After a few moments of standing uselessly in the doorway, however, she found herself accepting Mrs. Potts’s offer, stumbling gratefully across the landing to her own bedchamber, and collapsing in a heap across the bed.
It was then that the fragments of her dream, swept hastily away by Clarissa’s cry, returned to her in full force.
Her first feeling was guilt—guilt that any part of her, even the deepest recesses of her mind, had been focused on anything but her daughter’s well-being. She should not have allowed herself to fall asleep, let alone to dream.
But since she had, she supposed she should be grateful that the twists and turns of her fevered brain had not forced her mind to see what her eyes had missed: Clarissa falling headlong off the quay, Clarissa struggling fruitlessly against the sucking tide, Clarissa being pulled beneath the surface of the sea.
And as for what she had dreamt?
The nightmarish ending was the easiest to make sense of. Although St. John was hardly the man to take justice into his own hands in quite such a dramatic fashion, she would do well to remember that he meant to see her pay a steep price for what had been lost—his honor, as much as that necklace.
Truth be told, it was the rest of the dream that troubled her.
Sarah shifted onto her side and caught a glimpse of the trunk, closed and locked at the foot of her bed. The events of the day before had forced her to acknowledge certain feelings, emotions from her past she thought she had shut up as tightly as the items in that trunk.
She had never seen a man’s bare chest before, not even her husband’s. In that long-ago handful of nights after their marriage, when St. John had come to perform his husbandly duty, he had always worn a nightshirt and had respectfully waited to enter her bedchamber until the candles had been doused. She had never imagined that a real man’s body could vie with a marble sculpture of some Grecian god.
Remembering how St. John claimed he had spent his time in the West Indies, Sarah called to mind every whey-faced, stoop-shouldered clerk in her father’s employ. Whatever they hid beneath their frayed frock coats and ink-stained cuffs, she did not think it could be that.
Although she was exhausted, Sarah hoisted herself from the bed and went to the washstand to splash her face with water. If she allowed herself to sleep again, she clearly could not trust the direction of her dreams. On the landing, she paused to peek silently into her daughter’s room. Both Clarissa and Mrs. Potts had drifted off. Smiling to herself, Sarah crept downstairs and retreated into the kitchen, where she could neither see nor hear the rain that threatened to wash away months of planning and work.
But no matter the task she took up, the memory of her dream kept intruding. And nothing she did could ease her suspicion that there was reality at its core: She was vulnerable, and her womanly weaknesses only made her more so.
St. John was a danger to her—and some small part of her wanted to throw itself in harm’s way.
* * *
“Is that you, Mrs. Potts?” Sarah called, hearing the front door open and feeling the gust of damp air that whispered down the passageway and into the kitchen. “Clarissa and I are just sitting down to tea.”
“Oh, aye, mum, ’tis I. I woulda come in the back, but there’s someone here wants to see Miss Clarissa.”
Sarah didn’t have to guess who the guest might be. She had seen Mrs. Potts depart half an hour past with a bundle tucked under one arm—St. John’s clothes, she’d assumed—and make her way against a drizzling rain.
And he had come back with her. Of course he deserved to see how Clarissa had improved in a day. He had saved the child’s life, after all. But Sarah had begun to fear she was never again to have a moment’s peace. St. John had insinuated himself into the life of the village, invaded her dreams—did he have to fill Primrose Cottage with his voice and his scent and his overwhelming maleness, too?
“Who, Mama?” Clarissa demanded. Her voice was hoarse from coughing and her eyes were smudged with shadow; one night’s restless sleep had not quite erased the fatigue of the previous day’s adventure. And hidden by her dress were wide bruises across her chest and belly where she had struck the water, and smaller round ones that ringed her arms where St. John had grabbed her and pulled her to safety.
But those discomforts had only slightly diminished her energy. Clarissa slid from her chair and hurried to the kitchen door. “Mr. Sijin, Mama?”
Sarah masked a grimace with a smile and rose to her feet. “I don’t know. Let’s go and see, shall we?”
