To Kiss a Thief (26 page)

The information did not seem to surprise him. Or if it did, his eyes still never left Eliza. “Why? Why would you do such a thing?”

Eliza looked pained, clearly hurt by his lack of understanding. “To rescue you, of course. To set you free.”

“Free,” he echoed.

“I did all of this so you would see your wife for what she is. A social climber. A schemer. A—”

“A thief?” he suggested.

Eliza smiled then and walked toward him, her hands outstretched. “Oh, you scoundrel. What a start you gave me. I might have guessed you didn't mean it when you proclaimed her innocence.”

St. John stepped toward Eliza and took her hands in his, his pale eyes never leaving her face.

Sarah's heart lurched, pulled as it was in two very different directions. Had he really stood up for her, said he did not believe her guilty, despite the evidence? If so, then why hadn't he come to her side now?

According to Eliza, this was a place where the two of them had often played in their childhood. Now, in the fading light and against the shimmering sea, they looked for all the world like two lovers meeting on the beach. Standing in the place where they were born, born to be together. Looking deep into one another's eyes, holding hands...

Sarah's restless gaze traveled over the pair and then locked on the place where they touched.

St. John was not holding Eliza's hands. He was pinning her wrists.

And then he shook his head and she heard him ask, “Are you mad?”

* * *

As he looked into Eliza's eyes, St. John realized that the answer to his question very possibly was
yes
.

When he had seen them standing together on the beach, his first feeling had been relief. He was not too late—or at least, not quite. He had raced forward, despite the tide.

Now, however, he realized the full extent of the danger they were all in.

Was Sarah all right? He longed to look at her, reach for her, go to her, but he feared that to do so would draw down more of Eliza's vengeful wrath.

“You don't mean that. Come, my love,” she urged, tipping her chin in the direction of the boat. “This is our chance.”

Standing so close, he could not help but be struck by Eliza's beauty. But he could also see now that her beauty was surrounded by a hardness, like a thick layer of ice encasing a winter rose, destroying what it seemed to protect. Had he failed to notice it years ago? Or was this shell of more recent acquisition?

“I can certainly understand why you might be desperate to get away.” Sarah took a step toward him as she spoke, but her eyes never left Eliza's face. “Now that Captain Brice has followed you to Lynscombe.”

Beneath her wind-roughened cheeks Eliza turned deathly pale. “H-he is
here
?” A sort of wildness overspread her features and she jerked against his imprisoning hands.

“Yes,” Sarah confirmed. “My father saw him this morning in the village.”

In the village?
St. John tightened his hold on Eliza. Why hadn't Sarah said something sooner? Because she had feared what he would do when he knew? He had told her he believed her innocent, but she was not yet ready to trust his word, it seemed, not yet ready to believe he had spoken the truth. Last night she had given in to her body's desires, and his own. But her heart, it seemed, was not yet his.

Well, then, he would find another way to win it.

“I could not imagine what had brought him here,” Sarah was saying. “Until now. You said you promised him a great deal of money for his part in the theft of the necklace—more, I suppose, than Lady Estley has been able to supply.”

“Yes,” Eliza grudgingly admitted. “When he returned from France I explained how things stood and gave him what money I had. But, of course, it was not nearly what he expected. He's been hounding me ever since, threatening to expose me. But I did not think he would follow me from London.”

“You placed the gems in Sarah's trunk,” St. John said, “hoping to destroy his hold over you.”

“I was more concerned about her hold over you,” she said, her eyes darting between Sarah and him. “Why did you play the jealous husband all those years ago? Challenging a noted marksman to a duel. You might have been killed, and over a woman who could mean nothing to you! Did you know that I went to him, pleaded for him to choose swords, to give you a sporting chance?”

“How—considerate of you to intervene.” Despite the cool air on his skin, the old scar burned with fresh heat. “And how kind of him to agree. I hope I shall have an opportunity to express my gratitude to him in person.”

