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A Most Unsuitable Groom
Kasey Michaels


BEWARE THE BRIDEGROOM… Hot-blooded Spencer Becket went off to war in America, full of passion and young ideals, only to return older, wiser and with part of his memory missing. BEWARE THE BRIDE… Fiery Mariah Rutledge arrived at Becket Hall one stormy night, heavy with child and more than willing to refresh Spencer's lost memory.BEWARE THE BATTLE…Forced to the altar, Spencer and Mariah have little time to explore their attraction before they uncover a plot to restore the recently vanquished Napoleon to power in a most unusual –and deadly –way.Bound by the secrets that keep the Beckets safe from harm, Spencer and Mariah must battle the world and their own devils in order to prevent a tragedy…but what will be the price of their victory?









KASEY

MICHAELS

A Most Unsuitable Groom








To Daniel Edward Seidick

Welcome to the world, Danny!




CONTENTS


BECKET HALL, ROMNEY MARSH

MORAVIANTOWN

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

EPILOGUE




BECKET HALL, ROMNEY MARSH


August 1813

AINSLEY BECKET sighed, then removed the spectacles he’d lately found necessary for reading and tossed both them and the letter on the desktop. “Well, I’ll say this for the boy. They didn’t execute him.”

“Execute him? Our Spencer? Our so mild, even-tempered Spencer committed a hanging offense? Imagine that. I know I can.” Courtland Becket reached for the letter that had taken several months to arrive at Becket Hall, most of them, judging from the condition of the single page, spent being walked to Romney Marsh stuck to the bottom of someone’s boot. “What did he do, get caught bedding the General’s wife?”

“If it were only that simple,” Ainsley said, getting to his feet to walk over to the large table where he kept a collection of maps he consulted almost daily, tracking the English wars with both Bonaparte and the Americans. “He’s in some benighted spot called Brownstown, or he was when that letter was written, nearly five months ago. From reports I’ve read in the London papers, if he’s still there he’s in the thick of considerable trouble.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Courtland swore quietly, scanning the single page, attempting to decipher Spencer’s crabbed handwriting and then read the words out loud, as their friend Jacko was also in the room. “‘Forgive my tardiness in replying to your letters, but I have been incarcerated for the past six weeks, courtesy of our fine General Proctor. Allow me to explain. Against all reason, Proctor left only our Indian allies to guard several dozen American wounded we’d been forced to leave behind at the River Raisin after what had been an easy victory for us. I was sent back a few days later to retrieve them, only to discover that the Indians had executed every one of them. Hacked the poor bastards to pieces, actually. You, I’m sure, know what this means. There will be no stopping the Americans once they learn what happened. And that’s the hell we face now. How do you fight an enemy that’s out to seek revenge for a massacre? They’ll fight to the last man, sure that to surrender means we’d turn them over to be summarily killed.’”

“The boy’s right,” Jacko said from his seat on the couch. “When it’s kill or be killed, a man can fight past the point of reason. Now tell me what our own brave soldier did that should have gotten him executed.”

“I’m getting to it now, I believe.” Courtland looked down at the letter once more, turning the page on its end in order to read the crossed lines. “‘I returned to our headquarters once I’d seen the bodies, walked straight into Proctor’s office and knocked him off his chair. I should have been hanged, I suppose, and it would have been worth it to see Proctor’s bloodied nose. But Chief Tecumseh, the head of all the Five Nations, agreed that this mistake could cost us heavily in the long run, and Proctor settled for stripping me of my rank and throwing me into a cell on starvation rations. Now I’m assistant liaison to Tecumseh—Proctor considers that a punishment—and I don’t like the way the Chief is being treated. Mostly, I don’t like that he’s smart enough to see through Proctor, which could end with a lot of English scalps hanging from lodge poles. In truth, I have more respect for these natives, who at least know why they’re fighting. And, yes, thinking fondly of my own scalp, I have been careful to be very friendly and helpful to Tecumseh. Rather him than Proctor.’”

“I don’t see a career in the Army for that boy, Cap’n,” Jacko said, winking at Ainsley, who had returned to sit behind his desk once more.

“Spencer hasn’t the temperament to suffer fools gladly, I agree. Truthfully, I’m surprised he only bloodied the man’s nose.”

“And, for all we know, Spence is still squarely in the thick of the fighting,” Courtland said, picking up his wineglass. “This Tecumseh might leave the English, leave Spencer, to their fate. Or, yes, turn on them, kill them. No matter what, I can’t believe nothing’s happened since Spencer wrote this letter. But what?”

“Exactly,” Ainsley said as he stood up and quickly quit the room.

“He’ll be walking the floors every night again until we hear from Spencer, searching the newspapers for casualties in the 51st Foot,” Courtland said, taking up Ainsley’s seat. “Damn my brother for wanting to be a hero.”

“A hero? Spencer? No, Court, not a hero. A man. Spencer wanted to be his own man, not just son to the Cap’n or brother to you and Chance and Rian. Time the rest of you figured that out. Ah, I feel so old, Court. How I long for the feel of a rolling deck beneath my feet, just one more time. Running with the wind, the Cap’n barking out orders and the promise of sweet booty at the end of a sweeter battle. I envy our young soldier that, at the least. I never planned to die in my bed. Yes, bucko, land or sea, I envy Spencer the battle.”




MORAVIANTOWN


October 1813

TO DIE, TO DIE very soon, seemed inevitable. To die for stupidity, for incompetence, was unforgivable. He should have done more than bloody the man’s nose.

Spencer Becket stood half-hidden behind a large tree, waiting for the Americans. He didn’t look much like a soldier in the King’s Army, having divested himself of his bright uniform jacket in favor of an inconspicuous buckskin jacket that had been a gift from Tecumseh himself—not because the man loved him, but so Spencer wouldn’t stand out like a sore thumb, making himself an easy target.

To his immediate left stood the skinny-shanked Clovis Meechum, who still liked to consider himself Spencer’s batman, even though Spencer had long since lost his rank and was now nothing more than another highly disposable infantryman like Clovis and his constant companion, the Irishman, Anguish Nulty. They still wore their uniform jackets, but the material was so filthy as to be nearly colorless.

Behind the three soldiers, melted into the trees, were Tecumseh and his warriors.

All of them were waiting for the Americans. Waiting to die.

“They’ll be coming up on us soon, Lieutenant?” Clovis asked quietly, fiddling with his powder horn. “We’ll turn ’em back?”

Spencer went down on his haunches to look straight into Clovis’s eyes, not bothering to remind him that he was a lieutenant no longer. Clovis made his own distinctions. “No, my friend, we won’t turn them back. But perhaps we’ll slow them down, give the civilians a chance to put some more distance between themselves and the main American force. Are you prepared to die today, Clovis?”

“No, sir, I don’t think so, at least not today. How about you, Anguish? You ready to cock up your toes for king and country?”

The Irishman scratched beneath his thatch of filthy, overlong hair. “And that I’m not, Clovis. It’s still longing to see this Becket Hall I am, what we’ve heard so much about. Sturdy stone walls, a warm fire at my feet, the Channel to m’back and nothing but nothing to do today and nothing more’n that to do again tomorrow.”

Spencer smiled, showing even white teeth in an otherwise deeply tanned and dirty face. He looked a rare hooligan, as Anguish had been so bold as to inform him, his thick black hair grown uncared for and much too long—releasing fat, waving curls, Clovis had added, that would be the envy of any female. “You forgot to mention the mug of ale at your right hand, Anguish.”

“That, too, sir,” Anguish agreed. “I’ll be sorry to miss it, that I will.”

“Then let’s be sure we don’t end our days here, all right?” Spencer stood up and looked across the river to the other bank once more. He was so tired. They’d abandoned Detroit, the soldiers and more than ten thousand men, women and children with all their belongings, all of them heading for the safety of the western part of Upper Canada before the worst of the winter arrived.

But they’d left their retreat too late, and the Americans were catching up to them. Spencer could already taste the bile of defeat at the back of his throat. Tecumseh’s idea was a good one—fighting with the swamp to their backs while the English forces pushed the Americans back to the river—but any hope of outflanking the Americans was just that, a hope.

“Here they come, Lieutenant. It’s been grand knowin’ you.”

Even as Clovis spoke, Spencer felt the earth begin to tremble beneath him, signaling the imminent arrival of the American cavalry. Above the rumble of hooves pounding against the earth, the battle cry “Remember the Raisin!” rolled through the air.

And then hell and all its fury came straight at them, and there was no more time to think.

Anguish went down, but Spencer couldn’t stop to examine the man’s wound. There wasn’t even time to curse Proctor, as he saw the man commandeer a wagon and drive off with his family, leaving the troops to raise the white flag.

With Clovis standing at his back, Spencer tried to load his rifle one last time, only to discover that he was out of powder. Spencer threw the weapon at the American running toward him, bayonet fixed to his own rifle, then ducked as Clovis’s knife found the man’s throat…but not before the bayonet had sunk deep in Spencer’s left shoulder.

“Sir!”

“I’m fine,” Spencer shouted, pushing Clovis away from him. “Our troops have surrendered, but there will be no surrender for the Indians. No surrender, no quarter. We have to get clear of here if we hope to save ourselves.”

“But the women, sir,” Clovis shouted back at him, pointing to the near-constant stream of English women and children, and Indian squaws and their children, all of them running blindly, terrified, racing deeper into the swamp.

“Hell’s bells, what a disaster!” Spencer pressed his hand to his shoulder, felt his blood hot and wet against his fingers. The pain hadn’t hit him yet, but he knew it would soon, unless he was dead before that could happen. “Where’s Tecumseh? Is he dead?”

“No, sir,” Clovis said, pointing. “There! Over there!”

Even now, the chief was ordering some of his warriors to their left, to fill a breach before the Americans could take advantage of it. And then he seemed to pause, take a deep breath and look to where Spencer stood. Slowly, he moved his arm away from his body, revealing a terrible wound in his chest.

“Christ, no!” Spencer shouted above the din, knowing that if Tecumseh fell, the Five Nations would all fall with him; the battle lost, the coalition broken. “We’ve got to get him out of here! Clovis! With me!”

But Clovis had slipped to his knees in the deepening mud and, when Spencer bent to pull him upright, he felt the sting of a bullet entering his thigh. Falling now, he never felt the fiercely swung rifle butt that connected heavily with the side of his skull….



“SIR? LIEUTENANT BECKET, sir? Sir?”

Spencer awoke all at once, his mind telling him to get up, get up, find Tecumseh and carry him away. But when he lifted his head the pain hit, the nausea, and he fell back down on the ground, defeated.

“Get him away…we can’t let them see…leave me…must get Tecumseh away…”

“He’s gone, sir,” Clovis said, pushing Spencer back as he once again tried to rise. “Dead and gone, sir, and has been for more’n week. They’re all gone, melting away into the trees like ghosts, even leaving some of their women behind to make their own way to wherever it is they’ve gone. It’s just us now. Us and poor Anguish and some others. Women and children who hid or were lost until the Americans took off again. They left us all for dead, but you’re not dying, thank God. You just lay still and I’ll fetch you some water. Water’s something we have plenty of. Cold and fresh.”

Spencer lay with his eyes closed, trying to assimilate all that Clovis had told him. Clovis was alive? Anguish was alive? Tecumseh…the great chief was dead? Damn, what a waste. He opened his eyes, wincing at the bright sunlight that filtered down through tall trees, their leaves already turning with the colder weather.

He moved his right hand along the ground, realized that he was lying on a blanket, realized when he tried to move his left arm that it was in a sling. He moved his legs, wincing as he tried to stretch out the right one. His head pounded, but he was alive and supposedly would recover.

But where was he? Still in the swamp? Yes, of course, still in the swamp. Where else would he be? A week? Clovis had a said week, hadn’t he?

“Here you go, sir,” Clovis said, holding out a silver flask as he raised Spencer’s head. “Don’t go smiling now, because it’s water I’m giving you. We used up the last of the good stuff on Anguish before we cut his arm off. Cried like a baby, he did, but that was the drink. He wouldn’t have made a sound, elsewise. Now hush, sir. It’s herself, come to look at you.”

“So he’s finally awake. Very good, Clovis.”

