When the Duke and Duchess of Manchester invited Amarantha and her betrothed to attend a supper gathering, she accepted eagerly. Praying that the company of people like her parents’ friends would jolt her out of the insanity her thoughts and feelings had become, she dressed in her prettiest gown, allowed Mrs. Jennings to arrange her hair, and with new hope climbed into the carriage.

On the ride to the governor’s mansion Paul fidgeted.

“You seem unhappy,” she said. Perhaps Mrs. Jennings had told him of the time she spent with the captain. If so, she would admit to her mistake in becoming friends with such a man and she would not return to the hospital. It would be over. Over.

“I am.”

Fear and relief and a thick, painful sadness mingled in her throat.

“With me?”

“No, dear lady.” He squeezed her hand. “But I cannot like socializing in this manner with those who are still ignorant of the message of grace that I am bringing to this island—I and my colleagues.”

Slowly she released her pent breath, and it struck her that his manner was now so different from the bright-eyed enthusiasm of those days in Shropshire.

“But the duke and duchess are Christians,” she said. “They cannot wish to withhold salvation from anyone, can they?”

“When we first met, you knew little of the labor to be done in God’s vineyard,” he said, his eyes full of benevolence for her. “Yet now, less than a year later, you speak as though born to this life.”

“If I am to be the wife of a missionary, I must speak thus.” For the first time the if seemed to taunt her.

“Amarantha, these fashionable people,” he said, “they do not wish slaves to become Christians. They fear that if enslaved people taste spiritual freedom, they will want to eat at the table as well.”

“‘To eat at the table’?”

He offered a patient smile. “That they will demand emancipation. Since Parliament ended the trade, rumors are rife on plantations of the imminent arrival of full abolition. With all the upset to order in the parishes since the storm, planters’ fears are even greater. It is the reason for the new curfew on slaves, which of course has made the repairs on my church such slow going.”

She had heard the other volunteers at the hospital speaking of these matters, and she recalled Emily and their father occasionally discussing abolition. Now it seemed reasonable. If all souls were equal in God’s reckoning, why shouldn’t they be equal in man’s reckoning too?

“Won’t they demand emancipation?” she asked.

“Possibly. Only last year in Barbados a large number of them claimed freedom from their masters. It could happen here too. But just as in Barbados, they will not be granted it, and that is for the best.”

“For the best?”

“Dearest, the negroes’ souls must and will be saved. It is my greatest hope. But they will never rule themselves.”

“Why not?”

“They are incapable. Like children and women, they lack the full capacity for reason and therefore the ability to govern themselves rationally. It is our mission to lead them to God. After that, God alone will determine their fate.”

Like women.

Every day at the hospital that she awaited a man who made her heartbeats skip, but who by all accounts was a libertine and who was not her betrothed, she proved that she easily allowed her weakest instincts to overcome her rational mind.

Yet she knew women of reason. Emily adored museums and lecture halls. Their father, a man of rank, wealth, and education, respected his eldest daughter’s intelligence immensely. From the time they were tiny girls, he had read to them stories about the female warriors and stateswomen of history—Cleopatra, Boudica, Queen Elizabeth—later encouraging them to read everything in his library. Granted, it was Emily who had enjoyed actually reading the pages. Amarantha had liked to listen to her sister read aloud, but the hills and pastures always called so powerfully that attending closely had sometimes been difficult. Even so, she had learned that not all women lacked reason, not even all women in her family.

And since she had arrived in Jamaica, Emily had sent her excerpts of writings by abolitionists that made it clear the issues surrounding emancipation were hardly simple. Yet her fiancé’s ideas were so stark, as though they had nothing to do with actual people. With the human heart.

What’s more, Eliza, who was both a woman and black, managed the busy sick-house so capably—patients, their families, volunteers, and industrious sailors—that Mr. Meriwether was able to devote himself entirely to surgery.

Amarantha descended from the carriage bemusedly.

Although not as large as Willows Hall, the governor’s house with its magnificent white columns and elegant twin doors was impressive. Lights blazed from windows and the music of a quartet filled the humid night with magic. Amarantha enjoyed the jaunty tunes that the fiddlers and pipers on the docks played each evening as the sun set and the melancholy airs the sailors sang while working. But with her mind so unquiet, the cultivated familiarity of the duke and duchess’s mansion dressed up for a party felt customary, warm, and delightfully gay. It felt safe. Shrugging off her musings, she entered the drawing room with a smile.

And came face-to-face with Gabriel Hume.

