Dark Prince

by Eve Silver

  She rose to cross the space that separated them, careful in each step for her leg was stiff and aching. She laid her cheek against his scarred back, pressing the palm of one hand to his warm skin. He smelled of the sun and the sea, of the soap from their bath, and of man, pure and clean.

  He turned, wrapping her in his embrace, closing strong arms about her as though to protect her even from himself. Burying his face in the curve of her neck, he ran his nose along her throat and inhaled deeply.

  “Tell me,” she whispered.

  He only held her, and then he began to speak. “I was eleven years old, sailing on a ship much like the one that sank here last night. Only the ship I traveled on was not the victim of a storm, but rather the prey of wreckers.”

  The word made Jane’s stomach churn. Wreckers. She swallowed, thinking of the twinkling lantern light she thought she had spied on the shore last evening. She could not see how to tell him, not now.

  “I remember the shuddering groan of twisting, breaking timber, and the sick heave of the ship as it rolled. My mother gripped my hand so tight. I can still recall the way my bones pressed together under her grasp. Of my father there was no sign. We were thrown into the waves, clinging like barnacles to a ragged splinter of wood that barely held us afloat. The shore came into sight, and on it was a fire. Its bright flame gave us hope.”

  Jane’s thoughts turned to the fire they had built on the beach last night, the flames meant to provide life-giving heat to the survivors. But even before he said the words, she knew that the fire in Aidan’s memories had been meant for a different purpose.

  “Then came the shapes of men running in the surf,” Aidan continued. “We were close upon them, my mother calling feebly for help, exhausted now, her teeth chattering with the cold. I remember the instant she realized they did not come to our rescue. My mother moved to shield me, begged them as they pried her hands from the wood and watched her struggle against the waves.”

  Jane clutched him about the waist, fearful that if she loosened her hold, she would also lose her control, and would sink to the ground, overcome by his suffering. He stroked her hair absently, his large hand moving in a gentle rhythm along the sleep-tangled tresses.

  “She sank quickly, the black water closing over her head. I still did not understand that they had killed her.” His tenor did not change, the cadence of his words flat and even, but inside, oh, inside, she knew his heart was battered by the memory. How could it not be when her own heart was near torn asunder by the image of the small boy alone in the frigid water, watching his mother taken by death?

  She held that same memory, her own mother draped across the rocks, and later, her body, bloated and frightening, being dragged from the surf. She began to tremble.

  “You are cold.” With a frown, Aidan drew her back to the bed. “Let me wrap you in the blanket, sweet, before you catch a chill.”

  Even now, as he spoke of this terrible memory, his thoughts were for her. Her comfort. Her safety. She did not protest as he drew the thick quilts from the bed and set them about her shoulders, sinking with her onto the mattress and drawing her into the shelter of his embrace.

  “How did you survive?” She could not imagine it, a little boy, battered and desolate, alone in the storm.

  “One of the men caught me by the back of my shirt, lifted me from the water like a wet puppy. He dragged me up the cliff, to the very edge. I remember his size, a big man, and brawny. His face is lost to me, but I will never forget his voice. ‘Do you swim, boy?’ he asked.” Aidan tightened his grip on her, and she felt his cheek against the top of her head.

  “And then?” she whispered.

  “I lied. The one time in my life I lied well. My mother’s spirit governed my lips. ‘No, sir,’ I said, and he threw me far out into the ocean as though I weighed no more than a feather. I remember the tug of the tide and the brutal waves. The cold ugly fear.” He laughed, a harsh, dark sound devoid of mirth. “I was soon to learn that I knew not the meaning of fear. Not then. Not yet.”

  She wanted to take it away, the pain, the horror. She would gladly suffer the bite of that fear herself, if only she could take away his agony. And in that moment, she knew, her heart swelling inside of her, her depth of emotion increased with each word he spoke, any hope of denial cast aside. She did love Aidan Warrick, smuggler, pirate, little boy lost. Loved him with a fierce and true strength that terrified her, for only tragedy could come of loving a man so dangerous, so certain and cruel in his intent. He would hurt her without meaning to.

