Pretty Poison

by Lynne Barron

  “Where on earth would I find a Sheela-na-gig?” Emily asked in exasperation.

  “She knows better than to defile a Celtic Goddess,” Da replied disdainfully. “Did you give away money on a Monday?”

  “The only money I’m likely to give away is the fortune you’ll settle upon Nicholas if you force me to marry him,” she ground out between her teeth.

  “Nicholas, is it?” Margaret crooned.

  “Stop it!” Emily screamed. “Just stop it, both of you. I do not have a black cloud over me, I have not seen a single Sheela-na-gig since I arrived on this damned island, and I have not given away money on a Monday!”

  “Now Em,” her father murmured. “There’s no need to take on so.”

  “Nor have I walked under a ladder or stepped on a four leaf clover, and the only black cats I have crossed paths with are the two of you!”

  Silence reined in the pretty bed chamber decorated in soft yellow and palest blue. Three pairs of nearly identical green eyes glared at one another. Emily would have liked to roll over and present them both with her back but even that childish show of defiance was denied her.

  “It’s settled then,” Charles Calvert announced as he came to his feet.

  “Nothing is settled,” Emily replied peevishly.

  But her father ignored her words, leaned downed and kissed her on the forehead.

  Then he walked out of the room. Just like that.

  Emily looked at the door for long minutes after he closed it softly behind him.

  “I’ll talk to him in the morning,” she muttered. “I’ll make him see reason.”

  “You mean you’ll try to make him see things your way.”

  Emily had forgotten all about her aunt, who had taken the seat her father had vacated.

  “For once in Charlie’s life, he is seeing reason, Emily.”

  “You just want me to marry Nicholas so that his father can get his hands on my dowry,” Emily accused.

  “Perhaps,” Margaret allowed. “In the beginning that was certainly my only concern. I’d never met you, saw no reason you wouldn’t be happy to marry a fine man like Nicholas.”

  “If he’s such a fine man, why don’t you marry him?” Emily cringed as the childish words left her mouth. “Or better yet, why don’t you marry Viscount Talbot and give him your fortune.”

  “Not bloody likely,” Margaret replied disdainfully. “If you had any idea whatsoever what I had to endure at the hands of Lord Morris, you wouldn’t even suggest it.”

  Emily looked away from the bitterness in her aunt’s eyes.

  “The truth of the matter is that very little of Morris’s wealth was left to me. The bulk of it went to his children.”

  Emily turned back to Margaret. “I’d forgotten he had grown children when he married you.”

  “I only wish I could forget. But that is neither here nor there. The fact is that what little fortune I inherited has dwindled away to a pittance. I’ve already sold the small estate Morris left me in Lancastershire. If something doesn’t give soon, I’ll be forced to start selling off parcels of this land.”

  “I had no idea,” Emily replied. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “And heap yet another burden onto your fragile shoulders?”

  “Perhaps Da will give you some money.”

  “Not on a Monday he won’t.”

  Emily smiled at her aunt’s weak attempt at humor.

  “I’m too old to find another wealthy gentleman to seduce into marriage. And I’d like to spend my remaining years with the man I love. Andy’s a scatterbrained bubble head, but he’s my scatterbrained bubble head.”

  “Yes,” Emily agreed. She’d watched Margaret and the viscount, seen the secretive, sly smiles they bestowed on one another when they thought no one was looking.

  “I had no intention of telling you any of this. I’d rather drink an entire bottle of laudanum and stab myself right through the heart, than use my diminished circumstances to guilt you into marrying where you do not wish.”

  “But you’ll do it anyway,” Emily replied with a huff of laughter.

  “That’s just it, Emily,” Margaret replied softly. “I don’t believe you would be marrying where you do not wish.”

  “Why do you insist in thinking you know what is best for everyone?” Emily demanded warily. She was suddenly tired, so very tired of arguing and pleading. She was tempted to capitulate just to bring an end to the entire subject.

