The Slide Into Ruin

by Bronwyn Stuart

  “What were your men doing that close to the house? They were there within seconds after the last shot…”

  He could practically hear the pieces of the puzzle falling into place, see it in her eyes when he turned to face her, leaving his back unprotected.

  She didn’t let him get a word in but he thanked God her voice remained low when she fired accusations at him. “It was you. You forced us into your home by making ours uninhabitable.”

  He shook his head. “It was already uninhabitable and that’s not what happened. I wasn’t even there.”

  “Someone could have been killed. I could have been killed. Did my dowry mean that much to you that you would use trickery to get me into your home, into your bed? I could have… We could have… Oh my God.”

  The emotions she felt, one by one, were displayed in her big blue eyes, eyes that now glistened with moisture as the realisation that he’d duped her in the worst way sank in.

  “We didn’t have a choice, Eliza. You needed a roof over your head and yes, damn it, I needed your money.”

  Her gaze, piercing and direct, came like a stabbing blow. When she met his eyes, betrayal lingered behind a fierce determination. “And now you have it. What now, Darius? I’m sick of the lies and subterfuge, of the worry. What happens now?”

  *

  Her voice rose on the last four syllables while her heart cracked and fell to pieces.

  Eliza had started the mess that their lives had become when she’d forged the names on her father’s final letters, when she’d forged the documents promising her to Deklin Montrose rather than her sister just to buy them a few months’ grace with their heftiest creditor. Darius had been the one to force the issue after she had rejected him. Darius had been the one to call every single shot since then. He arranged the vicar. He saw to it that they were married before she’d had a chance to second-guess a thing.

  But she was the one who went to him nights after their hasty wedding. She was the one who had made sure their union had been consummated so he couldn’t take her dowry and leave them behind with the shame of an annulment. She was the one who had enjoyed and even begged for everything that had happened since. She was the one who at that moment might be carrying a baby born of deceit while her family were taken away from her.

  She was the one who would once again be forced into action or be left picking up the pieces.

  “Darius didn’t kill our father.” She spoke the words in a loud voice, a voice that carried like the sound of thunder on the howling wind.

  “Don’t do this,” her husband hissed at her. “They have nothing to go on. Don’t give them anything they can use against us.”

  “You’ve done your part,” came her final reply as she stepped around him and approached Sir Percival. “My lord, our father died from natural causes in his sleep.”

  “Why didn’t you report it as you only moments ago claimed you would?”

  She’d forgotten that part. “We were scared. We thought our guardians the vilest of criminals and that we would be far safer to keep the secret and claim the offered protection of our neighbour, the Earl of Wickham’s own son.”

  Sir Percival clearly weighed her words and counted his time before answering. “It is a crime to hide the death of a lord of the realm.”

  “That was my idea,” Nathanial yelled out, furthering the lies. When would it ever end?

  Percival regarded her brother with severity before his eyes softened a touch. “Why would you do it?”

  Nathanial put everything he had into his acting skills as he dropped his gaze and kicked a toe across the gravel. “I was ashamed of the state of our affairs and didn’t want anyone to know just how badly my father had left us when he died. Our house was falling in and we had no funds to speak of, not even to pay for funeral rites. As Eliza said, we feared our guardians would do more harm to our already ruined prospects.”

  “You can’t possibly think to believe all this rot and pigswill,” Wickham yelled, coming forward with menace aimed right at Darius. “They are protecting the pirate. He needs to be hanged for his crimes against England.”

  While Eliza hated what Darius had done, how he had manipulated her, she hated the idea of him hanging for a crime he did not commit even more. “Darius only came to our area three weeks past, my lord. Our father had already been dead long before that. If Harold did indeed see our father’s body, then he can attest to how long he might have been in the dirt.”

  Wickham drew breath to spew yet more accusation but Sir Percival held his hand up to stop any more arguments. Eliza saw Darius’s glare on his father and then felt it when inflicted upon her. Sir Percival said, “There are too many lies here, even a deaf man could hear the flaws in all of your stories. I must seek counsel on how best to proceed.”

  Eliza approached him. “May we stay here until you have reached a conclusion?”

  Sir Percival grew red in the face as he shook his head. “Certainly not. Not unless you want the filthy tales to spread far and wide that the Penfold children are seeking refuge in the arms of a bastard and pirate.”

  Eliza bit her tongue against defending Darius. She considered admitting that he was her husband but knew it would make things so much worse right then. Darius must have thought the same since he hadn’t said anything about their union yet either. “Then what will become of us?”

  “Wickham is telling the truth in that he is your guardian. I have the necessary papers. You must go with him until the matter is resolved.”

  *

  “Over my dead body,” Darius roared. He handed Sarah to Wes and surged forward, his pistol in hand in a blink of an eye. “You will not take them anywhere.”

  The baby’s cries added to the growing tension as a handful of Darius’s men gathered at his back. The two guards who accompanied Wickham also drew weapons and met Darius halfway, effectively blocking his path to the earl.

  Wickham smiled his triumph. “They will not be in your corruptive presence for one more second of this day. You should take your men and your bastard and leave England while you still can.”

