Teresa Medeiros (6 page)

Perhaps the handsome pirate had kidnapped Justin Connor, tossed his fat corpse overboard, and kept her father’s watch as booty
.

“Here you go. Careful, it’s hot.” The man’s husky voice interrupted her reverie.

She took the cup he offered and watched him settle his lean hips against the windowsill. The breadth of his shoulders blocked the sunlight, leaving him in silhouette. At least she was to be spared the temptation of gawking openly at his face. She took a swig of the coffee, but its bitter warmth failed to ease her chill.

Maybe the cannibal had eaten Justin Connor but been unable to digest the watch
.

Her spirits lifted at the thought. She tilted the cup to hide her grin. Ending up as an English delicacy at some native feast was more than equal to the various tortures and lingering deaths she had devised for the scoundrel over
the years. This man simply couldn’t be Justin Connor, she assured herself. If he were, he’d be living in a mansion, not a ramshackle hut with only a prim valet and an overeducated cannibal for company. She opened her mouth to ask him his name, then closed it again, part of her quailing from what he might answer.

“I could hardly sleep last night, wondering about one thing,” he said. Suspicion shaded his voice and Emily sensed he was a man who did not trust easily. They had that much in common.

She set down the cup, embarrassed to discover how badly her hands were shaking. “I should hate to be the cause of your insomnia. Do satisfy your curiosity.”

Pulling off his hat, he fixed her with a gaze of disarming candor. “Were you naked before or after you fell off the boat?”

A fierce heat burned her cheeks. She resisted the urge to tug the coat down over her pale calves. “After,” she croaked dutifully. “My dress was pulling me under the water, so I tore it off.”

Justin knit his hands at the small of his back, struggling not to smile at her bold ingenuity. “Most of the women I once knew would have gracefully drowned before shedding their precious petticoats and corsets.”

Anger surged through Emily. This scowling stranger suddenly represented all the narrow-minded prigs she’d left behind in London. “Forgive me if I offended your delicate sensibilities. Better dead than immodest. Wasn’t it our noble Victoria who said that?”

Except for a faint quirk of his eyebrow, he ignored her sarcasm. “So you’re English.”

“No. I’m Chinese,” she snapped.

She knotted her hands in Penfeld’s coat, struggling to control her temper. Miss Winters always said it would be her downfall, along with her profanity, her ardor for green apples, and her penchant for sliding down the banister in her Sunday pinafore.

“Why were you expelled from boarding school?”

Damn. Could the man read her very thoughts? she wondered. “Which time?” she replied innocently.

The question took him aback. “The most recent?” he offered.

She crossed her arms over her chest, mentally arming both barrels. She liked to see how well a man stood up under fire.

Drawing in a deep breath, she recited, “I ate a bucket of green apples and threw up on the headmistress’s best cloak. I put a snake in Cecille du Pardieu’s bed. I substituted firecrackers for the candles on last year’s Christmas tree. I cut off the buttons on the teacher’s boots … while she was teaching. I sawed off the newel post at the end of the banister. I replaced all the pepper in the kitchen with saltpeter, and I called the neighborhood curate a pompous, lily-livered, Satan-spawned, son-of-a—”

“Enough!” he shouted. “Thank you very much. That will be quite enough. There’s really no need for further explanation.”

She ducked her head modestly and cast him a shy look from beneath her lashes. “Oh,” she added as if in afterthought. “And the headmistress caught the gardener’s son and me in a rather … um … compromising position.”

Justin gazed down at her, thinking that a man could become intoxicated from the wicked sparkle of her eyes. Her grin slashed an impish dimple in one cheek and crinkled her nose. What manner of girl was she? She had tossed the torrid facts of a ruinous scandal in his face with the naughty aplomb of a fallen angel. Thank God he had a few more years of reprieve before David’s little Claire was faced with temptations so grave.

He was forced to turn away, the image of Emily rolling in the leaves with some pimpled gardener’s lad filling him with unexpected fury. Did they rendezvous in the gazebo? he wondered. Behind the toolshed? Did he bring
her roses? Weave chains of daisies to crown her chestnut curls?