Spencer looked up toward the sun once more to see the outline of a woman standing over him, her long, wild hair the color of fire in the sunlight. A woman? But wasn’t that the scarlet coat of a soldier she was wearing? Nothing was making sense to him. Was she real? He didn’t think she was real. “An angel?”

“Not so you’d know it, sir,” Clovis whispered close to Spencer’s ear. “One of the women, sir. She’s been nursing your fever all the week long. Her and her Indian woman. They’re stuck here with us and she’s, well, sir, she’s the sort what takes charge, if you take my meaning. Other women are camped here with us, children, too, who hid out until the Americans left. We’ve been living off the dead, which is where I found the flask and blankets, but not much food. We’ve only three rifles betwixt us, and not much ammunition anyway. It’s a mess we’re in, Lieutenant, an unholy mess.”

Blinking, Spencer tried to make out the woman’s features, but now there seemed to be two of her, neither one of her standing still long enough for him to get a good look, damn her. “English?”

“You’re not a prisoner, if that’s the answer you’re hoping for,” the woman said, her accent pure, educated. “We’ll give him another day, Clovis, and then we have to be on the move north. Onatah says we’ll have snow within a fortnight, and we can’t just stay here and freeze as well as starve, not for one failed lieutenant. As it is, it will take us at least that fortnight to get to civilization. We’ll make a litter, and we’ll simply have to take turns dragging him.”

Then she was gone, and Spencer squeezed his eyes closed as the sun hit him full in the face. “You’re right, Clovis. Not an angel,” he said weakly, and then passed out once more.




CHAPTER ONE


Becket Hall

June 1814

“CAN YOU SMELL IT, Spencer? There’s a considerable storm churning somewhere out there. I imagine Courtland will have noticed, and won’t bring the Respite back from Hastings until it passes. That’s unfortunate. I was hoping to hear any war news he and Jack may have picked up while visiting my banker.” Ainsley Becket turned away from the open window overlooking the increasingly angry Channel to look at his son. “How’s the shoulder? Does it still pain you when a storm’s on its way?”

Spencer shook his head and returned to his glass of canary. Well, Ainsley had slipped that question in neatly, hadn’t he? “No, sir. If it did, I wouldn’t tell you. Because then you’d tell Odette and she’d be after me again with her damn feathers and potions. I’m fine, Papa. Truly.”

“And bored,” Ainsley said, seating himself behind his desk. “You won’t be leaving us again, will you, now that you’re recovered? Or should I refrain from mentioning that Jacko has compared you to a lion incessantly pacing in its cage? All that seems missing is the growl, but I doubt that will be the case for long.”

Spencer avoided Ainsley’s intense eyes, pretended to ignore the inquisitive tilt of the man’s head. He knew he was being weighed, judged. Even goaded. Quite the devious fellow, Ainsley Becket, for how smoothly he poked at a person. That was the trick with his papa—don’t trust the smile, don’t pay attention to the mild tone. Watch the eyes.

“No, I’m not leaving, Papa. I’ve had enough of Canada for one thing and now that Bonaparte has abdicated there’s nowhere else to go, no one else left to fight. I’ll just sit here and rust like everyone else, I suppose.”

“And the headaches?”

“Sweet Christ!” Spencer leaped to his feet and began to pace. So much for trying to keep himself in check. He remembered Jacko’s comparison and quickly stopped pacing, ordered his temper back under control. “I told you, I’m fine. Fully recovered, I promise.”

Ainsley kept pushing. “So you remember now? How you got to Montreal, how you were loaded on a boat and then onto the ship that brought you back to us? You remember more than being in the battle and then being at sea? You remember more than either Clovis or Anguish has told you?”

Spencer stabbed his fingers into his hair and squeezed at the top of his skull with his fingertips until he felt pain. “No, damn it, I haven’t. Odette says the good loas kindly took away my memory of those weeks, so that I don’t recall the pain. Loa protecting me or not, I got a whacking great bang on the head, that’s all. And I’m damned tired of being treated like an invalid.”

“And you’re bored,” Ainsley repeated, palming a brass paperweight as he continued to look at Spencer, the man who had once been a defiant orphaned boy of hot Spanish blood, wandering the streets of Port-au-Prince, barefoot and close to starving, yet ready to spit in the eye of anyone who looked at him crookedly. Ainsley had been forced to stuff him in a sack to keep the boy from biting him as he took him to the island and handed him over to Odette and Isabella’s tender mercies, the seventh of the orphans Ainsley had felt it necessary to take on to ease his increasingly uneasy conscience over the life he’d chosen. He’d named the boy Spencer, in memory of the sailor they’d lost overboard on their most recent run.

Within months of his joining them, they’d fled the island, Spencer still mostly wild, a wildness that had never really left him. What a long way they’d come. How little he still knew about his adopted son. The timing had been wrong. He’d brought Spencer into his world only months before he had wished himself out of it, and Spencer had been left mostly to his own devices for the past sixteen years.

“Spencer? You can say it. I do understand.”

“Then, yes, damn it, I’m bored! How do you bear it, living here, day after day after day, year after year after year? At least when the Black Ghost rode out, there was something to break the monotony. I’d almost welcome the Red Men Gang back to threaten us, just for the excuse to ride out, bang a few heads together.”

“There will be no more smuggling from these shores, Spencer, and therefore no need for the Black Ghost to ride out to protect our people. With Napoléon contained, the government is able to use its ships to set up a blockade all along the coast. Smuggling has become much too dangerous an enterprise. And I won’t commit the Respite again. It’s too risky for us.”

Spencer knew they were getting into dangerous territory now, and spoke carefully. “Not everyone in this part of the Marsh is willing to give up the life.”

“I’m aware of that. But we took more than a few chances these past few years, and I don’t believe in pushing our luck, so those who persist in making runs will have to do so without the protection of the Black Ghost.”

Spencer kept his gaze steady on his father. “A few of the younger men are restless, confined here the way they are. They want their turn outrunning the Waterguard. They want their own adventure.”

Ainsley steepled his long-fingered hands beneath his chin as he looked at his son. “You had yourself an adventure, Spencer. Killed your share of men, watched friends die. Do you really long for another such adventure?”

“You coming, Spence?”

Spencer turned his head to see that his brother Rian had poked his head inside the room. “Oh, right. I forgot the time,” he said gratefully, getting to his feet, careful to look Ainsley full in the eyes as he added, “If you’ll excuse me? A few of us are meeting at The Last Voyage. Would you care to join us?”

Ainsley smiled, shook his head in the negative, just as Spencer had known he would—or he wouldn’t have invited him. Not this evening. “No, thank you, I think not. And watch for the storm. You wouldn’t want to get stranded in the village for the night.”

“Because to walk home along the beach in the rain might serve to melt me.”

“Probably not, but neither of us really needs to have Odette ringing a peal over our heads about her poor injured bird, now do we?”

Spencer grinned. “It’s gratifying to know I’m not the only one afraid of Odette’s mighty wrath. I promise you again, I’m fine, completely healed,” Spencer said, sighing. “Good night, Papa. I’ll see you tomorrow. And the day after that, and the day after that…”

Spencer motioned for Rian to precede him into the hallway, and then the two brothers sought out woolen cloaks and made for the front door, hoping to avoid Jacko and anyone else who might ask where they were going. “You saved me there, you know. Papa was being his usual self, asking questions for which I have no answers.”

“You can thank me later. They’re probably all waiting for us now,” Rian told him, donning his cloak with a flourish that seemed to come naturally to the almost poetically handsome young Irishman, with his riot of black curls and clear green eyes, the almost feminine, soft curve of his cheek. Less than two years Spencer’s junior, he seemed so very much younger…possibly only because he was so damned inconveniently pretty. He needed a few scars; that’s what Rian needed, if he was ever going to convince anyone he was a man, even at the ripe old age of twenty-five.

“Good. If we can all agree tonight, the Black Ghost will soon be riding again,” Spencer said, stepping onto the wide stone landing, pausing only to look out over the endless flat land that was Romney Marsh. On a clear day a man could see for miles, see distant church spires taller than any tree, as the few trees that grew here could only rise so high before being bent over by the ever constant wind from the Channel.

This place was so different from the North American continent with all its tall trees, rolling hills, rushing cold, clean waters and bluer-than-blue skies. Romney Marsh was stark, not green.

Spencer had lied to Ainsley. He did miss America. It was an old land and yet also new; young and raw and vibrant. When Tecumseh had spoken of his land, he had made Spencer see it through his eyes. An all-glorious land of bounty and promise. And freedom. Maybe he would go back some day. Not to fight, but to explore, to find his place. Because much as he’d tried, as much as he’d attempted to conquer his discontent, his place wasn’t here at Becket Hall. That Ainsley knew this concerned Spencer, but he knew his father would not stop him when it came time to leave.

Rian hefted the lantern they’d need to guide them along the path to Becket Village. “Spence? They’re all waiting on us. You looking or moving?”

He shook himself back to attention just as the skies opened up and the dark night turned extremely wet in an instant. “Right. Sorry. Rian? Do you think Papa knows what we’re up to?”

His brother involuntarily backed up a pace, nearly tripping down the steps. “Knows we’re planning some freetrading across the Channel? Please God, no. Why would you ask that?”

Spencer pulled the hood of his cloak up over his already drenched head as they headed down the stone steps. “No reason. We were having a conversation just before you came to get me, that’s all. I’m imagining things.”

“But Papa does have this way about him,” Rian said and then sighed. “He never goes anywhere, never does anything, and yet he seems to know everything. Spence? Damn this rain. Look out there, see if you see what I think I see. Is that a coach heading this way? By God, it is. Spence?”

Instantly on the alert, for visitors were rare at Becket Hall and never arrived uninvited, Spencer motioned for Rian to go alert their father as he watched the coach lurch to a halt and a groom hop down to open the door and let down the steps.

He squinted through the dark and the slashing rain, watching as a female form emerged from the doorway, holding tight to the groom’s hand as she stepped to the ground, a small moan quickly cut off as she thanked the servant.

Now what? You don’t turn away a woman, not late at night, not in the middle of a growing storm that could last for days. But who the hell was she, and why was she here? Was she alone?

That unspoken question was answered when the groom shut the door without anyone else having stuck his or her head out the doorway.

The groom looked good only for hanging on to and probably would have let the woman stand there until she drowned in the downpour, so Spencer advanced until he was in her line of sight, such as it was on this starless, moonless night. “Good evening, madam. Lost your way on the Marsh? This is Becket Hall.”

Her head lowered, the woman replied crisply, “What a happy coincidence. I fully intended to be at Becket Hall, albeit much earlier in the evening. Do you make it a point to keep visitors out in the rain, sir?”

“A thousand apologies, madam,” he said, gesturing with his left arm that she should walk ahead of him, climb to where Rian now stood in the open doorway, light spilling out onto the wide stone porch.

He followed her up the steps, the newly supplied light not quite bright enough for him to be able to inspect and perhaps admire the woman’s ankles as she lifted her gown and cloak in order to navigate those steps. Pity. He hadn’t been with a woman in a long time. Long enough to have forgotten both the time and the woman.

He shook his head, trying to clear it. He had to start thinking like a Becket, and a Becket would be calculating how dangerous this unexpected visitor could prove to be, not hoping for a glimpse of shapely ankle.

“Ma’am,” Rian said, bowing slightly to the hooded figure that brushed past him as he looked to Spencer, his expressive eyebrows raised. “Yes, of course, ma’am, please do come in,” he ended, the woman having already disappeared into the house. “Spence? Who in hell—?”

“Did you alert Papa?”

“I did. He’d just gone up to his bedchamber. He’s throwing on a jacket and will be down directly. Spence?”

“Good, he can handle our unexpected guest. I have no bloody idea who she is,” he told his brother as he shrugged out of his sopping cloak, looking toward the woman who had her back to him as she surveyed the large entry hall.

As she lifted her head the hood of her cloak fell back and Spencer looked hard for a moment, then squeezed his eyes shut as a memory flashed into his mind. Sunlight. A halo of golden red fire. And a voice. We can’t just stay here and freeze as well as starve, not for one failed lieutenant.