She lost her breath. She lost her senses. She had not anticipated this—him—in her world. She hardly knew what she did or said. Perhaps she nodded or curtsied when her hostess introduced her to the other guests.

“Lady Amarantha, I believe you are acquainted with Captain Hume from your work at the sick-house,” the duchess said.

Acquainted seemed such a wrongfully innocent word to describe the feelings he created in her like wind created a maelstrom. His uniform was sharp white over his muscular legs and rich blue across the expanse of his shoulders, the medals on his chest gleamed, his rather long black hair was neatly combed, with a single satiny lock curving over his brow, and his stance was the erect posture about which she had first teased him. At least half a head taller than every other man in the room, he was the model of military strength and virtue. Only his eyes revealed him: dark, glittering with candlelight, and replete with hunger as they swept her from the bejeweled combs fixed in her hair to the toes of her satin slippers.

“How generous you have been, Captain,” the duchess said, “to lend your crewmen and surgeon to the paupers’ sick-house when the refitting of the Theia must have your first attention.”

“’Tis no’ generosity, ma’am,” he said. “I saw a need that required attention.”

He was not speaking of the hospital’s needs. He was speaking of her, as he had done that first day.

She did not enjoy the party. She endured it. Throughout the evening her heart did not cease its quick, uneven tempo. To avoid being obliged to even look at him, she threw herself into conversation with other guests. Yet she knew where he was at every moment, as though her flesh sought his across the space. And she heard only him, as though her senses were attuned to the frequency of his voice alone. She felt brittle and too hot, like heat lightning crackling above a parched field.

Finally the hours of torture ended. Head aching, she tumbled into the carriage.

Paul patted her hand and rested his golden curls back against the squabs.

She twisted her kerchief between her fingers. “Do you despise those socialites even more thoroughly now?”

“I admit myself pleasantly surprised. And I have secured potential patrons for the mission school I wish to establish at the docks for freedmen sailors. It was not entirely the hardship I had anticipated.”

Guilt weighed on her. What a great man he was to always be sacrificing his own happiness for others. And how wretchedly weak she was to desire another man so much that it hurt.

Later, on her bed in the room she shared with her companion, she could not sleep, replaying each moment of torment during the party in which she feared she would reveal herself—to Paul or to him—either would be horrible.

For she was certain of one thing: he was playing with her.

He knew she was betrothed. A man of honor would respect that. He would not look at her as though he would consume her. He would not seek her out and make her wild with wanting him. She was a game to him, only a momentary amusement for a careless hedonist.

She must clear her head of him now.

Rising as first light turned the blackness to hesitant gray, she dressed silently and went out of the hotel. No one yet stirred on the high street. Soon it would be bustling with activity; repairs from the damage the storm had wrought were slowly restoring the port town to its former beauty.

The damage the storm had wrought in her heart, however, was only worsening.

Crossing the street, she headed for the docks to walk away her fidgets, to exhaust herself so that she could return to her bed and a few hours of sleep before she was expected at the hospital.

When the captain appeared from the shadows she did not start or stumble. She knew it was he before she could even see him clearly in the darkness. She thought perhaps she would be able to recognize him anywhere, in her sleep, certainly in her dreams. Some part of her had known he would be waiting for her.

He stood entirely still as she passed him by. A narrow corridor between wagons stacked with barrels to be loaded onto a ship beckoned. She went into it and he followed.

He did not seize her or embrace her or do any of the lascivious acts that she had heard scoundrels were likely to do to maidens. Instead he halted at the other end of the wagon, yards away. Through the murky predawn she saw him rake his hand through his hair.

“That is the man you’re to wed?” he said.

Her tongue crimped into a useless knot.

“That?” he repeated. “That pale, pompous, falsely pious excuse for a—That man?”

She hardly knew how to respond. He waited for her to speak into the silence cushioned only by lapping water and the familiar squeaking of ships’ riggings.

“He is none of those,” she finally managed to utter, and wondered that this was happening, that she was standing in the darkness alone with a young man who was a stranger to her family, and aching so deeply inside that she could hardly breathe. “How dare you—”

“You canna marry him, Amarantha.” He said her name for the first time. The syllables in his rough brogue sent sublime pleasure through her.

“I will marry him. As soon as the church is rebuilt.” Her fiancé’s reason for postponing their wedding sounded ridiculous now. “I will be his wife,” she said because she needed to hear it.

He came to her. Yet still he did not touch her. She looked up into the shadows of his eyes; they swam with the same confusion that swirled in her.

