Lords of the Isles

by Le Veque, Kathryn

  “I’m sorry I’ve been so neglectful, my dears. I’ve been busy in pursuit of my betrothed, and I feel my efforts in that score have only resulted in my neglect of you. It is unpardonable and I shan’t let it happen again.” She tugged a particularly stubborn weed that had wrapped around the base of the plant. She twisted it first left, then right, before yanking it straight up. “You are a tenacious one,” she muttered.

  “I would say the same of you, Lady Emmaline,” a masculine voice drawled.

  Emmaline careened backwards and landed in an inelegant heap upon her derriere at Drake’s feet. She stared overly long at the tips of his perfectly shined black Hessian boots and gave thanks for the wide brim of her flat-brimmed hat that shielded the stain of mortification that warmed her cheeks.

  Sebastian had forever mocked the bonnet, but now, more than ever, Emmaline had a deep appreciation for it. The brim kept Lord Drake blessedly out of view. When her face had cooled, she tilted it back. “You are not Sophie.” The words came out faintly accusing.

  Drake’s firm lips twitched at the corners. “No, I am certainly not Miss Winters.”

  Emmaline toyed with the weed she still held in her hand. She could only imagine what Lord Drake thought about his betrothed working in a garden like any common servant. If he’d been scandalized by her preference for a gothic novel, well then this offense was surely tantamount to treason in his pompous eyes.

  He continued to study her with that unreadable expression. The man must be a marvel at the gaming tables. She dropped the weed and scooped up a small bit of warm, moist soil, and sifted it through her fingers. A thin, slimy worm became caught between her fingers. She released the creature. It slithered off, deeper into a safe patch of ground away from prying hands—out of sight.

  A sigh of envy escaped her. Lucky creature. What she wouldn’t herself give to have the ground open and swallow her deep into its hold of invisibility. She cast a hopeful gaze to the sky, willing the Good Lord to assist with a miracle.

  Several moments later, Drake cleared his throat.

  Emmaline sighed. Apparently the Lord was attending to more important miracles than rescuing one peculiar young lady from a healthy bout of humiliation.

  She dusted her hands together. “Lord Drake.”

  Drake held out a hand.

  Emmaline glanced down at her mud-spattered fingernails, and then placed it in Drake’s, marveling at the strength of his long fingers wrapped so securely about hers. He effortlessly guided her to her feet, and she wondered that he should be so unaffected by the feel of their joined hands when it had sent her heart racing.

  “Thank you, my lord,” she murmured, bemoaning the loss of contact when he removed his hand from her grasp. She dusted off her hands upon the chintz apron she’d donned for gardening. Her small shovel and spade jangled in her front pockets.

  “You garden.”

  “I am surprised to see you.”

  They spoke in unison.

  “Yes, I garden.” She frowned at the pile of weeds at their feet. “Though I fear I’ve been neglecting these far too long this Season.”

  A full smile turned Drake’s lips. This wasn’t the mocking grin she’d come to expect from him.

  Her heart leapt erratically beneath her breast.

  “Uh, yes, I overheard that as well,” Drake said.

  Her toes curled with mortification. Of course he’d heard that. And of course the day he chose to pay his first visit, she would be less than presentable. She grimaced. With her stained skirts, ‘less than presentable’ was being magnanimous.

  To top off this splendidly disastrous day, he’d discovered her talking to plants…about him no less.

  “I have a tendency to talk to my plants.”

  He said nothing and Emmaline felt all the more humiliated for the admission. Stop talking, Em.

  Over Drake’s shoulder, she caught sight of Grace as she entered the gardens. The maid sat on a bench near the entrance of the portcullis.

  Emmaline waited for Drake to fill the void. She’d learned over the years; nothing her betrothed did was without careful deliberation. Something had brought him round to visit today…and she didn’t think it had a jot to do with her stimulating company.

  “I’ve come by for a reason.”

  And direct. Lord Drake was direct.

  Well, they may as well get to the heart of it. Oh, but how nice it would have been if he’d merely come for a visit. She sighed. “What brings you here, my lord?”