He shook his suddenly aching head and opened his eyes again to see that the woman had turned around and was looking at him now. God. Hair the color of golden fire was only the beginning. Her green eyes were those of an imp of the devil, tilted up at the edges and penetrating as a pitchfork to the gullet. Her full lips were slightly parted over straight white teeth; her skin was the color of fresh cream. With her masses of wavy, disheveled hair, she looked like a woman who would bed well. A passionate woman. One who might even bite…

And then she shrugged out of her cloak, allowing it to drop to the floor, which exposed an out-of-fashion plain gray gown and the fact that she was—good God, the woman was pregnant.

“As you can see, Lieutenant, I don’t arrive alone,” she said just as Ainsley Becket descended the last step to the marble floor. “Congratulations, sir,” she added, her green gaze fastened on Spencer. “It’s possible the coach ride from Dover so soon after my sea journey may have been ill-advised. I do believe, Lieutenant, that you’re about…to…to become a father.”

Spencer opened his mouth to hotly deny her ridiculous accusation. But his words were cut off when the woman swayed like a sapling in a breeze, then gracefully collapsed into Ainsley’s waiting arms.

“Rian, you help me get her into the drawing room. Summon Odette, Spencer,” Ainsley ordered tightly. “Spencer. Now.”




CHAPTER TWO


SHE WAS LYING on a couch now, in a large, splendidly appointed room. How lovely, after so much time at sea and then in that terribly sprung coach, to be somewhere that didn’t move. “Thank you…thank you, sir. I’m fine now, really. Perhaps I’d…I’d simply over-reacted. The jarring of the coach, you understand. I must apologize. I’m not by nature a blatantly dramatic person and hadn’t planned quite so intense an entrance.” She then quickly placed her hands on her swollen belly in surprise as another pain gripped her. “Oh.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Spencer said, fairly skidding into the drawing room after flagging down Anguish in the hallway and sending him to fetch Odette. “She’s really giving birth?”

She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Oh, dear. I had hoped for at least some small modicum of intelligence from the man. For the child’s sake, you understand,” she said, looking at Ainsley. “I…I should introduce myself, shouldn’t I? My name is Mariah Rutledge. I, um, I met Spencer in America.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Miss Rutledge. I am Ainsley Becket.”

“Would someone be so kind as to go out to dismiss the coach and bring in my maid, Mr. Becket? Her name is Onatah. And she won’t scalp any of you, I promise, which is something I had to swear to those idiots whose coach I hired. If you’re nice to me she won’t, that is.”

Rian grinned at Spencer. “Onatah? Is that an Indian name, Spence? Did she bring a red Indian with her from America? Yes, of course she did. Oh, this is beyond splendid. Except for you, I imagine. Sorry,” he added quickly, losing his smile as Spencer all but growled at him. “You stay here. Let me go get her. Yes? Well, I’m off, in any event.”

Spencer advanced on the couch, to get a better look at the woman. No, he didn’t recognize her. Just the hair. Just that voice, a little low, faintly husky, the disdain in it flicking hard at his memory. “Miss…Rutledge, you said?”

She looked up at him, then returned her gaze to the older man, attempting to sort out the people in the room with her. His father? No, she saw no resemblance. “He truly doesn’t remember me, does he?” she asked, pushing herself up slightly against the pillows now that the pain had eased.

“I don’t think so, no,” Ainsley told her kindly. “He has no memory of anything between his last battle and being at sea, on his way back to us. Where, may I ask, did you two meet?”

“Actually, sir,” Mariah said, embarrassed but truthful, “we were never formally introduced.”

“I tried to bring her but she—Miss Rutledge? Here? Our Sainted Lady of the Swamp? Oh, now and isn’t this a fine kettle we’ve got boilin’ now.”

Spencer wheeled about to see Anguish standing just inside the door, his ruddy Irish complexion gone white. “You recognize her, Anguish? And where’s Odette?”

“I was just about to say, sir. She was all dressed, Lieutenant, and waitin’ on me, but still at her heathen altar, prayin’ and such, and won’t budge until she’s done. That’s what I came to tell you. It’s knowin’I was comin’ for her that chills my marrow,” Anguish said, his bug-eyed stare still riveted on Mariah Rutledge, who had wrapped her arms around her belly once more. “Is she…is she…oh, Lord God, she is! Crikey, and her woman’s here, too? Ah, the sight of that takes me back to where I don’t want to go no more, lessen it’s to visit my poor arm, because at least my arm I miss seein’.”

Anguish stepped back sprightly as the latest addition to this insane farce entered the room behind Rian, who was grinning like the village idiot, as if he’d just brought home a Christmas surprise. The woman was small, thin, bent—wizened, Spencer supposed—with wrinkled skin the color of mahogany and black bean eyes that would give small children and many grown men nightmares. She wore a dark gingham dress over moccasins, her thick grey hair twisted into a single braid falling halfway down her back, a patterned wool blanket clutched tight around her shoulders by one heavily veined hand.

“Iroquois,” Spencer said quietly, recognizing the design on the blanket. “Bloody Iroquois.”

Onatah paused a moment in her advance, just long enough to say something gruff and pithy to him, before she moved on toward the couch.

“What did she say?” Rian asked excitedly. “Did you understand her? Do you know the language? God, Spence, this is magnificent. I never dreamed I’d ever see a real red Indian. Tell me, what did she say?”

Spencer’s jaw was set tight at an angle as he shook his head. “I hate to disabuse you, brother mine, but I’m not that familiar with the dialect. I spoke mostly to Tecumseh, who knew our language better than half the men living on this island. However, and only for your amusement, I do think I’ve just been called the fornicating son of a three-legged cur.”

“Oh, well, that’s understandable. I suppose. Ah, and here comes more trouble. I really should go wake Jacko and the girls. I shouldn’t be having all the fun.”

Odette shuffled into the room in her aged carpet slippers and one of Courtland’s old greatcoats over a rusty black gown, her wiry silver hair also hanging down her back in a single braid, her skin ebony to Onatah’s mahogany and only half as wrinkled. She stopped, took in the scene—her attention centered on the Indian for several tense seconds—and then walked over to Spencer.

“I was wrong,” she said sadly. “The good loa didn’t steal your memory. The bad loa took it, so that you would not know you’re to have a son. I only saw that in my bowl tonight, as she drew closer, too late to warn you. I ask your forgiveness for my failing.”

And then, surprising Spencer even more, Odette lifted her hand and slapped him hard across the cheek, her unexpected strength knocking him back on his heels.

“And what was that for?” he asked, holding a hand to his stinging flesh.

“For thinking the boy isn’t yours,” she told him. “Now, come, help get this girl upstairs. Your son wishes to be born tonight.”

Mariah was speaking quietly to Onatah, who had placed a hand on her mistress’s stomach, waiting for the next contraction. “They’ll stop now that I’m not in that coach, won’t they, Onatah? It’s too soon.”

“Babies come when they come,” Onatah pronounced with all the gravity of Moses tripping back down the mountain with stone tablets in his hands.

A gnarled black hand joined Onatah’s on Mariah’s belly, and Mariah blinked up into the kindest eyes she’d ever seen. “Foolish child, to hide the pains from your nurse. You’ve had them all day, since you first rose this morning. There is time yet, but not much. We will allow no harm to come to you or to Spencer’s son. Now come. Rise up, walk with us. And better you do it now, between the pains.”

“Onatah?” Mariah asked, feeling suddenly very young again, and quite frightened.

“Old women know best,” Onatah said and, between the two of them, Mariah was on her feet once more, being led toward the hallway.

She had taken only a few steps when she could feel the pain begin in the small of her back once more, long, strong fingers advancing around her hips to grip tightly against her lower belly. She’d had the pains since that morning, but not like this, not so intense, so frequent or lasting so long. “Ohhh,” she said, her knees buckling slightly. The hallway looked miles away, the tall, winding staircase a mountain she could not possibly climb.

“The devil with this!” Spencer exploded, storming across the room to take hold of Mariah’s arm and pull her toward him, then scoop her up in his arms. He turned toward the hallway. “Where? What room?”

“Yours, of course,” Ainsley said smoothly, motioning with a sweep of his arm that Spencer should carry Mariah up the stairs.

“No,” Spencer said flatly. “Morgan’s chamber.”

Mariah moaned again, her eyes shut tight. “If I had a pistol, I’d shoot you,” she told Spencer quietly. “Just put me somewhere—and then go away.”

“Go away, is it? Should have said that sooner,” Anguish whispered to no one in particular, unfortunately not that quietly. “Would have saved us all a boatload of bother.”

Spencer’s last sight of Rian as he carried Mariah toward the stairs was of his brother sliding down the wall, clutching his stomach as he laughed uproariously at the Irishman’s assessment of his brother’s predicament.

Mariah kept her eyes closed as Spencer carried her up the stairs, holding her breath against the pain of the contraction and the added pain she felt each time he jostled her as he climbed the stairs, not opening them again until she felt herself being laid on cool sheets.

When his arms left her, when he stood back from the bed, she felt curiously abandoned.

“When?” he asked her, his dark eyes boring into her. “Where?”

“What does it matter?” she asked in return. “Believe me, it was considerably less than unforgettable. Go away.”

“Do as she says,” Odette told him as the Indian woman stepped between them to begin stripping Mariah out of her clothing. “Go downstairs and fall into a bottle. It’s what men do. Women know what to do here.”

“But—” Spencer knew when he was beaten. “All right. But she and I have to talk. I have to understand how this happened.”

Odette’s white teeth flashed bright against her dark face. “Boy, I think you already know how. Now go.”

Spencer stomped out into the hallway to see Jacko standing there in baggy brown trousers, his nightshirt hanging over his large, tight belly and dropping all the way to his bare knees. The man’s eyes were fairly dancing. “Rian came to tell me your news. Congratulations, papa.”

Spencer spoke without thinking, because a wise man never gave Jacko an opening he could slip his tongue through. “I don’t even remember her.”

“You bedded what Rian tells me is a fine-looking woman and you don’t remember? Ah, bucko, there’s all kinds of hell, aren’t there? But I think you’ve managed to conjure up a new one.”

“As long as I can amuse you, then it’s all right,” Spencer said, heading for the stairs only to be stopped by his sister Eleanor, who had come out into the hallway in her dressing gown. Had Rian run from chamber to chamber, ringing a bell and banging on every door, eager to tell everyone?

“Spencer,” Eleanor asked, “is there anything I can do to help?”

He thought about this for a moment as he looked at his sister. So small, so fragile and beautiful. Yet Eleanor and her Jack had almost single-handedly dismantled the Red Men Gang last year. If there was anyone whom he could count on to move mountains, it would be Eleanor. Calm, steadfast Elly.

“Odette’s in with her, Elly, and her own Indian nurse. But,” he said, a thought just then striking him, “you could answer a question for me, one Odette would box my ears for asking. How long, um…” He hesitated, waving one hand in front of him. “You know. How long from…beginning to end?”

Elly blinked, then smiled. “You’re asking me the length of a pregnancy, Spencer?”

He nodded, looking back at the door to Morgan’s bedchamber, to see Jacko stepping forward to hold open the door for two of the Becket Hall women, Edyth and Birdie, to enter with pots of steaming water and an armful of towels. This was happening. This was really happening.

“I would say approximately nine months, Spencer,” Elly told him. “So that would be…last September?”

Spencer shook his head. “No, that can’t be right. We didn’t meet the Americans at the swamp until the beginning of October. So that’s…that’s…” He began counting on his fingers, then looked at his sister before looking at the closed door, his stomach suddenly uneasy. “It’s too soon, isn’t it? If it’s mine.”

“If it’s yours? Spencer?”

He held up his hands to ward off the harder tone of Eleanor’s voice. “It’s mine. Odette says so. The woman says so. I’m the fornicating son of a three-legged cur. I just don’t remember. Why don’t I remember?”

“You had that knock on the head,” Jacko reminded him. “Your shoulder, your leg, the knock on the head, that fever that hung on for months according to Clovis. Damn, boy, I’d say the woman had her wicked way with you when you couldn’t fight her off. You lucky devil.”

“Jacko.”