“Marriage to him will kill you.” His gaze covered her face, one feature at a time.

“You must have seen him before this,” she said.

“Aye.”

“Then why are you saying this to me only now? Did you speak with him last night?”

“I didna speak. I listened.”

“To what?”

“To the music o’ your voice as you told them all about the hospital an’ about the people you’ve come to know there. With every syllable, your pleasure was as bright as the light o’ the candles burning around you. You spoke with affection an’ with your heart.”

Amarantha felt dizzy.

“An’ you spoke like a man.”

Her cloud of bliss burst.

“What do you mean by that?”

“You spoke your mind, lass.”

“Oh.” Oh, no. She had been so agitated, she hardly recalled what she had said.

“You spoke with intelligence an’ knowledge,” he said with an almost-smile. “An’ fearlessness. As always.”

Upon a painful leap, Amarantha’s heart pounded back to life.

“Always?”

“Aye.” His eyes narrowed. “An’ I listened to him interrupt you an’ speak over you an’ belittle what you’ve done.” He swung away and his fingers scraped through his hair again, disarranging it further. He had thick, gloriously black locks, and she did not wonder that women eagerly gave their favors to him, despite his many ports. To be allowed to run her hands through his hair as he was doing now might convince her to wait for him months on end too.

“That prim, superior son o’ a—I nearly throttled him. I’d like to take his lily-white neck between my hands an’—”

“Stop!” Her hand was at her own throat, her other palm over her mouth. In all of the hours, all of the weeks that he had made her laugh and long for him, she had never expected he could be this. It frightened her.

It thrilled her.

He pivoted to face her. “He doesna deserve you.”

“But you do? A man who could wish to harm another man in such a manner?”

Alarm flashed on his face. And abruptly, in the eyes that had seen war, she saw vulnerability.

He came to her again, swiftly this time.

“No,” he said. “Never if it would displease you.”

“It would displease me if he were harmed.” The words shook a bit. “And . . . if you harmed anyone, I think it would displease me,” she said brazenly. “Rather, I know it would.”

“I’ve harmed plenty o’ men, lass.”

“Of course you must have. You have fought in battles.”

“No’ only in battle. In cold blood. In hot blood. With drink in my head at times, an’ at others clear as rainwater. You were right to think me a beast. I am—a monster o’ a man, damned a dozen times over by what I’ve done willingly, gladly. An’ I’ve no apologies for it.”

She swallowed across the thick scald in her throat. “I see,” she whispered.

“I would give it all up to have you.”

She closed her eyes. This was what she had been waiting for in her heart.

“Why—” Seizing the courage that had propelled her over vast hills and through dark woods and across an ocean, she opened her eyes. “Why have you not touched me since that night?”

“If I touched you even once,” he said quietly now, like the rumble of an oncoming storm, “I wouldna be able to cease.”

She could hardly breathe. “You do want me.”

“More than I have ever wanted anything.”

The laughter of pure joy burst through her lips. “I am not a thing.”

“Aye. You’re a woman. An’ I thank the Almighty that he made you so.” He smiled with such unguarded pleasure she nearly threw her arms about his neck and gave herself to him there, between the wagons, with dawn upon the harbor and the cries of gulls in the sky.

“You thank God?” Her lips would not be still; they smiled, and she laughed again. “I thought you were a heathen.”

“Basking in the light o’ an angel.” In the burgeoning day, she could see his face entirely now, the boy who had had death and responsibility thrust upon him, who had embraced it, and who could still gaze so tenderly at her.

“A fallen angel,” she whispered.

The roguish smile returned. “My favorite sort.” The brogue was a seductive caress. It sent heat skittering into every crevice of her body. She balanced on the balls of her feet to be closer to him—his face—his lips.

“What shall we do next?” she said.

“You’ve told me I’m no’ to throttle him. So you’ll be needing to take matters into your own hands.”

She was certain she should not feel this elation. She wanted him to kiss her more than she wanted to breathe. She wanted him to throw caution to the wind and seize her in his arms and make her his.

“I’ll no’ kiss you, lass,” he said. “No’ until you are no other man’s.”

“How did you know that I—”

The gleam in his eyes sealed her lips. By all reports he had kissed many women. Certainly he would recognize when a woman was longing to be kissed.

He backed away.

“Do what you must,” he said, lengthening the distance between them with easy, confident strides now. “Then come find me.” His smile was wide. “I’ll wait.”

She watched him disappear around the corner of the wagon at the very moment the sun crested the Theia’s mainmast, and in a glorious shower of gold and pink the day broke.