Duchess of Sin (41 page)

Off the Coast of Ireland, 1804

T
his was not how Caroline Blacknall expected to die.

Not that she had ever thought about it very much. Living took up too much time and energy to think about dying. But she would
have thought it would be quietly, in her bed, after a long life of scholarship and travel and family. Not drowning at the
age of twenty-one on a crazy, ill-advised pursuit.

Caroline clung to the slippery mast as a cold wave washed over her and lightning pierced the black sky over her head. The
little fishing boat rocked and twisted under the force of the howling wind. Waves crashed over its hull, higher and stronger
every time, nearly swamping them completely.

She couldn’t hear the shouts of the crew any longer, or even her own screams. All she could hear was deafening thunder and
the crash of those encroaching waves.

She squeezed her eyes shut and held even tighter to the
mast. She dug her ragged, broken nails into the sodden wood. A splinter pierced her skin, but she didn’t mind the pain, or
the bitter cold wind that tore through her wet cloak. It told her she was still alive, although probably not for much longer.

Behind her closed eyes, she saw the faces of her sisters, Eliza and Anna, saw her mother’s gentle smile. She felt the tiny
hands of her nieces and nephews wrapped around her shoulders, heard her stepdaughter Mary’s laughter. Were they all lost to
her forever?

No! She had just begun to live again after her husband’s death a year ago. She had just begun to find her own purpose in the
world. That was what this voyage was about, putting the past to rest and moving into the future. She couldn’t give up now.
Blacknalls did
not
surrender!

She opened her eyes and twisted her head around to see the crew of the little boat scurrying and sliding over the deck as
they desperately tried to save the vessel and themselves. They hadn’t wanted to take on a passenger, especially a woman, but
she had begged and bribed until they gave in. No one but fishermen ever went to the distant, forbidding Muirin Inish.

She wagered they would never take a “cursed” woman aboard again, if they all made it through this.

Caroline tilted her head back to stare up into the boiling sky. It couldn’t be much past noon, but that sky was black as pitch,
black as midnight. Only jagged flashes of lightning broke through the gloom, lighting up the thick clouds and the turbulent
sea.

When they set out from the coast of Donegal that morning, it was gray and misty. One of the sailors muttered about the absence
of seabirds, the silence of the
water, but despite these supposed ill omens they set sail. Birds couldn’t stand in the way of commerce, and Caroline refused
to be left behind. She had traveled too far to turn away now, when her destination was at last within her grasp.

She had even glimpsed the famous pink granite cliffs of Muirin Inish, so close yet still so far, when those black clouds closed
in. It was all much too fast.

Was he there somewhere? she wondered. Did he watch the storm from those very cliffs?

A crack sounded above her, loud as a whiplash, and she looked up to find that the mast, her one lifeline, cracked. Horrified,
she watched it slowly, oh so slowly, topple toward the deck.

Caroline felt paralyzed, captured, and she couldn’t move. But somehow she managed to throw herself backward, unpeeling her
numb hands from the wood.

She moved just in time. The broken mast drove down into the beleaguered deck, cutting a wound in the boat that swiftly bled
more salt water. It twisted onto its side, and Caroline was thrown into the waiting sea.

She had thought it was cold before, but it was not.
This
was cold, a freezing knife thrust into her very heart that stole her breath away. The waves closed over her head, dragging
her down.

Somehow she ripped away the ties of her cloak and kicked free of its suffocating folds. She had learned to swim as a child,
lovely summer days with her sisters at the lake near their home at Killinan Castle. She blessed those days now as she summoned
all her strength, pushed away the numb cold, and swam hard for the surface.

Her head broke through the water and she sucked in a
deep breath of air. The hulk of the floundering boat was far away, a pale slash in the inky sea. The rocky cliffs of shore
beckoned through the darkness, seemingly very far away.

Caroline kicked toward it, anyway, moving painfully slowly through the waves. Her arms were sore and terribly weak; it took
every ounce of her will to keep lifting them, to not give in to the restful allure of the deep. She knew if she couldn’t keep
moving she would be lost, and she couldn’t give up.

