"Wouldn't have been able to cram his horns under the helm, would he?" she muttered.
From his pallet beneath the window, Penfeld emitted a lumbering snore. Emily shifted to her elbow.
Justin Connor more resembled a dark satyr than a noble knight. His lashes were too long, his lower lip
too full. He hadn't one perfect feature, but in combination they were devastating, giving his face a flawed male beauty that made her unwilling heart beat like the wings of a captive bird. She fought an absurd desire to crawl over to his pallet and run her fingers over him, to commit each feature to her memory in the fear she might awake in the morning to find him gone-just another elusive creature of her dreams.
She had spent years clutching her dreams of a noble savior to her child's breast. But her dreams had
been only phantoms, disappearing like smoke in the cold light of day. Reality lay on that pallet-six feet of reality, all refined sinew and muscle. She could reach out and touch it just as she had touched a stranger's face in the moonlight.
The light from the low-burning lantern gilded the chiseled planes of his face. She had expected him to
be older, but he couldn't be far over thirty. The same age her father had been when he died.
Her eyes narrowed. Justin stirred, groaning low in his throat as if sensing her enmity. The lines etched around his eyes deepened. He twitched as if in pain. Pain? Emily wondered. Or guilt? Her guardian did not sleep the untroubled sleep of the innocent.
She wanted to shake him out of his dream and demand he look at her. She had lived in his shadow for seven years. Every prank, each profanity, all the wasted fury of her tantrums had been played to an invisible audience of one -the man who had abandoned her then dared to hold her in his arms without showing even the scantest hint of recognition. His apathy touched an old pain in her, a pain she'd thought shoved to the farthest reaches of her heart. She could tolerate many things, but being ignored was not
one of them.
She flung herself to her side, forcing her gaze away from him. Questions buzzed through her mind like angry gnats. Why was he living in this dusty hut, and where were the riches her father had written of? Had he hidden the gold somewhere? Was he a smuggler using the pristine solitude of the beach to
escape the stiff port taxes of the harbors? Perhaps he was still just a dirty swindler taking advantage
of his reputation as the son of one of the richest dukes in England to bilk decent men of their inheritances, as he had done to her father.
Against her will, fate had delivered Justin Connor into her hands. He didn't realize who she was, but she knew him only too well. Surely somewhere in these musty stacks of books and papers she could find the sordid story of his life.
Her ruse of an injured leg had given her time. Time to probe his secrets and discover the truth about the missing gold and her father's untimely death. Time to make him sorry. Let him enjoy his dreams for
now, because once she had gathered enough evidence of his foul play, he would come face-to-face
with his worst nightmare.
Drawn like a moth to a sizzling flame, she rolled back over and glared at the dark purity of his features until her weighted lids dragged her into a dreamless sleep.
Chapter 4
In your absence, God has sent me solace in that
most precious of his gifts-a true friend…
"More tea, Penfeld?" Emily gazed wanly into the delicate china cup the valet offered. "What a delightful surprise. You must have read my mind."
"A fine New Delhi brew," he pronounced, beaming proudly. "Justin procured it from the Bay of Islands for my last birthday."
"How dear of him," she murmured.
She waited until he had bustled back to the stove before tossing the contents of the cup over her shoulder and out the window. She'd trade all the fine teas in the world for one coffee bean to suck on. The mannerly valet had been very vocal in his opinion that coffee was simply too crude a drink to pass her dainty lips. Emily was beginning to wonder if the sly Mr. Connor was smuggling not gold, but tea.
She smacked her lips on the cup's rim, pretending to drain it. "Marvelous flavor. I've never tasted anything quite like it."
Penfeld clapped his plump hands. "It warms my heart to see a young lady enjoying tea." He swept the cup from her hand. "If you like it so well, I'll pour you another."
Groaning silently, Emily buried her face in her hands. The portly valet was killing her with kindness. Every time she'd wiggled in the past three days, he had been there- fluffing the blankets beneath her ankle and pouring tea down her throat as if it were the elixir of life. She would almost swear her wary host had sicced him on her out of spite.
The mysterious Mr. Connor disappeared each day at dawn and did not return until sunset. After wolfing down some flat biscuits and a hot pasty stew consisting mostly of canned beans, he would collapse on
his pallet with little more than a grunted good night.
As attentive as always, Emily thought grimly.
A cooling breeze wafted through the window, stirring the curls at the nape of her neck. Her nose twitched at the salty tang of the sea. A twilight paradise beckoned to her with a whisper of sunlight and surf, but thanks to her own lie, she was trapped in this musty hut, watching Penfeld polish his teapot. She ached to sink her toes into the warm sand, to feel the ocean spray mist her skin. She eyed the stacks of books longingly. She was also dying for a moment of privacy to dig through the hut for some hint of the treachery her guardian had worked on her father.
Her wish was granted when Penfeld pulled a wicker basket off a peg and trotted out the door, mumbling something about a "tidy pinch of mint." Praying mint did not grow in this hemisphere, Emily jumped to her feet and whirled in a giddy circle. A teetering stack of books blocked her way. She steadied them
with her heel, torn between the books and the window. The warm breeze was too strong a temptation. She thrust her head out the window, savoring the salty bite of the sea air.
The wicker hut crouched at the very edge of a sun-dappled forest, huddled beneath the sweeping boughs of two trees that resembled gigantic ferns. The murmur of the sea was a distant sigh, luring her toward freedom. She ought to climb out that window and never look back. But how far could she get before the truth would catch up with her? She'd spent far too long eluding it.
She tightened her jaw in determination and turned back to the books. Her daddy had always said you could divine a man's soul by reading his books. Somewhere among them might be a deed, a map, or a journal holding clues to the whereabouts of her father's gold.
She picked up a leather-bound volume and blew the dust off its cover. "Mozart: The Master and His Music," she read aloud. She thumbed through the pages, then tossed it aside and plucked out another. "The Polyphonic Symphonies of Beethoven?"
Emily frowned. She had been hoping for Machiavelli's The Prince or perhaps the Marquis de Sade's
Les 120 Journées de Sodome. She examined book after book, only to discover weighty biographies of Mendelssohn and Rossini, fifteen volumes describing the rhythms and meters of the world's greatest operas, and a mildewed treatise pleading the case of the viola against the violin. She pawed through the stacks, swearing under her breath as the precious minutes ticked away.