My Enemy, My Heart (The Ashford Chronicles)

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  The babies began to cry.

  “Juliet,” Kieran said, “Will you please affix brakes to your tongue?”

  “Will you fetch Phoebe?” Deirdre asked. “I need my babies.”

  “I will bring them to you.” Kieran rose. “Juliet, leave us. You should not be home for hours yet anyway.”

  “We risked traveling before dawn once we received word of the births,” Juliet explained.

  Tyne, Phoebe, and Chloe appeared in the doorway behind her.

  “We had some interesting callers in the middle of the night,” Tyne said. “An overeager lieutenant. Would you know anything about this escape, Kieran?”

  Kieran didn’t answer. He busied himself bringing the boy to Deirdre. She wanted to nurse him, but didn’t know how with the room full of people. Yet she didn’t want them to go. Whatever Tyne did to Kieran, she needed to be there with him.

  “Here you go, child.” Phoebe pulled the Norwich silk shawl off of her shoulders and draped it around Deirdre’s. “I would have kept them out, but I thought perhaps you would want to be in on this little family row.”

  Little? Deirdre hadn’t seen Tyne so angry since the day Kieran brought her home.

  “Who tattled on us?” Chloe asked.

  “Rutledge.” Tyne closed and locked the door. “He seems to have been spreading a bit of gold about to learn Ashford family secrets.”

  “He will have the wind taken out of his sails now,” Juliet declared. “Admiral Barrington told him to leave the house right in front of everyone.”

  “He is a worm,” Chloe declared. “He cannot win against us.”

  “He came a bit close.” Tyne’s mouth hardened. “Thank you, Deirdre, for choosing last night to present me with my first grandchildren. No thanks to their father and aunt, they should grow up to enjoy the privileges of being Ashfords.” He skewered Chloe and Kieran with his lapis eyes. “As for you two, you deserve a month or two locked up for daring—daring!—to risk our safety and freedom for strangers, for our enemies, for what? Excitement? Pure rebellion? I thought you had gone beyond that kind of behavior, Kieran. I thought you respected me enough and wanted my trust enough to act like a responsible husband and father.”

  Watching Tyne, Deirdre realized that he wasn’t so much angry as hurt.

  “Sir,” she began.

  Kieran squeezed her shoulder. “Wait.” He stalked forward and faced his father. “What is more responsible than performing the one act that will show the woman you love that you hold her in the highest regard?”

  “Oh.” Juliet clasped her hands to her heart.

  The others stood staring at him in wide-eyed silence. Deirdre wished she could climb out of bed and stand beside him. She cuddled her sleeping baby instead and hoped Kieran could read her love in her eyes.

  Tyne cleared his throat. “You knew I could disinherit you of everything but Tyne Hall and the title?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And deny you the right to ever see your mother and sisters again?”

  Kieran grinned. “And yourself the right to ever see your grandchildren.”

  Tyne looked stony-faced for a full minute. Then he started to laugh and embraced his son. “Then I am proud of you. But if you ever pull a prank like that again . . .”

  Laughing, too, Kieran led Tyne to the cradle. “Our daughter. Do you think she will favor her mother or me?”

  “Her mother, I hope.” Tyne smiled at Deirdre from across the room. “And the lad, too.”

  “Hey,” Kieran protested. “I have done well for myself.”

  “Not so well as I have,” Deirdre said. “I got a whole family out of this.”

  “Bringing you home,” Tyne said, “is the best thing my son has done thus far, is it not, Phoebe?”

  “I always told you he would settle down once he met the right lady.”

  “I suppose I’d better learn how to be one.” Deirdre looked at Kieran. “I can’t go around embarrassing my children by hanging upside down off balconies.”

  Kieran paled. “You did what? When?”

  “How do you think I managed to hide a thousand English pounds of gold?”

  He paced to her side again and stood frowning down at her. “I knew it had to be somewhere. Have you spent it all?”

  “I’m afraid so.” She let the shawl fall back enough to expose the baby’s red scalp fuzz. “Are you angry?”

  “It was only gold.” He touched the baby’s cheek with a forefinger. “This is life and love and—what do we name them?”