One word, just one, from Eleanor and Jacko lost his smile and much of his swagger. “I was just saying…”

“Yes, and now that you have, you will forget you’ve said it, please,” Eleanor told him as if she were a governess scolding her young charge. “Now, you boys go downstairs to Papa, who had the good sense not to come up here, and I will go in with the ladies and offer my assistance if it is needed as I introduce myself to your young woman.”

“She’s not my—” Spencer gave it up as a bad job. “You’ll let us know what’s happening?”

“I will,” Eleanor said, her smile soft. “What’s her name, Spencer? I should most probably know that.”

“Rutledge. Mariah Rutledge. And she’s English. But that’s all I know. Damn it all to hell, Elly, that’s all I know.”

And that hair, that voice…

Spencer pressed his fingers against his temples, hoping for more memories to assert themselves. But there was nothing. He did not know this woman, remember this woman. “Go downstairs, everyone, before we wake Fanny and Callie. I’m…I’m going to go talk to Clovis.”

He walked briskly toward the servant stairs and climbed to the top floor of the large house to where Anguish and Clovis had been installed upon their arrival at Becket Hall.

Ainsley had given them the run of the house if they’d wanted it, in thanks for bringing Spencer back to Becket Hall, but neither man had felt comfortable with that sort of free and easy arrangement. After all, as Clovis pointed out, they were only doing their duty. Hiding them from an army they didn’t wish to return to was thanks enough for both of them.

Still, Becket Hall wasn’t like most English homes, made up of a strict hierarchy of master, master’s family, upper servants, lower servants. No, that wasn’t for Ainsley Becket.

He had run a taut ship but a fair one, and he ran a fair house. The servants were the crew, each lending a hand to whatever chore was necessary at the moment, and each still very much the individual…individuals who refused to see Ainsley as anyone less than their beloved Cap’n.

There was no butler or major domo at Becket Hall. Whoever heard the knocker and was close opened the door. When beds needed changing they were changed; when rugs needed beating they were beaten.

The only area of the house Ainsley considered to be off-limits to himself and most of the household was the kitchens where the cook, Bumble, reigned supreme by means of a sharp tongue and a sharper knife that had been waved threateningly a time or three over the years, and anyone who thought the man’s wooden leg had slowed him soon learned their mistake.

When Clovis and Anguish were moved in nobody blinked an eye. The Cap’n said they could stay, so stay they would and welcome aboard. Clovis had insisted upon acting as Spencer’s right hand and, since Anguish no longer had a right hand, he had offered his left to Bumble and now spent most of his day sitting on a high stool in the main kitchen, telling tall tales to make the females giggle behind their hands and sampling all of the day’s dishes. It was an arrangement that worked well all around.

Spencer knocked at Clovis’s door, because personal privacy was also very much a part of living at Becket Hall, and entered only when he heard a grunt from the other side of the thick wood.

He walked in to see Clovis sitting on the side of his bed, still completely dressed, an empty bottle in his hand.

“Sir!” Clovis said, quickly getting to his feet. “I’m wanted?”

“In several countries, no doubt,” Spencer returned with a wan smile, indicating with a wave of his hand that his friend should sit once more, and then joining him. “You’re still worrying about our decision to guard the freetraders?”

“That I am, Lieutenant, sir,” Clovis told him, then sighed. “You and Anguish see adventure, and I see only trouble. I think I’m old, and I don’t know which worries me more.”

“No, not old, just prudent. But I’m here on another matter. Clovis, do you recall a woman named Mariah Rutledge?”

Clovis shot to his feet once more. “You’re rememberin’, sir? Well, sir, that’s above all things grand.”

“No, I’m not remembering anything, more’s the pity. She’s here, Clovis, at Becket Hall. Miss Rutledge. And she’s giving birth to my child in my sister’s bedchamber. Odette says it’s a boy, so I imagine it is.”

The older man sat down once more with a thump that shook the bed. “I shouldn’t drink so deep. I thought you said—sir?”

“I know, Clovis. It’s a lot to swallow. I don’t remember Miss Rutledge. I damn sure don’t remember bedding the woman.”

Clovis wrinkled his brow, deep in thought. “Well, sir, we were all together for more’n three weeks. First in the swamp, then movin’ north. Forty-two of us, forty-one after little Willy died. Sad that, him being only three years old. You remember that, sir?”

Spencer shook his head. “No. Nothing. How did he die?”

“Caught a stray bullet during the worst of it, sir. We laid him atop you when we drug you along in the litter the Indian women made up. Until he died, that is. You suffered something terrible, sir, when we had to take his little body from you. I didn’t want to tell you. There are things best not remembered. Mr. Ainsley said as much himself when we told him. Either you’d remember or you wouldn’t.”

Spencer buried his head in his hands. War. What a stupid, senseless way of settling disputes. Governments shouldn’t rise or fall on how many people their soldiers could kill. “I don’t remember, Clovis. I don’t remember any of it. Tell me…at least tell me about Miss Rutledge.”

“Miss Rutledge, sir? Now there’s a woman. General Rutledge, Anguish called her. Standin’ up, takin’ charge, barkin’ out orders, everyone steppin’ -to just as if they knew it was right, that she was goin’ to save us all, lead us out of there. And I’ll say this for her. She did it, sir. A fine, rare woman. She was the first to begin strippin’ the dead for what we could use, sayin’ prayers over each one, thankin’ them for what she took. It was her what sang to our Anguish the whole of the time we was cuttin’ off his arm. Holdin’ his head in her lap, singin’ loud enough to shoo the birds from the trees. Don’t hear the saw workin’ down on the bone so much that way, you see, or hear Anguish cursin’ and screamin’.”

He shook his head. “I ain’t never seen the like, not from a woman. Walkin’ around in that scarlet jacket she took for her own, givin’ us all what-for, tellin’ us what to do. Our Lady of the Swamp, Anguish called her, too, when she couldn’t hear him. I think he half expected her to be growing wings at any minute—when he wasn’t thinking she should be sprouting horns. A hard taskmaster, Miss Rutledge. But she saved you, sir. Her and her Indian woman. She saved us all.”

Spencer wished he could remember, hated that he’d been a burden rather than a help. “So Miss Rutledge was in charge of me, Clovis? Not you?”

Clovis went red to his hairline. “I did…the personal things, sir. Bathing you and such like. Don’t fret about that. But nights, sir? There were only a few of us men and we had to stand guard on the camp, you understand. So Miss Rutledge would watch you then. Give you water for the fever, lend her body to heat you when the chills took you, shook you. The night…the night after Willy died, you were shakin’ bad, sir. Really bad. I was sure you were dyin’ on us then.”

“So she laid with me, sharing the heat from her body,” Spencer said, imagining the scene. The dark woods, the chill October night air, their two bodies close together in the middle of nowhere, hope fading, young Willy dead, their collective future looking bleak. Sometimes you just needed to hold on to someone, believe you were alive…

“I see.” He got to his feet. “Thank you, Clovis. You won’t speak of this to anyone.”

“No, sir, Lieutenant,” Clovis said, standing to attention. “Not a word to anyone. She’s a good woman, sir. Daughter of the quartermaster at Fort Malden, him cut down in the first volley. A world of hurt she had that day, but she never gave herself a moment to mourn, never gave us a moment to think on our dire straits. A true soldier’s daughter. Just movin’, keep movin’, and she got us safe out of there.”

“And then?” Spencer asked. “How did we become separated?”

Clovis lowered his head. “Well, sir, it’s like this, sir. Anguish didn’t want no more of the Army, and I could agree with him, seein’ as how General Proctor made a holy mess out of everythin’ he touched. We saw a boat, stole you out of the cabin they put you in that first night, and off we went, fast as we could.”

He looked up at Spencer pleadingly. “They were safe, sir, everyone was safe. But we wanted to be gone before everythin’ froze and we was stuck there all the winter long, and we couldn’t think to leave without you. But she found you, so that’s all right, isn’t it, sir? A baby you said, sir? Doesn’t that beat the Dutch for somethin’?”

“That it does, Clovis, thank you,” Spencer said as he walked out of the room, ducking his head under the low lintel, for the room was tucked into the eaves of the large house. His head stayed down as he walked the length of the hallway to the servant stairs, then slowly descended to the next floor. He paused for a moment, looking down that wider hallway toward his sister Morgan’s room.

The woman had saved his life. She’d saved many lives.

And he’d rewarded her by impregnating her, leaving her and then forgetting her.

She was here now, straining to bear his son, and he still didn’t remember her, couldn’t remember her.

“Bloody hell,” he swore, and turned his back, headed all the way down the servant stairs to the kitchens. He walked past a startled young cook’s helper he didn’t recognize and slammed out of the house and straight into the raging storm, the windblown rain plastering his thick black hair to his head and his shirt against his skin in mere moments.

He half walked, half staggered to the slippery sand and shingle beach. He didn’t stop until he was standing knee deep in the angry Channel, where he punched his tightly fisted hands high above his head, lifted his face to the wind and rain and screamed out his frustration at the lightning-streaked sky.




CHAPTER THREE


MARIAH SENSED someone looking at her and slowly opened her eyes. She’d slept, only a little bit, but couldn’t seem to tamp down the strange exhilaration she felt, as if she’d just accomplished something wonderful. And she had, hadn’t she?

“You,” she said, seeing Spencer, and closed her eyes again. He looked so solemn; please God he wouldn’t feel some compelling need to ask her again if he was truly the father of her son. And if he was, then it was just too bad for him. Odette said there was no doubt and he’d simply have to come to grips with the situation, wouldn’t he? “Come to see the fruit of my labor, have you?” she asked him, unable to restrain a smile at her genius. Goodness, she felt good. Sore, tired, but good, very good. And fiercely protective of her son…their son.

“Madam,” Spencer said, looking a bit awkward. “He’s a fine boy. Small, but Odette promises me he’s strong and healthy. And you? How do you feel this morning?”

Mariah opened her eyes once more, even summoned another smile. He looked rather like a boy who’d been caught with his hand in the candy dish and was now weighing the consequences as to the reward and the possible punishment. He also looked exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept all night. “Much like a horse that’s been ridden hard over rough country and put away wet, I imagine. How do you think I feel?”

“Abandoned,” Spencer said. “Clovis told me what happened.”

Her smile turned rueful. “Oh, I highly doubt that. He wasn’t there at the time.”

The corners of his mouth twitched slightly. “You might be down at the moment, Miss Rutledge, but you’re most assuredly not out, are you? Are you always this blunt?”

“I’ve just given birth to your child, Lieutenant. And I’ve no time for niceties. If you’re at fault, so am I. It was a…a frightening time. You really don’t remember? Eleanor swears you don’t. I wish I didn’t.” She regretted those last words as soon as she said them, for Spencer seemed to stiffen his spine as if she had just physically threatened him. “He…the baby has such a thick thatch of black hair just like yours. Did you see?”

“I did. A humbling sight. And I’m sorry that I questioned you last night. He’s mine, there’s no doubt.”

Mariah plucked at the bedcovers, avoiding his dark, intense gaze. He looked so different and yet so much the man she remembered. A handsome man, there was no denying that. Fiery. Exotic. All that was missing was the vulnerability. Healed, sound once more, he was rather formidable. But she could be formidable, too!

“He’s also mine, sir. I cannot, however, provide for him, not now with my father dead, our few possessions gone and with no other family to take me in. After paying for the passage, the coach, I have precious little left but what I can stand up in, once I can stand again, and Onatah to care for. I can’t…” Her voice broke slightly and she took a deep, steadying breath in order to say what she had to say. “I can’t even nurse him. Onatah has decreed that I’m too weak from our journey, that I need all my strength and that he needs more than I will be able to give him. Your Odette agreed and has kindly arranged a wet nurse. I hate both of them for that, but they both said I was being womanish, which I hate even more.”

Spencer felt even more uncomfortable. What could he say in answer to a statement like that? All he could do was reassure her, he supposed. “We’ll marry, of course. As soon as you’re recovered. You have no worries about your future, madam, I promise you that.”

Those green eyes flashed in quick anger, anger being preferable to tears. “Aren’t you generous,” she said, her voice all but dripping venom. “It’s not my future that brought me here.”

