Night in Eden (4 page)

It never occurred to Hayden to knock before entering his own private parlor. He simply pushed open the paneled door and walked in.

The convict woman was sitting in a chair beside the fire, one cheek resting against the chair's high back, her eyes closed. She was dressed in nothing but a thin shift and a tattered old petticoat. The shift was open at the front, revealing one white, rounded breast at which Simon suckled drowsily.

She definitely had nice breasts, Hayden thought, closing the door gently behind him. The kind of breasts a man liked to hold in his hands. Now that she was cleaned up, the rest of her wasn't bad to look at, either. She wasn't a classic beauty, like Laura. Her chin was too strong for a woman, and her nose tilted up a bit at the end, making her look somewhat like a willful child. But there was nothing childlike about her mouth; it was all woman, full and sensual.

His eyes settled on her hair, and he wondered how he ever could have thought her hair nondescript. It was the color of fine port wine, warmed by the fire. It curled around her head in reckless abandon, making her look as if she'd just gotten out of bed.

It was a thought that surprised him.

Bryony sat up with a start, staring at the man who stood just inside the parlor door, his hand still resting on the handle behind him.

The booted and spurred adventurer with the murderous knife slung at his hip had been transformed into a gentleman, dressed to go out for the evening. He wore an elegant, dark coat with a double-breasted front panel that curved toward the back. His waistcoat was of white silk, as were the stockings that showed beneath his formal breeches. He had an evening cape casually flung over one arm. From his hand dangled a
chapeau bras
and a pair of white gloves.

But for all his finery, there was still an aura of wildness about him, she noticed—an indefinable air of untamed danger that seemed at odd variance with the clothes he wore.

Painfully conscious of her naked breast, Bryony eased the sleepy baby off her nipple and pulled together her shift. She wished she'd had the sense to put her dirty old dress back on right after her bath.

She quickly tied the ribbon at the neck of her shift. When she looked up, she discovered his dark, somewhat disturbing gaze focused on her hair. His flaring brows were drawn harshly together, as if he didn't like what he saw.

Bryony's hair had been cropped short before she was put on the ship, but in the last six months it had grown to an awkward length. Now that it was clean, it curled wildly about her head in an untidy riot.

"What have you done to your hair?"

She blinked at him in surprise. "I—I washed it."

He walked over to the humidor that stood on a side table and extracted a cigar. Even in evening clothes, he had a lithe, coiled way of moving. "From now on," he said over his shoulder, "keep it pulled back. You look like a whore with it all over your face like that."

She felt her cheeks grow hot. "I don't have anything to hold it back with. Someone stole my caps on the ship."

He turned, the cheroot resting against his lower lip. "I was planning to have Gideon take you down into the town tomorrow to pick up some things for Simon. You can get yourself a new dress and cloak while you're there. And some caps."

"Yes... sir."

She rose to lay Simon in the cradle that stood near the fireplace, self-consciously aware of his disturbing eyes, watching her.

"We might not make it into town again for some months," he said, striking his tinderbox. "So be sure to buy whatever Simon is likely to need in the immediate future. I assume you know what will be necessary?"

She glanced up at him from where she bent over the cradle. He sat with his hip resting against the edge of the oak table near the window, carelessly swinging one silk-clad leg back and forth. His tinderbox flared. The flame cast harsh shadows across the sharp bones of his face. She thought of those wild, desolate hills, rolling endlessly into the distance, and swallowed hard. "Is your property so far?"

He shrugged and tipped back his dark head to exhale a long stream of blue smoke. "If the roads were decent, it could be done easily in a day. But the roads in New South Wales are never decent."

He flipped the ash from the tip of his cigar with one movement of his lean hands. He had nice hands, she thought; strong, yet well-formed, and tapered, like an artist's. Or a musician's. She wondered, idly, if he played an instrument.

He lifted the cigar to his lips again. "I hadn't meant to leave you alone with Simon yet, but I've received an invitation from Government House for tonight that can't be refused." He paused to inhale deeply, his gaze never leaving her. "I've already told you what will happen if I find you have mistreated or neglected my son in any way. Do you need me to repeat it?"

She stared at his harsh, arrogant face, and unconsciously
clutched her shift to her breast as if some flogger were already about to rip it off her. "No... sir," she forced herself to say, thinking that she'd never hated anyone more than she hated this man.

"There's one other thing I forgot to mention." He stubbed out his cigar with a quick motion. There was an edginess, a restlessness about him tonight that she could sense even if she couldn't quite explain it. He glanced back up at her, and she could feel his gaze on her body. It made her skin feel hot, as if she were standing too close to a roaring fire. She wished he would go away.

"If you've a taste for drink," he said curtly, "lose it. Don't ever let me smell alcohol on your breath."