“Sijin! Sijin!” Clarissa clamored, barreling into the sitting room, where St. John stood before the fireplace, much as he had been standing when Sarah had first seen him following his arrival in the village. Now, however, there was a fire crackling in the hearth and Clarissa’s few playthings were scattered before it. Sarah’s black knit shawl was draped over the rocking chair and her workbasket was open beside it. Framed by the doorway, it looked to be a cozy domestic scene.
She wondered how and when—or if—she would be able to tell her daughter that the man for whose attention she vied was her father. How would St. John react to hear Sarah correct Clarissa, to hear her say, “Call him ‘Papa,’ dear one?”
Worse, what if he decided to take matters into his own hands, to reveal his identity to the child and strip away the last bit of power Sarah held? She had no doubt that the man who had already charmed half of Haverhythe would easily win Clarissa’s affection if he set out to do so.
St. John knelt as he had the first night and met the child eye to eye. “And how are you today, Miss Clarissa?” His wide smile revealed a row of perfect white teeth, but his pale eyes darted nervously over Clarissa’s face and limbs, and then past the child to lock questioningly on Sarah.
“We’re all well, thank you,” Sarah answered, stepping into the room. “Clarissa has slept well and eaten well and is not to be persuaded away from her toys.”
“I should hope not!” he said, rising to his feet. “For here is something new to play with, and I would be utterly downcast if Miss Clarissa should deem my gifts unworthy.” He bowed elegantly while proffering two wrapped packages, and Clarissa giggled at his mock ceremony even as she reached out both hands to take the presents, one in each chubby fist.
As he helped her first with the ribbon and then with the paper, Clarissa eagerly pressed him. “What is it? What is it?” Turning to Sarah, she repeated the question.
“I can’t guess, ’Rissa. Show me!”
The wrappings fell away to reveal a soft doll with frizzled yellow yarn for hair and a painted-on smile. Sarah had seen it many times in Gaffard’s but had never been able to justify the expense. Now her heart felt ready to burst—or perhaps break—as she listened to Clarissa squeal and watched her hug the doll, then thrust it back into St. John’s hands, shouting, “See! See!”
“I do see,” he said, admiring the doll with an enthusiasm that did not seem feigned. “And what a charming dress. She looks like you—only not half so pretty,” he maintained, returning it to Clarissa with a smile. “Now, what do you suppose is in the other package?”
“What?” Clarissa asked, eyes wide.
Again he helped her with the wrappings and shared her surprise at the discovery of a beautiful little book filled with brightly colored pictures of animals from around the world. Sarah’s breath caught when she imagined the cost of such a thing and how quickly it might be ruined by a child’s careless hands.
“May I see?” Sarah asked, and Clarissa reluctantly turned and laid it on her mother’s palm. “How lovely! But I worry it will be . . . Perhaps it should be saved for another day.”
St. John stood and lifted the book unceremoniously from her grasp, returning it to Clarissa. Sarah frowned at him, but a slight shake of his head was St. John’s only reply. “I’d say that today is a perfect day—rainy days are always best for stories, don’t you think, Miss Clarissa? Now, let me see.” And he set about arranging her blanket on the floor and propping himself on one arm
alongside it, his long, booted legs stretching almost into the center of the room. “Come, sit beside me and bring Dolly with you. She will want to look, too.”
Clarissa obediently sat down and leaned against his chest, tucking the doll between them as St. John opened the book. “Do you suppose your mama would be so kind as to fetch a storyteller a cup of tea—for storytellers should be rewarded for their efforts, don’t you think?” Clarissa nodded and giggled again.
St. John lifted his eyes over Clarissa’s curls to send a glance in Sarah’s direction, and she felt suddenly as if she had never seen this man before. Certainly she had never seen his countenance so open, his eyes so gentle, his smile so genuine—and all so different from the man who had haunted her dreams. What was happening here?
Sarah snagged her lower lip between her teeth and gave a nervous nod. “Of course. I won’t be a moment.”
“Now,” he began, turning back to Clarissa as if sharing a great secret, “I’ll tell you all about a friend of mine who lives in a very special place—the place where we get the sugar for our tea and cakes and puddings. Can you guess where that is?”
