LITMIR.BIZ

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her.

      She hated the way her chin wobbled as the strength that she always kept hold of broke into shattering sobs, but she could stop nothing.

      It was over. Her life here was over and she could not even begin to imagine what she was going to do next.

      The clock on the mantel marked the passing of silence as Asher watched her from above, her scar-traced hands linked across the pillow. Ruined hands like his own.

      They had both been ruined by circumstance.

      The thought knocked the breath from him. He had spent five days listening to her rambling memories of childhood. Memories no one should have, memories fractured by madness and drink and death and dissolved into…what?

      Blowing out the candles, he sat in the dark and when her breathing shallowed out he was glad. Looking down at the nightgown her aunt had carefully dressed her in, he noticed things he had not seen before.

      The frail thinness of her bones and the way her hair curled beneath the fragile lobes of her ears.

      God. Emerald Sandford. He should be furious. More than furious. His mind went back five years to the sea battle off the Turks Island Passage and he remembered other things. The soft feel of her lips against the nub of his thumb, the laughing turquoise eyes, the warmth of the day and the cold of the sea. He frowned. He had drawn back from the fight the moment he knew her to be a girl, and as he had dropped his guard she had retaliated with the hard edge of her sword and flipped him over the side.

      Down into the cold of an angry sea where he had caught hold of the barrel she had thrown in after him, the roar of her father’s anger loud on the air. Closing his eyes, he remembered other things. The circling sharks and a blood-red boiling sea. Thirty sailors on his ship and ten had survived.

      Ten. He swore. Six by the time they had reached the coast and then only himself after a year in the pirates’ compound.

      Emerald Sandford.

      Lord. His eyes ran across her full bottom lip and he laced his fingers together to stop himself from touching.

      He wanted to shake her and he wanted to climb in beside her and hold her against the demons of her past. But he couldn’t.

      ‘I love you.’ How many times had she said it? Would say it? The hollow shaft of memory held him bound by doubt.

      As he let himself out of the room, he hated both her fragility and his intransigence.

      She had lied, had continued to lie, her motivation based solely on the greed of treasure. Swearing, he walked down the hallway and out on to the balcony, relieved to feel the air on his face. Fresh. Clear. Cold. How long did it take for the sharp prick of vengeance to fade into a lesser ache? A quieter loss?

      For ever, he decided, and felt a bone-deep shiver of guilt.

      Emerald regained full consciousness just before the morning and lay very still, not wanting to waken the servant who sat dozing in a chair to one side of the bed.

      Everything ached, but the mist that had consumed her was lessened.

      They knew now. Knew who she was, knew who she had been. Asher. His mother. Taris. Lucinda. Her eyes fell to her hands. Gloveless. Exposed. Like she was. The scars red against the white of the sheet. She didn’t even curl them up to hide them but turned her head to the window and watched the first pink blush of dawn on the high clouds outside.

      Thus far she was safe. They had not taken her to Newgate. Or sent her to the poorhouse. No, she was still at Falder. In her room.

      A portrait of Asher graced the far wall, his eyes watching with velvet gravity and their unexpected dance of gold. Behind him the house was caught in the last rays of a summer sun, the ocean sparkling to his left.

      Falder.

      As much as she might have liked to, she didn’t belong here—she was a dangerous interloper from another world. A harsher world where the price of a life was measured in less than honour and where integrity and tradition were words other people used. I love you. She had said it again last night and wished that she hadn’t even as the door opened and he walked in.

      He had been riding. His clothes were splattered with dust and when he shut the door behind the departing servant she smiled. His manners were far better than her own. Another difference.

      ‘I think we should talk.’

      She nodded and looked directly at him. Beneath the façade of politeness she glimpsed a steely anger, held in check.

      ‘You are Emerald Sandford, are you not?’

      She nodded.

      ‘Beau Sandford’s daughter?’

      Again she nodded.

      ‘Who was it that taught you to fight?’

      ‘My father. Azziz. Toro. Anyone with a bit of time to waste between watches on the Mariposa.’

      ‘It was you on the boat, then? The girl who hit me?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘If you had stayed aboard, my father would have killed you. There were fifty men from the Mariposa and less than a dozen still fighting from the Caroline.’ She stopped and looked away. ‘He always killed those who were left and I thought, since you had given me a chance, that I should return the favour.’

      ‘The favour?’ Anger resonated around the room. ‘The favour? Better to have lopped my head off then and there than the slow death you sentenced me to.’

      ‘I did not know—’

      He didn’t let her finish.

      ‘You are a pirate, Emerald.’ The name came from his lips as if he did not even like the sound of it. ‘You have killed people for your own gain.’

      The horror in his words was palpable and, turning her head, she faced him, squarely. The past was the past and she could not change it. ‘Believe what you will of me. I came here only for the map.’ Her words were flat and she hated the sound of defeat in them, but she had no more to fight with.

      ‘And that is all you want from me? Nothing else?’

      Question quivered between them.

      I want you to love me. I want you to take me in your arms and hold me safe. For ever.

      She almost said it, but at the last second pinched the underside of her left arm to stop herself. When she looked down the red crescent left by her nail on the skin was easily noticeable.

      ‘The map,’ she repeated with more conviction this time, ‘is all that I want from you.’

      He nodded and stood, hands in the pocket of his coat and feet apart, as a sailor might have stood on the deck in a storm. Distant. Lonely. Distracted. ‘I have instructed everyone here to keep the secret of your identity. For the moment you are safe. But when you feel better, I would rather that you did not venture outside this room without somebody at your side.’

      ‘Because you feel I might be a risk to your family?’ A hollow ache pierced her as he looked up and the blank indifference in his eyes broke her heart.

      ‘I will provide passage to Jamaica for you when you want it. On my ship out of Thornfield.’

      She could only nod this time, the thick sadness in her throat rendering speech difficult.

      ‘And if you should need money—’

      She stopped him. ‘No. Just the map.’

      As he turned for the door, the dizzy whorl of relief hit her. Another moment and she would have caught at his hand and begged him for even the scraps of love.

      Like. Friendship. Esteem.

      Even they might have been enough.

      Outside Asher laid his head

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