Chapter Thirteen
AUTUMN MEANT THAT the nights were beginning to grow longer and the dawn broke late after a reluctant awakening. And that evening it also meant longer in bed, wrapped around Lavinia.
If someone had told Andrew a week ago that he’d be in digs over a coffeehouse, cradling her head on his shoulder, he would’ve laughed in disbelief. Yet that’s exactly what he was doing.
A few days ago, when he’d lost control of his senses and dragged her down to her workshop floor, she’d told him that sex had never been the thing that was broken between them. She’d always been sharper than him, and naturally, she’d been right again this time, but nothing had prepared him for what it would actually be like. Yes, there was the familiarity of an old lover, but they were different now. Lavinia had been married and he . . . well, he’d taken care of his needs when he could find a willing partner who would enjoy a brief affair while he was in port waiting for orders for his next assignment.
It wasn’t just the accumulation of their experience, however. He’d never felt the raw, unfiltered need for a woman the way he did with her. Whether he wanted to admit it not, he’d quietly burned for her all those years, and now he couldn’t ignore the flames.
Despite the late hour and the exhaustion of worrying about Lavinia while she was at the dinner party, he hadn’t hesitated when she’d lifted her kiss-swollen lips to his and tempted him once again. The second time they’d had sex, it had been slower but no less passionate, each of them rediscovering every inch of skin to find those spots that made their bodies sing. She’d taken his cock in her mouth, sucking until he could hardly think, and he’d returned the favor, burying his tongue between her folds to lap at her until she raked her nails across his shoulders.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked, casting a look up his chest now that their breathing had finally steadied.
He brushed back a strand of her mahogany hair. “That you’ve left me a broken man.”
She laughed, and he could’ve lost himself in that sound for an eternity. Lavinia had always laughed with her whole body, the emotion spilling out of her like water sloshing over the side of a glass. Her mother had tried to rein in that part of her, and he was glad to see that Mrs. Malcolm hadn’t been successful in at least that one area.
“I’m old now,” he said.
“Hardly,” she said with a nudge of her elbow.
“Sometimes I feel it,” he said, rubbing at the still-new scar tissue over the slash he’d gotten in Constantinople.
“Do I want to know the story behind that one?” she asked.
“Probably not.”
“Does it hurt?”
“And the man who gave it to you?”
“Got the worse end of the fight,” he said. In truth, he didn’t know what had happened to the man, but the extent of the wounds the Russian agent had suffered made him doubtful his foe would’ve survived.
“Does it ever become easier?” she asked.
He shut his eyes for a moment, letting the wash of casualties—some whose names he knew and others who were simply anonymous enemies—spill over him.
“No.”
He paused, wondering how much he wanted to share with her. By telling her more, he risked letting her wedge her toe into the gap of the iron-banded door behind which he hid the deepest parts of himself, but holding back felt wrong. Even after all of the heartbreak she’d caused, he still felt compelled to spill every one of his secrets to her the way he once had.
“I told you this is my last mission for the War Office,” he said. “After we stop Wark’s plot, I’ll be finished.”
“You were serious about no longer sailing?” she asked.
“Yes.”
The fingers that had been stroking over his chest in wide, lazy circles stilled. “Andrew Colter, no longer a man of the sea. It’s been so long since you were just a boy gazing out at the horizon.”
“I’ve seen enough,” he said, pushing a hand through his hair.
“How did you start with the War Office?” she asked.
“After I came back to Eyemouth and found out you were married, there was nothing keeping me in Scotland. I traveled to Liverpool and signed on as first mate for a ship sailing to New Orleans. The day before we were due out of port, I was pulled off the ship and marched into a hotel. A man named Admiral Perry and another named Rickman told me my travels made me an ideal man for some work that needed doing.”
He must’ve shuddered at the memory, because she quietly asked, “What happened?”
“I was meant to pass a message to an agent working in New Orleans, but a French agent intercepted me.” He rolled onto his side slightly and pointed at a raised white scar that ran over the ribs on his right side. “He dealt me that.”