  Darius searched the magistrate’s wide eyes looking for any hint of compassion that may lie there. “He only wants the girls’ dowries. Can’t you see how he bends the tales? If it is discovered that Eliza and her sisters travel alone with him, they’ll be ruined well and truly.”

  But Sir Percival turned back towards the carriage, dismissing him much the same as most of the people in his life had so far. “They were ruined the moment you took them in, lad. They may yet need a man of Wickham’s character and good standing if they want to claw their way out of the holes you have dug for them.”

  Darius growled and tried to advance but one of Wickham’s men threw him back.

  A flash of lavender and black caught his eye as his wife and his family were ushered into the other carriage. “Don’t do this, Eliza, let me help you. We can do this—” Oomph. Pain exploded his stomach and Darius crumpled, black spots shimmering in his vision. “Don’t do it,” he whispered, caught off guard and not seeing the second blow coming for his head until it was almost too late.

  One of his men deflected that blow and threw a punch that sent Wickham’s man reeling into the other one, blood dripping from his chin.

  He ignored them as he sought out Eliza, tried to make her see she didn’t have to go. Bright blue eyes bathed in moisture met his across the snowy gravel, churned up by hooves and boots as men scrambled and horses shied from both the smell of blood and fear. “You can’t save us now, Darius. It’s too late.”

  “Bullshit,” he said, but the curse emerged as a barely there growl and then she was gone. The door closed, the henchmen climbed on the side of the carriage and the horses were whipped into action. Tarquin only just managed to drag him out of the way of being trampled.

  As Darius lay on the cold ground, fighting to regain both his breath and his senses, he kept seeing the hurt in Eliza’s eyes when it clicked in her mind that he had been behind it alm
ost from the start. The betrayal when she learned she didn’t have to marry a bastard after all. The sheer determination in her eyes and the belief that she was the only person in her life who could save them the way she had already done so many times before.

  The final twist of the knot in the rope he could use to hang himself with had been the fact that she had gone. She hadn’t spoken up. She hadn’t declared him her husband and able to take care of her brothers and sisters, of her. It’s too late. You can’t save us.

  If he had a title he could have saved them all. If he’d been born to an honourable man on the right side of the blanket, none of it would have happened. If he’d been an unremarkable bastard instead of a bloody pirate, he might have been worth something to her and not considered worse than the mud beneath their boots.

  Darius sat, his head in his hands long after the sounds of his future leaving him faded into the irregular beats of his heart ricocheting like a thunderous echo in his head. His men stood around, probably wondering what the hell had just happened. Probably wondering if their captain was indeed a spineless cur who couldn’t even keep the faith of his own wife long enough to make her stand at his side and proclaim him good.

  Perhaps this had been the cruel trick coming to sweep his feet from under him? The final blow always came. When he’d been a lad and his grandfather had tried to help him, he’d been happy before the death blow came. When he was a young pirate, full of bluster and a sense of worth for the first time ever, he’d staged a mutiny against the one man who had been more father to him than his own. Why couldn’t things just work out for him? Why did it always have to come to Darius being the last one standing, on his own, useless, worthless, hurt beyond words? It was that hurt he’d been trying to keep from cracking his fragile heart.

  “Captain?” Tarquin’s voice seemed so far away and Darius wanted to ignore it, block it out so he could hear only his own self-recriminations.

  “Captain, we have to go after them.”

  A buzz of consensus followed but Darius knew it was futile. “We can’t.”

  Wes squatted next to him and pulled his hands away from his head, forcing him to look up when he shoved him. “Why the bloody hell not?”

  They didn’t get it. None of them knew anything about London or society. They knew nothing about how Darius’s dreams of success and family always came to naught. “That man was the law here and what he says goes. We don’t have the power to go up against any of them.”

  “We have the gun power,” Wes countered.

  “It’s not enough. We can’t go killing this lord and that. We can’t let the children get caught in the crossfire.”

  Tarquin puffed up, a look of sheer malice on his face. “We should have killed that Wickham and his bloody son when we had the chance. We could have buried them next to the duke and been long gone before the spring.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “We’re not killers,” Darius said quietly. “We’re sailors.” He should let them blow off their tempers while they could still summon the passion to care.

  “We can be both,” at least three of his men answered at the same time.

  Darius stood and addressed them all. “We are traders, all of us. Legitimate cargo traders for a good company run by a good man. Would you risk all of that to charge to a rescue that would see us all hanged if it failed? You heard what Eliza said as well as I did. We can’t save her.”

  “Bollocks to that,” one of his men said.

  “Like hell we can’t,” chimed another.

  Wes clapped him on the shoulder. “Seems we should be able to decide on our next course of action, on our own fates.”

  Darius shook his head. “I am your captain and I say we keep out of it. The ship is repaired and outfitted. We can leave on schedule.”

  A cry caught his attention and he remembered Sarah. Innocent, helpless Sarah. She was his responsibility now and the least he could do was get her out of England. He was a bastard who could save his bastard sister. That much he could do. Taking the baby into his arms, he turned to go back into the house but then someone spoke behind him.