  “I think you should name them—”

  Chloe clapped her hand over Juliet’s mouth and steered her through the door. “You need your beauty rest, younger sister. You look positively hagridden.”

  Tyne and Phoebe followed, closing the portal behind them with a gentle click.

  Deirdre started to look away, then held his gaze. “I was afraid to think about that. I wanted to name a boy for someone in your family, but you might not have liked that. I mean—” A twinge of lingering uncertainty roughened her voice. “If you thought he might not truly be the heir.”

  “Oh, Deirdre.” Pain clouded his eyes. “I have been a blackguard, have I not?”

  “Well, a bit.” She grinned at him. “But I forgive you.”

  He tweaked her nose. “You, my wife, have not been a saint.”

  “Give me another year or two, and I will be a staid, quiet matron like your mother. I’m even learning to sew.”

  “Do not work at it too diligently. I would not want you to be a bad influence on the children.” He glanced at the cradle. “What was your mother’s name?”

  “Sophie. Why?”

  “She had to have been a brave and devoted lady to go to sea with her husband and bring you into the world. I would like our daughter to carry that legacy. As for this one . . .” He lifted the boy from her arms and gazed down at him with unabashed pride and love. “Garrett for his grandfather? Though he looks a bit small to be the future ninth Earl of Tyne.”

  “He has decades to grow into the role.”

  Gazing at Kieran holding their son, Deirdre felt the last of her uncertainties slip away like waves beneath a keel. Before her stretched a vista of love and passion and friendship far more beautiful than anything she had ever observed from the crosstrees.

  A PREVIEW OF BOOK 2 FOLLOWS.

  Editor’s Note: This is an early excerpt and may not reflect the finished book.

  Chapter 1

  Devonshire, England

  Sunday, June 4, 1813

  8:00 p.m.

  Seventeen miles of barren moorland lay between Ross Trenerry and freedom. Less than a mile lay between him and Dartmoor Prison, and the alarm bell was beginning to ring. The Somerset militia guarding the American and French prisoners of war had discovered that eleven of those men had escaped.

  “Too soon.” Ross glanced over his shoulder, feeling the iron bands of shackles holding him down, as they had too often since the American merchantman on which he served as first mate had been captured by a British privateer. Or maybe this second capture would simply get him hanged.

  Instead of darkness, sunshine slanted across the rocky gray-black landscape in the late spring evening, and Deirdre, his friend, his dead captain’s daughter, wasn’t there. She was giving birth to their enemy’s get, and that enemy, her husband, Kieran Ashford, raced past the ragged prisoners, prodding them along with curt commands and glares from his eyes, their bright amber glow more obvious for the dirt rubbed on his face to blur his features. Another Ashford, the stunning sister in male attire, sped along with them, as agile on the rocky path as a gazelle.

  But the soldiers were marching. The escaped prisoners and their enemy guides needed wings to get free.

  “Trot, lads,” Ross said.

  The men glanced at him, then tried to move faster. Ross saw the effort in their gaunt faces running with sweat despite the chilly evening, the straining of limbs robbed of once formidable muscles from hauling lines and climbing rigging
and lifting cargo aboard the merchantman Maid of Alexandria. But the uneven stone path and eight months of near starvation had weakened all of them, especially Wat, already an old man before the English had captured their schooner and they’d all ended up in Dartmoor.

  Now Kieran Ashford, that privateer owner, was helping them escape for the sake of his wife, Deirdre. At least that’s what he claimed. With the alarm bell clanging its warning that prisoners had escaped, Ross suspected a trap, a betrayal.

  He flashed a glance at Ashford. “Who knew besides you, Deirdre, and your sister that we planned this?”

  Ashford either did not hear or chose to ignore Ross. The sister, the lady who had brought him food and blankets and promises to keep him going through the months at Dartmoor, glared at him, and said nothing except “Faster.”

  “Faster.” Ross repeated the admonition above the persistent clang, clang, clang. “Come on.” He slipped a hand beneath Old Wat’s elbow.

  Wat shook his head and slumped against a boulder beside the narrow track cutting through the gorge. “Can’t. Go on without me.”

  “A little farther is all.” The sister spoke, lagging behind for a moment. “We’ve traps set and ponies waiting.”

