A Stranger's Secret

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  “No, you cannot.” She pressed her fingers to his lips.

  He drew them gently away and spoke above her protests. “Shall I tell you I want to forget about wrecks and—”

  “David, stop. You don’t understand—”

  “Forget about murders and attempted murder and . . . everything but you?” He leaned forward, cupping her face in his hands. “For this?”

  He kissed her. His fingers splayed across her cheeks and his thumbs caressing the smooth skin beneath her jaw, he parted her lips with his as though he could draw truth from her with the intensity of the contact.

  She made a wordless sound somewhere between a whimper and a sigh of contentment and buried her fingers in his hair, drawing it down to curtain their faces. She kissed him back as though she were starving, as though nothing but propriety kept them apart.

  Then, when the contact strained propriety and proper behavior to the breaking point, he released her and leaned back against the headboard, shaken to the core, filled with wanting her, hollow with guilt, especially when Morwenna slid to her knees on the floor and buried her face in the bedclothes. And she wept hard enough to shake the bed ropes.

  He rested his hand on the neat coil of her hair. “I must be doing well. Twice now I have kissed you and twice now I have made you cry.”

  “You haven’t.” She raised her face with its drowned pansy eyes melting every hard thought he’d ever had about her. “You haven’t made me cry, that is. It is I, my past . . .” She wiped her face on her shawl. “Do you ever wonder why I am so easily believed to be guilty of the wrecking despite being a Trelawny?”

  David’s eyes widened at this abrupt change in topic. “It’s your beach, and your husband was in the smuggling trade.”

  “Those are your reasons, and I can distract you from them. I’ve done it again today. You start to accuse me and you end up kissing me like—well . . .” Her cheeks turned the color of peonies.

  “Like I have no business kissing a lady to whom I am not even betrothed.” He cringed inwardly. “I am sorry. I don’t regret it as perhaps I should, but I regret hurting you.”

  “You haven’t hurt me, David. You are such a good man.”

  His conscience pricked him, urging him to speak, even to tell her what the physician had said about his father. But the less he told her, the more he could learn what she knew of the information—limited as it was—he had been able to gather.

  He held up a staying hand, his conscience smiting him. “Not so much forthright as you think.

  “A good man wouldn’t have kissed you today or the other night.”

  “Not if you knew—” She shot to her feet and paced across the room to shovel a load of coal onto the smoldering fire, then stalked across the room in the other direction and pushed open the casement to a billow of cold air smelling of rain and the sea. “I left my sinful life behind three years ago when I married Conan, Lord Penvenan. I wouldn’t say I lived a Christian life then, but I didn’t live as I had before. The Christian life came later, after Mihal’s birth, after I saw what God had done in the lives of my cousin Elizabeth and her husband. But before then, before my marriage, I was . . . wicked.”

  David wanted to protest, wanted to tell her he doubted she could have ever been wicked. Yet he could not when he held his own condemning suspicions against her. Yet her smooth, contralto voice grated with pain, as though each word she spoke scraped her throat raw, so all he could do was listen and pray, take in each word and hope she gave him even a gossamer thread of hope to believe she was innocent of harming anyone with unlawful acts.

  Gripping the windowsill with white-knuckled hands, as though the painted wood were stopping her from being swept downstream, she continued to face the courtyard beyond the window. “After my parents left for the last time, I, um, went looking for love and affection where I could find it. My grandparents tried to rein me in. They locked me in my room. They tried sending me into Devonshire for schooling, and they prayed for me. I climbed out my bedroom window and nearly broke my neck, but I escaped. I ran away from school with the music master. I broke as many rules of proper behavior as I could.”

  And he had just helped her break one more.

  He wanted to play the craven and duck beneath the bedclothes to hide his shame. He made himself listen to her in silence, watching her, praying for wisdom for once in his life.

  “Conan wanted a wife and heir,” she pressed on. “He knew all about me and didn’t care. In fact, it made getting me to wed him easy, I expect. We had to keep our marriage secret so no one would kill our son, or me for that matter, especially after he was murdered. We had planned to tell my grandparents so we could collect the dowry and rescue Penmara, but Conan died and my grandparents were not so kind about me bearing a child, as they thought, without the benefit of marriage, so I determined to save Penmara without their help. But that’s beside the point here. What matters is that I didn’t love my husband as I should have, as he deserved. He was my friend and I loved him for that, but Penmara came first in his life, and he died for it. He married me to save it and he died because of it, and I’m glad I didn’t love him. I’m glad my parents left before I was old enough to love them. I’m glad Conan died before I could love him. And now I’m glad you think ill of me, even while you think you love me, so I remember not to love you. I will not let myself love anyone.” She pounded one fist on the sill to emphasize each word. Then she slammed the window and charged toward the door.

  “My lady, Morwenna.” David spoke her name quietly.

  She checked her flight but didn’t look at him.

  “I want to believe you innocent of all wrongdoing more than I want to stop loving you.”

  She gave her head a hard shake. “As I said, you’re a good man. You want me, and your goodness tells you that has to mean you love me. Don’t let that hurt you in the end. You’re far safer with the part of you that is thinking in your head and telling you I’m guilty. Either go to the authorities with that information, or go home to Bristol where you’re safe.”