  “About last evening,” he began. “I saw you and I must inquire as to your flirtation last evening.”

  In the full light of day, memories of her brazen kiss from the evening prior made her cringe. She toed the ground with the tip of her black boot, kicking aside a soft patch of mud. Oh, if she could just dig a hole and bury herself. “I-ah—it was merely a kiss.” But it hadn’t been just a kiss. In fact, it felt blasphemous to so slight that magical union of their lips.

  A vein bulged at the left corner of his neck, the only indication of his tightly suppressed control. “Just a kiss?” he asked silkily.

  Now she’d gone and done it. She’d offended his male pride. Emmaline waved her hand breezily, or rather gave her best attempt at breezy. “La, sir. You’ve kissed so many ladies. I cannot imagine my kissing one gentleman would rouse such a stuffy reaction.” She cringed. Had she really just said, La sir?

  “You kissed him, too?”

  She scratched her forehead. “I kissed who, too?”

  “Him,” he growled.

  “Do you mean, you?” His convoluted questioning was beginning to give her a megrim. “And I would hardly call it a flirtation,” she added.

  His eyes narrowed, the emerald deepening to a jade hue, as they were wont to do when he was irate. Emmaline had come to know Drake enough to recognize that telling reaction.

  She placed her hands on her hips and glowered back at him. “How cowardly of you to blame me. I daresay you are of equal blame for what transpired last evening.”

  He took a step towards her and she scrambled away from him. She didn’t believe he’d hurt her but still, gentlemen fought duels for lesser charges against one’s character.

  Drake’s lip pulled back in a sneer. “Are you saying I’m at fault for what transpired between you and Waxham?”

  Emmaline placed her foot on a moist patch of ground and felt her boots sink into the earth. She tried to tug it free, when his words registered. “Waxham?”

  “Yes, Waxham,” he bit out.

  “Waxham?” Whatever was he talking about?

  “You kissed him.”

  What?! “I kissed Waxham?”

  His nostrils flared, and she realized he’d construed her question as a statement. “You think I kissed him.” Emmaline snorted, and then she howled with laughter, hilarity shaking her frame until she doubled over with a stitch in her side. Tears of mirth smarted from behind her eyes. “A-are you d-daft?” She struggled to breathe. “I didn’t kiss him.”

  Drake cocked his head to the side. “You didn’t kiss him?”

  She dashed a hand over her eyes. “No, you silly man. I kissed you.”

  He made a show of dusting the impeccable sleeve of his sapphire coat. “I saw you tilt your head, whisper, and smile up at him. I daresay I’ve engaged in enough flirtations to know the nuances of one. And I will not allow such flirtations to continue so long as we are betrothed.”

  Emmaline shook her head. “Oh, you are daft.”

  Had she been made of less stern stuff, the flinty gleam in his eyes would have caused her trepidation. But it would take more than that to make her run.

  As if remembering they were not alone, Drake glanced over in Grace’s direction. He lowered his voice to a near whisper. “I saw you with Waxham. After shamelessly kissing me, you hurried over to flirt with him. Mayhap you have set your cap on him if you can’t bring me up to scratch.”

  Emmaline’s hand flew out and she slapped him soundly on the cheek.

  Hi
s head jerked back under the ferocity of the movement. He cradled his sore cheek. “Damn. For one so small, you can deliver quite the wallop.”

  He deserved more than that slap and still, guilt filled her at the crimson stain her fingers had left on his scarred cheek. “Uh, why thank you.”

  “It wasn’t a compliment,” he mumbled, his words somewhat muffled by the edge of his palm as he still held his cheek.

  She jabbed him in the chest with her pointer finger.

  “Ouch!”

  “How dare you?” she demanded. “You come here.” Another jab that forced him backwards. “And reprimand, me?” Another jab. This time he flinched. Good! “You, who have forgotten for the better part of fifteen years that I so much as exist,” A fourth jab drove him back another step. “dare to address my behavior?”

  “Grace, will you excuse us?” She ordered, not even bothering to look back at her maid.

