The Wild Wellingham Brothers. Sophia James
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cantered along the beach and up into the valley that led to Falder Castle.
Gaining her room she laid her head back against the solidness of the portal and tried to catch her breath, lost in the run up from the stables. Her breathing was closer to normal when she opened the connecting door to see Miriam sitting in a chair by her window, reading a book.
‘Whatever has happened? You look like you have come across a ghost.’
Emerald’s smile was laboured. Hardly a ghost. Asher’s lips still burnt into the recesses of her memory and raised the temperature of everything.
Hot. Scorching. Torrid.
She poured herself some water, watching the drips run jagged against the side of the glass before drinking it all.
‘You seem better, Aunt.’
‘If you could find the cane, Emerald, I’d be better still.’ The sentence was finished on a bout of coughing and Emerald’s worry grew. After her behaviour today, she was uncertain whether the Duke of Carisbrook would even want her to stay till the end of the week and here was her aunt plagued with illness.
Lord, could things get any worse? She shook her head and made herself concentrate on what Miriam was saying.
‘Carisbrook has a map room at the back of the eastern wing. I saw it today when I attempted a walk round the rose garden. Perhaps he has already found the map, and keeps it there.’
Emerald’s interest was piqued. ‘Near the rose garden you say?’
‘Yes. The Wellingham family mausoleum sits further over to one side. The footman I walked with said that the garden has been laid out in memory of the Duchess of Carisbrook.’
‘Melanie Wellingham is dead and buried at Falder?’
‘She is indeed. The tomb of their son is there too.’
‘A son?’
‘Stillborn at full term three years before she died.’
Death and loss and waste.
The enormity of Miriam’s revelations changed everything. The Duke of Carisbrook had loved his wife. He still loved his wife. The sapphire ring on his finger, the picture in the library and the flower garden, and his self-confessed resistance to being plunged again into the state of holy matrimony—suddenly everything added up, made sense.
She was a small detour in the course of his life. That was all. He was a duke with lands stretching hundreds of miles in every direction and a shipping fleet that plied the world.
He was not for her.
Would never be for her.
She reached into her pocket for the shell she had collected and wished that she could find the map and just go home.
He was drunk.
He knew he was by the way the portrait of Melanie that he sat in front of swam in and out of focus. He hated this painting. Hated the sheer memory of it. A brutal reminder of all that he had lost.
He should not have kissed Emma Seaton. Not like that. Not with the raging want in his blood and the sure damned knowledge of duplicity in his head. She was not as she said she was. She was a liar and a would-be thief. She was dangerous to his family. To him. To the world he had spun around himself ever since he had returned home, a slim wedge against chaos. He should kick her out, right now, before the calmer shifts of reason took hold and her turquoise eyes reeled him in like the sirens of Circe, haunting, familiar and undeniably false.
And yet he couldn’t. He couldn’t. He sighed and leant his head back against the wall wondering just why it was that he couldn’t. Not just the warm willingness of her body or the sharp raw hit of lust that had floored him when her lips had met his. No, there was something else too. Something he had felt unexpectedly as he had held her on the beach against him. Something close and safe and right. Something that took away the cold for ever etched into his very bones and left a question of possibility.
‘I thought that I might find you here. And drinking.’ The heavy censure in Taris’s words jarred his thoughts and Asher closed his eyes against it. Tonight his more usual reserve was lost under the fiery belly of too much whisky.
‘When I was with Emma Seaton today…I forgot Melanie. For just one moment…I forgot her.’
He felt the stillness of his brother rather than saw it, but he was strangely relieved by the confession. Saying the words lessened the strength of them. Tonight he needed absolution.
‘She is a beautiful woman, Asher, and Melanie has been dead for over three years. Why should you not admire her?’
‘Because she’s a liar. Because she was here the other night. Right here. Dressed as a boy. And because I think she and Liam Kingston are one and the same.’
‘Lucinda’s knight in shining armour? The one who bested Stephen Eaton? Lady Emma?’
‘She has a tattoo on the soft skin of her right breast.’
‘A tattoo?’ Intrigue was plain in his brother’s question.
‘Of a butterfly. Done in blue.’
Taris began to laugh.
‘I want her to stay here. At Falder. I want to protect her…’
The laughter abruptly stopped.
‘Someone has hurt her,’ Asher continued and stood, tripping over a low stool in front of him as he did so and veering towards the wall. Leaning against it, he was pleased to regain his balance. ‘And she’s frightened. I can see it in her eyes…sometimes…often…and I can hear it in her voice.’
A clock chimed in the next room and Asher counted the hours. Three o’clock. Two more hours till the dawn and the promise of sleep. Tonight it was all he could do to keep from closing his eyes and let slumber overtake him.
But he mustn’t.
He knew he mustn’t. Not until the dawn when the voices were softer and memory did not cut his equilibrium to the quick.
He slid down the wall, his knees drawn up before him. In defeat. The stubs of his severed fingers rested against his knee and he brought them up into his vision as if seeing them for the first time.
‘Sometimes I can feel these fingers…ghost fingers touching things, feeling things. I used to think they’d gone to the place where Melanie was, a little part of me waiting with her till the rest could follow…and now…I don’t want to follow them.’ As he leant his head back, his eyes went to the uncurtained window, where he could see only an unbroken darkness and he hated the lack of control he could hear in his voice.
‘Melanie would have wanted you to be happy again. Laugh again. Feel again.’
‘Would she?’ He stroked his finger down the thin crystal stem of his glass and almost laughed. ‘I remember once in Scotland when she nearly fell into a raging river and I caught her and pulled her back. She said that if anything ever happened to me, she would be sad for ever. For ever. Such a long time…for ever.’
Taris was quiet. Asher noticed he had removed his glasses and put them into his pocket. Seeing with memory. All that his brother was left with now. Sometimes he hated Beau Sandford with such a passion that it worried him. The smarting scars across his back. Taris’s loss of sight. Even in death the pirate haunted him.
‘Go to sleep, Taris. I will be all right.’
‘I could stay…’
‘No.’
He was pleased when his brother left him to his familiar demons.
Emerald strolled back towards Falder after an early