  “Morwenna—”

  She slipped out the door before he could even think to look for his clothes, let alone don them. By the time he located them folded into a chest, she was nowhere to be found in the inn. None of the Trelawny party were to be found in the inn according to the young man with a pistol stationed outside his chamber door.

  “Sir Petrok hired me to guard you and taste your food,” explained the youth, who looked as solid as the truncheon hanging from his belt along with the pistol. “If you want to go somewhere, I’ll be going with you.”

  “No, thank you. I’m staying right here.”

  He was staying in Cornwall until he had his answers and until he won Morwenna’s heart. Neither task was going to be easy, but one thing he now knew for certain.

  Morwenna Trelawny Penvenan was not among the guilty.

  CHAPTER 18

  MORWENNA WAS NOT ONLY SLUMPING, SHE SUPPORTED her sagging head and shoulders with her elbows on a table in the inn’s coffee room and held her chin in her cupped hands. Grandmother had already admonished her about her elbows on the table and her poor posture. She ignored it. She ignored the talk between Tristan, Jago, and Grandfather. Her gaze rested on the rain-streaked window and the blurry image of the inn yard beyond, without seeing any of the carriages or horses coming and going. She wasn’t thinking of David—much. All but that corner of her mind into which she relegated David for the moment, she held fixed on the meeting that had ended no more than a quarter hour earlier.

  A wholly disastrous meeting.

  “We cannot invest in mines on an estate riddled with scandal,” one of the potential investors declared, speaking for all his cohorts. “If Lady Penvenan is innocent of helping wreckers, then we will reconsider. The land there should still be rich in ore, so you should perhaps consider selling now that the entail on the land is broken.”

  Repeating those words in her head again and again, Morwenna slouched farther, going so far as
to cover her face with her hands. She kept hearing “sell Penmara” from all sides. Grandfather could do it too. The disposal of Mihal’s inheritance lay in the hands of the trustees, and with this failure, they might decide selling was in Mihal’s best interest. What monies it brought could be placed in trust for his majority. Morwenna would be forced to raise him in the rigid rules of Bastion Point. With herself and Drake as examples of what that produced, she didn’t want her son growing up there, however much her grandparents claimed the Lord had changed their hearts. She still saw them as autocratic.

  An alternative was to wed.

  She peeked through her fingers at Jago and Tristan. They were such good catches, intelligent, attractive, enamored of her. Neither had his own home, and Grandfather could still sell Penmara, but her dowry from Bastion Point’s vast wealth would more than provide for purchasing lands and a house, if not Penmara itself.

  But she could still feel David’s lips on hers. Even the memory hours later set her pulse racing and warm softness spreading through her. He was a terrible choice. Better looking than either Tristan or Jago. He was kinder, certainly, with his heart more in tune with what the Lord wanted of a man than either of the others. But there the pros ended. David was poor. David lived in Bristol. He claimed to love her.

  She shouldn’t have let that happen. She should have done a better job of discouraging him from caring for her. She shouldn’t have let him kiss her once, let alone more. She knew quite well that physical wanting got mistaken for love. He’d looked upon her with longing and hunger from the beginning. She should have taken more care of his heart—or attraction. But she flirted and touched, cared for him and showed interest in him because she wanted information. He had given her all too little of that which she wanted and all too much of what she did not.

  No, not that. She wanted—his companionship, his touch, his heart. But she would conquer that wanting as she would conquer everything else. That was how she survived. She would not let herself love a most unsuitable man who would come to his senses and head back for Bristol the instant he could. His nice family wouldn’t want her, so he would think better of suggesting she join it. He hadn’t even mentioned marriage except in his apology for kissing her. That mention hadn’t preceded an offer. Too easily he accepted her pronouncement that she would not love him. Then, after her revelations about herself, he had likely changed his mind about her already. She couldn’t bear to look in on him and see the truth of that—abandonment—before he left her vicinity.

  “Morwenna, you are in public.” Grandmother never raised her voice. Nor did she speak sharply. The enunciation of each word conveyed her disapproval. “If you are weary, go to your room.”

  This time, Morwenna made herself straighten and lower her hands to her lap. “I should look in on Mr. Chastain.”

  She should stay away from him, sever the ties.

  She waited for Grandmother or Grandfather to tell her that was improper. They did not. Tristan and Jago stopped talking and gave her expressions of disapproval so much like elders frowning down on a lesser being she let out a snort of amusement.

  “You need to be above reproach, my lady,” Tristan said.

  “I am already far below reproach, Tristan Pascoe.” Morwenna rose. “Nothing short of my exoneration will make matters better.”

  “Exoneration and marriage to someone respectable.” Jago rose and started toward her. “You’ve been a widow too long.”

  “And everyone knows ladies should not be left widows for too long or they get up to mischief.” Morwenna turned her back on the company and stalked to the door. “I shall go to my room. I need rest if we are to leave for Bastion Point in the morning.”