“Perhaps not, madam, but that’s what is going to happen. No son of mine will be a bastard, never knowing his father. Or did you simply think I would hand you money and send you and the child on your way?”

“I didn’t know what you’d do,” she admitted quietly. “Yes, marriage had occurred to me. It seemed a logical answer.” She looked up at him again. “Until now.”

“How did you find me?” Spencer asked, to avoid an answer to her last words, not that he had one.

Mariah shifted on the sheets. “There was a letter in your jacket. Bloodstained, but I could make out some of it. Someone named Callie signed it, adding the words Becket Hall, Romney Marsh to her signature. No one knew you when we landed at Dover but the closer we drove, the more people were able to direct the coach on the proper roads. It’s difficult to believe this is England. The landscape is so singular. I lived with my father in the Lake District, until we left for North America eight years ago.”

“Clovis tells me your father was the quartermaster at Fort Malden. Yet we never met.”

Mariah caught her bottom lip between her teeth for a moment, the mention of her father, who would never see her child, obviously piercing her heart. “Papa kept me fairly well isolated from the men once we were moved into the fort as our losses mounted. And the Indians, of course, no matter what Onatah told him to the contrary. He was certain they’d be after my hair if they had a chance.”

Spencer looked at the mass of golden-red curls spread out on the pillow; living fire. His fingers itched to reach out to stroke that hair, to learn whether it was as soft and warm to the touch as it appeared. “I remember your hair. I don’t know why, but I do. Your hair, your voice.” He shook his head. “But that’s all. I’m sorry. Clovis told me you were very brave and that he doubts anyone would have survived without you. Me, most especially. So I thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Mariah said, wishing he’d leave the room. She was going to cry. She wasn’t exactly sure why, but she was definitely going to cry. She wanted, needed, to cry.

“He also told me about the child who died. We…we have a small tradition, us Beckets. When I was brought to…when Ainsley adopted me, I was given the name of a sailor who had died. With that in mind, I thought we might name the child William. William Becket.”

Mariah squeezed her eyes shut. Would he please just go away? “William Henry Becket. After my father, as well.”

Spencer laughed shortly. “William Henry? As in William Henry Harrison, the American general who beat us so soundly?”

Now Mariah was caught between tears and laughter. Thankfully, laughter won. “General Proctor’s name is Henry,” she pointed out, grinning at him. “Perhaps we need to reconsider this whole thing?”

“No,” Spencer told her. “William Henry Becket. And he’ll grow to be his own man, as we all must. Now, madam, I think you should rest.”

“I was just about to suggest the same thing,” Mariah said, sighing. “But I would like to see William again, please. Just for a minute?”

Spencer looked to the door to the dressing room, then to Mariah. “He was sleeping when I looked in on him a few minutes ago. And alone. Um…I’ll go find somebody.”

“Why? Just bring him to me, Mr. Becket.”

“Spencer, Mariah. I think you’ll agree that we’re a bit beyond formalities.”

Just when she thought she could begin to relax, he was looking at her that way again. So intense. She had to look away and hated him for making her so nervous. “Yes, of course. Spencer. Just pick him up and bring him to me. You can do that, can’t you?”

He’d rather juggle siege cannonballs. With their fuses lit. “Yes, certainly.” He looked toward the door once more. “Is there…is there anything I should know about him?”

“I don’t think he’ll break, if that’s what you mean,” Mariah said shortly, then took pity on him. She threw back the coverlet. “Oh, let me do it.”

Spencer held out his hands to stop her. “I said I’d do it, damn it.”

“Thank God,” Mariah said quietly, falling back against the pillows. She really was exhausted and more than a little sore. “Support his head, please.”

“What?” Spencer asked, already halfway to the dressing room. But he kept going, knowing that if he stopped he’d probably turn into a complete coward and simply run away, like Proctor. So he opened the door slowly and looked into the dim room at the cradle someone had brought down from the nursery.

Their ship’s carpenter had made the cradle for Callie, so many years ago. Pike, dead now, one of the first casualties in their personal war with the Red Men Gang. But the cradle was still here, the magnificent carving done with such talent, such love, the oils of Pike’s hands as he stroked and smoothed the wood permeating it, giving it color and life. In this cradle, Pike lived on. They all lived on, every last lost man of the Black Ghost and Silver Ghost crews, if only in the memories of those who had sailed with them.

Just as young Willy would live on in William Henry Becket.

For the first time Spencer truly understood why he and the others had been taken to the island, taken in, been fashioned into a family by Ainsley Becket. By Geoffrey Baskin, who had died sixteen years ago, come to this most deserted area of Romney Marsh coastline, and become Ainsley Becket. If he could be half the father Ainsley was, he’d be a happy man.

Spencer looked down on his sleeping son, a cotton-wrapped warm brick snuggled against his back. There was a small brown cloth bag tucked into one corner of the cradle, tied with colorful ribbons and with a single feather protruding from the top. Odette and her charms and amulets. The child would soon probably have his own gad—an alligator tooth dipped in powerful potions to ward off bad loas, bad spirits. Spencer believed he might have some small trouble explaining that to Mariah. Ah well, as long as Odette was happy.

William’s incredibly small hands were in tight fists, hanging on to this new life with fierce tenacity, already looking as if he knew there would be times he’d have to fight.

But not alone; never alone.

Something drew up hard and tight in Spencer’s chest, just like William’s fists, and he marveled at the feeling, at the fierce protectiveness he felt all but overwhelm him.

My son. My God, my son.

“Spencer? Just put one hand beneath his bottom and the other behind his head,” Mariah called to him from the other room.

Spencer blinked, realized his eyes were wet. He’d been alone for so long. Alone, amid the crowd of Beckets. Always looking for his own way, some reason for being here, for being alive at all. Always angry, always fighting and not knowing why.

And now, William.

And now, in an instant, everything made sense.

He bent over the cradle, carefully scooping up the closely wrapped infant, pressing him against his heart. The knot in his chest tightened even more, then slowly dissolved, filling him with a warmth of feeling that threatened to completely unman him.

Slowly, as if he were carrying the most precious of treasures, he returned to the bedchamber and crossed to the high tester bed. “He’s so small. It’s like holding air.”

Mariah reached up her arms. “Amazing, isn’t it? For the past few months I would have sworn to anyone who asked that I was carrying a sack full of rocks wherever I went. Please? Give him to me?”

Spencer handed the child to her and immediately felt the loss of that slight weight. “He stays here,” he said firmly. “You stay if you wish, marry me, or go if you like. But the boy stays here.”

Mariah ignored him, gazing in wonder at her child who, until she’d actually seen him, held him, had been considered little more than yet another problem to be solved in a world filled with problems. “He has my eyes. See? Tipped up at the edges a bit? That won’t make him look too girlish, will it?”

“Madame, I’ll have your answer,” Spencer said, feeling fierce and wishing himself civilized. But then, he’d never been all that civilized.

She tightened her hold on the infant as she glared up at Spencer. “I liked you better when you were nearly senseless. You didn’t talk so much. Yes, I’ll marry you. For William, for what appears to be your very kind and concerned family, I’ll marry you. But attempt to touch me again, Spencer Becket, and I’ll gut you like a deer. Do we understand each other?”

Spencer watched her eyes, those tip-tilted green eyes that had looked so lovingly at William and now stared icily at him. The fire of her hair, the sudden ice of her eyes.

He remembered Jacko’s joking comment and un-ashamedly used it. “I could say the same to you, Mariah, as I was hardly in any position to fight off your advances, was I? Another man might say you took unfair advantage of me.”

“But another man didn’t say that, did he? You did. Another man might not have been fevered and distraught and reaching out to someone, to anyone. And another woman might not have been so frightened, so alone…so foolish as to yearn for someone to hold on to, for someone to tell her that, yes, she was still alive, she could still feel…and that being held, being kissed, being touched, was so natural, so human a need…”

“Sweet Jesus,” Spencer said, rubbing roughly at his aching head. She’d just said exactly what he’d thought last night, put those thoughts into words that sliced at him, humbled him. “I don’t remember, Mariah. I can’t remember. I’m…I’m so, so sorry. Was it so terrible?”

“You? Were you so terrible? Is that what you mean?”

Spencer attempted a smile. “Consider it manly pride, madam. If the thought of me touching you ever again upsets you so, I must imagine that the experience wasn’t exactly a maiden’s dream.”

Mariah didn’t know what to say, where to look. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…that is, I didn’t know what to expect.”

“But, whatever you did expect, it wasn’t what you received?”

“No, I suppose not.” She kissed William’s head. “When you were gone, I was glad. I knew I couldn’t face you, not after what we’d…And then, when I realized what had happened…that I was…Can we please discuss this some other time?”

“When you realized you were carrying my child,” Spencer finished for her. He was pushing her, he knew that. But there was so much he couldn’t remember. How in hell could a man forget bedding this woman? “You must have hated me then.”

“I can’t hate you now. Look at him. Something good, coming out of something so terrible. So many lives lost, and now there’s him.”

Spencer sat on the side of the bed, laid his hand on the small, tightly swaddled infant. “Let’s begin again,” he suggested quietly, then smiled. “No, let’s begin. There’s no again about it, is there? For William?”

Mariah pressed a hand to her mouth to stifle a sob. “I’m so tired. I feel as if I’ve been fighting forever, fighting the entire world. I don’t want to fight with you now, too.” She managed a watery smile. “Besides, Eleanor tells me you’re all bluster and heat and hot passions, but really a very nice man. Of course, she’s your sister so she probably doesn’t really know you all that well.”

“You’re right,” Spencer said, grinning in relief. “I’m actually a blackguard who sold his soul to the devil years ago. We just don’t tell Elly because she likes to think the best of everyone.”

Mariah returned his smile. “You look nothing like her or the man I met downstairs last night. You said you were adopted. And Eleanor?”

Spencer made a small face. This was going to be difficult. There were things he could tell her and much more he could never tell her. Giving birth to his son did not make Mariah Rutledge a Becket.

The baby stirred in her arms and he pressed a finger against William’s opening hand, only to have the child grasp that finger tightly.

“Our son has Spanish blood,” he began slowly, feeling his way. “At least that’s what we believe. I’m told that I spat some fairly choice Spanish at Ainsley the day he found me, took me home with him. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten most of it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Spencer told her, smiling even as he sorted facts in his mind, deciding what to reveal, what to conceal. “Ainsley isn’t my father or father to any of us except Cassandra—Callie—whose letter you found. The rest of us? Flotsam and jetsam he picked up along the way when he was living in the islands. Haiti. Have you heard of it?”

Mariah nodded. “I think I could point it out on a map, yes. To the south and east of the American Florida, yes? It must be warm there.”

And then it got hot…too hot to remain there.

“Papa…Ainsley owned sailing ships. Trading ships,” he said, keeping to the story that had been told for so long that he sometimes even believed it.

“And you all lived on the island. Haiti.”

“No, not on Haiti itself. We, um, we had our own island. There are several to choose from in the area.”

Why, the man sounded positively embarrassed. Or leery of telling her about his youth. Which was it? “Oh, my. That does sound important. And wonderfully warm weather for all of the year. No snow, no ice freezing over the rivers every winter so that you are virtually isolated from the world. How could you bear to leave?”

“The girls were beginning to grow up, so he decided it was time to return to England. And here we are.”

“And who are we?”

Spencer felt on firmer ground here. “I told you that Callie is Ainsley’s own child. Her mother died shortly after she was born. Callie’s—good God, she’s about sixteen now. You’ll meet her soon enough, I’m sure—it’s difficult to keep Callie away from anything she wants. And then there’s Morgan. This is her bedchamber, hers and her husband’s, when they visit here from Ethan’s estate. Morgan’s the Countess of Aylesford now and the mother of twins I’ve yet to see, now that the earl is making himself useful at the War Office and a nuisance in Parliament—but that’s another story.”

“One I hope to hear,” Mariah said, committing the names to memory. “And the young man from last night? Rian, was it?”

He nodded. “You’ll have to excuse him. He isn’t usually so silly. Ainsley gathered up Rian and Fanny from the rubble of a church that had taken cannon fire.” He smiled wanly. “Another long story, I’m afraid.”

“Fanny and Rian,” Mariah repeated. “Are they brother and sister?”