“Gaffard’s!” Clarissa shouted.
Wisely, St. John did not laugh. “An amazingly good guess, my dear, but it’s someplace more exciting even than that. Sugarcane is grown on islands far away, in the Caribbean Sea, where it’s hot and sunny every day. But that’s all right, because my friend likes it that way. He’s a monkey.”
“You know a monkey?” Clarissa asked, eyes wide with disbelief.
“Indeed, I do, and his name is Jasper. Now, Jasper is a friendly little fellow. He’d love to share your bread and jam.” When Clarissa looked alarmed, he added, “Why, he’d no more hurt you than would the donkeys here in Haverhythe.”
“Donkeys bite,” Clarissa informed him solemnly.
“Do they? Then I shall have to be on my guard! But Jasper would never bite you, no matter what sort of tasty treat you had in your hands. He’s far too clever. Do you know what he’d do instead?”
Clarissa shook her head, totally enthralled.
He pointed to the illustration. “He’d perch himself on your shoulder and wrap his tail around you here,” he said, curling his free hand around her waist, “tap you on the other shoulder, and then reach around this way with his little hand and snatch it right from your fingers!”
Clarissa dissolved in a fit of giggles as St. John tickled her—but gently, as if he knew the bruises the fall had inflicted.
Sarah took a resolute step in the direction of the kitchen. St. John had proved he could be trusted with her daughter’s life.
That certainly did not mean it was safe to trust him with her own heart.
Chapter 11
He had nearly run out of adventures for Jasper, so when Sarah returned with his tea, he stood gratefully and strode toward her, leaving Clarissa absorbed with the book’s rich illustrations.
Lifting the cup from her hands, he took a sip of the sweet, hot drink. “Mmm. Thank you.”
Sarah nodded absently, still watching Clarissa on the floor. “Have you spent much time with children, my lord?”
“A little,” he said, recalling the eager, innocent black faces that had surrounded him on his every visit to the slaves’ quarters on Harper’s Hill Plantation.
“You are amazingly good with her.”
St. John rested the cup in its saucer. “It is not difficult to like a child, Sarah.”
“Your child?”
He could not miss the note of hope in her voice, although she was unable—or unwilling—to meet his eyes.
Dear God, but he wanted to believe that this child was his. The intensity of his longing surprised him. Years of practiced indifference had built a shell of ice around his heart. How could one little girl have melted it so easily?
Clarissa might be his daughter, of course. That could not be denied. Nothing about what had happened three years ago seemed clear to him anymore. Certainly he could no longer trust his stepmother’s version of events—she who had been encouraging him to marry Eliza Harrington, all the while knowing his wife still lived!
But his stepmother’s lies did not necessarily make Sarah honest.
“Anyone’s child,” he murmured at last, lifting the cup to his lips again.
Mrs. Potts bustled past them toward the fireplace, a welcome interruption. “Now’s the time for wee ones to be in bed,” she announced to Clarissa. “Come along.”
“Mama!” Clarissa protested, clutching the book to her chest.
But Sarah shook her head and pried the treasure from her grasp. “Mrs. Potts is right. Come, give me a kiss. And say thank you and good night to—to our friend.”
He had half-expected her to say “your papa.” Would he have been sorry if she had?
“Good night, Miss Clarissa. And good night, Dolly,” he added, touching their pink cheeks in turn.
“You shouldn’t have,” Sarah said again when their footsteps had retreated on the stairs. She began to gather up Clarissa’s playthings and restore them to their basket on the hearth, pausing to run her fingertips across the cover of the picture book. “Such lavish gifts,” she said with a shake of her head. “How could you—?”
The catch in her throat undermined the accusation in her words. When he laid one hand on her shoulder, she reluctantly turned to face him. One teardrop slid down her cheek, and she blinked furiously to keep others from following it.
“Sarah,” he murmured reprovingly. Cupping her cheek in his palm, he brushed the pad of his thumb along her cheekbone, whisking away the wetness there. Dark, spiky lashes fanned across her pale skin as her eyes dropped closed. Threading his fingertips into her hair, he tilted her face and lowered his mouth to hers, brushing her lips with his own, feeling her softness and heat.
