Between the Devil and Ian Eversea: Pennyroyal Green Series

by Long, Julie Anne

And yet . . . he kissed her as though he . . . needed her.

  Only her.

  As though he was searching for something and finding it . . . some solace, some ease, some answer. She’d felt his kiss in the soles of her feet, the palms of her hands, from the top of her head on down. Through every part of her. He’d trembled when he kissed her, and his hands had been skilled and reverent, and she knew he’d been . . . lost.

  Seducer. Seduction. She knew he was known for this, and the words implied calculation, process. It might have begun a bit like a chess game, but it had taken on its own momentum, and owned both of them.

  It made her want to give and give. She had never thought of herself as an inherently generous person. But it worried her that she wanted to give him anything he wanted when he kissed her.

  She would not believe he kissed every woman that way. He would have been worn to a nub by now.

  Then again, how ever would she know? Perhaps it was all part of his magic.

  And what if . . . well, he certainly wasn’t a duke. He didn’t even have a title. What would it be like to be married to Ian Eversea? Surely there was no harm in imagining it . . . surely a man like him would take a wife one day . . . She woke in time to find the stripe of light leading to the window. How would he look this morning? Any different than he had? How did she look?

  She followed the little light road and peeked out.

  But he wasn’t there.

  She waited a bit, the speed of her heartbeat ratcheting up a bit.

  And he didn’t appear.

  And when the light was finally high enough, she knew he wasn’t going to, which, she supposed, was all for the best.

  Deflated, resigned, feeling quite martyred and mature, she flung the braided rope of her hair over her shoulder and settled in at her desk. She smoothed out the foolscap, and decided she would need to write smaller if she wanted to confine her list to a single page. She reached for her quill and wrote:

  Kisses me as though his very life depends

  upon it.

  Chapter 19

  “WE SET SAIL IN a little less than a month, Captain Eversea. Will you be on board? We could use a man like you. Pirates, you know. Le Chat is still sailing, or so rumor has it.”

  “I thought I was embarking on a pleasure jaunt, and you intend to put me to work?”

  “Men like yourself live for it,” the captain said dryly.

  Ian couldn’t argue with that.

  He inhaled deeply. They were so close and yet so far from the sea in Sussex, and here the smell of it was primordial and thrilling. A heaving glassine green-blue stretching for as far as the eye could see. The ship seemed a behemoth at the dock but would be a speck on the chest of the sea. They would be at its mercy. He found the notion peculiarly soothing.

  “I’ll be aboard.”

  He thought of Tansy Danforth standing on deck, her bright eyes reflecting the seas and skies. She’d probably enjoyed that voyage, the risk, the danger, the newness. And how fun it would be to banter with her, to share the sights, to protect her from the goggling men on board and to watch her attempt to rein in those flirtatious urges.

  And at night . . . in a narrow little bunk . . .

  Something tightened in his gut again. He wanted her with a ferocity that bordered on fury. And it was this he needed to outrun, too.

  He remembered the archery competition, and he thought sometimes he was like that: ever since the war he was like a bowstring pulled too far back for the arrow to do anything but overshoot every target. What he wanted and needed was to keep moving, until somehow his restlessness had run its course.

  He watched the ship and dock activity idly a moment. The crew was working ceaselessly, repairing sails, scrubbing and sanding decks, bringing on cargo and supplies, checking the manifests as they grew person by person.

  He’d apologized to his cousin Adam and begged leave for a day or two in London so he could put a deposit down to hold his place on this particular ship. It would sail as far as Africa, but he could step off in any port he chose along the way, or take another ship bound for anywhere. Anywhere at all. As long as his money lasted. And he’d saved enough money to keep moving for years, if he so chose.

  “Eversea!”

  A delighted voice spun him around.

  “Caldwell!”

  It was Major Caldwell who had suggested him for the East India Company promotion.

  “A pity you won’t be working for the company here in London, Eversea. Not only would we have a splendid time, we could use a clever sort.”

  “I’m flattered you’ll miss me, sir, but this is something I’ve long wanted to do. Before I’m too decrepit to do it, mind you.”

  “Well, make your fortune and gather a few stories and bed a few brown maidens and return to us full of enviable stories, if you must.”

  “I must.”

  He said.

  Meaning it.

  HE RETURNED LATE enough that the entire house was asleep, and so he stripped off his clothes and flung himself, smelling of horse and the sea, into his bed, and fell too quickly asleep.

  And in moments, it seemed, he could feel Jeremiah Cutler’s little body tucked beneath his arm, plump and squirmy, vibrating with sobs. But he couldn’t hear him over the screams of horses, the ceaseless roar of artillery, the guttural cries of men cut down. He handed Jeremiah back into the safety of his father’s arms. He turned and lunged, dodging through chaos. He had only seconds to get to—

  Ian broke through to consciousness with a gasp and a hoarse inarticulate cry.

  He sat bolt upright, breathing as though he’d actually been running. He dropped his face into his hands and breathed through them.

  The dream was potent; it was as if he’d lived it all over again.