"I don't drink... sir," she said in a strangled whisper.

His nostrils flared. "I've never met a thieving whore yet who didn't like to hit the bottle."

She felt an angry flush stain her cheeks. "I'm not a whore. And I'm not a thief, either."

"No?" He pushed away from the table. "Then, what are you?" he demanded, advancing on her slowly. "What does a woman like you do to get herself deported?"

She didn't answer him.

"Well," he prompted, still coming at her. "What was it? Forgery? Receiving? Uttering?"

"No," she said finally, goaded, her voice trembling with fury.
"Manslaughter."

In the suddenly silent room, the word hung in the air between them. Bryony stared up into his deadly blue eyes and wished she could call it back.

He planted himself in front of her. He was so close she could feel the tension radiating from him, see the muscle that jumped beneath his hard, tanned jaw. He towered over her, six feet plus of raw, angry power.

"For
what?"
he demanded, his voice low and dangerous.

She swallowed convulsively, but she didn't cower and she didn't back away. "Manslaughter," she repeated.

"Good God." He tossed his evening cape and hat on a nearby chair and walked away from her, as if he didn't
trust himself to stand too near. Reaching the table, he leaned over it, bracing his hands against its edge. She could see the smooth line of his evening coat bulge over the bunched muscles of his arms and back, a kind of feral strength gloved in black silk. "They've given me a
murderer
to nurse my son?"

"I'm not a murderer," she said faintly, her earlier bravado gone. "It was an accident."

He twisted his head and looked at her over his shoulder. "Was it, by God?"

"Yes."

"And just who was it you
accidentally
killed?"

Bryony hesitated. "My husband."

His eyes narrowed. "I thought they still burned husband-killers in England."

Her breath left her in a whoosh. It had been one of her worst terrors—that they might burn her. The fear of it still haunted her. "It... it was an accident," she somehow managed to say again.

He straightened up and walked back to her with the slow stalk of a hunter advancing on his prey. She held her ground as he came right up to her again, only closer this time. Close enough that she could see the fine pattern of the silk of his waistcoat, the intricate folds of his cravat, the smooth tan of his lean cheek, the hard slant of his lips. Close enough for him to put his strong, beautiful hands around her slender throat.

She forced herself to stand still beneath his grip, barely breathing.
"If you
ever—
ever
—do anything to harm my son," he said quietly, increasing the pressure of his fingers slightly, "you won't live to hang. I'll break your neck myself."

Cornwall, twelve months earlier

"When is Papa coming home, Mama?"

Bryony forced herself to smile as she smoothed the tangled curls away from her two-year-old daughter's forehead. "Soon, sweetheart." She glanced to where the warm, golden light of the fine September evening slanted in through the nursery's mullioned window, and added, "It's time for you to go to sleep now."

"But he promised he'd be home in time to read me a story," Madeline insisted.

"I know." Bryony fussed with the cutwork trim on the child's sheet and noticed absently that the lace needed mending again. "Something must have come up to delay him."

Madeline's lower lip trembled, but she was too stubborn to let the tears that swam in her big brown eyes fall. "He only said he'd read to me because he didn't want to take me down to the village with him. He never really meant to do it."

"Oh, no, Maddy." But of course it was true, which was why Bryony didn't hold out any hope of the promised story being delivered tomorrow. Oliver disappointed the little girl enough on his own without Bryony adding to it.

She rose quickly and reached to close the curtains against the setting sun. Outside, seagulls wheeled high above the windswept cliffs behind the house, their mewling cries mingling with the crash of the surf against
the rocks at the base of Cadgwith Cove, far below. Bryony paused with her hand on the faded chintz and watched the dying sun glint off the water and cast long purple shadows over the gorse and boulder-strewn cliffs.

The wild and desolate beauty of the familiar scene filled her with a poignant, aching sense of joy. But it was followed too swiftly by an unexpected surge of loneliness, and an uneasiness that was close to fear.

She jerked the curtains shut and turned back toward her daughter with determined cheerfulness. "Shall I sing you a song? What would you like?"

"'Six White Horses.'"

Bryony smiled and settled on the edge of the miniature sleigh bed. Madeline always asked for 'Six White Horses.'

"'Six white clouds, flying o'er the sea,'" Bryony sang softly. "'Be six white horses, that will carry me...'"

Madeline's long lashes fluttered against cheeks rosy from a day spent with sun and sand and sparkling sea. Slowly the child's breathing eased, and she slept.

The song ended, but Bryony lingered at the side of the bed, gazing down at her daughter's sweetly parted lips, at the silky golden hair spread out over the worn linen. Her heart filled with fierce, desperate love for this child... and a deep, festering anger toward the careless man who had hurt her. Who was always hurting them both.