  The drum of running, booted feet joined the rhythm of the bell.

  Ross froze, refused to look, to watch the enemy bear down upon them. He knew what would happen if the soldiers caught them—worse confinement in the cacheau. Darkness. Fetid air.

  “Run,” Ashford called. “A hundred yards and we can trap ’em.”

  The men picked up their pace to a trot. Bare feet slapped and rattled against the rocky path. Their breaths wheezed. Ross’s breath chilled in his lungs. None of the men could move any faster, and pursuit sounded louder, closer. Too close. The soldiers couldn’t achieve more than a trot on the stony, uneven ground, but they surely moved swiftly enough to overtake the Americans within minutes. Despite himself, Ross glanced back. He counted eight men, seven with bayonets affixed to their musket barrels. Too close to get the men away unless they found the strength to run.

  “Go. Go. Go.” His voice was hoarse. He counted his men. Besides himself plus Ashford and his sister. Only twelve.

  Ross halted. Old Wat wasn’t with them. Turning, Ross caught sight of the man still slumped against the rock, his face gray beneath the layer of dirt they all wore.

  And the soldiers drew closer, close enough for Ross to see faces behind the muskets. Five minutes’ grace was all Ross figured he had to get free with the others.

  Wat pressed one hand to his chest and waved Ross on with the other. “Leave me.”

  Ross glanced at the approaching soldiers, then down the hillside toward the crew and freedom. Wat was his mentor, a surrogate father.

  Ross sprinted back to the old man. “Come on. Ashford set a trap down a bit.” Or so he claimed.

  “No, lad—”

  “Don’t argue.” Ross lifted the old man over his shoulder and headed downhill. His legs felt like year-old carrots. Wat sagged against him, dead weight. No, not dead. Not—

  Muskets cracked above the drum of footfalls, drum of heartbeats. Ross tasted tin, the bile of fear. Soldiers were still too far away to fire with accuracy. But soon, too soon, a minute or two, he’d be in range.

  Run faster!

  He staggered under the old man’s weight, slight though it was.

  More muskets resounded. Wat jerked, and Ross smelled the metallic stench of blood.

  “God, please, no!” He forced himself into a run. Fire blazed in his lungs. More gunfire rattled, and pain slugged into his shoulder. He stumbled over an outcropping of granite, then landed on his knees. Sharp pebbles cut through the frayed cloth of his woolen breeches, and Wat slid onto the ground, dead. No one survived a wound like the one gaping on the old man’s back.

  Ross closed his eyes, willed his body to find the strength to rise, keep going. The soldiers grew louder, nearer. Another minute, another shot. Ahead, nothing of the others echoed down the gorge. Good, they were away . . .

  Running footfalls pounded on the path, quicker, lighter than those of the soldiers.

  Those footfalls thudded toward him. He lifted his head, stared. He wasn’t mistaken. Someone ran toward him, Lady Chloe Ashford, who had corresponded with him against even Deirdre’s will, who had visited him, who had given him hope that all the English weren’t scoundrels, that the war would not last forever. As in a dream, she swept toward him, leaping over the rocks with the long-legged grace of the deer back home in Carolina.

  “Sir.” Her face still obscured beneath the floppy brim of a hat, she dropped into a crouch before him. “Let me help you.” Her voice was soft, melodious.

  “No.” Ross shook his head. “I’m hit—”

  “I can get you up.” She held out narrow, long-fingered hands. On one finger, a ring glowed like a slice of moonlight with sparks of blue and green. “I’m stronger than I look.”

  “But you’re a woman.” And what those approaching soldiers would do with a female, he didn’t want to consider.

  She laughed. “And I won’t leave Deirdre’s best friend to my countrymen.” She moved closer, close enough to slip her hands beneath his elbows, close enough for him to smell lily of the valley and violets above his prison stench.

  The sweetness of the girl swirled through his head, springtime incarnate, dizzying. No, blood soaking down his arm made him dizzy. His head throbbed like boot heels on stone. Soldiers nearer. Musket blasts.

  He grasped Lady Chloe’s arms and lurched to his feet. “Wat?”

  “I’m sorry.” She slipped her arm around his waist. “We have to leave him.”