  “Unless the rain remains this heavy,” Grandfather said. “Our old bones can’t take that much exposure to the wet, and I doubt Mr. Chastain is up to the discomforts.”

  “Will he be returning with us?” Jago asked. “I mean, he has had singularly unpleasant experiences here in Cornwall.”

  “He’s waiting for his family to either send or bring money,” Morwenna said.

  “Why doesn’t someone just give him the money to move along?” Tristan asked. “I am happy to do so.”

  “I tried.” Grandfather stared hard at Morwenna. “He has nearly as much pride as my granddaughter and perhaps a bit more stubbornness.”

  “Perhaps all the laborers have is their pride.” Morwenna lifted the door latch.

  “My dear,” Grandfather said, “Mr. Chastain is far more than a laborer. He is an artisan. Where seafaring vessels are concerned, he is an artist.”

  “A silk purse from a sow’s ear.” Tristan spoke sotto voce, clearly for everyone to hear, even Morwenna at the door.

  She opened the door. “I will accept your judgment on that, Grandfather. I know nothing of boats.”

  For all she had lived in sight of the sea all her life, she had only sailed once—when Conan took her to Guernsey where they could be married in secret without banns or licenses. She had been so ill she wasn’t all that eager to repeat the experience.

  Another reason why she and David didn’t suit. Too many reasons from the gulf between their social statuses, to their mutual poverty, to her unwillingness to risk her heart. Despite all that, she found herself outside his door instead of her own.

  “Is he sleeping?” she asked the guard Grandfather had hired.

  “I hear him moving about some, m’lady. He asked for paper and ink.”

  “Of course he did.” A reluctant smile tugged at Morwenna’s lips. “I’ll just look in on him and see if he needs anything he won’t ask for.”

  The guard wasn’t about to stop a Trelawny. He moved aside so she could tap on the door. Beyond the heavy panel she heard David’s quiet, “Enter,” and her heart began to race.

  He sat at the simple table that served as a desk in the room. A branch of candles shone on the papers spread before him and drew reddish lights from hair he had combed but not tied back.

  “If you brought tea,” he said without looking up, “please set it beside the bed so I don’t have to move any of these papers.”

  “I didn’t bring tea, but I can send for it if you like.”

  “My lady.” He scrambled to his feet. “I thought it was the guard or a maid, or I would have risen sooner.”

  “No need to stand on ceremony with me.” She studied his pallor, obvious even in contrast with his white shirt, especially noticeable against his dark hair. “Should you be up and about at all?”

  “I feel well enough now.” He glanced around, then drew his chair farther from the desk. “This seems to be the only chair, so do, please, take it.”

  “I shouldn’t stay.” She formed a barrier between them with her folded arms. “I shouldn’t have come.”

  “I’m glad you did. I want to talk to you—”

  “No.” She flung up her hands, palms out. “I only came to see about your welfare.”

  “Did you?” He closed the distance between them.

  Morwenna folded her arms again. Only a hand’s breadth of space and her folded arms lay between them.

  “Are you certain you came simply to see if I’m faring well?” David hooked his thumbs into his waistband. “Or do you dislike being away from me as much as I dislike being away from you?”

  She would have backed away, except the door rose behind her and she feared if she opened it, David would follow her into the corridor and expose his feelings for her to everyone.

  She closed her eyes so she couldn’t see his enticing face and form. If she took shallow breaths, she couldn’t inhale his clean-as-nature freshness of vetiver. “You should know how my reputation precedes me to Falmouth. The potential investors withdrew because of the wrecking, because of the riding officers who were set upon, because my grandfather won’t put up any kind of surety for the venture.” She leaned her head back against the door. “Grandfather could buy engines for a dozen mines, but will not because he wants us at Bastion Point. He wants me to fail.”
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br />   “And so does someone else.”

  “What?” Her eyes popped open.

  “Your beach has been picked as a place for the wrecking, though, from what I observed in my travels, Cornwall offers scores of miles of suitable cliffs to accomplish their end, but they pick yours.” He hooked his thumbs into the slits of his breeches’ pockets. “Riding officers are set upon on their way from trying to arrest you, again making you look guilty. So I believe the question we should be asking is not who is doing this, but why do they want people to believe it’s you. If we work that out, we will come at the an—why are you staring at me like that?” He grinned down at her as though he already knew the answer.

  She licked her lips. She swallowed. Her mouth remained dry, and she could only manage a whispered, “You don’t think I’m guilty?”

  “I don’t. I think you’re understanding why I did, but no lady as kind and giving as you is capable of perpetrating such a heinous crime.”

  “But, David—Mr. Chastain, how came you to change your mind? Not so long ago, you were accusing me of trying to poison you.”

  “Because that’s the easy way to think of answers. You are the obvious culprit. Too easy a culprit.” He leaned against the wall beside her, his arm brushing hers. “As I was lying there trying to work out how I could think ill of you and be so certain of loving you, I realized that I had to be wrong in one way or the other. You tried to talk me out of loving you more than you tried to talk me out of thinking ill of you.”

  “I cannot protest enough to prove my innocence.”

  “But you could tell me of your past, thinking it would give me a disgust of you. Am I not correct in this?”