“No, not by blood.” The baby stirred slightly, made a small sound, and Spencer’s heart lurched in his chest. “Is he all right?”

“I think so. He may be getting hungry, poor little scrap. You should probably call someone. And that’s all? You, Rian, Callie, Morgan and Eleanor, who has already told me that she lives here with her husband, Jack…”

“And Fanny,” he added helpfully. “Then there’s Chance, the oldest of us all. He has his own estate north of London and is married, with two children of his own. And Courtland. God, let’s not forget Court. He still lives here and probably always will. You’ll recognize him by the perpetual scowl on his bearded face. The world sits heavily on Court’s shoulders, you understand.”

Mariah lifted William’s hand to her mouth, kissed it. “Why?”

“Why?” Spencer repeated, inwardly wincing. Damn his tongue for running too hard. Explaining his family without exposing his family was difficult in the best of times. “No reason. Court just likes to see himself as being in charge of all of us. Elly, too, come to think of it. But they’re not. Ainsley is the head of the family, very much so.”

“Such a large family. I had only my father,” Mariah said. “It must be wonderful, having so many brothers and sisters.”

Spencer smiled. “Many would think so, I suppose.”

“But you don’t?”

“That’s not—of course I do. But I’m a younger son and sometimes I feel as if I’m standing at the end of a long queue, awaiting my turn to—never mind.”

“No,” Mariah said, truly interested. “Waiting your turn for what, Spencer?”

My turn to live. The words were in his mind, but he didn’t say them, ashamed of his desire, his need, to be his own man, unburdened by the shadow of Ainsley’s past and the dangers that past still held for them all. Because he’d always believed there was a life away from Romney Marsh and, now that he’d seen it, he felt more confined than ever. Because to say the words out loud would brand him as an ungrateful bastard.

Mariah felt the sudden tension in the room and raced to fill the silence. “So Ainsley was once in the shipping trade, you said. What do you all do here? Farm? Herd sheep? What do people do in Romney Marsh?”

Free trade. Ride hell for leather across the Marsh after midnight as the mist rises all round, outrunning the militia as the casks of brandy and tea are moved inland. Race ahead of the wind on the Respite upon occasion, just for the thrill of it, playing cat and mouse with a French frigate patrolling the Channel. Cool their heels two weeks out of every four and stare at the choppy sea, aching to see what lies beyond the water.

Spencer bit back a smile. “We keep ourselves busy,” he said, standing up once more. “I’ll go find Odette.”

“They’ve already bound my breasts,” Mariah heard herself say, and then lowered her head, her cheeks hot. “They won’t even let me try. But if it’s best for William, I suppose I understand.”

“I’m…I’m sorry,” Spencer said, sure that Mariah was upset. “You haven’t had an easy time of things. I’m sure your woman is only thinking of your own health, as should you. I don’t remember most of my voyage home. Was yours an easy crossing?”

She shook her head, wishing away these silly tears that kept threatening. “We had storms most of the way. For six long weeks I spent the majority of my time with my head over a bucket, I’m afraid.” She lifted a hand, let it drop onto the coverlet once more. “I know they’re right.” Her face crumpled slightly. “But I’m his mother.”

Spencer felt as useless as a wart on the end of Prinney’s nose and sighed in real relief when the door to the hallway opened and Odette came sailing in, a young woman following behind her.

“Here now,” Odette said, taking in the scene. “Is this what you’re good for, Spencer Becket? Making the girl cry? Take yourself off and be glad I don’t turn you into a toad and step on you.”

“But I—oh, never mind. Who’s this?”

“I’m Sheila, sir,” the small brunette said. “Jacob’s wife.”

“Jacob Whiting? Morgan’s Jacob?” Spencer asked, remembering how Jacob had followed Morgan like a puppy for years, the poor besotted fool.

“Not no more he ain’t, sir,” Sheila said, raising her chin. “I’m weaning my own little Jacob now, and Odette asked for me to nurse the new little one, and that’s what I’m doing. Sir.”

It seemed he was being put in his place every time he opened his mouth, so Spencer merely nodded and quit the room, promising to return later to see his son again, adding to himself: when there weren’t so many damned women around.

Mariah sniffled, still feeling sorry for herself, and watched him go, because asking him to stay would make her appear weak and she had the feeling that, no matter how rosy a picture Spencer had painted of Becket Hall and its inhabitants, she would need to be very strong in order to survive here in this strange place. What was odd was that she was beginning to think that Spencer thought the same thing about himself.




CHAPTER FOUR


FOUR DAYS PASSED with Mariah sleeping almost constantly, regaining strength dissipated by the long journey and the hours of labor. And she was content, except when she was complaining. She could see William. He could be laid on her bed. She could stroke his head, kiss his fingers. But she couldn’t hold him because, Onatah explained, to hold him would be to draw more milk into her breasts.

She saw Spencer twice during that time, as he seemed to be avoiding her chamber, even as he used the separate door from the hallway to the dressing room to see his son. He could hold William and, irrational as she knew her feelings to be, she hated him for that.

On the fifth day, Mariah decided she’d had enough. Remain in bed for ten long days? What nonsense! She had given birth. Surely a natural process for a woman. And she felt fine. Well, as fine as anyone could possibly feel, being deprived of most fluids in order to keep the milk away, her breasts strapped tight to her—not to mention the layers of folded cloth between her legs as she continued to bleed, also something she had been told was perfectly natural.

Onatah and Odette had already come and gone, fussing over her, subjecting her to the indignity of washing her, just as if she couldn’t do such basic things for herself—it was an amazement to her that they let her clean her own teeth! William was back in his cradle, sleeping the sleep of the well fed; Sheila Whiting had gone back to her own baby.

Mariah was alone. Blessedly alone.

She pushed back the covers and swung herself into a sitting position, ignoring the fact that lying prone for five days could tend to make a person slightly dizzy when that person first attempted to stand up. She took a few deep, steadying breaths, then looked down at the floor, which seemed quite far away.

There was a knock at the door moments before it opened. “Damn it!”

“Mariah? Mariah, what are you doing?”

“Shh, Callie,” Mariah called quietly. “Come in here and close the door. Lock it, if necessary. I’m getting up. I’m getting up, I’m getting dressed and I’m going downstairs to see something besides these four very pretty but confining walls before I go stark, staring out of my mind. And it wouldn’t be quietly, I promise you.”

Callie closed the door and padded across the room to stand at the bottom of the bed. Such a petite, pretty child, all golden-brown curls and huge velvet-brown eyes over a small, pert nose and bee-stung mouth. An angel of a child. Except that, as Mariah had learned to her delight over the past days, Cassandra Becket had the heart of a warrior. And all the deviltry of a born mischief-maker.

“Odette won’t like this, you not obeying her orders. Everyone obeys Odette, you know, and is afraid to take a step wrong around her,” Callie pointed out and then grinned. “Should I get your clothing for you?”

“Would you?” Mariah asked, sliding off the mattress until her bare feet connected with the carpet. “Everything has been washed and pressed, thank God, not that there’s much I didn’t strain at the seams these past months.” She looked down at her belly beneath the voluminous white night rail. “Oh, would you look at me? Do you think there’s another babe still to come out? I still look as round as a dinner plate.”

Callie giggled. “Oh, you should have seen Morgan after the twins were born. Ethan called her his pumpkin, which earned him a shoe tossed at his head. Do you ride? Morgan was back on her horse before anyone could say differently and she swears it helped. I’ve always been a little plump, although it’s finally going away—Odette said it was baby fat. But I know how you feel. Not that I’d want to be all bones like Elly, but no one wants to have someone else shaking their head and tsk-tsking, just because you’ve reached for a second muffin.”

While Callie was chattering she was also opening drawers and cupboard doors, pulling out undergarments, hose, a yellow and white sprigged muslin gown that had been one of Mariah’s father’s favorites—and one of the few personal possessions she had insisted on dragging through the woods after the battle—and a pair of black kid slippers that, alas, had seen better days.

“Would you like anything else?” Callie asked. “I can turn my head, but it would probably be easier if I just helped you, don’t you think? I helped Morgan the day she sneaked out of bed. I think she lasted one more day than you, though.”

“Thank you.” Mariah believed she may have left her modesty somewhere, because she couldn’t seem to muster much at the moment, and began stripping out of her night rail, allowing it to drop to her feet, so that she stood there in her cloth-wrapped bosom, pantaloons that held the cloths between her legs in place, and not much else. “There are a multitude of indignities associated with giving birth, Callie,” she told her seriously, “beginning with the moment a woman you once thought to be perfectly rational kneels on the bed between your spread legs and shouts excitedly, ‘I can see the head! Push! Push!’”

Callie giggled again. “Morgan says she wouldn’t have cared if the whole world had been standing there watching while her bottom was bare, just as long as someone for God’s sake got that baby out of her. Of course, she had two babies in there. Morgan does nothing in half measures.”

“She won’t mind that I’ve been using her chamber?” Mariah asked as she began unwrapping the cloth binding her breasts and then sighed in blessed relief once it was gone, feeling as if she was now taking her first full breath in days. She cupped her bare breasts in her hands, rather marveling at a new heaviness, gained during the pregnancy, that hadn’t seemed to have abandoned her. “Oh, that feels so much better. Would you please hand me my shift?”

“Mariah, I thought I’d see how you—oh, bloody hell.”

Mariah looked toward the door to the dressing room, to see Spencer standing there, looking at her as if…well, she really didn’t want to consider what he might be thinking.

She grabbed at the shift Callie was holding and pressed it against her breasts. “Some people knock and then ask permission before entering a woman’s bedchamber, sir,” she said, hoping the tremor she heard in her voice wasn’t apparent to him. She wouldn’t even think of the way her nipples seemed to have tightened the moment she realized he had seen her bare breasts. She had never suckled William, but that night, that wild and insane night, Spencer Becket had fastened his fever-hot mouth to her as she’d given herself over to the moment—and the man.

Spencer was looking at the floor as if there might be something of great interest lying there. “Some people, madam, were supposed to remain in bed, resting. What in blazes do you think you’re doing?”

“Oh, for pity’s sake, Spence,” Callie said, rolling her eyes at Mariah. “She’s getting dressed. What did you think she was doing? Go away.”

As quickly as it had come, Spencer’s embarrassment left him. “No,” he said, raising his eyes to look at Mariah. “You leave, Callie. Now.”

“But, Spence, she’s not even dressed. I can’t, oh, for pity’s sake, don’t glower at me like that.” She looked apologetically at Mariah. “Ten minutes. I’ll be back in ten minutes,” she promised. Then she stomped past Spencer, glaring at him, and left the room.

Mariah turned her back to the man. “Are you always such a bully?” she asked, fumbling with the shift, trying to cover herself better even as she knew her back was bare to her waist.

“Probably, yes,” he said, reaching around her to take hold of the shift. He should have left the field, retreated, but not yet. Definitely not yet. “Here, let me help you.”

“No,” she protested, knowing that the bundled shift was all that covered her breasts. But he wasn’t listening to her or at least he wasn’t obeying her.

She couldn’t struggle or else his hand might slip. The shift might slip.

“Mariah, you just gave birth,” Spencer told her, his breath warm against her bare shoulder. “I’m not a monster.”

She closed her eyes, nodded. And let go of the shift.

“Ah, that’s better. Raise your arms, Mariah.”

She’d rather die. She felt so vulnerable. “Just…just drop it over my head, please. I can manage from there. And turn your back!”

Spencer smiled, then realized he was probably fortunate Mariah couldn’t see that smile. “Would turning my back come before or after I lower the shift over your head? After all, my aim might be off, and I’d end up dressing the bedpost.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake! You’re perfectly useless, aren’t you? I’ll do it myself.” Keeping her right arm pressed across her bare breasts, she turned on him, grabbed the shift from his hands and then turned her back to him once more, struggling with her free hand to find the head-hole of the damned, uncooperative shift.

He didn’t know why he did what he did, even as he knew he was being, as so many told him, so often, impossible. Because what he did was perch himself on the side of the mattress, right next to Mariah, fold his arms and say with a grin, “Have at it, my dear. I’ll just watch.”