“There seems to have been a slight flaw in your plan, Miss Harrington,” Sarah observed coolly, disrupting the vengeful train of his thoughts. “If both Lady Estley and Captain Brice knew you had the gems, and both are here now to confirm it, doesn't that make it rather clear that
you
are the guilty one, not I?”

“The only flaw in my plan is about to be rectified,” Eliza snapped. “Let us go, Fairfax. Together. As we were meant to be. You needn't worry about her anymore.” She tossed a disparaging glance over her shoulder at Sarah. “Leave her here and you'll soon be free of her forever.”

As the water pushed closer, it was only too clear what she meant. Could Eliza—this woman he had known almost all his life—truly be so calculating, so cruel?

But he already knew that answer, too.

“I cannot.”

“Of course you can,” she insisted. “After all I've done for you, surely you do not mean to deny me.”

“I belong here, Eliza. At Lynscombe.”

Her grass-green gaze flickered over his face. “I suppose I can take some consolation at having been thrown over for that shabby village rather than your shabby wife.” The small boat shuddered and lifted from the sand with the force of the rising tide. “Don't be a fool, Fairfax,” she said, fright sharpening her voice as she struggled against his hold.

Sarah spoke then with quiet determination. “Let her go.”

Reluctantly, St. John released her wrists.

Once free, Eliza scrambled into the little boat and took up the oars. “You
must
come with me, Fairfax.
Now
.”

He shook his head.

Eliza's scowl traveled from him to Sarah and back again. “I see. You always were too sentimental about Lynscombe by half. Well, suit yourself.” Her brittle laugh tinkled over him like droplets of frozen rain. “I wish you joy of your choice.” And she pushed off with surprising strength, making her way against the tide.

At last he could reach out a hand for his wife.

She was standing little more than an arm's length away, her slender fingers pleating her skirts with the crisp, careful movements he had once imagined a show of calculated calm, and which he now recognized as a sign of her unease. As he stepped toward her, he felt his shoe fill with icy water.

Automatically, he looked down, although he knew what it meant. Waves had eaten into the beach, carving the hard-packed sand with ease and leaving pools and rivers in their wake. The sea drew back for a moment and then pressed forward again, swirling around their ankles, soaking the hem of Sarah's gown. The danger posed by Eliza had momentarily driven all thought of the encroaching tide from his mind.

He looked over his shoulder. He saw no sand.

Only water.

He had not realized they had walked so far. Even at the tide's lowest point, the sandy frontage was narrow, bordered on either end by outcroppings of rock that reached far into the Channel. Unless one approached by sea, the only way to reach the little spit of beach was by climbing down the cliff. The only way out was up. Where they were standing, however, the cliff was almost sheer. The nicely terraced trail they had descended was separated from them by water that in places was already waist-deep and rising.

He glanced behind him, but Eliza was nearly out of sight. Pushing away the horrible realization that she was willing to strand them there to save herself, he snagged Sarah's hand in his.

She understood their predicament. He could see that at first glance.

“I don't suppose you can swim?” he asked, forcing a sort of half smile to his lips as he slipped off his shoes, tossed them aside, and tried not to imagine his father having to identify them in the absence of their owner.

“Another country pursuit,” she answered wryly with a shake of her head.

He recalled her willingness to charge into the water after her daughter. Her bravery. Her foolishness. He forced an answering smile to his lips. “In the spring,” he promised, cupping her face in his hands and pressing his lips to hers, feeling their chill, tasting salt. “I'll teach you. When the weather is warm and the water is calm, there are few pleasures to equal it.”

As he spoke, he tugged her shawl free from her grasp and felt his way to the end of the wide band of silk. “I'm sorry, Sarah,” he said as he tore through its length, splitting it neatly into two narrower strips, knotting them tightly together, and then dipping the knot into the surf, wetting it so it would not give way.

She gasped but made no other protest, not even as he tied one end of the makeshift rope around her waist and began to lead her into deeper water, away from the rocks on which they might be dashed, gripping his end of the shawl so tightly that his fingers soon began to ache.