  He lifted his head at last.

  Tansy was sitting at the foot of his bed, knees tucked under her chin, arms wrapped tightly around them, watching him.

  He nearly yelped.

  “What the bloody . . . how did you . . .”

  “I think you were having a terrible dream,” she said somberly.

  “Am I still dreaming?” he asked wildly. “This isn’t usually part of it. But if it is, I should warn you, it never ends very well for women.”

  He fell back against the pillow, hard.

  Bloody hell. He threw a beleaguered arm over his eyes and sighed a sigh of despair.

  Tansy slid from the bed, walked across his room to his bureau and sniffed the pitcher suspiciously. She poured some water into a glass, brought it back and held it out to him.

  Ian reflexively took it and gulped it down. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and clunked the glass down on his night table.

  “How did you know I was home?”

  “I saw your light.”

  A horrible suspicion struck.

  “Wait . . . How did you get in here, Tansy?”

  “Your window was open. Just a little.”

  “My wind— Oh God. Tell me you didn’t climb from your balcony onto mine. Tell me you didn’t climb from your balcony onto mine!”

  “It was easier to do than I thought.”

  He opened his mouth. Only a dry squeak emerged. He tried again. “You can’t do that. Mother of God. Do you want to die? You’re going to marry a title and a fortune, remember? And live happily ever after.” His words were still frayed. “Finding your broken body on the ground below my balcony would ruin my morning view.”

  “Shhhh,” she said soothingly.

  He closed his eyes. His breathing seemed deafening in the room, now that he had an audience.

  He felt the mattress sink next to him and opened one eye.

  She’d stretched out along the length of the bed, dangerously close to him b
ut not touching, close enough that he could smell the sweetness of her, and now she was nestling her head into his other pillow.

  Then she reached over and gently lifted his hand from his chest. Slowly, gently, carefully, as if stealing a bird egg from a nest.

  “What are you doing, Tansy?”

  “Comforting you.”

  He snorted softly.

  She took the hand back with her to her side of the bed and held it companionably.

  And because he couldn’t think of a reason to pull away, he allowed it.

  And it was comforting, strangely enough. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d held anyone’s hand.

  They lay side by side, flat on their backs, in silence.

  “I couldn’t sleep, either,” she said, after what seemed a long time.

  He gave another short humorless laugh. “Bad dreams?”

  “Sometimes. And very disturbing good dreams, too, about the man in the room next to mine.”

  He half smiled. “Tansy.” A drowsy warning.

  He could almost hear her smile.

  They were silent again.

  “Ian?”

  “Mmm?”

  “What was your dream about?”

  He stiffened.

  The thing was, he’d never told a soul. Oh, he’d told the story behind the dreams. It was part of the war stories men shared with each other. But he’d never confessed to being haunted by it at night.

  And while he waited and said nothing, the fire said quite a bit. It popped and crackled and a log flopped over.

  “Did you hear me say anything in my sleep?”

  He’d always wondered. He dreaded the answer.

  “It sounded like ‘Justine.’ ”

  Ah, bloody hell.

  He sighed a long sigh of resignation and swiped his free hand over his face. “I wish you hadn’t heard that.”

  “I’ve heard worse. I heard you break wind the other day on the balcony. Just a little.”

  “You what?” He was not going to blush.

  And now she was laughing.

  “Leave. Leave now. Or I’ll do it again.” But now he was laughing, too, and bit his lip to stop it. “Lower your voice, for God’s sake.”

  But he didn’t let go of her hand so she could leave.

  “Have you been spying on me, Tansy?”

  Though he was aware any indignation was hypocritical, given that he’d essentially spied on her, too.

  “I wasn’t certain it was you, until only recently. I just thought it was a man with a beautiful torso.”

  The words ambushed him. Beautiful torso?

  He’d truthfully never been so disarmed by a woman in his entire life. She was one of a kind.

  Don’t leave yourself so open to hurt, Tansy, he wanted to tell her. You shouldn’t say those sorts of things to me. He knew the power of words and flattery, because he’d used them strategically. And so did she, for that matter. But she was so sincere.

  What was the matter with him when sincerity unnerved him completely?

  He could tell her that he thought she was beautiful, too. That her lips were paradise. That her hair was a symphony of color. That her skin . . . oh, her skin.

  But he wouldn’t, because words like that bound another to you. Everyone wants to know how much they matter. He never used them lightly.

  And in the wake of those words, he considered it might be sensible to drop her hand.

  Perhaps . . . perhaps not just yet.

  “Who is Justine?” she wanted to know.

  “A bit of the war that won’t let me leave it behind, I’m afraid. That’s all.”

  “Were you in love with her?”

  He made an exasperated sound. “God. Women and that word. They bandy it about so freely and I doubt half of them know what it means.”

  “In other words . . . no?”

  He sighed, pretending extreme exasperation, which made her smile again. “Very well. Since you’re relentless. Justine was . . . she was someone for whom I felt responsible, and she died in the war. I was too late to stop it. And I suppose I regret it every day.”