A piece of wood drifted past her, a section of the broken mast. She grabbed onto it and hauled herself up onto its support.
It floated toward shore, taking her with it, and all she could do was hang on tightly.

Once it had been fire that separated her from him. Burning, scarring fire and the acrid sear of smoke. Now it was water, cold
and just as burning. It felt like the primal wrath of the ancient Irish gods she loved studying so much.

Caroline pressed her cheek to the wood of her little raft and closed her eyes. “This shouldn’t be happening to me,” she whispered.
It was utterly absurd. She was a respectable widow, a bluestocking who preferred quiet hours in the library to anything else.
She was not adventurous and bold like her sisters. How did she find herself caught in a perilous adventure straight out of
one of Anna’s beloved romantic novels?

But she knew how it was she came here. Because of
him,
Grant Dunmore. A man she should have been happy to never see again. They seemed fated to brave the elements together through
their own folly.

Caroline felt something brush against her legs, something
surprisingly solid. She opened her eyes to find she was not far from the rocky shore of Muirin Inish. She tried to kick toward
it, but her legs had become totally numb and refused to work.

She sobbed in terrible frustration. The tide was catching at her, trying to drag her back out to sea, even as land was so
tantalizingly near!

Above the wind, she heard a humanlike shout. Now she was surely hallucinating. But it came again, a rough call. “Hold on,
miss! I’ve got you.”

Someone grabbed her aching arm and dragged her up and off the mast. She cried out at the loss of her one solid reality and
tried to cling to it, yet her rescuer was relentless. He wrapped a hard, muscled arm around her waist and pulled her with
him as he swam for the shore.

Caroline’s chest ached, as if a great weight pressed down on her, and dark spots danced before her eyes. She couldn’t lose
consciousness, not now so close to redemption! She struggled to stay awake, to hold on.

Her rescuer carried them to shore at last. He held her in his arms, tight against his chest, as he ran over the rough, stony
beach. Caroline was vaguely aware that she was pressed to naked skin, warm on her cold cheek, like hot satin over iron strength.
His heartbeat pounded in her ear, quick and powerful, alive. It made
her
feel alive, too, her heart stirring back into being.

He laid her down on a patch of wet sand, gently rolling her onto her side. “
Diolain,
don’t be dead,” he shouted. “Don’t you dare be dead!”

His voice was hoarse from the salt water, but she could hear the aristocratic English accent under that roughness. What was
an Englishman doing on an isolated rock like
Muirin Inish? What was
she
doing there? She couldn’t even remember, not now.

He yanked at the tangled drawstring of her plain muslin gown, ripping it free to ease the ruined fabric from her shoulders.
Through her chemise he pounded his fist between her shoulder blades, and she choked out the sea-water that clogged her lungs.
The pain in her chest eased and she dragged in a deep breath.

“Thank God,” her rescuer muttered.

Caroline turned slowly onto her back as she reached up to rub the water from her aching eyes. The man knelt beside her, and
the first things she noticed were the stark blue-black tattoos etched on his sun-browned skin. A circle of twisted Celtic
knotwork around his upper arm, a small Irish cross on his chest. Dark, wet hair lay heavy on his lean shoulders.

Dazed and fascinated, she reached up to trace that Celtic cross with her fingertip. The elaborate design blurred before her
eyes.

He suddenly caught her hand tightly in his. “Caroline?” he said. “What the devil are you doing here?”

She slowly raised her gaze to his face, focusing on those extraordinary golden-brown eyes. She had seen those eyes in her
dreams for four long years.

And now she remembered exactly why she had come to Muirin Inish.

“I’m here to see you, of course, Grant,” she said. Then the world turned black.

Where authors give you the inside scoop!

Dear Reader,

In going through my desk, I found personal case notes from Rick Ramirez, the hero of TEMPTED BY FATE, Book Three in the Guardians
of Destiny series…

I hope you enjoy Ramirez and TEMPTED BY FATE! Don’t forget to check out the equally engaging (and hot) heroes in the other
Guardians of Destiny books. And drop by
www.kateperry.com
to say hi—I’d love to hear from you.