  “You like Nicholas, I know you do,” Margaret replied, ignoring Emily’s words. “I am fairly certain you find him enticing. He’s a big strapping young man with a handsome face and wonderfully large hands.”

  “Large hands?” Emily asked in confusion. It was true she found his giant, rugged hands mesmerizing to look upon and downright sinful when he put them on her, but surely his hands had nothing to do with his suitability as a husband.

  “Trust me, you’ll thank me later for matching you to a man with large hands,” Margaret replied with a sly smile. “My point is that you like him, you enjoy his company. Contrary to what you believe, you really must marry.”

  “Why?” Emily asked, truly curious about the answer. “I am a capable woman with a fortune at my disposal. I have a home at Emerald Isle. A family who loves me. Why can’t I simply remain unmarried? And don’t start with the children of my own nonsense. I’ve brothers and a sister, I’ll have plenty of nieces and nephews upon whom to shower love.”

  “And what will happen later in life? When you are old and no longer quite so capable? When your siblings are grown and married with their own families? Do you really desire to be that dotty old woman who lives alone in an old mansion? The one whose great nieces and nephews come to visit once a year because it is their duty? The one who has never known the love of a good man?”

  “I could know the love of a good man without marrying him.”

  “You could, but would you be able to share him? With a wife? With his children? Because make no mistake, Em, good men want a family. They want sons to carry on after they are gone.”

  “You shared Viscount Talbot with his wife, you’ve never married him,” she pointed out.

  “It wasn’t by choice. He was already married when we met. And by the time Lady Talbot, God rest her batty soul, passed away, he was in financial straits and my measly fortune, had I decided to share it with him and his sons, would have been gone within a year. Perhaps less.”

  Emily remained silent, contemplating her aunt’s sad story.

  “By your silence, I am going to assume you are in agreement that you must marry.” Margaret held up her hand when Emily opened her mouth to speak. “Give over, Emily, you are an intelligent lady. You know you must marry. Why are you dead set against Nicholas Avery as a husband?”

  “I’m not dead set against it,” Emily relented enough to admit. “Perhaps if we had time to come to know one another, to be sure.”

  “Time is one luxury you do not have. If you will not marry Nicholas, he will marry another lady. And soon. He knows his duty to his family.”

  That stopped Emily cold. She hadn’t contemplated what would happen to Nicholas if she refused to marry him. But of course, her aunt was right. He would accept her refusal, smile wryly at her, kiss her hand, and move on to the next heiress Margaret and Viscount Talbot brought forth.

  “He might even marry the Nasty Baggage,” Margaret said.

  “Not fair,” Emily said with a weary laugh.

  “I’ll ask you again, Emily, and please consider telling me, for no other reason than that I truly cannot comprehend it. Why are you resistant to marrying Nicholas?”

  Emily shrugged her shoulder and drew in a sharp breath at the movement. “I had thought to marry a man I could love.”

  “Balderdash,” Margaret cried, jumping to her feet. “I am perfectly aware that you were betrothed to a nincompoop whom you did not love in the least. You insult my intelligence when you spout insipid platitudes and call them reasonable arguments!”<
br />
  “Fine, I want to marry a man who might love me,” Emily cried. “Or at least respect me enough to remain faithful to me. I don’t want to raise my husband’s illegitimate children. I don’t want my husband to have any children but the ones I give him and I don’t want my husband to climb from my bed into any other woman’s!”

  Margaret dropped back into the chair she’d vacated and stared at her niece.

  “Peter Marshall may have been a nincompoop but he would have been faithful to me. He didn’t have a lusty bone in his body. And that was fine with me. We would have managed to come together often enough to produce a few children. And he never would have humiliated and shamed me with his mistresses.” Emily’s voice rose in near hysterics.

  “You don’t believe Nicholas would remain faithful to you?”

