Pirate's Bride (Liberty's Ladies) (46 page)

“Emmie, you’re a tempting woman, but someone has to stop this before it goes any further. I have a wife — and I love her. I suggest you forget about me…”

“And find someone else?” she broke in, her face distorted in a sneer which was less than becoming to her. “I don’t want anyone else but you.”

“The Babcocks appointed me to look after you, to see to your needs. I don’t want to besmirch their request and memory by doing the unforgivable with you.” Was that Ian Briston, notorious womanizer and the infamous Captain Hawk, making such an insane statement? What had happened to him? But he knew the answer when Bethlyn’s face once again invaded his thoughts. He loved her, no matter what she’d done.

“You will be looking after my needs if you bed me,” Emmie retorted. “I need you, Ian, need you inside me.”

At that moment, any infatuation Ian held for Emmie withered away. He realized that something other than Bethlyn kept him from making love to Emmie. Emmie had turned from a shy flower into a vulgar woman. Where was liberty’s heroine?

He wondered if he’d built up Emmie in his mind as something she wasn’t. This was the real Emmie, the woman who sat nude on the bed, stroking her breasts in an attempt to excite him to take her. The demure and shy Emmie was how she wanted him and other people to perceive her, but that Emmie wasn’t real.

She’d lied to him all of these weeks. He couldn’t trust Emmie Gray, either.

Her moaning as she touched herself disgusted him. He wished he was home with Bethlyn, loving her, making a child with her. Not here with this woman, a woman who’d deceived him. He felt like a complete imbecile.

“Good evening,” he brusquely intoned, and started for the door. Emmie catapulted from the bed when he stepped into the hallway, not caring that any of the servants might see her, naked and holding on to Ian’s coat sleeve, begging him not to abandon her.

“I have no intention of abandoning you,” he told her. “I promise to look after you as the Babcocks wished. When you reach twenty-one, you may do as you want with your money, but until then I’ll make certain that you’re well cared for, that your bills are paid, and I’ll advise you in any capacity you deem necessary. But I won’t become your lover.”

“You don’t mean that. I know you don’t. Your conscience is bothering you, that’s all. You’ll change your mind eventually. I know you will.”

He disentangled her hand from his sleeve. “Good night.”

For a moment he thought Emmie was going to follow him down the stairs, but she stood on the landing, her eyes filled with some emotion he couldn’t name. He shivered.

Seconds later, he climbed into the carriage and shut his eyes, grateful to have escaped Emmie’s clutches. He nearly laughed. Emmie’s clutches. What an absurd choice of words, but after a few moments’ thought, he decided they aptly fit the situation. He’d felt cornered, more than eager to flee her and those grasping hands.

Emmie had deceived him and others into thinking her an innocent. But why?

Ian had meant it when he told her he wouldn’t abandon her. He’d do his duty by Emmie in the way the Babcocks had requested, but an uneasy feeling nagged at him. Something wasn’t right about any of this. He silently vowed to himself that somehow he’d discover the mystery of Emmie Gray.

~ ~ ~

Emmie had just returned to her room, flinging toilet articles to the floor in an unbridled rage when the servant girl arrived to inform her that a gentleman wished to see her.

“Ian has returned!”

Her hope was dashed when the girl said it was Lieutenant James Holmes.

“Tell him I’m asleep and can’t—”

Holmes broke off her words by appearing in the doorway, and he dismissed the girl.

“You look quite awake to me,” he said, and leered at her, his eyes taking in every aspect of her body.

“What do you want, James? I’m quite exhausted.”

“Not too exhausted to risk dallying with a married man.”

“Ian Briston isn’t happily married. I think he might be having trouble with his wife.”

James Holmes reclined on the bed, delighting in watching her. “Ah, yes, I remember the vixen. Bethlyn Briston is a most beautiful and desirable woman. It’s no wonder you’re jealous. She isn’t the sort of rival you can match, Annabelle.”