“I could cheerfully hate you,” Mariah told him honestly, then gave up all modesty in order to turn the shift about with both hands, locate the head-hole and finally drop the damnable thing over her head, shoving her arms into the armholes. And tug. Tug again. “It doesn’t fit. Did you open the buttons?”

Spencer looked at her, her head poking up from the bodice that seemed stuck halfway over her lush, full breasts. Even her arms were stuck. “I believe I’ve seen scarecrows in the field that look much as you do now, madam. But you’re correct. I do think I neglected to open all of the buttons. Would you like me to do that now?”

“No,” Mariah groused, knowing she must look exactly like a scarecrow, damn him. She was hot, she was frustrated, her hair was tumbling into her eyes, and if he didn’t help her she’d be stuck in this ignoble position until Callie came back into the room. “What I’d like is for you to go straight to hell, Spencer Becket.”

“I’ll take that as a yes, in any event,” Spencer said, pushing away from the bed and stepping behind her to open the last half dozen buttons on the shift, then giving the material a yank, settling the straps on her shoulders. “There, you’re decent now.”

“Not in my mind, I’m not,” Mariah told him honestly. “In my mind, I’m committing murder upon your person, in several unlovely and definitely painful ways. But as long as you’re here, now you may button me again. Please.”

“Ah. Please. How can I possibly refuse?”

Mariah stood still, fuming as he began buttoning the shift, from bottom to top. His fingers kept brushing against the skin of her back and for some reason that incidental contact—please let it be incidental—served to tighten her nipples, so that she felt her breasts to be actually straining against the material.

Which was nothing compared to the way her insides reacted when, finished with the buttons, he put his hands on her shoulders, then bent to lightly brush his lips against her nape. “Thank you, again, Mariah, for William.”

She whirled around to push him away, completely forgetting that she was still standing within the puddle of her night rail, and ended by crashing against his chest, her hands on his shoulders to support herself.

“My God,” Spencer said, his senses swimming as he looked at her; that swirl of living fire that was her hair, those bewitching green eyes. “How in bloody hell could I have forgotten you?”

“I…I don’t know. As you said, I took advantage of you,” Mariah said, closing her eyes as his hands slipped down to cup her waist. “Don’t…don’t do that.”

“We’re to be married,” he reminded her, his concentration centering on her full, slightly parted lips.

“And?” Mariah asked, arching one brow at him. “You sound as if you’re purchasing a horse. Pay the price, and I’m yours to…to do anything with?”

Spencer removed his hands, held them up at his sides in mock surrender. “Clearly we don’t know each other very well yet, do we? Will you feel better if I tell you that I don’t believe marriage makes you my possession?”

Mariah stepped out of the tangle of night rail and walked to where her robe hung over the back of a chair. “Yet you said I could leave, but William would stay. I think we should see this marriage for what it is, don’t you? It will be for William. As for anything else?” She slipped her arms into the robe and turned to face him, the material of the robe held tight over her breasts. “I should wish to be recovered from William’s birth before we even discuss the idea of marriage again.”

At the moment, Spencer believed he would agree to anything. His palms still burned from where they had made contact with Mariah’s soft skin, so pale beneath his tanned hands, and the mere thought of her creamy breasts, how she had seemed to be holding, weighing them in her cupped palms—as if offering them to him, or at least that’s how he’d always remember that sight—would probably haunt his nights. “You want time, Mariah. I understand that. How long?”

She shrugged, wondering how much time she could reasonably ask for without daring his refusal. “A month? Two?”

He nodded. “A compromise, then. Six weeks, Mariah. But we will be married.”

“For the child,” she reiterated.

“For whatever reasons may occur to us. The gutting me like a deer, Mariah, will remain negotiable,” he replied, and then turned his head as Callie knocked lightly on the door and then reentered the room. “Callie, help Mariah finish dressing, please.”

“You say that as if that wasn’t what I was doing when you first stumbled in here and sent me out of the room,” his sister reminded him. “Or have you forgotten that?”

Spencer rolled his eyes. “No wonder Court calls you his unholy terror,” he said before bowing to Mariah. “Don’t overtax yourself, madam. Good day.”

“I’ll be very careful, sir,” Mariah shot back at him. “Just as you will be careful to knock next time you come to visit, and then wait for my permission to enter my chamber.”

The door had slammed on Spencer’s back before the last words left Mariah’s mouth.

She looked at the closed door for a few moments and then at Callie. She raised her eyebrows.

Callie raised her own eyebrows.

The corners of their mouths twitched as their eyes danced.

And then the two of them laughed out loud.

“Did you see his face when he first came barging in here?” Callie said, wiping at her eyes as their laughter subsided. “I thought he was going to swallow his own tongue.”

“Well,” Mariah said, removing the robe, “I was standing there, holding on to myself, just as brazen as you please. Oh, Lord, Callie, what am I laughing at? He dressed me! I’m so embarrassed. Mortified. Quickly, help me on with my gown before I’m tempted to crawl back under the covers, never to show myself again. As it is, I’ll never be able to look at the man again.”

“I don’t know. He certainly was looking at you,” Callie said, helping Mariah into her gown. “Turn around and let me button this, if I can see the buttons through my tears. Mariah, I’m so glad you’re here. With Morgan gone, we’re so stodgy and boring these days. But I think that’s about to change.”

Mariah slipped into her shoes and walked across the large room to the dressing table where Onatah had laid out her brushes. She sat down in front of the three-piece mirror and fairly goggled at herself. Look at her hair! She looked like a wild woman. Why hadn’t Spencer run screaming from the room, convinced he’d been compromised into wedding a witch?

She picked up a brush and began attacking the mass of hair that fell well past her shoulders, waving so wildly that it was almost as if only half of her face could peek through to the world. Which might not be too terrible, if she didn’t want to look at Spencer. “It’s all so thick and heavy and a terrible nuisance. I should have Onatah just cut it all off,” she said as Callie picked up another brush and began working on the left side of Mariah’s head.

“Cut this beautiful hair? Are you mad? I’ve never seen hair this color. It’s so alive. It’s like…like a candle flame. I heard Spencer the other night when he thought I wasn’t listening. He was telling Rian that he remembered your hair. ‘Like fire in the sunlight,’he said. It’s not like Spence to be poetical.”

“It’s not?” Mariah asked, daring to open the drawers in the dressing table, then borrowing a dark green ribbon she discovered in one of them. She was so curious to learn more about the man who was to become her husband. “What is it like Spencer to be?”

“Angry,” Callie said, taking the ribbon and tying back Mariah’s hair in a thick tail at her nape. “He’s always angry. Papa says he’s got the passions of a hot-blooded man and chafes at the confines of Becket Hall, of how we live. There! Doesn’t that look pretty? Are you ready to go downstairs now, before Spencer finds Odette and tattles and you’re slapped back into bed?”

“Certainly,” Mariah said, rising to her feet and brushing down the front of her gown. “I’d like to go outside, if that’s possible. Breathe some sea air. The world should smell good after three days of storms.”

“Only if the Channel didn’t spit up something terrible from the bottom,” Callie told her, grinning. “We’ll use the front stairs. Odette never uses them, even though Papa told her she could. But he gave that up as a bad job years ago. Odette does what Odette does. She’s a mamba, you know. A real voodoo priestess. She’s taught me a lot, but says that I’m not a chosen one, so she won’t teach me more. Maybe she’ll teach you. She likes your hair, you see. Says it’s a sign from the good loa. Magical living flame. I wish I had magical living flame hair. Mine is just brown. So depressingly ordinary, and there’s so very much of it. If only it wouldn’t curl so, like a baby’s hair. I detest ringlets….”

Mariah let Callie chatter on as they walked and she examined her surroundings, as she’d been otherwise occupied the first time she’d entered the very large, impressive foyer of this huge house. Squire Franklin’s manor house had been the grandest dwelling she’d seen at home, and she’d lived in her share of small, cramped quarters, following her father to North America.

But Squire Franklin’s prideful possession paled in comparison to Becket Hall. Most anything would, she imagined. In fact, at least half of the Squire’s domicile would probably have fit comfortably in the foyer of Becket Hall.

They passed Edyth in the hallway, and Mariah asked if she would please sit with William for an hour. The woman’s smile was all the answer she’d needed to assure herself that the infant would be in good hands.

Odette had been kind enough to explain how Becket Hall was run, and the whole arrangement seemed very democratic. Almost American in the way everyone was free to do what he or she did best, and with responsibility placed on each person’s shoulders by that person him- or herself. Odette had also told her of the years of slavery in Haiti before the slaves had risen in their own version of the French Revolution and Ainsley Becket’s abhorrence for anything that even vaguely resembled forcing anyone to do anything.

Mariah would have thought that everyone would just lie about, doing nothing, yet Becket Hall was pristine, beautifully organized. And the maids, if they had to be given a title, sang as they worked.

Callie descended the wide, curving staircase slowly, looking back at Mariah every few steps, as if she might faint and topple on her, but then they were crossing the wide foyer and Callie’s slim shoulders seemed to relax.

“Papa is in his study most days at this time, reading all of the London newspapers that he has shipped to him, and everyone else is out and about somewhere—and Spence is probably hiding his head somewhere in shame. Do you want to see the drawing room first?”

“You seem to be enjoying your brother’s discomfort,” Mariah pointed out, smiling.

“Oh, yes, definitely. It’s lovely to not be the one Odette will be giving the hairy eyeball for this once. That’s what Rian calls the way Odette looks at us—the hairy eyeball. I have no idea what that means. Well, here’s the drawing room. You probably didn’t notice much of anything the night you arrived here.”

The furniture in the main drawing room was massive, much of it, Mariah believed, Spanish—she’d once seen a book of drawings on such things. The ceilings soared, the windows rose from the floor to nearly touch those high ceilings and the fabrics that covered those windows and the multitude of furniture in the drawing room were of sumptuous silks and vibrant brocades. She strained to take in the fine artwork hanging on pale, stuccoed walls and to count all the many vases of exotic flowers and acres of fine Turkish carpets spread out over gleaming wooden floors the color of dried cherries.

“All these flowers,” she said, cupping one perfect pink bloom in her palm.

Callie nodded. “We have a conservatory and Papa is always adding new flowers and plants he has shipped here. But it’s Jacko who cares for them. I’ll show it to you later, if Jacko says it’s all right. He’s very possessive of his babies. Not that he calls the flowers his babies, but that’s what Rian says.”

“Then I’ll wait for his permission,” Mariah said, continuing her examination of the large room.

None of the four immense crystal chandeliers, each hanging from a different coffered area of the ornate ceiling, had been lit, as all the draperies had been thrown back so that only sheer ivory silk panels with fleur-de-lis woven into them covered the windows that poured with sunlight.

One enormous glass-fronted cabinet placed between two of the windows displayed a collection of jade that was probably worth a king’s ransom. The far wall—it was very far away in this large room—actually had a highly ornamental black metal grille hanging on it, the entire piece nearly the size of a barn door. And yet it didn’t overpower the other furnishings. Little could.

“It’s humble,” Mariah said cheekily, “but I imagine that, to you, it’s simply home.”

Callie frowned at her, not understanding, and Mariah wanted to slap herself for speaking so plainly. This was a fine home and she should be on her best behavior…and she would be, if she knew what that was. But she was a quartermaster’s motherless daughter, brought up in some rather rough-and-tumble locations, and she was probably both more unsophisticated and more blunt than most young English ladies.

The paintings on the walls were magnificent: landscapes, seascapes. And, when she walked toward a fireplace that could probably comfortably roast an ox on a spit, it was to see something else she had missed that first night—the nearly life-size portrait of one of the most beautiful women she’d ever seen. Her hair was a mass of dark curls, her smile lit up the room and her striped, full-skirted gown was bright, colorful. Exotic.

“Mama,” Callie said as Mariah walked closer for a better look. “Her name was Isabella. I don’t remember her and I don’t look like her. Everyone says I do, but I’m not half so…so vibrant. I’m the pale English version, I suppose. Papa bought most everything in this room and many of the others while he lived in the islands and had it all shipped here on his boats, for years and years, to be stored until we found Becket Hall. Oh, and I meant ships. Jacko winces if I don’t say ships.”