  He glanced over to find her clear eyes not on him but on the ceiling.

  He smiled. She always seemed to be looking up.

  His smile faded when he remembered she looked up for her mother.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly, at last. As if she’d pictured the entire episode and genuinely mourned it along with him.

  She knew what it was to mourn, too.

  And strangely, there was a sudden easing in him, as if someone had finally played a note that harmonized with the one he sounded every day.

  So as the words came for the first time, he aimed them at the ceiling, too, his voice abstracted.

  “She was the wife of my commanding officer. Pretty, vivacious, very kind. I was close to both of them. We tried as best we could to keep women away from the battlefield but she traveled with our regiment and she wanted to be near her husband. She was intrepid as well as foolish, I suppose. But none of that matters. I was able to get to her child in time, but I couldn’t get back to her—I took a bayonet in the gut, which rather slowed me down—and she got caught in cannon fire. I saw it. I never knew whether he would have preferred to have his wife or child alive because I spent the rest of the war recovering in a farmhouse in Flanders.”

  Her grip on his hand grew tighter and tighter as he talked. As if she walked the whole thing through with him.

  “Oh, yes. I’ve medals and the like,” he said dryly. “I’m brave as brave can be, so they said. I just wasn’t fast enough to get back to her without getting myself skewered. And so I saved her child, but watched her die. And I get to watch her die in my dreams on occasion, too.”

  Tansy was quiet for a long while, taking this in.

  “Well, as long as you have medals,” she said thoughtfully.

  He threw back his head and laughed, and had to bite his lip to stifle it.

  And she laughed, too.

  It was the perfect thing to say. Well, you did your best, or It wasn’t your fault—it didn’t matter how true those things were. It didn’t matter how you tried to rationalize it away. The dreams would come anyway.

  She knew it.

  “Do you know . . . what’s coincidental about that, Ian? My parents wished I’d died, instead of my brother.”

  It was such a ghastly thing to hear, his mind blanked for a moment. It was almost as though she’d confessed to murder.

  He almost stammered. “Surely you’re mistaken—”

  “I heard them say it.” She said this matter-of-factly, but he heard the steeled nerve in her voice. “Overheard them, I should say. My mother said, right after my brother died, ‘If only it had been the girl.’ ”

  It was like someone had punched him in the heart.

  He was shocked by how literally painful the words were.

  And a sort of furious flailing helplessness followed. As if he’d been once again one second too late to prevent someone from being cut in two by cannon fire.

  “People say terrible, misguided things when they’re in pain, Tansy. Things they don’t mean.”

  “But sometimes you just know, don’t you? You have so many siblings. You must know. They loved me but they loved my brother more. He was their pride and hope and the heir and so forth. And I was just a girl. I loved him, too, you know. I suppose I’ve always wanted to matter more than I did.”

  Love.

  He didn’t say, There’s that word again.

  He supposed it explained a good deal about Miss Titania Danforth and her quest for attention.

  He’d always suspected Colin was his mother’s favorite. And that Genevieve and Olivia were his father’s. He didn’t suppose he’d cared. There was always enough affection—and affec
tionate contempt—to go around in their household that it didn’t matter to him. For selfish reasons, he would have happily gone to the gallows in Colin’s place. To spare himself from having to watch Colin die, and to spare his mother from having to witness Colin’s death.

  Every day Colin had spent in Newgate had been a torment, though Ian had made sure Colin never knew this. He’d kept up the gallant nonchalance.

  The fact that Colin had escaped the gallows was very like Colin.

  “Your parents loved you, Tansy.” Surely this much was true. He felt as though he could make it true with the force of his words. “Perhaps they simply worried more about you than your brother.”

  “Of course they loved me,” she said absently. “I know they did, don’t worry. Enough to threaten me—in their will, no less—with the loss of everything I’ve ever known or loved, unless I marry an amazing title and I’m taken care of for the rest of my life. And they didn’t quite trust me to get it right on my own. Thought I might do something rash.”

  “I suppose they must have known you pretty well, then.”

  A smile started up at one end of her mouth and spread to the other, crooked, wicked. Then she laughed. Pleased with herself. Her laugh was wonderful. It was mischief made musical.

  And then she sighed contentedly. “It’s nice to be known,” she said wistfully.

  “You lost them in a carriage accident?”

  She nodded.

  “What were they like?”

  He wouldn’t know where to begin answering a question like that if anyone had asked it of him. And what she said would reveal as much about her as it did about her parents, he was sure.

  She was quiet a moment, apparently giving it some thought. “Mother was always laughing. She loved to sing. She loved wildflowers. Columbine—I don’t know if they grow here. They look like little paper lanterns? And aster, the purple ones. Like purple stars. Chicory, buttercups, Queen Anne’s lace. The blue ones reminded her of my father’s eyes. When I have a home, a permanent home of my own, I want to plant all of them in my garden to make it feel like home again. I promised Mama I’d bring a little of them home to England should I ever visit. She used to talk to them to make them grow.” She was smiling now. “She thought of them as her children, in a way.”