He found himself at the stove, fiddling aimlessly with the tin coffeepot. She’d been kicked out of other schools, had she? Had there been other boys? Grocery lads? Lamplighter’s nephews? Chimney sweeps? A series of visions, erotic and vivid, raged through his mind, obliterating all his hard-earned sanity in their path. Because in those visions it wasn’t some boy who took her, but he himself who knelt between her thighs and showed her how it felt to be loved by a man.

His knuckles whitened on the warm edge of the stove as he struggled to remind himself how fast a desire this hot could scar.

He stole a glance at her. With her tousled curls and flushed cheeks, she looked to be no more than a child, a little girl playing dress-up in her father’s coat.

Perhaps he should be locked away for even entertaining such notions about her. “How old are you, Miss Scarlet?” he choked out.

She lifted her cup in a mocking toast. “Grown.”

Taking a deep breath, he turned. His voice came out with the cool detachment of a stranger’s. “I am terribly sorry, but I fear it’s impossible for you to remain here unchaperoned. There are missionaries in Auckland who can help you.”

“The curate suggested an exorcist.”

Justin suspected she needed an exorcist less than a sound spanking. He lowered his voice to a hollow whisper. “I could call on Trini’s
tohunga
, the high priest. I’m sure he’d know some way to get those nasty spirits out of you.”

“Oh, no, you don’t.” She shook her head violently. “I’ll not be an hors d’oeuvre for some leering skull shaker.”

“Why, Emily, you insult the Maori! They’re quite civilized, you know. They never eat their friends. Only their enemies.”

“How benevolent.” Emily blew a stray curl out of her
eyes. She had no intention of being frightened off so easily. Not until she’d quenched her burgeoning suspicions. “Very well, then. If you want to be rid of me, then rid of me you shall be.”

Justin thought he had won until she began to briskly unbutton Penfeld’s coat. His mouth fell open as the ebony folds parted to reveal the creamy swell of her breasts.

He leaped across the hut and grabbed her wrists. “What in heaven’s name do you think you’re doing?”

She blinked up at him. “Returning your valet’s coat. I’m not blind. I can see he cherishes it.”

“I’ll buy him another in Auckland,” Justin growled. He released her, ashamed to find his fingers had dug red marks into her creamy flesh. “Come on,” he said gruffly. “We’ll borrow a wagon from Trini.”

He pulled her up. Before she could take a step, her leg collapsed. Justin caught her in the circle of his arms.

Moaning, she clung to him. “Oh, my ankle. I must have twisted it when I crawled ashore.”

Her curls tickled his nose, maddening him with their softness. He was tempted to drop her, but forced himself to lower her gently. He knelt to examine her ankle. No swelling. No bruising. Not so much as a freckle marred the smooth satin of her skin. He pressed the bone with his fingertips. She winced and clenched her teeth.

“Terrible pain, eh?” He cocked a skeptical eyebrow.

“Dreadful.” Tears welled in her luminous eyes. “Do you think it might be broken?”

Her face was next to his, her lower lip soft and trembling. Justin wanted to bite it. He trailed his fingers up her calf to the hem of Penfeld’s coat, helpless to keep from envisioning what she wore beneath it—nothing. She gave him one of those melting glances—her eyes all sparkling coffee innocence. He was tempted to give her what she was so unwittingly asking for. Tempted to continue the slow glide of his fingers up her thigh toward a dark and sensual destruction. But whose destruction? Hers or his own?

He snatched back his hand and stood, his spirits sinking. Unless he wanted to carry her all the way to Auckland, the girl was staying for a few days. He suspected she was faking her injury, but other than setting fire to the hut and hoping she’d run out, he had no way to prove it. A thread of relief ran through his irritation. Auckland would swallow a girl like her without a qualm. If it
was
a hint of purity shining in her eyes, he didn’t care to see it destroyed. New Zealand took little mercy on innocents. He was living proof of that.

“It seems you’ll be staying until you’re well enough to travel.” He shook a finger at her. “But if you’ve any thoughts about slipping a snake into Penfeld’s pallet, be warned. There are no snakes in New Zealand.”

Her cheek dimpled. “I shall endeavor to put forth my best behavior.”

He sensed her best behavior might be more than he could handle. He strode to the door, then paused. He wanted desperately to question her further, but to do so would violate the unwritten creed of this land. Too many ships had dumped their secrets, their scandals, and their unwanted convicts on these shores. It had resulted in a privacy hard won and so jealously guarded that a man might honorably defend it to the death. At least his past would die with him. So Justin bit back his questions, knowing he, too, might die or kill before he let someone rake open his own raw scars.