He watched as she traced over the scar through the air as though she didn’t dare touch it. “That one truly doesn’t hurt any longer,” he said with a chuckle.
“But it hurt at the time,” she said.
“Exactly as much as you think a dagger in the side would.”
“What about this one?” she asked, pointing to a puckered scar.
“I was shot by an agent for the Orange Free State in Cape Town. I was fortunate that the bullet went clean through my shoulder.”
“And where did you get this?” she asked, picking up his left hand and turning it in the light to see the ragged cut along the back of it.
He flexed his fingers, the skin there still tight. “Slashed with a knife in Indonesia. That was just poor luck. Wrong place, wrong time.”
“You’ve been injured so many times,” she said.
And yet none of them hurt as much as what she’d done to him.
“It’s all over now anyway,” he said, letting his head fall back against the pillow. “The condition of my service was the freedom to name when I left.”
“What happened that day, Andrew?”
“What day?” he asked, even though he knew what she meant.
“The day your ship wrecked.”
He sucked in a breath. “Disaster.”
“Will you tell me?” she asked, her head shifting on his chest as she was looking up at him.
“Why do you want to know?” he asked, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.
She was silent a moment, but then, in a voice that cracked slightly, she said, “Because that day changed both of our lives.”
Changed. Altered. Ruined.
He hugged her a little closer, pulling strength from the simple fact that she was there. “I’d been named the first mate on the Andraste when we left São Luís in Brazil, but I was still green.”
“What happened to the old first mate?” she asked.
A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “It’s not fit for a lady . . .” She began to protest. “But since you keep insisting that you’re not a lady, he and a woman from the port were making feet for children’s stockings and—”
She burst out laughing. “ ‘Making feet for children’s stockings’? Is that what you sailors call it?”
“Among other things.”
“Enlighten me,” she said.
“You can shake out the sheets or dance the Paphian jig. Or perhaps you’d prefer to have your corn ground?”
“Oh Lord,” she groaned between laughs. “That’s particularly awful.”
He was grinning like an idiot now. “It is, isn’t it?”
“So this first mate was caught in the midst and . . . ?”
“The story goes that he leapt out a window to avoid an angry husband with a pistol,” said Andrew. “I was promoted to replace him, and we sailed out that evening with a full ship.”
The memory of what happened next drove all of the humor from him, and his voice sobered. “We were two weeks out of São Luís with a good wind when a storm hit. They aren’t supposed to be that big at that time of year, but for whatever reason we were caught right in the middle of it. I’d sailed through nor’easters and squalls, but I’d never seen anything like this.
“We brought the sails down as fast as we could, but it hardly mattered. The wind whipped up the waves, and they started smashing the deck like a hammer. Two men were swept overboard in the first ten minutes, and we would’ve lost more if we hadn’t been quick with rigging up a grid of ropes across the deck to act as guidelines.
“In the end, the hull was breached—I still don’t know how—and she started to take on water. We did what we could to try to save her, but we couldn’t pump fast enough to clear the water out. The storm ripped the Andraste apart like it was nothing more than a piece of balsa wood. We didn’t stand a chance.”
“What did you do?” she asked.
“Abandoned ship and hoped for the best. A sinking ship can cause a vacuum that sucks down anything in its path. I jumped and managed to get away from the worst of it by holding on to the galley door. A few weeks before, we’d rigged it with a rope to keep it shut when it was too swollen in the tropical heat, and I wrapped the line around my wrist to keep myself tethered to it. I reasoned that if I were to die, at least my body might wash up when the door reached the shore.”
He’d wanted Lavinia to stand a chance of knowing what had happened to him if he died. They hadn’t married yet, but as his fiancée she should have an answer—to know that he hadn’t gone the way of so many sailors before him, jumping ship on a far-flung island where the weather was always hot and the living was easier than on the deck of a merchant vessel. Yet for all those fatalistic thoughts, getting back to her—surviving for her—had been everything. She’d been the reason he’d kicked his legs when he’d jumped overboard into the churning sea. She’d been the reason he’d held on when his fingers had bled from the scraping and scrabbling it took to stay clinging to his float when the waves thrashed at him.