  And, without meaning to, she would let him.

  “I cannot forfeit my vengeance, Jane.” His assertion gave voice to her thoughts, her fears.

  “You speak of vengeance, yet your story holds nothing of a reason for your hatred of my father.” Clutching the quilts tight about her, she sat back and studied him, determined to hear the whole of it, nurturing the seed of hope that she might yet turn aside his singular purpose.

  He hesitated. “Why must you know?”

  Incredulous, she stared at him. “Why? You mean to destroy my father, and you ask why I would know the reason?”

  ‘‘I would spare you this knowledge.”

  “Then spare my father,” she whispered, knowing the futility of her request but hoping, hoping, that he might relent.

  His expression hardened. “I was plucked from the waves by a passing ship, one that ran French brandy and pilfered silk, and within a day, the excise men arrested all those aboard. The captain told the very truth, that I was a lad pulled half­drowned from the waves. But there was a revenue man determined to believe what he would. In his mind I was cabin-boy to a pirate, and he would hear no other possibility.”

  Jane stared at him, mute with dismay. She had known her father was not always an innkeeper, and suddenly she knew what he had done in the time before. Her father had been the excise man Aidan spoke of.

  “He saw me sent to the hulks,” Aidan said.

  The hulks. Prison ships that adult men barely survived. She knew dire rumors of what they did to men on the hulks, and she knew that those who survived often came back with their will broken and their wits gone.

  Her father had condemned a child to hell. A child, who had grown to become this man, filled with anger and hate. Dear Lord, she could not bear the weight of it.

  “I twined my hand in his coat, begging him on my knees, and he kicked me aside like a dog. ’Twas the last I begged of any man.” He ran his hand along the tangled length of her hair, a gentle stroke that left her feeling bereft and confused, his tenderness at terrible odds with his icy tone and the story he told. “‘You’ll survive or not, boy,’ he said, and suddenly I knew his voice, that excise man. I heard it in my nightmares. Some nights, I still do.”

  He was silent for a moment, and she could feel her heart slamming against her ribs. Each beat prefaced the next, harder, stronger, and she could not breathe, could not move. She knew, oh, God, she knew—

  His gaze locked with hers. “Do you want to hear it, Jane?”

  She could only nod.

  “His was the voice I heard, asking if I knew how to swim.”

  The pain was terrible, sharp-taloned and deep, as though a blade stabbed to her core, twisting to the right and the left. Her father. Memories assaulted her, recollections of his drunken ramblings, words that suddenly fit this horror when pieced together in an unbroken chain, and the endless excuses she had built in her mind. But this... this...

  Salty tears welled in her eyes. “My God, what you suffered... because of my father...” A deep, dark anguish pressed on her heart. “I thought he was a good man. A good father...” She said the words and tried to mean them, yet she no longer doubted that Aidan had known a different man, hated a different man.

  She felt battered, bruised, dizzy with the strength of her devastation, and yes, her anger.

  “A good father...” He nodded. “Let me tell you of such a one. My father survived the wreck and spent his life searching for me, tra
veling from country to country in pursuit of a phantom, the son he refused to believe was lost to him. His lungs were weak, I learned, and he hacked and coughed until his life slipped away. He died still dreaming that he would find me.”

  Something ominous and sinister whispered through her, and she knew his tale was yet to end. There was worse to come, and she held up one hand, half wishing that he would spare her, though in truth she would not rest until she knew the whole of it.

  “My father died the day before my feet touched English soil, one day before I made my way to his door. The twenty-fifth of July, 1802. I survived that damned prison ship and then a pirate’s sloop for endless, stinking years only to be damned to a different hell on my return. My father died without ever seeing my face again, and as I looked upon him, cold in death, with his one hope unrequited, I swore there was no forgiveness in my soul. I vowed on my father’s corpse, on my mother’s memory, that Gideon Heatherington would pay for the marks on my back and the hate in my heart, and then pay double for my father’s wasted life.”