  Darius would later call it the voice of reason.

  “Are we cowards or are we men?”

  A rousing chorus yelled back, “We are men!”

  “Are we killers or are we yellow-bellied dogs?”

  “We are killers!”

  Holding Sarah close against his chest, he walked back down the steps and pushed his way into the circle of roaring sailors. “You are not killers. We are not killers. The law has to take care of Eliza and her siblings now. It is not cowardly to know when you are outnumbered and outmanoeuvred. If you looked at her face before she left, you would know she no longer wants our interference. She no longer wants my interference.”

  Benny, the sailor who began the rousing came forward to lay one hand on Darius’s shoulder and another to Sarah’s back. “Whether the lady likes it or not, whether you can admit it or not, we are a family now. All of us. Yes, you lied to her, but she lied to you in a far worse way and on more than one occasion. She’ll see that soon enough. If you’ll be begging my pardon, Captain, that bleeding female doesn’t know what she wants and those poor children have no say in any of it.”

  “That’s my wife you’re talking about,” Darius said through gritted teeth and clenched jaw.

  “Not if she goes off with the likes of your sire. How long till he discovers she married you? His bastard? The one he tried to off as a lad? The thorn in his side? If her dowry is already gone, he’ll move on to the next one and then the one after that.”

  “Society won’t allow it.” He heard himself utter the words but he had no belief in them. He only had to marry one girl to make the others tow his line. He only had to threaten Eliza’s life and the rest would fall in with his greedy, malicious plans. He didn’t even have to marry Gabriella himself. He could give her to Harold.

  Chills took him. Harold. Where had he been while it had all played out? Was he waiting with a vicar in town? Would he believe Eliza if she told him she was already married or would the bloody martyr keep the information to herself and go through with the vows to buy time for her sister?

  She bloody well would. Eliza was stronger than anyone really gave her credit for. Would she go through with a wedding night as well just to save face until they got to London?

  Sarah’s wails alerted him to the fact that his grip had tightened as his vision had darkened with the fury of it all. Eliza might not think him up to the task of protecting them. She might not think him up to the task of being everything a husband entailed but he was her husband. They’d said their vows and sealed their bargain with a passion he hadn’t known existed in English roses.

  He had one chance to show her that even though he wasn’t a dragon slayer, he was a protector. He had one chance to show her that even though he wasn’t worthy of her, he would fight to his last breath to defend what was his—and she was his. She had made a mistake today in walking away from him.

  If nothing else, he had to find her and prove her wrong. Prove that he could and would be the husband she deserved to have after all the years of being let down by the men in her life.

  *

  Sickness churned deep within Eliza’s belly as she held Grace and Ethan close on the crowded seat in Wickham’s hired carriage, Gabriella to her left and Nathanial directly across next to the two men who’d brought about their doom today. Black spots swam in her vision and made her head feel lighter than a feather but she would not faint. Not now. Not when they had so much to lose, so much at stake.

  Just like all the men in her life so far, Darius had lied to her. He’d fabricated an event to push her from her home and into his. She knew why he had done it, she wasn’t daft, but she wished he hadn’t. Someone could have been very seriously hurt, even killed. She would have said yes eventually. Another day, another week. Time had been running out—she knew that. Obviously Darius’s patience had come to an end sooner. He’d sped things u
p beautifully. For himself. But he’d put the children in serious danger and that really pinched her temper. She felt betrayed.

  As her mind raced from one thought to the next, something Sir Percival had said kept resonating and wouldn’t stop. “You said you have the papers to prove Wickham our guardian? Where did you get them?”

  Sir Percival gestured with his head to Wickham. “He gave them to me. Don’t much care where he got them from though. You were in severe danger, my dear.”

  They were in severe danger now, she thought as she transferred her gaze to Wickham. “My lord? Where did you get the papers?”

  “That should not be your concern right now.”

  “Oh? What should my concern be?”

  A flicker of irritation crossed eyes the same hazel as Darius’s. “If the ton discovers you were holed up with a pirate, hiding the death of your father, there won’t be a corner of the world to flee to, to escape the gossip.”

  Ethan lifted his head and said, “Darius isn’t a pirate anymore. He’s my—”

  Eliza squeezed the last words from him, fearing what he had been about to say more than the man sitting across from them.

  Wickham wasn’t easily fooled. “He’s your what, lad?”

  “He’s our knight in shiny armour. He’s going to slay Eliza’s dragons.”

  Percival and Wickham both laughed at this but Ethan didn’t like it. “He’s an honourable man! Eliza would never have—”

  “Not another word, Ethan,” she whispered, clapping a hand over her brother’s mouth. He met her gaze and nodded.

  The men stopped laughing in an instant. A fraught moment later and Percival frowned. Wickham went from jovial scorn to red-hot anger. His face brightened and his eyes narrowed. “Eliza never would have what?”

  Eliza kept her hand over Ethan’s mouth. “You needn’t listen to him, my lord. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

  Little teeth bit down on her palm and Eliza flinched with a yelp. “Ethan? You bit me!”