They made slow progress, their goal seeming to recede with every step, the water dragging them toward it before pulling them back, and rising with every passing moment.

By his estimation, the tide was nearly at its highest point. To reach the cliff now, they would have to cross the surf line, where the waves broke and roiled and whirled back into the sea. He doubted her ability to fight her way through it, hampered as she was by her skirts and her fears.

He could see only one solution.

Dropping the end of the shawl, he put both hands on her shoulders, water lapping his fingers where they gripped her. “Do you trust me?”

She hesitated. The sea inched higher.

“Yes,” she whispered at last.

He mimed for her to draw a deep breath.

And then, feeling as if he were ripping his heart from his chest, he pushed her under the water.

S
he burst up through the surface of the icy water, sputtering, choking, blind. Her arms and legs flailed wildly, straining for something solid and safe, when she realized suddenly that her feet could touch the ground. So could her hands, she discovered, as her benumbed fingers scrabbled against the rough chalk face of the cliff.

When she had gained a handhold and was certain she was upright, and alive, she dared to open her eyes and look around. She expected to find St. John beside her, still gripping the end of her shawl.

But its green length floated free, swept forward and backward with the movement of the water, like the fronds of some peculiarly elegant variety of seaweed.

Relaxing her grip on the rocks only slightly, she craned her neck to search for him in the water that still rushed behind her.

She spotted him at last, farther away than it seemed he ought to have been, but swimming mightily with the powerful strokes that had once saved Clarissa's life. No matter how hard he swam, however, he got no closer. Even as the tide rolled toward her, the water seemed to sweep him up and suck him back. Pushing her to safety had put him in danger. Why could he not make his way to her side?

All at once, Sarah remembered how Martha Potts had first described her husband's drowning.
“He swam for the shore, but his heart weren't in it. The sea wanted him for her own, I guess. Leastways, she kept dragging at him and dragging at him until he couldn't fight no more.”
She recalled fishermen speaking in awed tones of the invisible current that held a man back, that would pull him under if he couldn't get free of it, teasing and torturing him the way a cat plays with a mouse it means at last to eat.

“St. John!” she screamed. “Swim away!” She let go of the rock with one hand and waved him off, certain he would think her mad. But it was the surest way to escape the treacherous crosscurrent in which he had been caught, or else he would drown just a few feet from shore.

Whether it was her frantic gestures or his own fatigue that did it, he relented slightly, and a wave carried him out of the current to a place where he could swim more freely. In a few more strokes, he was almost to her, but so drained by his exertion that she feared the next wash of the still-rising tide would sweep him away forever.

Letting go of the cliff face, she reached down to untie the knot at her waist, tugging and tearing at the salt-stiffened silk with frantic, fumbling fingers until it gave way. She wrapped one end around her wrist and let the other float free, stretching across the water to her husband.

With a last weak effort, St. John lunged toward it.

His fingertips caught and tangled in the fringe.

Wordless prayers streaming past her lips, Sarah began to pull him carefully to shore, until he, too, had solid ground beneath his feet. He collapsed beside her, his cheek pressed against the chalky cliff, one as pale as the other.

After a long moment, his eyelids fluttered and his blue eyes came to rest on her. “Sarah,” he breathed.

“St. John.” She could feel the tears streaming down her cheeks, mingling with the salt water that surrounded them. “Thank God.”

He smiled weakly and closed his eyes again.

Clenching her jaw so her teeth would not chatter, she asked, “Can you climb?”

He nodded, and after he had caught his breath, they made the slow ascent. By the time they reached the top, the last of the day's light had slipped from the sky. The wind had died down, but the air had grown cooler, and they lay in the rough scrub, side by side, soaked and shivering.

Eventually St. John struggled to a sitting position. “Do you think you can make your way back to the house?”

She raised herself up and studied the path, at the end of which gleamed the distant lights of Lynscombe Manor. “I c-can t-t-try,” she ground out from between chattering teeth. But none of her limbs seemed willing to honor that commitment.