“Jacko again.” Mariah returned her attention to Callie, who could prove to be a fountain of information—if she could only find the correct way to ask her questions, that is. “I don’t recall that name in the list of Becket siblings. But he is a Becket?”

“Jacko? Oh, no, he’s not a Becket. Jacko is Papa’s business partner. Most everyone came here with Papa when he decided it was time to return to England. Why, they even broke up the ships and used the lumber to build the village. We’re very self-sustaining, Papa calls it.”

“And quite isolated,” Mariah said, now heading for the hallway again. “This room seems to be at the front of the house. I want to see the water. I don’t know why, as I saw much too much water for six long weeks. I think I’m simply attempting to get my bearings and I’m all turned about at the moment. Which way would I go?”

“This way,” Callie said, leading the way down another wide hallway, Mariah following slowly, taking time to peak into several other large rooms, all of them furnished in equal grandeur. The Beckets were obviously not worried where the pennies for their next meal might come from. She stopped at one doorway, leaning a hand against the jamb. “A piano! Oh, and a harp! Do you have musical evenings, Callie?”

Callie backtracked to look into the room done all in golds and reds, just as if she’d never seen it before this moment. “The music room. The piano is mine. Papa gave it to me one Christmas, as soon as he learned of the invention. What sort of present comes with an obligation for daily practice? Elly plays much better than I could ever aspire to do. And Spencer sings. But never ask Court to sing. He will, most willingly, but he’s not very good. Now come on. We can’t be safe for much longer before someone will see us and—oh, good morning, Jacko.”

Mariah turned around to see a huge man standing in front of her. Not that he was overly tall, but he was, as her father would have said, a door-full of man. Broad, with a hard, rounded stomach that she felt certain she could bounce coins off, if she dared. He was dressed simply in white shirt and tan breeches, his muscular calves straining at white hose. His dark hair had begun to thin atop a huge head and he had a smile that seemed to be full of amusement and a joy for life.

Until, that is, she looked more closely. Because that’s what he was doing—looking more closely at her, his head forward on his neck, his heavy, slightly hunched shoulders hinting at an aggression his smile would put the lie to only for anyone who wished to believe in fairy tales.

This was the man who had grown all those beautiful flowers? The idea seemed incomprehensible, as he looked more like the ogre who would invade a town, frighten all the children and stomp on all the pretty posies.

Mariah fought the urge to step back a pace and instead lifted her chin even as she dropped into a slight curtsey. “Mr. Jacko, I am Mariah Rutledge. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Jacko reached up his right hand to scratch beneath his left ear, a curious gesture, but one that now had his head tilted to the right, so that he seemed to be looking at her now out of the corners of his bean-black eyes. “Just Jacko. There’s no mister about it. So, you’re the one who gave us that fine boy upstairs. I haven’t laughed so long or hard in a long time.”

Mariah lifted her chin even higher. “You find my son amusing, Jacko?”

Now he tipped his head from side to side, as if weighing how he would answer. A fascinating man, but perhaps fascinating in the way a North American rattlesnake could be fascinating. “No, Mariah, girl. I find the fix Spencer’s in amusing. You’ve just tied him fast to Becket Hall, didn’t you now? Tied him hard and fast, when we couldn’t find a way to make him stay. The Cap’n’s over the moon, though he’d never say so. He likes to know where his chicks are.”

Mariah knew her cheeks had gone pale. “Spencer…Spencer didn’t plan to stay here? Where was he going to go?”

Jacko shrugged those massive shoulders. “Which way is the wind blowing today, Miss Rutledge?” He lifted a hand to his forehead in a blatantly mocking salute. “But he won’t be sailing off now. What with the fine great anchor you tied fast to his ankle.”

“Jacko,” Callie said quietly. “That was a mean thing to say. Go away.”

And, to Mariah’s amazement, that’s just what the man did, turning his back on the pair of them and heading toward the front of the house. Her body inwardly sagged in relief.

“Did he mean that, Callie? Was Spencer planning to leave?”

Callie shrugged. “Spencer has always talked about the places he’d like to see. China. America. I think he’d cheerfully sail off to the moon, if it took him away from Becket Hall. That’s why he went off to the Army. He wanted to fight Napoléon, see the Continent. But he was sent to Canada instead.” She smiled. “But that’s how he met you, Mariah, and now you’re going to be married. Elly says Spencer has to grow up now, stop chafing at living here. I don’t know why he chafes. I think it’s lovely here. But Spence was ten years old, I think, when we came to Romney Marsh. He remembers the islands and I don’t. I only know Romney Marsh.”

“But Spencer knows other places exist,” Mariah said as they began walking once more. “Whole other worlds he hasn’t seen. And now, because of William and me, he won’t see them.”

“Nonsense. He hasn’t even been to London. You can take William and go to London, surely. That’s another world, or at least that’s what Morgan and Elly say. Come on, we’ll go outside, let you smell the fresh air.”

Mariah nodded her agreement, knowing she’d just heard an opinion straight out of the innocence of youth. It would serve no purpose to argue that she, Mariah, had put an end to all of Spencer’s dreams, whatever those might be. A wife and child meant responsibility and, if she knew nothing else about Spencer Becket, she knew he was a man who took his responsibilities very seriously.

She’d had time, around their nightly campfires, to listen to Clovis tell her about Spencer Becket, the man who had bloodied General Proctor’s nose. She’d heard the same story from her father, who’d believed the man had deserved a medal, not two months in the small gaol and being stripped of his rank.

Was it any wonder that the night she’d crawled beneath the blanket to share her body’s warmth with Lieutenant Becket, and he’d reached for her, felt her softness, began to fumble with the buttons of her gown, that she’d welcomed that touch, sought…sought something in that touch? Not only allowed what the feverish man was doing, but aided and abetted him?

Even the pain that had come when he’d entered her had been welcome, proving to her that, yes, she was still alive and she could still feel.

And now she had tied an anchor to the man’s ankle; he felt duty-bound to marry her, care for their son. She’d quite possibly saved his life; he’d quite possibly saved hers without knowing it and his reward was to be a lifetime in this house, on this land—where he didn’t want to be.

“Mariah, what do you think?”

Mariah blinked, surprised to see that she was now standing on an immense stone terrace overlooking a stretch of sand and shingle beach, the Channel lapping quietly at the shoreline, the blue sky seemingly limitless.

“It’s…it’s beautiful,” Mariah said honestly and walked over to the railing, placing her palms on the cool stone. How did Spencer see this view? Did he recognize it for its own beauty or stand here to look longingly toward the water and all that lay beyond it? “Oh, and two ships. Aren’t they sleek-looking?”

Callie also looked to her left to where the sloops rode at anchor offshore, about one hundred yards apart, their sails rolled up and firmly lashed to the masts. “The first is Papa’s Respite, and the other is Chance’s Spectre.”

“Spectre? You mean, as in ghost?”

Callie’s smile suddenly seemed awfully bright. “Yes, that’s it. Chance, um, Chance says that with a wife and two children now and his estate to oversee, he has only the ghost of a chance to go sailing on her more than twice a year. He says that and then Julia gives him the hairy eyeball and he laughs.”

“The hairy eyeball and an anchor firmly tied to his ankle. Well, they’re beautiful ships.” She leaned forward slightly, still looking to her left, to see a few peaked roofs peeking up behind a rise in the land. “And there’s the village, I suppose. I’d like to walk over there someday, but not just yet.”

She then looked to her right where there was—nothing. Only some tall grasses waving in what must be a constant breeze from the water. Even the shingle slowly faded away, leaving only a wide stretch of sand.

“You aren’t allowed to walk there,” Callie said, suddenly serious, as if she knew where Mariah was looking. “The sands can shift and swallow you whole, the way the whale swallowed Jonah. But the sands never spit you out again. Long ago, someone told me, some local freetraders taking their wool across the Channel used the sands to beach their boats where the Waterguard wouldn’t dare follow, and then offloaded the contraband they brought back with them. There are so many legends. But the smugglers knew the sands and we don’t. They’re not safe. Nobody goes there. And nobody smuggles from these shores anymore, of course. Not for years and years.”

“Really?” Mariah asked, still looking at the sands, fascinated by them for some reason she didn’t understand. Perhaps it was the stark beauty of waving grass and sand and water…and the danger hidden beneath that beauty. Or perhaps it was the rushed way in which Callie had told her small story and then added even more warnings.

“Oh, yes. There’s no smuggling here. There’s no need.”

“But it must have been so very exciting, don’t you think, Callie?”

Callie sniffed. Quite an adult sniff, at that. “That’s just romantical. Smuggling is…smuggling was what they did to survive, nothing more. Nobody smuggles for the adventure of the thing. That would be silly.”

“Yes, of course it would be,” Mariah said, stepping back from the railing, ready to return to the house, as she was beginning to feel as if her legs were fashioned out of sponges. But then she caught a movement in the distance, and moments later Spencer Becket appeared out of the tall grasses. He was striding surefootedly across the sands toward Becket Hall, a staff taller than himself in his right hand. The young man she recognized as Rian Becket from that first night walked along behind him.

Rian Becket had a small wooden cask hefted up and onto his shoulder and he was whistling. The sound carried to her on the stiff breeze.

She felt Callie’s hand on her arm. “We should go inside now.”

Mariah blinked, closed her mouth, which had fallen open at the sight of the two men. “Yes, yes we should. I’m afraid I’ve done too much too soon.” She allowed herself to be led back across the wide terrace to the French doors they had used earlier, turning only at the last moment to take one last look to the beach.

He carries the staff in case the sands try to take him. To either hold out to a rescuer, or brace it lengthwise against the sands and employ it to crawl to safety. But he carries it carelessly, because he already knows the way.

What had she asked him? How did he amuse himself here on Romney Marsh? And what had he answered?

Oh yes, she remembered now. “We keep ourselves busy….”




CHAPTER FIVE


“SHE SAW ME, saw what I was doing.”

“Is that so? And precisely what did she see you doing, Spencer?” Ainsley asked coolly as he continued to slowly move the magnifying glass across the map on the table.

Spencer fisted his hands at his sides, trying to hold on to some semblance of calm, remaining at least marginally civilized. “I saw her hair. That damn hair, burning in the sunlight. She was on the terrace when I came through the sands, and Callie with her.”

He closed his eyes. Yes, he’d seen her hair. He’d seen considerably more of her earlier. No wonder his eyeballs burned in his head. Just as his soul should be burning in hell for lusting after a woman who’d just given birth. To his son. And he couldn’t even remember impregnating her. What a damnable mess. He could barely wait to be shed of this place for a space, concentrate on something other than his own confused feelings. And if that made him a coward, then so be it.

Ainsley put down the magnifying glass and looked at his son who, as he’d expected, didn’t so much as blink, even as he was sure Spencer would like to be pacing, seething, perhaps even shouting—anything but standing still in front of Jacko and his father. Standing tall, never cringing. Personal bravery had never been an issue with Spencer. Good sense, however, had. Still, he had gone away a lad, and come home a man. “How nice that Mariah feels strong enough to be up and about so soon. You’ll arrange for the wedding now, of course.”

“No, not yet,” Spencer said, thinking back on the promise he’d made to Mariah. “She’d, um, she expressed a wish to be fully recovered from the birth before we hold the ceremony.”

“I see. And you’ve agreed?”

“I’ve agreed. Hell, it was the least I could do.”

Ainsley nodded. “Very well. Was there anything else?”

Spencer dropped unceremoniously onto the leather couch, taking a moment to glare at Jacko, who sat at the other end. He loathed subterfuge, and Ainsley was so very good at it. “Don’t pretend you both don’t know what I’ve been planning, Papa. You made it clear the other night that you knew and warned me against it.”

Ainsley looked levelly at him and then smiled slightly. “Clearly my powers of intimidation have gone sadly missing then, because you still plan to leave for Calais tonight to arrange for the first smuggling shipment.”

“You know even that? Clovis told you,” Spencer said, smacking his fist against his thigh. Mariah’s arrival had delayed his first trip across the Channel, but he would go tonight or know the reason why. “He’s turned into an old woman, afraid we’ll all be caught and hanged. But I never thought he’d betray me.”




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