“You’ve no need to fear discovery here, Miss Scarlet. There are many who come to New Zealand to elude the past.”

She inclined her head. A fall of curls veiled her expression. “And there are some, sir, who come to find it.”

He realized he had become so accustomed to the island’s code of suspicion that he hadn’t even offered this small, bedraggled young woman his name. She hardly looked the sort of spy the efficient Miss Winters or his rigid father would dispatch.

“You may call me Justin. Justin Connor.” He closed the door behind him, never seeing the bitter, triumphant twist of Emily’s lips.

Justin couldn’t seem to put enough distance between himself and the hut. He strode through the cornfield, his long strides eating up the turf. Penfeld trotted along behind him.

“Hell and damnation!” he finally exploded. “A girl simply shouldn’t go around looking at a man like that.”

Penfeld plucked at his suspenders, more worried about being outdoors without a coat than about his master’s consternation. “Like what, sir? I hadn’t noticed anything unusual about her looks. A bit on the boyish side, perhaps.”

Justin spun around, his voice rising on a note of disbelief. “Boyish? Compared to whom—Helen of Troy? Cleopatra? Besides, I wasn’t referring to her looks in particular. I was referring to the way she
looks
at me. That ridiculous sparkle in her eyes. That clever little trick she does with her bottom lip.”

Justin tugged on his lip to illustrate, but Penfeld only blinked at him dumbly. A trickle of sweat snaked between Justin’s shoulder blades at the mere thought of it. As the sun beat down on his bare head, he realized he’d forgotten his hat.

“Blast her anyway! She had no way of knowing what sort of men we were. What if she had given that look to some of those whalers or timbermen in Auckland? They’d have slapped her in a whorehouse so fast, it would have made her curly little head spin.”

The valet paled. He became as nervous as a rabbit when anyone mentioned Auckland. Justin had found him in the teeming harbor town four years earlier, wandering the streets in a daze, his handsome suit in rags, a shattered teacup his only possession.

Justin plucked a corn silk from Penfeld’s thinning hair. “Now
you’re
doing it. Don’t stick out your lip and go
all quivery on me, because Auckland’s exactly where I’m taking her. She must think I’m a blithering idiot to have fallen for that old twisted-ankle ploy.”

“I’ve never known you to blither without cause, sir.” Penfeld looked as downcast as if his master had announced he was taking the girl to Sodom with a side picnic to Gomorrah.

Snorting with determination, Justin spun on his heel. “I’m going to march right back to that hut, make her gather her things—”

“She has no things.”

Penfeld’s quiet words halted him at the edge of the field. A hill studded with tussock grasses rolled down to the beach. The warm breeze teased the golden clumps into waving fingers.

Penfeld was right, he realized. The girl had nothing. Not even the coat on her back. She had come into his world as bare and unfettered as on the day she had come into God’s.

He was a grown man. Surely he could temper his lust with common decency for a few days. If she refused to leave by the end of the week, he would ignore Penfeld’s sulks and insist on escorting her to Auckland. Until then he would spend the long days working in the fields so he could collapse on his pallet at night, too exhausted to even dream of—

He drove his fingers through his hair. It was hardly her fault that every time he looked at her he saw her as she had been in the moonlight, that each time he touched her he wanted to bury his fingers in her silky curls. All of them. Justin groaned.

His agonized musings were interrupted by a joyous cry.
“Pakeha! Pakeha!”

A line of naked honey-skinned children streamed up the hill with Trini in tow. Justin squatted and a wiry little boy barreled into him with the force of a muscular cannonball.

He faked a stagger. “Ho, there, Kawiri! You’re too strong for an old chap like me.”

The children swarmed around him, chattering in Maori. A little girl with almond-shaped eyes crawled between Kawiri’s legs and held Justin’s hand. His face relaxed in a smile as their musical tones soothed his troubled spirit.

“You can come out, Penfeld,” he called over his shoulder. “They won’t eat you.”

Penfeld crept out from behind a cornstalk and gave the children a shy bow. Trini beamed proudly as several of the children bowed back. Justin knew his unflappable valet wasn’t afraid of cannibals, but children terrified him.