Page 17 of Once an Angel
As the children trailed after her, he stood, absently flattening his palm against his chest. If Claire Scarborough was his cross to bear, why did he feel so naked without her image resting next to his heart?
* * *
That night Emily kicked restlessly at her blankets. The island breeze had turned cool, but an icy fire burned in her veins, stoked by both disdain and fury. Her guardian lay on a pallet a few feet away. She pillowed her chin on folded arms and studied his sleeping features with hungry fascination.
He was nothing as she had imagined him. Somehow she had always expected him to be blond with a neatly clipped beard and side-whiskers. A cap of shining gold hair complemented a suit of armor, did it not? Self-contempt at her own naivete flooded her.
"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. . .
"Moretea, 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.
