The Return of Lord Conistone (27 page)

V
erena woke to find her left temple throbbing as if it had been hit with a hammer. The nausea gathered again. Realising she was back on the bunk in Lucas’s cabin, she twisted sideways and started to retch helplessly.

Everything was still swaying and rattling wildly. But someone was there, holding out a basin for her. She heard Lucas Conistone’s voice, saying gently, ‘My poor girl. We’re riding a westerly storm, I’m afraid. But we’re almost through the worst’.

She finished being sick at last and hauled herself up, her head swimming. He held out a tin mug to her of lukewarm tea, sweetened with sugar. She drank it thirstily. He took the mug back, then bathed her face very carefully with a cloth wrung out in a ewer of water set on the cabin floor.

Meanwhile, she remembered everything.
Lucas is a British agent. And my father was—a traitor
. She felt weak, and wretched, and sick with humiliation.

She suddenly realised that she was dressed only in her thin white chemise. Someone had removed her gown.

She burned with renewed shame. ‘Where is my…?’

‘You were sick all over it,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought another one for you’.

She nodded, tight-lipped. Then realised it was a flimsy garment made of pale pink muslin. Short-sleeved. Extremely low-necked. Bedecked with tawdry lace and frayed scarlet ribbons.

It must belong to one of those women.

‘Better than nothing,’ Lucas drawled. ‘Isn’t it? It has to cover you fractionally more than that—undergarment you’re wearing’.

The colour started to rise in her cheeks. She got too quickly to her feet, staggering involuntarily as the ship rolled.

‘Sit down,’ he said almost sharply. ‘Don’t be a fool. I’ll finish washing you before you put it on’.

He sat down beside her on the bunk, planting the ewer of water firmly between his booted legs and dipping the cloth into it. Then he squeezed it out and drifted its cool dampness over her face and temples. Down her neck. Feather-light. Tantalising. Cold. Her nipples puckered, standing out through the silk of her chemise. She crossed her hands over her breasts in acute embarrassment.

He drew them gently apart. ‘No need to be ashamed’.

She drew a deep breath. ‘On the contrary. You must despise me’.

He stopped his stroking. ‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because of my father…’

‘Querida
, that is nothing to do with you,’ he breathed softly.

She turned her head to face him, agonised. ‘Oh, Lucas. Why didn’t you tell me the truth about him earlier?’

He sat back, rubbing one hand across his temple. The question that haunted him also. ‘I knew that you loved your father deeply, Verena. I did not want to destroy that love.
Even if you believed me, about your father, I thought you would have hated me because I knew the truth’. His voice became harder. ‘As I expect you do now’.

She was silent. Utterly wretched. His very nearness, his tender strength, made the heat rise up from deep within her, and suffused her whole body with incredible longing.

‘Lucas, I saw his diary,’ she whispered at last. ‘In the pavilion. I read about his—meetings’.

He paid me the agreed sum, with a promise of more next time.

Lucas had gone very still. ‘You’d seen it…’

‘I’d seen it, but I didn’t understand—until now—what it all meant. I should have guessed, I should have known. My father had promised he would make us rich. How else, but by selling information to the French?’ Her voice failed; she took a deep breath then went on, ‘I saw the evidence with my own eyes, that night in the pavilion, but I refused to believe it. My own father…’

‘He loved you,’ Lucas said almost urgently. ‘Always remember that. To the end, he loved you’.

He was dipping the cloth again in the water, stroking her arms, her hands. His head was bowed in concentration as he sat at her side, his dark lashes softening his harsh cheekbones with shadow. The ship still swayed, but less wildly now.

‘The scar,’ she said suddenly, ‘across your ribs, Lucas; Dr Pilkington said it was done by a French sabre, but I didn’t realise…’

‘That was
O Estrangeiro’s
doing,’ he said. ‘An encounter in Portugal, earlier this year’.

‘Dr Pilkington said you could have died from that wound!’

‘Nonsense. I fought them off’.

‘They?’

‘The French spy known as The Foreigner had two friends with him. They were—inept. Now they are dead’.