She kissed Madeline's forehead and stood up, her hands moving restlessly over the barely perceptible swell of her belly. By spring she would have another child. It was a thought which brought her, once again, that disturbing sense of trouble. She pushed it away.

The big old house settled quietly into dusty shadows as Bryony descended the single flight of bare wooden steps. The thump of her unfashionably sturdy shoes echoed in the stillness. When Bryony was a little girl, a Persian runner with vivid blue and red and gold swirls had carpeted the grand staircase that rose proudly from the slate-floored hall of Cadgwith Cove House to the half dozen or
so bedrooms above. In those days, her sea captain father had still been alive, and her mother's gay, musical laughter had filled the house with sunshine and love. But Captain Peyton and his vibrant wife were dead six years now, lost together in a boating accident in the treacherous waters off the cove. This past June, Bryony had decided that the tattered, threadbare stair runner had become dangerous, and she'd had it taken up.

A rattle of crockery from the kitchen told her Mrs. Pencarrow would be putting dinner on the table soon. Mrs. Pencarrow was expecting Oliver home, too. He'd flattered and teased the old cook-housekeeper into making roast chicken with bread sauce, his favorite. Bryony sighed, foreseeing more wounded feelings that would need soothing tonight.

She pushed open the swinging door that led to the ancient, sandstone-flagged kitchen. The kitchen was the oldest part of Cadgwith Cove House, thick-walled and low-ceilinged and dark with the smoke of ages. It smelled wonderfully of roasting chicken and the fresh apple pie set to cool on the stone sill of the open casement window.

"Madeline's asleep, Mrs. Pencarrow," she said to the stocky, gray-haired woman who stood at the stove and stirred her bread sauce. "I'm just going out for a quick walk along the cliffs before dinner." She lifted the latch on the stout kitchen door and tugged it open. "I won't be long."

"The cliffs?" Mrs. Pencarrow swung around to shake her wooden spoon at Bryony. "The cliffs, is it? When you know you should be upstairs dressing for dinner like the lady your da woulda wanted you to be, rather than scrambling around on the sea cliffs like a hoyden?"

But Bryony only laughed and pulled the heavy, weathered door shut behind her.

A warm breeze laden with moist, salty air caressed her face as she clattered down the two cracked stone steps that led to the yard. A gull screeched. Bryony flung back
her head to watch as it floated above the house's weathered gray slate roof, then dipped toward the sea.

She hurried across the cobbled yard, past low-walled beds of struggling, pathetic-looking herbs and vegetables, and followed the weed-choked path of crushed seashells that led up a small rise.

She crested the hill and stopped. The great blue sweep of the sea opened up below her.

Bryony loved the sea. She loved its restless, primitive pull, and the way the sea winds buffeted her ears and whipped at her skirts. She breathed deeply, filling her lungs with the essence of sweet heather and tangy brine and the mysterious scents of faraway, wondrous and unknown places.

Once Bryony had assumed that Cadgwith Cove House would always be her home. Then had come the unbearably gray, misty morning when they'd buried her mother and father. The day her uncle, Sir Edward Peyton, had come for her. He'd taken her away from the sea, to live in his dark, joyless house in the middle of the moors. At the time it had seemed to Bryony that all the sunshine and laughter had gone out of her life forever. She'd endured three miserable years of endless disapproval and lectures and beatings.

And then she'd met Oliver Wentworth.

He'd been twenty-one at the time, handsome and charming and always laughing. Late one night, she'd crept out of that dark, miserable house and married him.

Under the terms of Captain Peyton's will, control of Cadgwith Cove House had passed upon her marriage to Bryony—or rather, to Bryony's new husband. But Oliver saw the property as a source of income rather than as a livelihood. And now he was talking about selling the house and its adjoining land. He said it was because he'd rather live in London, but Bryony suspected the real reason was because he needed the money for his endless gambling debts. She was desperately afraid that one of these days he would go ahead and sell it, whether she
wanted him to or not. It was a thought that tore at her insides and suffocated her with panic and fury and a deep, abiding sense of failure.

The ominous loneliness she'd felt earlier returned, tinged now with despair. She turned and walked along the cliffside path, watching the first stars wink at her from out of the purpling sky.

She loved Oliver still, but it was in a different, diminished way. There was little in it of trust or respect, or even of passion. Sometimes she thought her love for Oliver was like the indulgent love of a woman for a spoiled but engaging and affectionate child. It was not the kind of love a woman wanted to feel for her husband.

Yet Oliver was her husband, and he always would be.

In the cove some hundred feet below her, dark green waves swelled and rolled, then dashed themselves to foam against the rocks at the base of the cliff. The air was heavy with salty spray and the endless, rhythmic boom and hiss of the sea.