  There. The end of the tale, and an ending more terrible and tragic than ever she could have imagined. She was too horrified to cry, though she thought that her heart wept tears of blood and pain for what he had suffered. He could be barely more than thirty, and he had lived enough torment to weigh down ten lifetimes.

  Reason had no part in her actions then. Had she the will to deny her heart, logic dictated that she run far and away from this man before he tore her soul to shreds. Instead, she reached for him, resting her palms on either side of his jaw and pressing her mouth to the hard, unyielding line of his lips.

  “Mine,” she whispered. “Your pain is mine. The boy you were, the man you are, I take all into my heart.”

  He jerked back and caught her wrists, his eyes shadowed and dangerous as he stared down at her. “I will not yield in this, Jane.”

  “And I will not cease my efforts to sway you.” Oddly, she felt no fear. He would never hurt her on purpose, that she knew as a certainty. Nay, he would hurt her without distinct intent, an offshoot in small part of the harm he would cause her father, and in greater part, the harm he would cause himself.

  “Still you seek to protect him?”

  She shook her head. Aidan could destroy her father, kill him in a dozen different ways, and still it would not grant him peace. Just as the smuggler’s death here in Pentreath those many years ago had not eased her own torment. So he had died. Drowned. His death had changed nothing, given her back none of the things he had stolen. There had been no comfort in it.

  Aidan’s gaze shifted to her mouth, and she saw the flare of heat and need in his eyes. He loosed his hold on her wrists, and she let her hands fall to her lap.

  “This was never my intent, to catch you up in my hate. I meant only to take you from harm’s path, to see you, the only innocent in this sordid play, safe from the consequences of both your father’s actions and mine. Safe here in my home.” He paused. “I should set you free, send you away.”

  Free. How long had she dreamed of being free, flying like the raven or running like the ponies that pounded across the moor? Somehow, she could not imagine leaving Aidan Warrick as any sort of freedom. “Send me away, Aidan? Send me from you because you wish me gone, because you have done the deed and have no further use of me? Or because you fear your resolve will weaken?”

  “My resolve will never weaken, sweet. It was hewn in a stinking pit, forged with my blood.” He moved his hand with a sharp gesture of frustration.

  She knew not what end there would be to this path she chose. Likely she would find naught save heartbreak and pain. Yet, in truth, she could not take any other road.

  “If one of us is to go, Aidan, it must be you who chooses to leave.” She tried for a smile. “For you see, we are in my chamber.”

  With a sound part laugh, part groan, he caught her hand and pressed his lips to her palm. “On this road lies madness.”

  She lifted her eyes and met his gaze. “A fine pairing, then. If we are both mad, neither shall notice the malady in the other.”

  Chapter 14

  Aidan took her to the moor. Not to the deepest, most barren part of it, but to the edge, not so very far from Pentreath. He drove the carriage himself, so it was just the two of them, sitting shoulder-to­-shoulder high on the driver’s bench. Jane turned her face to the winter sun and the wind. With the beautiful cloak Aidan had given her about her shoulders and a blanket draped over her legs, she was warm. Happy.

  Their pace was unhurried. He held the reins with ease and comfort, and she wondered at that.

  “You are a puzzle,” she said, watching the movement of his gloved hands, remembering the way he had touched her with those hands, stroked her, teased her.

  “A puzzle? Why is that?”

  “The way you are with horses. I would think it strange for a man of the sea.” She glanced at him, at the hard masculine profile, softened only by dark gold-tipped lashes.

  “I like to do things well,” he said. The smile he sent her was predatory, and yes, she believed he liked to do things well. That he demanded it of himself, in fact.

  “Look.” He pulled the carriage to a stop. Jane held the side of the seat as they rocked forward and back.