  “Why should I? You have only to look to his father to see the example that has been set for him. I’m sorry, Aunt Margaret, but it’s true. Look at the world he lives in. Society they call themselves. Sodom is more like it! Nobody in his world, in your world, goes into marriage expecting fidelity, or demanding it. He followed me into the stables thinking I was a servant’s daughter and kissed me. He is here, at your miniature marriage mart, expressly to find a wife and yet he followed a woman he believed to be unmarriageable into the stables and kissed her. Does any of that sound like Nicholas Avery is likely to cleave only unto me?”

  Emily sat forward in agitation, anxious to be up and out of the bed. But she couldn’t use her injured arm, and the pillows seemed to suck her down, the blankets to wrap around her legs, pinning her in place. A bubble of hysteria rose in her throat, falling from her lips in a terrible cry that was half laugh, half sob. And one hundred percent painful.

  “Help me. I must get out of this bed… I cannot stay… Help me!” Her stammering words ended in a great wail before Margaret wrenched back the covers and carefully grasped her good arm, helping her to slide her legs over the side.

  “Breathe,” she murmured, gently pushing her niece’s head down between her legs. “That’s it. Just breathe, slow and easy. You’re all right, Em.”

  Emily waited until her breathing slowed, until the weight that seemed to be crushing her heart eased, and raised her head to find her aunt standing over her, tears slowly tracking down her cheeks.

  “I’m all right,” Emily whispered.

  “We will not force you to marry Nicholas,” Margaret promised quietly. “I will speak with your father.”

  Emily leaned her head against her aunt’s warm belly, felt her fingers running delicately over her bent head, easing the vise that had clamped around her skull. And she pushed back the cravings that crawled over her skin, burrowed into her spine and traveled up to her nape, where they would linger. Please, she silently prayed. Please don’t let them linger forever.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Nick watched Emily from the open window of his bed chamber as she strolled through the garden with her father. It was the first time he’d seen her since they’d taken her unconscious from the wagon bed and carried her upstairs the day before.

  He’d thought about sneaking into her room last night when the house grew quiet, just to assure himself that she was truly all right. Well, perhaps that wasn’t the only reason. He’d wanted to look at her, to hold her hand, to tell her how amazing and brave she was.

  He still couldn’t quite believe what he’d witnessed in the woods.

  He’d noticed the two sets of dog tracks just after Emily had called out to tell him she was going back. They’d been headed in the exact same direction her voice had come from. He’d taken off running, praying he was overreacting, that there was no danger from the dogs. Then he’d heard her scream, heard the terror in her voice. Legs pumping, lungs heaving, he’d broken through the trees in time to see Emily sprint across the clearing.

  It had all happened so quickly. He’d sighted down the long barrel of his rifle, knowing in his heart that it was too late, that at least one of those dogs would be on her before he could get off two shots.

  He hadn’t seen the branch she was running for, hadn’t realized a plan was already forming in her mind. When she dove through the air he’d thought she’d tripped on the uneven forest floor. Then she’d been swinging through the air, like a high flyer he’d once seen at the circus, higher and higher, twisting and catching the branch with her leg, pulling herself up onto it. All in one seemingly easy fluid motion, as if she’d spent her entire life swinging from branch to branch in the woods and had simply been waiting for the opportunity to show off her skills.

  Nick was coming to suspect that Emily Ann Calvert was one of a kind. There couldn’t possibly be another woman like her anywhere. If he searched the globe he’d never find a sassier, wittier, sexier lady. Or one who was stronger. She had a core of strength in her the like of which he’d seen in few men, and never before in a woman.

  How different she was from the odd little lady he’d met in London. Lady Margaret said she’d been ill for months without anyone being aware. Veronica Ogilvie chose to believe she’d been with child. And while that could account for her lethargy, it didn’t explain the emptiness he’d seen in her eyes, the slow-witted non-responses she’d gifted him with each time he’d attempted to engage her in conversation, or the near skeletal frailty of her form.

  Nick had known, not two minutes after the others had followed Lady Margaret from breakfast, that the servants’ gossip was untrue. It wasn’t that he could not imagine Emily gifting a man with her body. No, he’d tasted her passion himself. But had she found herself with child and abandoned, he could not believe she would have sought the coward’s way out.