“The storm finally stopped, and by some miracle I was still alive and on that door,” he said. “I couldn’t see the ship’s debris any longer, and I didn’t know how far I’d been carried. All I knew was that I had to hang on with everything I had.”
“How long were you like that?” she asked quietly.
“Maybe three days? I can’t be sure. Quenching your thirst is the only thing you can think about when you’re a castaway. It’s torture. You’re surrounded by water all day and night, and you can’t drink a drop of it.
“But I was fortunate,” he said with a rueful smile. “The storm tossed me near the coast of Suriname. At some point I spotted land and, after convincing myself it wasn’t a hallucination, I swam as hard as I could for it. Somehow I made it to the shallows off a tiny fishing village. A fisherman and his son pulled me out of the water and took me to their home. They nursed me and treated my saltwater blisters. It took weeks for me to get any strength back, but as soon as I had enough to sit up I began to make a plan for the next time the traders came through.”
“When was that?” she asked.
“In three months’ time. As I said, it was a tiny village. I managed to talk my way onto the traders’ boat and eventually landed myself in a port town, where I could arrange for passage to the British base at Kingston. From there it was a simple matter of getting home.”
“Except it wasn’t simple when you arrived,” she said quietly.
“No,” he said.
The word hung around them heavily until finally he said, “And now you. You’ve told me some of what happened while I was gone. What of the rest of it?”
Lavinia squeezed her eyes shut tight as though trying to work up the courage to tell him. Except she didn’t need courage for that. She was already the boldest woman he knew—brave enough to steal papers from a dangerous man’s home, all while clad in an evening dress of her own design and construction. No matter what, his respect for her would never be diminished again.
“Your father received a letter from the shipping company. Your ship had been lost at sea. No survivors.” Her eyes opened and he could tell she was reliving the depths of whatever emotions had gripped her on that day. “He came to the vicarage as soon as he’d read it and told me. He said it wasn’t right that he should know before I did since we were to be married.”
“He was a good man,” Andrew said quietly, regretting that he hadn’t been there for his father’s twilight years before the hardworking ferryman had slipped away in his sleep.
“He was. When he told me . . . I never thought once that I’d lose you. Even when you were at sea where all number of things could happen, I’d always thought that you’d be safe because you were mine.” She coughed once to clear her throat. “But you were gone. It was written on the page with such certainty, but I didn’t want to believe it. How could I?
“At first my mother and father thought I was just showing the appropriate respect and mourning you as any woman would, but after three months they began to disapprove. I wouldn’t wear anything but black. I hardly left the house, and I refused to go out in society. My mother began to ask her friends to bring their unmarried sons to call. It was uncomfortable for them and humiliating for me.”
“What of Parkem?” he asked, trying to keep his voice neutral.
“I told you—”
“I want all of it.”
She blew out a breath, and he could feel her steel herself next to him. “Six months after you’d been reported dead, Mamma and Papa called me to Papa’s study and told me that a proposal from Alistair would be imminent. He’d called a time or two, but I’d hardly paid him any attention. I should’ve realized that his mother was great friends with Mamma and the two of them had been trying to engineer a match for years. With you dead, she saw her chance.
“Alistair proposed the following day. I turned him down thinking that the matter was finished, but he came back. He came back every single day for nearly two months, and I still refused. I couldn’t—” Her voice thickened. “I just couldn’t.”
He didn’t want to hear this. The physical intimacy they’d shared was one thing, but this was rewriting everything he’d assumed he knew about her. He needed to believe that she’d moved on from him. That she’d chosen to marry another man—even loved him. It was the foundation upon which he’d built these last twelve years and if that foundation was shaky—or, worse, nothing more than a figment of his imagination—then what had his life been built on?