She swiftly turned from the mirror where she stood, admiring herself. “Never call me Annabelle again!” she hissed at him. “Annabelle Hastings is dead, but Emmie Gray is alive and quite ready to do battle with the haughty Bethlyn Briston, I know a few tricks which I doubt she can match.”

James laughed. “Yes, I’m certain you do and that Ian Briston will appreciate your special talents, talents you learned from your stepfather, no doubt.”

Her face paled, and her mouth trembled. “Don’t mention him to me ever again. I hate him.”

“Come now, Annabelle. Don’t lie to me. I know the truth about you, got it straight from my mother’s mouth before she breathed her last breath. She told me how sorry she was for you after she married your stepfather. She wanted to be a good mother to you, but you hated her. At first she thought you disliked her because you thought she was trying to take your own mother’s place, since you’d been caring for your stepfather and running the tavern during the time he was widowed. Almost like a proper wife, too.” He laughed at her reproachful look.

“I don’t want to hear any more of your lies.”

“Now don’t put your hands over your ears, love. My words can’t block out your memories of the nights the old man sneaked into your room and your bed.”

“He wasn’t old,” she denied. “Luther was thirty eight.”

“And a randy thirty-eight he was, too. Or so my dear mother told me. At least he was until you started catering to his baser needs. Tell me, did old Luther teach you everything you know? Or can I take some credit for your ability?”

He was actually salivating, his gaze feasting on her breasts and darting to the light-colored triangle of hair at the juncture of her thighs. She always had this effect on James, whether clothed or not. He wasn’t the best of lovers, in some ways Luther had been better, more able to please her.

She now realized that she had enjoyed bedding Luther because he was her stepfather, someone forbidden to her. But she hated him for making her a woman at only thirteen, for changing her from an innocent child to a wanton the day her mother was buried. During the two years when her mother and Luther were married, she knew Luther had looked at her in an odd way, but she’d been too innocent to know what those looks meant.

The night she cried into her pillow for her mother, she learned. It had all started when Luther came into her room and sat beside her on the bed, pulling her into his arms and consoling her. She had wanted to think of Luther as her father, but he was nothing like her real father, who had been kind and gentle.

Luther wasn’t always nice to her mother. Sometimes he hit her, leaving bruises on her face and arms. He never hit his stepdaughter. It almost seemed that he went out of his way to please her, but she couldn’t forget those strange looks.

That night Luther pleased her in a way she never thought possible. One moment he’d held her like a father would, the next his lips had claimed hers. She remembered trying to break away, growing frightened and confused. But Luther had held her, telling her that she belonged to him now and must do whatever he said or he’d have her carted off to London where there was a school for bad girls who didn’t listen to their folks.

Having no other relations and no place to go, she didn’t balk when he laid her on the bed and removed her thin nightrail before taking off his own clothes. She didn’t know what to make of this hairy but well-built man, and Luther was well endowed in all ways. She didn’t know what to make of Luther’s hands and lips moving across her body, touching her in places she never knew could feel. But feel she did, and she moaned her pleasure while Luther’s fingers buried themselves deep within her. Even now, years later, she blushed to remember how wonderful her body felt when Luther finally entered her. The pain of joining dissolved with each thrust, and every time he kissed her budding breasts, fire grew within her, and with the subsequent explosion, she became Luther’s willing slave.

Perhaps she’d been destined to be wanton, but she hated him for making her a woman. He had destroyed her image of herself as a nice little girl, yet she couldn’t get enough of him, sometimes teasing and seducing him three or four times a day, until Luther was physically incapable of lovemaking. When he married James Holmes’s mother she was jealous of the woman because she was rather pretty and seemed genuinely fond of Luther.

At fifteen, Annabelle’s body was alluring and beautiful, and many a young man had vied for her attentions. But she didn’t want any of them. She wanted Luther, because he was so smitten with his new wife. Sex gave her a sense of power, and finally she wore down Luther’s resistance.