  She was braver than that, tougher, fiercer.

  Then he’d seen the scar that ran from shoulder to sternum and the servant’s gossip had taken on a whole new light. What she must have endured. And any last lingering doubts had disappeared.

  His first thought upon seeing Emily and Charles Calvert in the garden was to hurry out to join them. But there was something in the way father and daughter walked quietly together, not touching, barely speaking, that stopped him.

  Charles Calvert was a loud, blustering man and his daughter a lively, animated lady. Yet today they were eerily still and serene.

  So Nick waited. He waited until Charles Calvert entered the house alone and made his way slowly down the long hall to disappear into Margaret’s study, quietly closing the door behind him.

  The garden was empty, a cold breeze ruffling through the bare trees. He turned a circle, wondering where she’d disappeared to so quickly. A blur of movement, a glimpse of burnished red had him setting off toward a break in the tall hedge surrounding the vast garden.

  He cleared the hedge in time to see Emily wandering toward an old barn that sat on a small knoll. The gray stone structure had once served as a dairy before the modern barn had been built.

  The interior was shadowy and quiet, the tile floor swept clean but for a scattering of leaves that had likely blown in with the lady. Small windows set high in the walls allowed the winter sun to drift about the open space. A narrow set of steep steps led to a loft above and that was where Nick found her.

  Emily stood at the open hayloft door with her back to the room, sunlight streaming over and around her, setting the curls piled atop her head ablaze. She’d taken off her coat and thrown it over one of a dozen bales of hay that lined the space. Dressed in a gray wool dress, the full skirt blowing in the wind, whipping around her, teasing him with a glimpse of her lithe shape, she looked out over the fields that spread out like a patchwork quilt in every direction.

  “Would you care for some company?” he asked as he hesitated at the top of the stairs.

  “I would be honored,” she replied, turning to face him.

  She gave him a small smile as he came to stand before her and Nick was taken aback by the poignancy in that smile, by the haunted look in her eyes.

  “Is your shoulder paining you?” he asked.

  “Oh, no
t so much today,” she replied. “It’s more of a steady ache now. From past experience I expect it will feel only mildly bruised in a day or two.”

  “Past experience?” he asked in surprise.

  Emily laughed softly before answering, “This shoulder’s been the bane of my existence for years. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve wrenched it.”

  “This has happened to you before?”

  “Oddly enough, the first time I was up in a tree also. Or on my way down. I’d scrambled up an old willow tree after Nate and Tate and got entangled in my skirts.”

  “Ah, so that’s how you developed your aversion to dresses,” he replied with a lascivious grin.

  “To hear Da tell it, I’ve been tearing off my dresses since I was a babe and running about bare assed…” Emily’s voice drifted away as a blush stole over her cheeks.

  “Now that I’d dearly love to see,” he murmured.

  “Yes, well,” she continued, ignoring his wicked words. “I landed wrong and since then it’s prone to just pop out at the most inopportune moments.”

  “Inopportune?” Nick repeated with a shake of his head. “I would have to say that yesterday’s misadventure was a bit more than inopportune.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, meeting his eyes directly, studying him. “Thank you for saving me.”

  “You saved yourself.”

  “No, had you not arrived when you did those dogs would have leapt up and dragged me off that branch.”

  Nick shuttered at the image her words evoked.

  “You saved my life.” Emily reached out, laid her hand upon his arm and gently squeezed. “Thank you, Nicholas Avery.”

  “You’re welcome, Emily Calvert,” he said, laying his hand over hers.

  They looked at one another without speaking and Nick watched the play of light drifting over her face, accentuating the green of her eyes and the smattering of freckles across her nose. In that moment she was beautiful—arrestingly, achingly beautiful, and his heart seemed to stop, to cease beating altogether, as he recognized how precious she had become to him. In a matter of days, this bright, witty, irreverent woman had stolen his heart.