The lies he’d told himself.
The wrongs he’d done to Lavinia without remorse.
Those realizations ripped at his chest, as though his heart were being pulled in two, and yet Lavinia kept speaking, hardly knowing what her words were doing to him.
“Mamma got her way in the end,” she said with a weak smile.
“By posting the banns and locking you away?” he asked, fury striking in him at the thought of anyone trying to steal Lavinia’s spirit. Her freedom.
“Papa was the one who posted the banns, but yes. She told me in no uncertain terms that I would marry Alistair or she’d let it be known that I’d let myself be ‘defiled’ by you and cast me out. That’s what she called it, as though what we did was something improper and nasty.”
Something in his chest twisted. He’d known her mother to be a hard woman, thoroughly disapproving of him and his working-class father. Yet he hadn’t thought the woman would stoop to threatening the ruination of her own daughter just to break her.
“Mamma was the most determined woman I’ve ever known when she thought she was right,” said Lavinia. “In her own delusional, misguided way, she must’ve been trying to protect me. Alistair could provide me with a life and a seat at the forefront of the community that she thought I should have. Except Alistair lied. He lied about the security of his business and his worth. He was nothing more than a confidence man, moving money around to make it seem as though he was always flush with cash. All it took was one ship sinking and the loss of its cargo to ruin him.”
“How did Alistair die?” he asked. “Did he . . . ?”
She shook her head, dismissing the idea of suicide outright. “The doctor said that he had a weakness of the heart that couldn’t have been diagnosed. And so, after two years of marriage, I was a widow.”
Not knowing what else to do, he gathered her closer, thankful to be able to feel the soft beat of her heart against his chest and the faint tickle of her hair where it spilled over his arms.
“When I returned to Eyemouth and saw him with you, I thought you’d wanted this.”
“How could you not?” Her soft voice was laced with regret. “It wasn’t even a year, and already I was married. But I never wanted to be, Andrew. You must believe me: I never could’ve given my heart so easily after you.”
I never could. It was a far cry from I never have, but he wanted to believe, lying on the wide feather mattress of his rented rooms in a city that wasn’t his own, that it was what she meant to say. If only she could.
“What’s happened tonight . . .” he started to say.
“Was inevitable.”
It was same word she’d used when he kissed her in her workroom. The way she said it had made it sound like a mistake, but that wasn’t tonight. Tonight had been intentional.
“You like that word, don’t you? It means that you can do what you like without having to face the fact that you wanted this enough that you hoped for it,” he said.
She jerked a little, her natural defenses no doubt rankled by this gentle admonition.
“We didn’t just fall into bed tonight because we’ve done this before, Lavinia,” he said slowly. His old distrust of her was hard to shake but he wanted to be free of it—oh, did he want to—if only to recapture something of what they’d lost and look ahead to the future.
After a moment’s consideration, she said, “No.”
“And we didn’t just have sex because you spent most of the evening in danger and I wanted to hit something.”
“Did you?” she asked, trailing her finger across his chest.
“Yes. I was convinced that something had happened to you and like a brute, it was the only thing I could think to do.”
There had been a time long ago when he would’ve moved heaven and earth if it had suited her whim and, although he’d never tell her, he was beginning to remember what that devotion had felt like. Powerful. Awe-inspiring. Terrifying.
Moving with the grace of a selkie sliding through dark waters, she twisted and rolled on top of him. Pressing up on her hands, she let her hair spill over her shoulders as she looked down at him. His breath caught in his throat. He’d been wrong when he’d thought—hoped—that age would in any way diminish her looks. Instead, maturity had changed her from merely pretty into a breathtaking, soul-stirring beauty, one who rendered him defenseless. He was a man who’d done things in the service of the War Office that would haunt his nightmares for the rest of his life, but this woman he’d known his entire life could still slay him with a simple look.
“I think, Andrew Colter,” she said, a smile tipping her lips, “that it’s time to reassure you that I’m not only alive, but very well.”
And that was exactly what she did.