Page 17 of Catching Captain Nash
“Unfortunately when I stumbled into the nearest town, opinion was divided whether I was a pirate or a spy. They flung me into the local prison while they made up their minds.”
“How long were you there?” Morwenna asked, nausea tasting sour on her tongue. How had he borne all of this?
His voice was flat, and she could see that he deliberately avoided the grimmer details of his incarceration. But she knew his travails had been horrific and unrelenting. She’d seen the scars on his beautiful body, and his emaciation, and the haunted look in his eyes. A haunted look absent when he awoke, but now back full force.
By heaven, if using her body gave him the briefest moment’s peace, she’d happily lie down for him anywhere and anytime he asked.
He stared down at the untouched rolls on his plate. “I managed to escape two months ago. I made it to the coast and wondered what the devil I could do. Luckily, the whaler that brought me back to London stopped for fresh water and took me on as extra crew for the voyage north. Even luckier, they were on their way home and not starting their hunt, or I wouldn’t have been back for another year.”
Morwenna sent him an appalled glance and met steady black eyes. He knew as well as she did how close they’d veered to disaster and a scandal that would taint the family name. Another year, and she’d have been married to Garson, perhaps the mother of his child. After all, it hadn’t taken her long to conceive Robert’s baby. Any children she and Garson had would be declared bastards, because with her first husband alive, her second marriage was invalid.
Morwenna realized with a shock that she hadn’t yet told Robert about Kerenza. She braced to tell him, but Silas hadstarted speaking. “It was one of the happiest days in my life when you walked in.” His deep voice, so similar in timbre to Robert’s, was thick with emotion. “None of us took losing you easily. Morwenna, most of all.”
She released Robert’s hand and prepared to hear him condemn her for accepting another man’s proposal. But to her surprise, he reached across and clasped his brother’s shoulder. It was the first unforced gesture of affection she’d seen him make since he’d returned.
Well, unless she counted last night’s passion. But that had resulted more from desperate need than anything as simple as mere fondness.
“And you can’t know how the thought of my family waiting for me kept me fighting to survive.”
Silas made an attempt to move beyond the appalling details of Robert’s imprisonment. “You won’t know the children when you see them. Although of course they’ve heard all about their heroic Uncle Robert. And, my God, how Kerenza will preen now that her father’s home at last.”
Chapter Six
Kerenza?
As he lurched to his feet, Robert’s face must have shown his profound shock, because everyone around the table fell silent. Morwenna stood away from the table and retreated a couple of paces, regarding him with a distraught expression.
“I tried to tell you last night,” she said, wringing her hands.
“Kerenza,” he said slowly. A child?Hischild?
Silas, Caro, Amy, and Pascal glanced at each other and by unspoken consent also stood. “I’m afraid I’ve put my foot in it,” Silas said.
Morwenna mustered a shaky smile for her brother-in-law. “It’s not your fault.”
Caro looked between Robert and Morwenna. “We’ll leave you alone.”
“Thank you,” Robert said through stiff lips. He waited until the others had gone, then stepped close to Morwenna without touching her. “Is this what I needed to know?”
While she didn’t back away, she regarded him warily. She reminded him of the woman who last night had seemed afraid that he might do something violent. When Dobbs shaved him this morning, Robert had looked in the mirror and acknowledged that she had cause for her uncertainty. He’d arrived at Nash House looking like a complete villain. Littleremained of the dashing captain she’d married. Instead she’d welcomed back a grim-visaged and ramshackle stranger with a saber slash marring his face.
“Are you very angry that I didn’t tell you?” she asked in a small voice.
Was he?
He’d spent so long concentrating on basic survival, he’d lost the habit of examining his feelings. One didn’t need the finer points of self-analysis to stay alive another day, when hope was so far gone, it was hardly a memory. One just needed the dogged will to endure.
Now he was back in London, and life wasn’t nearly so simple.
“We had so little time together before I went away,” he said thoughtfully. Since leaving her, he’d had plenty of opportunity to regret that. He’d found the woman for him, then they’d spent most of their first year of marriage apart. Now he’d made it home, that was going to change.
When a wry smile curved her lush lips, relief eased the tightness in his shoulders. At least she no longer looked ready to take to her heels. “It was enough.”
“How old is she?”
“Four.”
His daughter’s age confirmed that she was his. Not that he had any doubts. Before last night he might have questioned the child’s parentage. Morwenna had loved him, but five years was a long time to wait for a dead man.