He wasn’t looking at her. Only concentrating on wiping, soothing. She saw his wide shoulders flex and contract beneath the white lawn shirt he wore, saw the strong muscles of his forearms, where his sleeves were rolled up, saw the skin brown from the sun, the light dusting of sunbleached hairs, the steady movements of his lean fingers. Somehow his tenderness served only to emphasise his incredible strength. His utter masculinity.

How she treasured these moments of not having to think. Of just being able to gaze at his intent profile, noting how the shadow of a beard darkened the hard planes of his high cheekbones, his sculpted jaw.

Despair wrenched at her heart anew.
Time to start facing reality, Verena
. How could he feel anything but scorn for her now?

She said at last, ‘Lucas’. He stopped what he was doing. ‘Lucas, I loved my father’.

‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ he said quietly.

‘Why—’ her voice broke ‘—why did he do it?’

He cupped her chin in his hands and tilted her face, very gently, to meet his. ‘He was a desperate man, Verena!’ Lucas’s eyes burned into hers, tender and concerned. ‘As you must have known, he lived for his travels, his adventures, but eventually he must have realised he had neglected Wycherley, culpably so’.

Verena nodded wretchedly. ‘He didn’t even realise your grandfather had diverted that stream for his corn mill’.

‘Exactly. My grandfather was utterly wrong to do it, of course, but a good landowner should have known, instantly. Your father realised the estate was failing. But while on his travels, I think he truly believed, at first, that he’d found the mythical place in the Portuguese hills where
ancient treasure was supposed to be hidden. And he tried to sell that secret to my grandfather. My grandfather paid for a share in the treasure, but by then your father had realised the legend of gold was a lie’. Lucas hesitated. ‘By then your father also knew, I’m afraid, that he had something else that could be of great value in a time of war. The details of unmapped routes across the mountains of Spain and Portugal’. Lucas took her hand and held it. ‘Verena, your father saw my grandfather on his last visit home two years ago; and they argued—didn’t they?—badly, over the diary, over the so-called treasure. Your father was in a great hurry to get back to Portugal to meet his French paymasters. He probably didn’t realise until he was on board ship that my grandfather had substituted the diary with a blank one. By then it was too late for your father to return. For he knew that all his dark secrets would be betrayed by what was in that diary’.

Verena breathed, ‘Yet it lay in that pavilion, forgotten, because the Earl could not read it!’ She pressed her palms to her cheeks. ‘Until the Earl led
me
there, in hopes that I would translate the secret of the non-existent gold!’

‘And I guessed it was there and found it while you slept. I was hoping desperately, Verena, for
your
sake, that you didn’t know of its existence’.

Her eyes were wide again with distress. ‘I’d looked at it only briefly. I’d seen, and wondered, about his meeting with
O Estrangeiro
. But then I tried to hide the diary again, because I knew you wanted it—and—my father warned me not to trust you, Lucas’.

His voice was sharp. ‘When?’

‘It was in one of his letters. Sent after he left England, for the last time. Only I didn’t discover it until you went away. And when you came back, on the day of the Fair…’

‘Hush’ He took her hands. ‘Dear God, I understand it all now. Your coldness. Your
fear
of me…’

‘I thought, you see, that you’d been enjoying yourself. On the island of Jersey’. She was shaking her head. ‘Really, you were probably in
danger
…
’

‘I was meeting Alec there. He’s no wastrel, but one of Wellington’s top couriers’.

She nodded, biting her lip. ‘Of course…’

‘And you see now why I couldn’t tell you everything?’ His eyes were bleak, his face haggard. ‘I was in a hellish situation, but I never dreamed you would be put through such a terrible ordeal. If I could turn back time, I would, believe me’.

He might as well say it—he regretted
everything
. He had said nothing at all about what else had happened in the pavilion, how they had made passionate love. It had all been a ruse, to distract her, so he could get the diary. Even his offer of marriage had been made in desperation, to get it, and himself, away from her.

Oh, Verena, you are going to need all your courage now.

She withdrew her hands firmly from him, and tried to shrug. She even ventured a faint smile. ‘I fear my behaviour has been an object lesson in how not to conduct oneself in a crisis,’ she said as steadily as she could. ‘I’m sorry, Lucas. You must rue the day indeed that you ever met the Sheldon family. Is there anywhere else on this cursed ship where I can spend the rest of the journey?’