  “Very well, my lady,” Grace called. The young woman’s tone indicated she approved of Emmaline’s outrage.

  Emmaline redirected her attention on her betrothed. “How dare…?”

  “I will not be subjected to another of your rants,” he muttered.

  He kissed her.

  *

  Drake tugged the silly, too-large bonnet from Emmaline’s head. The hasty movement unsettled the precarious chignon in which her silken brown tresses had been arranged, and sent the chocolate waves tumbling to her waist. Had he really ever thought the color mousy? He tangled his fingers in the luxurious strands, angling his head to better avail himself to her mouth.

  She whimpered, and her body melted against his like a Gunther’s ice on a summer day. He held tight to her so she didn’t dissolve into a puddle at his feet. Filling his hands with her gently rounded buttocks, he anchored her against his center.

  “Drake,” she moaned against his lips.

  Another groan tore from his chest and he stroked her tongue with his. He ran his hands over her body in an attempt to explore the subtly seductive flare of her hips, the delicate swell of her buttocks.

  He cupped her breast in his hand.

  “Ohhh,” she gasped.

  The husky timbre of her voice drove him wild, and he ached to slide between her moist folds and stroke her with his length.

  He wanted to take her here and now, right on the garden floor. He sat down on the bench and adjusted her on his lap which set the gardening tools clattering. That small tinkling of metal meeting metal penetrated his consciousness. Drake pulled away with infinite slowness. He placed one more lingering, kiss upon her swollen lips and rested his brow atop hers. His breathing labored and harsh blended with the loud beat of his heart and made thinking difficult.

  What hold did Lady Emmaline Fitzhugh have over him? When he was with her all logic and reason fled. Enough of his life was riddled with bouts of lost control. But she was like a tonic he could not live without, and whether he liked it or not, whether he wanted it or not, he craved her with an intensity that bordered on physical pain.

  Emmaline’s breathing settled into a normal cadence. He stroked the small of her back, grateful at the time she took regaining her composure for it afforded him the same opportunity.

  She spoke first. “Waxham is a friend of my brother’s.”

  Apparently his kiss wasn’t as powerful as he liked to think. She hadn’t forgotten the reason for his earlier upset, the reason he’d kissed her into silence.

  She went on. “Waxham has been like a brother to me.”

  In spite of her words, Drake felt that awful emotion, he was beginning to recognize all too well as jealousy, rise in his throat, and nearly choke him. Emmaline might view Waxham as a brother but Drake had recognized the very appreciative male gleam in Waxham’s eyes. There had been nothing brotherly in the way he’d eyed Emmaline. “I don’t care about your relationship with him. I worry about how it reflects on our betrothal,” he lied. A bloody pathetic lie.

  That callously insensitive remark drove Emmaline from him and replaced all warmth in her eyes with a sheen of coolness. Drake regretted the transformation even as he knew he was the cause of it.

  “You’re worried about our betrothal, my lord?” She mocked. “Now? After all these years? After three Seasons? Now, it bothers you who I converse with?”

  Drake braced himself for another assault from her finger.

  Then the fight seemed to go out of her. The sparks glimmered, flickered, and finally dimmed. She hugged her arms across her stomach. “I am tired of this.”

  Drake’s brows dropped.

  “I don’t want to do this anymore,” she whispered.

  “Then stop dogging my every step.”

  As soon as the harsh words left his mouth, he wanted to call them back.

  The sad, detached expression she wore tugged somewhere in the vicinity of his chest and filled him with panic, a fear that he had said something irrevocable. He fished for another rejoinder, to rouse some other emotion than the defeated one she now wore. He wanted to redirect her thoughts away from… from…

  From what?

  Giving him exactly what he wanted?

  Except of a sudden he realized he didn’t know exactly what it was he wanted anymore. He’d spent nearly fifteen years lashing out over the betrothal he’d been committed to as a child. It had redefined his relationship with his father, had resulted in Drake fleeing to fight on the Peninsula. He’d built up years and years of resentment toward Lady Emmaline, who’d herself been a victim of their circumstances.