“Shock,” St. John said, reaching across the ground for the coat he had evidently discarded before making the descent and wrapping it around her shoulders. “Let's see if we can't get you warmed up first.” With searching eyes he looked about them and then murmured, “I wonder,” more to himself than her.

Burrowed into the blessedly dry fabric, Sarah watched as he got stiffly to his feet, walked back to the cliff's edge, and lowered himself onto the ledge. Curious, she half-crawled to a point at which she could see what he was doing. He had located a deep crevice in the cliff face and was pulling loose a few stones and the abandoned bird's nest that filled it. In another moment, he uncovered some smallish brown object, which he showed eagerly to her.

“I can't believe it was still there.”

She looked at the little wooden box, with its rusted hinges and straps, and then up at St. John.

“A pirate's treasure chest,” he explained. “And inside . . .”

He pried it open and revealed its contents, the sorts of things that would have made a boy's eyes gleam: a dull knife, sundry buttons that looked like coins, a tattered bit of vellum, and—a tinderbox.

Then he gathered dry brush and a few sticks, and in a matter of moments, a feeble spark had caught and the first tongues of fire began to lick along the wood.

With careful tending, sturdier flames began to light up the sky, driving away the twilight and making all around them appear even darker. She followed St. John's gaze over the water, in the direction Eliza's boat had taken.

“Why did you tell me to let her go?” he asked. “Do you not believe she ought to face the repercussions for her actions?”

“She already has,” she said quietly. “She has lost the man she loves.”

He shook his head in sharp denial. “Whatever Eliza felt, or feels, for me, I cannot call it love.”

Sarah shrugged.

“If I did not know better,” he said, tilting his head to the side, studying her expression, “I would think you pitied her.”

“Is it so strange, then?”

His gaze wandered out to sea again. “No more strange, I suppose, than the pity I find I feel for my stepmother. I do not know if I can forgive her for what she did to you, but I realized tonight that her life has not been what she hoped it would be, either.”

Sarah's ribs ached as she drew a deeper breath, gathering her courage. “I did not know until Eliza told me that you had been betrothed. I thought—”

“Betrothed?” he repeated, his shoulders suddenly stiff, as if the word were an accusation. “We were never betrothed, although certainly we all knew it to be her father's fondest wish.” He paused, and his posture softened slightly, along with his voice. “But when we were younger, we were . . . very close. The connection between our families permitted certain—liberties, I suppose one might call them. We were more intimate than perhaps was wise.”

She did not need to ask what he meant.

His fingers traveled the ground between them until they found hers, and against her better judgment, she let him take her hand. He turned her palm to the flickering firelight, studying the raw, red skin, pausing over a deep cut she had not even realized was there. With his other hand, he reached for his cravat, sliding the length of damp linen free of his collar and wrapping it gently but firmly around her injured hand.

She winced at the pressure, but the throbbing pain in her hand was nothing to the pain in her heart.

“The night of our nuptial ball, I heard you tell Eliza that your heart would never be mine,” she whispered. His words had been burned into her brain. Even the years that had passed had done little to mute their echo. “Because it has always been hers?”

“No. It was never hers,” he insisted. “What you heard that night, what she seems to have imagined I meant . . .” His voice drifted off, as if he were trying to remember some detail from another man's life. “I said you would never have my heart because I felt quite sure I hadn't a heart to give.”

He glanced behind her toward the house and then back at the expanse of water and sky before them. “I was born here, Sarah. This was where I first knew love. And when my mother died, and I was forced to leave this place, I feared that my capacity to love left me.” Finally, his pale eyes settled on her. “Eliza was right about one thing. When I saw you with Brice, I was jealous.”

She could not help starting at this revelation. “Do not speak of him, please. I swear he never—we did not—”

“I know,” he spoke across her. “I think a part of me always did. But nonetheless, I discovered something important that night. What I felt when I saw you in another man's arms showed me how wrong I had been. About you. About myself. And I was afraid of those feelings. I realized that could only mean I cared for you far more than I had intended. So I fought against them. Then, like a coward, I left.”