Two nights past, he had been determined to seduce her, mislead her, persuade her to bare her very soul to him. He had held her in his arms and contemplated the sort of controlled, calculating kiss that would make her confess all her crimes.
One night was as good as another.
But this was not that kiss.
With one hand at her back, he pulled her closer, exploring her deeply, tenderly, slowly, before dragging his mouth across hers and along her cheek, tasting the salt of her dried tears, trying to capture the scent of her hair and her skin, that delicate note that drew him like no rich perfume ever had.
“I did not think my buying the child a few trinkets would distress you,” he whispered against her scalp. It was not a lie, exactly, although, of course, his motives when he had first purchased the presents had been far from pure. He certainly had intended to provoke an emotional reaction in her.
He just had not expected to feel anything in response.
“Hardly trinkets, my lord,” she insisted, pulling free of his embrace and dashing away the remains of her tears with the back of one hand. “And hardly necessary. Her life was gift enough—especially when you might have let me drown trying to rescue her and solved all your problems thereby.”
And then, on a choked sob, she ran from the room.
Almost before the scuffle of her steps had faded from the room, he heard the back door of the cottage slam. Without thinking, he followed her. Then, two steps into the cramped, windowless kitchen, he ran into the sharp corner of a deal table pushed up against a wall.
With a muttered oath, he groped his way into one of the high-backed wooden chairs that surrounded the table on three sides, rubbing the heel of his hand against his bruised thigh, welcoming the pain that brought him to his senses. What the hell was he doing, running after her? He should be running in the opposite direction—away from temptation, away from emotions he had no business feeling.
Behind him, the door swung open once more, narrowly missing his chair, and Mrs. Potts shuffled into the room, carrying the stub of a candle in a shallow dish. He made as if to rise, but she motioned him back down. “Sit,” she ordered. Despite the breach of etiquette involved, St. John did as h
e’d been bid. Beneath the shadow of her cap, the widow’s dark eyes appraised him sharply. “I’ve got summat for you.”
Taking the meager light with her, she disappeared through a doorway just beyond the table, its lintel angled sharply where it ran beneath the staircase—a storage room pressed into service as a private chamber, he realized with a start. Why had the woman given up her cottage’s only two bedrooms to Sarah and her daughter?
In another moment, she reemerged holding the candle, a bottle, and two mismatched tumblers, all of which she thumped onto the table without ceremony before taking a seat herself. St. John watched as the widow poured a dram into each of the glasses and pushed one in his direction.
What sort of salacious brew was she offering? Whatever it was, he could hardly refuse. “To your very good health, Mrs. Potts,” he murmured, raising the glass to his lips.
With a sound halfway between a snort and a snicker, Mrs. Potts drained her own glass and returned it to the table. Somewhat hesitantly, St. John followed suit. But contrary to his expectations, the liquor that rolled across his tongue was smooth and mellow, of the sort his father would have welcomed into the cellars at Sutliffe House.
How on earth had Mad Martha Potts come into possession of a bottle of fine French cognac?
“Smugglers,” she said, as if she had read his mind. “One day, my man come upon their hideout. No one about, so he pinches a bottle and brings it back to show me. A fortune, says he, just lying there for the takin’. So that night, he goes out again, plannin’ to fetch back what he can. But his little skiff weren’t built for booty the likes o’ that. He was ridin’ low in the water when the storm come up. Mighta saved himself if he’d tossed the lot into the sea. But he couldn’t bear to see it slip away, I guess.”
St. John remembered hearing that Mrs. Potts had watched her husband’s boat go under. But why was she telling him this now? “I’m sorry, ma’am. Knowing it was such a senseless tragedy must make your loss even greater.”
He watched as she squeezed the cork into the carefully husbanded brandy bottle. Few people of his acquaintance could have watched a loved one drown and not drained it on the spot. “My man never tasted a drop o’ what he worked so hard to get,” she mused, tilting the bottle in the candlelight to study its amber glow. “If he coulda been satisfied with what he had in front o’ himself, he’d a had no call to go after the rest.”
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