  In a short span of time, he’d come to the realization that nothing was or had been as it seemed for perhaps, ever—and it left him feeling off-balance. It was as if the world had been flipped upside down and he was hanging on by his fingernails.

  Crash!

  Drake flung himself on top of Emmaline, and knocked her to the ground, burying her body beneath his.

  His breath came fast as he waited for the crack of the gunshots, the ensuing cries and screams. They never came. His mind remained embroiled in the hellish world of roaring cannon fire and the blinding thickness of gunpowder smoke.

  “Drake.”

  Drake’s heart hammered wildly in his chest and under any other circumstance he would have luxuriated in the feel of Emmaline’s lean, lithe body under his. In that particular moment, however, mind-numbing terror gripped him in a tight vise. It sucked the air from his lungs.

  Emmaline wrestled a hand from between them stroked back the hair that had tumbled across his brow. “It was just the tools,” she whispered, as though speaking to a fractious mare. “They fell. All is well,” she assured him.

  It wasn’t Emmaline’s words that reached through his tortured remembrances and wrenched him back to reality, but the soft, soothing cadence of her voice that penetrated the devil’s unyielding hold.

  She stroked his cheek. Drake leaned into her touch. His eyes slid closed, needing her touch. It was like a balm on his wounded soul.

  Please, don’t stop touching me. In Emmaline’s embrace he felt…whole. Drake swallowed painfully and through sheer will forced himself to pick up his head. Emmaline’s troubled eyes caught and lingered on the vivid scar traversing his cheek. He flinched under her scrutiny.

  She spoke again. “Are you all right?”

  His mind conjured a trail of blood beneath her fingertips as she traced the mark.

  “I-I am sorry,” he stuttered and climbed to his feet. He helped her up from the ground. “Have I hurt you?” Of course you hurt her, you bloody monster.

  Emmaline shook her head. “No, no, I’m not—”

  “Please, forgive me.” In his haste to be free of the nightmare unfolding before him, he stumbled backwards, and tripped over the metal gardening tools.

  Emmaline reached for him but he recoiled.

  He mustered a hasty, distracted bow and fled.

  Chapter Seventeen

  My Dearest Drake,

  I had a nightmare last night. I dreamt the war had ended and you forgot to come home
. You were wandering about an empty field. If you forget how, promise you will write me…I will help you.

  Ever Yours,

  Emmaline

  Emmaline sat on the window-seat in the Floral Parlor. Her copy of Glenarvon rested haphazardly upon her lap. She surveyed the gardens below.

  On any other day, the small patch of nature, awash in the glow of the sun’s bright slanting rays, would have soothed her. She pressed her forehead against the cool pane and stared down. Not this day.

  With all of the hurts Drake had unknowingly inflicted, it should be easy for her to go to Sebastian and request he terminate the betrothal contract.

  Except this morning in the gardens with Drake changed everything.

  Resting her chin on her knees, she rubbed it back and forth over the smooth fabric of her dress. Funny, the greatest concern she’d had upon waking had been the neglect she’d shown toward the gardens.

  How could so much change in the span of a few hours? Her earlier concerns about the weeds and her garden sanctuary now seemed so trivial. She didn’t think she would ever be able to see her garden as any sort of refuge again. Not when it had revealed the inner Hell that gripped Drake.

  When Drake had been on the Peninsula, she had penned him a note each day he’d been gone. She’d signed every letter. Sealed them. And stuffed them into the bottom of her trunk.

  Reflecting back on the contents of the notes, she cringed. In her unsent letters she’d blathered to him about the mundane. She’d gone on and on about her aggravation with her brother and lamented the boredom she felt in the country. There had never been a moment when she’d truly stopped to think about Drake’s time on the Peninsula. She hadn’t stopped to consider that Drake had been a young man who would be irrevocably changed by his experience.

  That wasn’t to say she hadn’t worried over his safety or thought about what he was seeing and doing—she had, every day. But she hadn’t thought about war in the graphic sense. Instead, she’d seen it as more of a grand adventure. Why, he’d had the opportunity to travel and see different landscapes and meet exotic individuals, who were most definitely not the prim, proper members of English society.