She could hardly wrap her mind around what he was telling her, the lengths to which he had gone to cut himself off from his emotions. From his past.

From her.

The moon was rising, the horns of its crescent seeming to snag on the day's last delicate clouds. She watched as it freed itself from their clinging hold to cast its feeble light across the water.

“But now you've returned,” she pointed out. “You feel a renewed sense of responsibility to this place, one my dowry can help you meet. And I am . . . I am glad of it, for the sake of the people here.” She fingered the tattered edge of her skirt. “I have asked my father to give you the money from my dowry outright, whatever happens.”

“Your note, you mean?” Reaching toward her again, he slipped one hand into the pocket of his coat where it lay across her thigh and withdrew a familiar scrap of paper. She gasped and snatched at it, but without ceremony, he tossed it into the fire. In the blink of an eye, the paper had curled into ash.

“‘Whatever happens'? You are my
wife
.” He took her restless hand in his and with one fingertip, he touched the gold band she wore, turning it so it gleamed in the light. The urgency with which he spoke sent another shiver through her. “Lynscombe needs your father's money, I'll not deny it.” A pause. “But
I
need
you
.” He lifted searching eyes to her face. “I love you, Sarah.”

“You . . . love me?”

“After last night, can you doubt it?”

She tugged anxiously against his hold, but he did not let her go. “One may . . . do such things, feel such things without love, I believe.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “One may. But last night, I did not. I wish I could deny that I ever had,” he continued quietly, almost mournfully. “Young men tell themselves that love is a trivial thing. They imagine it some weak synonym for coquetry or lust or—”

“Desire,” she supplied reluctantly. “Eliza is very beautiful.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “But not so beautiful as you are.”

Sarah gave a snort of disbelief.

“Why do you deny it?” he challenged. “Hers is a beauty of externals. Your beauty, on the other hand, comes from a place deep within you—so deep that at first I could not see it. If I did not know better, I would accuse you of trying to hide it from me. But it does not matter—I see it now. And I do not intend to let it out of my sight again.”

She could feel the heat rising to her cheeks and hoped the glow of the firelight disguised it. “Those are fine words, my lord, but—”

He laid one long finger across her lips to stop her. “Oh no, Sarah. Don't try to hide behind such formalities. You said my name once. Say it again.”

How, as he had lain there gasping what she had feared might be his last breath, had he been able to spare the energy to notice that treacherous slip of her tongue?

“Very well,” she muttered around his finger. “
St. John
. But—”

He shook his head. “Once more,” he said, lifting his finger away to replace it with a gentle, searching kiss.

“St. John,” she breathed when their lips parted.

She felt rather than saw his smile. “Better. Now . . . you were saying?”

What
had
she been saying? She gave an uncertain shake of her head.

“You are beautiful to me,” he said again when she did not answer. “And I'll thank you not to argue with me about it.”

From somewhere deep inside, Sarah dredged up the daring to reply, “Yes, my lord.”

St. John raised one eyebrow and gave a slow, admonishing shake of his head. “Oh, Lady Fairfax. What am I going to do with you?”

To her mortification, something deep inside her quivered at the delicious darkness of his regard. But in another moment, a smile tugged at one corner of his mouth and dispelled his show of sternness.

That, she feared, was a weakness Clarissa would soon learn to exploit.

Some pang of emotion must have crossed her face at the thought of their daughter, for St. John's expression shifted again. “Oh, Sarah. I am sorrier than you can know that I have wasted so many years of our life together. Sorry that I ever doubted you. But if those mistakes taught me how much you mean to me, I cannot entirely regret having made them.”

“Did you really throw the necklace and break it?” A rather embarrassed nod. “Why?”

“Not for the reasons you imagine,” he said quickly. “I knew there must be a reason why it was in your trunk. I still believed you were innocent.” His eyes dropped to their joined hands, almost as if he expected to see the jewels there. “But I also realized that it would not matter to me if you were guilty. I would love you just the same. I suppose that does not really explain why I did it . . .”