Then she heard another sound, the high-pitched trill of a woman's laughter, coming from behind the mass of boulders that lay off the path ahead, to her right.

"Lawdy, Mr. Oliver," giggled the woman. "Do that again."

Oliver's familiar voice answered, pitched low and husky. "You like that, do you?"

Bryony's heart raced fast and painfully hard, sending the blood drumming in her ears and narrowing her vision with a red haze of sickened fury. She paused for a moment, her hand to her thudding chest, then left the path and circled around the rocks.

She saw the woman first, and recognized her as Flory Dickens, the wife of one of the village cottagers. Flory had an unmistakable mass of flame-red curls that tumbled from beneath her mobcap, and a plump, heaving bosom barely restrained by the low-cut bodice of her tawdry gown. She sat with her dirty skirts hiked up to her waist,
her knees spread wide, straddling Oliver as he lay flat on his back in the long grass that grew between the rocks near the cliff face. Bryony could see the woman's white, naked buttocks undulating in rhythm with the rise and thrust of Oliver's hips. He had one hand beneath her bunched skirts, playing with her, while with the other hand he tugged at the lace-trimmed edge of her bodice, pulling it down until her generous breast spilled out into his palm.

"Ah, you do know how to touch a girl, Mr. Oliver," Flory moaned. Licking her lips, she tipped her head back...

And screamed.

"Get away from him!" Bryony grabbed a handful of red curls and yanked hard. "How dare you? How
dare
you?"

Yowling like a cat with a singed tail, Flory Dickens scooted back against one of the boulders and cowered with her arms wrapped protectively about her head.

Oliver rose to his knees in the grass and quickly hitched his pants up over his bare hips. "Bryony." He scrambled to his feet with his flap only half done up. "I can explain."

"Explain?"
Bryony stared at him, her breath coming in short, angry huffs. For a moment she thought she might be sick.

He brushed an errant guinea-gold curl off his forehead and grinned at her sheepishly. It was a look that had melted the heart of every female Oliver Wentworth had ever encountered, from the doting nurse that rocked his cradle, to the old cook-housekeeper Bryony wouldn't let him replace. "Bryony," he said again, his voice low as he stepped forward to gaze down at her with sparkling gray eyes that always held just the right mix of sincerity and devilment. "Flory means nothing to me. You know that. You know how much I love you. But a man has needs, Bryony, and since you've been increasing—"

Bryony felt something break inside her, something that hurt. "I have never turned you away, Oliver," she said, her voice an agonized whisper. "Never."

He laid his palm, gently, against her cheek. "Bryony, you know how it was when you were carrying Madeline. When there's a baby in there, it just doesn't seem... decent."

"Are you saying the fact I'm with child again justifies this?" Her voice broke as she swept her hand toward Flory Dickens, who still crouched against the boulder and wailed.

He moved as if to take her in his arms. "Bryony—"

"Stay away from me." She whipped around and went to stand on the cliff's edge and gaze out over the rolling sea. The waves were running high and rough, as if a storm were blowing up. The water churned and thundered around the rocks below, restless and dark and dangerous. It called to something deep within her, something ancient and wild and sad. She choked back a sob until she thought it might strangle her.

The wailing from the cottager's wife ceased, and Bryony thought with relief that Flory Dickens must have finally taken herself off. She dashed an escaped tear from her cheek with the heel of her hand and turned back to confront her husband.

And found him helping Flory Dickens to her feet.

Rage, hot and bright and all-consuming, flamed within her. "Stay away from that woman!" Bryony threw herself at Oliver. "How dare you touch her?"

Bryony's fists pounded his chest as he swung around to face her. For a moment he looked startled. Then he caught her flailing fists and laughed.
Laughed.

She jerked her hands from his grip and backed away, stumbling over a ring of stones that surrounded the remnants of a nearby, long-dead fire. She lost her balance and fell, landing with a jarring thump in the middle of the cold gray ashes. As she floundered about, trying to regain her footing, her hand knocked against a blackened length
of wood. She seized it and brought it with her when she scrambled back up to her feet.

Oliver was still grinning. She put all her weight behind the wood and swung it at him.

The first blow hit him in the ribs. "Ow." He doubled over, holding his midriff. "Bloody hell, Bryony. That hurt!"

"Does it, Oliver? I don't hear you laughing now." She swung again, catching him this time on the arm.

"Bryony, don't." He jumped back, eluding the next blow. "This is not amusing, Bryony. Stop it."

"Amusing!" Bryony gripped the wood with both hands now. "Is it not
amusing
that I sit at home, trying to comfort your heartbroken little girl and growing big with your child, while you're out gambling away what's left of our money and satisfying your
needs
with the villagers' wives?"