  “I tried—” His throat tightened.

  “Save your breath.” She propelled him forward.

  The ground rocked beneath his feet like an earthquake. The sides of the hill seemed to draw nearer, sway, dim. He reached for something steady and found his arm going around the girl’s waist. She was warm, slender but sturdy. His other arm wouldn’t work. He was cold on that side. Numb. The girl warmed his other side, kept him going. Faster. Faster. The ground slipped beneath his feet. Thumping reverberated through his body from the wound, through his ears from the soldiers’ feet. He glanced back and saw the soldiers’ faces. He shook his head, certain he was seeing things. Blood loss was making him hallucinate.

  “Here.” The girl rounded an outcropping of blackish granite, and the faces vanished. “We’ve got to climb.”

  Ross stared at the steep bluff, lower than the gorge sides where the soldiers still marched, but still formidable to a weakened man. He noted the broken scrub pine, earth scored where rocks had lain. “The others went this way?”

  “Yes, we’ve sturdy moorland ponies on the other side of that ridge.”

  “But the soldiers will catch us.”

  “Not if we create a little diversion.” She grinned. “Deirdre planned a trap. It’s up to us to carry it through.” She spun away from him to lean against a boulder. “Help me push this if you can.”

  “Of course I can.” With one hand he could. He’d do anything to remain near her warmth, her courage.

  They shoved the rock. Pain sliced through his shoulder. The rock remained immobile, and the soldiers sprinted forward. Half a minute would bring them abreast. They’d capture Lady Chloe and Ross.

  Ross pushed on the rock again. Lady Chloe joined him. The boulder moved perhaps a handspan.

  A volley of musket fire sent splinters of granite spiraling into the air. Ross thrust both hands against the rock. Blood gushed down his arm. No pain. Cold seized his body. Darkness clouded his sight. His ears roared. Taking a deep breath to gather more strength, he found dust and gunpowder filling his nostrils. But the next thrust worked. The boulder tilted, swayed, rolled. Cries of alarm rose from the soldiers.

  As the hillside began to collapse, barring the soldiers’ way, a cry of triumph rose from Lady Chloe. “That’ll stop them long enough.” She grabbed Ross’s hand and started climbing. Rock fragmen
ts, earth, and bell heather showered them, stung Ross’s wound. He bit down on a blossom in his mouth, tasted bittersweet.

  No more gunfire roared behind them. The soldiers were eerily quiet. As one, Ross and her ladyship paused halfway up the side of the gorge to glance back. The redcoats swarmed around the far side of the boulder, pushing, shoving, and making no forward progress. Two men tried to climb the steep sides of the gorge.

  “We did it.” Lady Chloe’s voice was soft but so full of triumph she might have shouted.

  Ross couldn’t stop a grin from curving his lips. Nor could he stop himself from succumbing to the temptation of her ladyship’s smiling mouth. Briefly, for no more than a heartbeat or ten, he kissed her, reveling in the human contact, the softness of her lips, the sweetness of her mouth.

  Then a shout drew his attention away from Lady Chloe kissing him back with abandoned fervor. Stunned, Ross stared back.

  Ashford grasped his good arm. “Get moving. That landslide won’t hold the soldiers forever.”

  Ross nodded and headed across the moor where a straggly line of ponies headed toward the sea. Lady Chloe started to join him, but her brother caught hold of her arm and swung her away.

  “Go home.”

  “I cannot. You need my help.”

  Ashford’s mouth pursed, but he gave a brusque nod of acknowledgement and stalked away.

  “Come along, Mr. Trenerry.” Lady Chloe grasped his arm. “I will see you get to freedom.”

  She helped him and the others get off the moor and into a rabbit warren of caves, and after that, Ross’s memories grew dim, as loss of blood and wound fever took over his existence. When he regained his senses, the ret of his crew was gone. Nor was Lady Chloe anywhere in sight. Instead, her beautiful younger sister, Lady Juliet, sat holding his hand, while she read to him from Shakespeare’s sonnets.

  “You are awake,” she cried. “This must be the happiest day of my life.”

  In that moment, as weak as a kitten and with no idea how long he had lain senseless, Ross believed that moment might be his happiest as well.