Then James arrived to visit his mother, and she decided she wanted to captivate this handsome young soldier. Being her stepbrother, he was forbidden to her, too. But the two of them made love in the barn on the first night of his arrival. Things, however, turned ugly when Luther found them together and raised his pistol. James was quicker, and tackled Luther to the ground, knocking Luther unconscious. James picked up the pistol and, before the disbelieving eyes of Annabelle Hastings, he killed her stepfather.

His mother died of a heart attack that night, and from that day on Annabelle belonged to James Holmes.

Even now, it seemed that her body knew he was her master. She moved closer to the bed, hating herself for wanting him, but the man she saw before her wasn’t James Holmes any longer but Ian Briston. Ian, Ian, her heart cried when James pulled her down to him, swiftly and violently making love to her. I love you so!

~ ~ ~

 “That was good, wasn’t it?” James asked, and lit a cheroot as he leaned against the pillows.

Gritting her teeth at the absurdity of such a question, she agreed it was. Why did he have to ask her? Didn’t he know if the sex was good or not? She bet Ian would never have to ask something so stupid.

“You promised me the fifth name,” he reminded her.

She sat up and wrapped the sheet around her. “I told you that there is no fifth person. I was wrong.”

“I don’t believe you, Annabelle, or Emmie. I think there is a fifth man who betrays his king behind a loyalist cloak. General Howe is much impressed with my information and is considering making me a major. You wouldn’t want me to lose my promotion by keeping such a valuable secret from me.”

“There is no one else,” she retorted.

His fingers dug into her arm. “All I need do is arrest Ian Briston to learn the truth.”

“No! You’re wrong. I swear you are.”

“Stop lying. You’re an expert liar and actress, my dear, but I know you well. You forget that I’m the one who tutored you in speech and proper manners. You were a countrified little dolt when I took you away from the tavern. You may have all of Philadelphia eating out of your hand with your poor waif story, but I know differently.”

“Sometimes I wish you never had involved me in all of this.” Emmie gritted her teeth and pulled away from him.

“Liar! Without me all of this luxury wouldn’t be yours today. How fortuitous that the Babcocks were old and ill. You don’t actually think that I’m going to allow you to live like a queen while I can’t live in high style. Their deaths and the will, leaving all to you, took me by surprise, but you’re going to marry me so that I may profit from your windfall.”

This was the first she’d heard of marriage. Never would she marry Holmes, not when she’d fallen so in love with Ian Briston.

“Tell me the fifth name.”

“James, you’re utterly tiresome. I wish that little strumpet you kept for a while hadn’t taken off the way she did. At least she kept you amused so you wouldn’t have the time to pester me about a man who doesn’t exist.”

“Della was amusing,” he agreed, and eyed Emmie warily. “But she was grateful for everything I gave to her and taught her. She was more ignorant than you were, but she never lied to me.”

Tossing his cheroot on the carpet, he grabbed her again, hurting her. “Ian Briston will never want you. You’re too far beneath him. He’s married to the daughter of an earl, a woman who can no doubt trace her ancestors back hundreds of years and tell you every little detail about them. I won’t allow you to fancy yourself in love with Briston. I demand that you tell me he was the fifth loyalist who was at Simpson House.”

“I can’t — Ian wasn’t there!”

His voice held an ominous threat. “Oh, no? Well, let me see how I can remedy this sudden loss of your memory. Maybe I should pay Briston a visit and tell him how his heroic Emmie Gray is nothing but a whore, that she seduced her own stepfather and then used her wiles on me, her stepbrother, tell him that you’re not as young as you look. Perhaps I should also inform him that the real Emmie Gray died during the Indian attack, an attack which I planned to wipe out the settlers on the frontier, that you’ve spied for me many times, but this time you came to me, begging me to use you as a spy, and assumed Emmie Gray’s identity. Do you think he’d even think of bedding you after that?”

“Those are half-truths. I never wanted to spy for you.”