  She followed his gaze and the line of his outstretched arm. There were wild ponies, almost a dozen, grazing in the distance. Two broke off from the rest and gamboled about in a wide circle. The sight made a lightness well up inside her and she laughed, easy and carefree.

  Turning her head, she found Aidan watching her, his blue-gray eyes sparking with heat. “Your laughter. It fills me,” he said.

  “Fills you?” she asked playfully. “Like porridge for breakfast?”

  His brows rose, and then he nodded. “Yes, exactly.”

  A startled snort escaped her. She had not expected him to give quite that reply. “Truly?”

  He studied her, solemn now, intent. “When I was on the hulks, there was no food. If I was lucky, I caught a rat.” She gasped, but he kept talking in that same calm, even tone. “I used to dream of porridge. Hot and warm, with sugar sprinkled overtop and a thick dollop of creamy yellow butter melting into a puddle.” He lowered his lashes and tipped his face up to the sun. “I would have given anything for a bowl of that porridge, anything to taste it on my tongue and feel it warm my belly.”

  The lump that formed in her throat was hard and thick, and she blinked against the sting of tears. “I have never heard porridge made so appetizing.”

  He slanted her a half-lidded glance that made her breathe just a little faster.

  “Do you still dream of porridge?” she asked.

  In slow perusal his gaze slid to her lips, her breasts, and finally back to her eyes.

  She swayed toward him.

  “Ah, temptation.” His chest expanded on a deep breath, and then he exhaled. “I want to show you something. But if you look at me like that, the only thing you will see is the inside of the carriage.”

  For a moment, she wondered what he meant by that.

  “So that I might take a taste of you,” he clarified.

  “Oh.” Heat unfurled in her veins.

  “Yes, oh.” His smile was purely wicked, dispelling any melancholy his earlier story had evoked. “Come,” he said, and swung lithely from the high seat before turning to look up at her.

  Jane scooted forward on the driver’s bench until she was at the very edge. Climbing up had been an interesting experience. She wondered how she might get down.

  “Jump. I will catch you.”

  For an instant she felt dizzy and the distance to the ground seemed very far. She looked up. The sun shone bright, a glowing disc against the undisturbed expanse of blue sky, warm on her face.

  “Shall I trust you?” She looked down once more, breathless, the words coming in a rush, meaning far more than she had intended them to.

  Silent, solid, he just stood there with his face upturned and his arms outstretched, waiting, waitin
g.

  “Then catch me,” she said, and let herself fall from the seat.

  He did catch her, high against his chest, and then he turned her and let her slide the length of him. His palms skimmed along her arms. They were so close together, she could feel the steady beat of his heart. She tipped her head back, her gaze locked on his. One beat, two. A part of her was amazed that she had found the courage to trust that he would not let her fall.

  Lacing the fingers of one hand with hers, he drew her over, opened the door of the carriage, and reached in. When he turned back to her he held a leather device that looked a little like a horse’s bridle, but not quite, with two leather hoops, one larger, one smaller, joined by thick leather bands and buckles, with soft red felt lining the whole of it.

  “Here, this is what I wanted to show you.” He shook the thing lightly so the buckles jangled. “Put it on.”

  She stared at him, completely confused. “Put it... on?” She shook her head. “On what?”

  “On you.” He smiled a little.

  “I beg your pardon?” She glanced to the front of the carriage, at the horses’ bridles and reins, and then she looked back at Aidan, appalled.

  Reading her expression, he threw back his head and laughed. She loved the sound, and the knowledge she brought him that.

  “It is a splint, Jane. You told me that your leg gives way, that it folds out from beneath you. This will work, I think.” He spread the leather loops vertically with both his hands, so the larger circle was on top and the smaller on the bottom. “I wrote to London, to your Doctor Barker, in fact, when first I saw you. He was unfamiliar with your case, but open with his advice once I explained what I could. I took his suggestions and added some modifications of my own.”