering strategies and garnering strength.

      Retrieve the cane and return to Jamaica.

      Simple plans and the revival of a proper life. Ruby and Miriam and St Clair. Home. The word filled her with longing, even as the amber-fired eyes of Asher Wellingham danced before her. Beguiling. Intriguing. Forbidden.

      Shaking her head, she sat down in the chair by the fire and watched the shadows of flame fill the room.

       Chapter Three

      Asher Wellingham came to Haversham House early the next morning and hard on the heels of a note he had sent. And he came alone.

      The drawing room where Miriam and Emerald sat to receive him had been hastily tidied and what little furniture they had in the house had been brought down to fill out the spaces left from an auction they had held almost two months prior in York. Quietly. Secretly. The recompense they had gathered from the exercise had reflected the clandestine nature of the adventure. Still, money could be translated into food and beggars could not be choosers. At least they still had the silver tea service, placed now on a side table.

      This morning Emerald wore her second-best gown of light blue velvet with lace trimming around the neckline and an extra petticoat sewn into the base of the wide double skirt for length. On her head she wore a matching mobcap, the scratchy lace making a red rash on the soft underside of her throat. If she had had her potions from home, she might have been able to ease the itchiness. The names on the bottles in the London apothecaries were indecipherable.

       Indecipherable!

      Everything here seemed that way. Medicines. Places. The weather. People. The Duke of Carisbrook.

      ‘Ladies.’ This morning his voice was underlaid with both tiredness and purpose. ‘I have come to you this morning on a rather delicate manner.’ He cleared his throat and Emerald caught a hint in his eyes of what she could only determine as uncertainty, though the impression was fleeting before the more familiar and implacable urbanity returned. ‘I was wondering whether it would be possible to speak with the young man who resides here with you.’

      ‘Young