Even as she rose, bracing herself against the pain in her heart, his fingers suddenly closed over her slender shoulders and he swung her round to face him. He said, in his low, rich voice that seared her soul, ‘How do you think that I feel about my grandfather? Do you think I’m proud of
him
, a man who would put the ordinary people back into a state
of serfdom if he could and would sell his soul for yet more riches? Listen to me, Verena. We make our own destiny. You are not your father. You are honest and brave and true. Any fault in this is mine. I cursed myself a thousand times for my errors in handling this. A thousand times I thought,
I should have told her. I should have told her’.

‘Lucas’. Her voice was very quiet. ‘Did you seduce me to get the diary? Did you have—orders to seduce me?’

He was silent, his gaze raking her. Then he said, ‘There have been moments when I would have flung that diary to the bottom of the ocean, Verena, if I could only have your love. And—’ his eyes flickered dangerously ‘—in case you hadn’t noticed—nobody orders me to do a damn thing’.

The ship gave a violent roll. With a half-sigh, half-groan of longing—
’Verena’
—he gathered her in his arms and clasped her to him on the narrow bunk. And the storm that raged outside was nothing to the storm of passion that raged within her heart.

She realised she was hungry for him. Famished for him. Needed him as a lost traveller in the desert needs water. She flung her arms around him, clasping his head so her fingers trailed in his thick hair; she lifted her mouth to his, tasting him with her tongue, exploring, delighting when his own firm, beautiful lips captured hers in turn and returned, doublefold, the passion.

Every part of her remembered and wanted to renew the intimate contact they’d previously shared. As the peaks of her breasts rubbed against his hard-muscled chest, the longing for him to cup them, to caress them, was almost a pain. Sensing it, he ripped aside her chemise and lowered his head to lave their crests with his tongue, while she clasped and unclasped her fingers, raking them over the supple curves of his wide, sinewy back. ‘Lucas,’ she said in
a husky voice, ‘Lucas, you have my love. You have always had it’.

He lifted his head from her bosom, his eyes brooding, almost black with passion.
‘Meu amor
…’

He was on his feet. At first, she thought he was leaving her. But then, smiling darkly, he was shedding his boots and waistcoat, then stripping off his shirt and breeches, leaving them on the floor.

He came slowly towards her. She caught her breath at the sheer male magnificence of him. The strength and fine moulded curves of his chest and powerful thighs. The lean beauty of his waist and hips. His manhood was quivering with taut passion as it thrust outwards. She felt the liquid heat pooling in her womb.

She wanted this man, so very much. And incredibly he still wanted
her.

His iron-grey eyes smouldering, he lowered himself beside her on the narrow bunk and gathered her in his arms, holding her close, covering her face with kisses. His strong, hair-roughened legs twined with her own silken ones. She felt the throb of his shaft against her abdomen; she snuggled against him so his chest caressed her breasts.

She was arching towards him, hungry for more intimate contact. But he held back. He lifted his head above hers, his eyes dark in the lantern’s light, and whispered,

‘There are some things I must say to you. I meant every kiss, every word of passion I’ve ever offered to you, Verena. I want to marry you’.

The intensity of his voice almost scorched her. ‘Lucas. Lucas, are you sure? My family—my father…’

‘You are not your father
’. He kissed her again, tenderly cherishing her lips.

Her heart was full. This was where she needed to be; in his arms, as the storm surged around the ship. Feeling,
close against her body, the smooth strength of his shoulders, his lean hips; the roughness of his strongly-moulded thighs. The heat and silken power of his erection against her stomach.

He was kissing her again. This time his tongue was sliding between her lips, beginning a slow, insistent intrusion that caused her womb to throb in primitive echo. Her legs slid apart. She gasped as his strong fingers stroked up her slender thighs and began to caress the moist folds of her sex, finding the swollen peak that was the centre of all her desire.

She arched her hips against his hand almost violently. ‘Lucas—’

‘Patience, sweetheart. Time enough’.

Trailing his lips down her throat, he took the peak of one breast in his mouth, licking and caressing its stiffness. At the same time, she could feel the silken blunt tip of his manhood nudging against her with increasing pressure. She cried out again in pure need and opened to him, clasping him tight as he entered her in one smooth, blissful thrust. Breathing his name, she clasped her arms and legs around his virile body and bared her flushed face for his kisses.