The Price of Temptation

by Williams, Harmony

  Adam tried one last time. Go. Please. He mouthed the words. She did not leave.

  Hell and damnation, he didn’t deserve her loyalty. He’d hurt her, twice, by disappearing from her life. The very least she could do was return the favor. But she didn’t, and it hurt and salved his pain in equal measures.

  When at last Chatterley finished and was dismissed to the sidelines, Adam steeled himself for the verdict. He would be turned over to the Royal Navy for punishment or—equally likely, given the pomp with which his arraignment had been conducted—deferred to trial to decide his fate. A military trial would have caused less of a sensation in the masses. No, the officer in charge had wanted to make this public. He wanted to rake Adam over the coals for desertion so all the world could see.

  Which meant Adam would likely meet his fate at the end of a rope in Newgate. There would be ballads written about him, ridiculous as it sounded. At least his child would know some part of his legacy, even if none of it would be true.

  As the magistrate conferred with a barrister, Adam allowed himself one last look toward the crowd, toward his wife and her family. Please go. He didn’t want to see her fall apart when the verdict came. He wanted to remember her happy, healthy, as she would remain long into her dotage.

  Please, Lily.

  When she turned away from the scene, elbowing her way through the assembled gawkers, he should have felt relieved. He did…or so he told himself. He didn’t examine the inevitable emptiness that swept him under. The beat of his heart filled his ears. He shut his eyes and tried to console himself one last time.

  At least soon, he would never have the power to hurt her again—intentionally or not.

  …

  Lily thought she had resigned herself to the uncomfortable wash of emotions she now felt upon seeing Reid. Betrayal. Disgust. Rage. But listening as he laid out document after document proving that her husband had deserted his post and therefore deserved punishment reignited every last one. While he’d held her family’s debts in his hands—which he might still do, if he found a way to counter the proof she and Sophie had put together to show that the money that had paid the debts had originated with her family. Lily felt backed into a corner. Unable to defend herself or her family.

  Now, her temper was stoked and she wasn’t going to bite her tongue.

  Dimly, she heard her sisters protest as she left them. Their words were swallowed in the sea of jeers aimed toward her husband, a good man. On the other side of the courtroom, slipping through the gate in the waist-high rail, a true villain went overlooked. He strutted into the anonymity of the crowd and might have exited the courtroom entirely if she had not been smaller and quicker. The crush of bodies didn’t pose as much of an inconvenience to her.

  She wanted to strike him. She imagined it in vivid detail: her knuckles impacting his hard jaw, the look on Reid’s face as he stumbled back and jostled those around him…and the violence erupting like the flame of a spilled lamp to consume the high tempers of those gathered. Innocent people, hurt. She balled her fists nevertheless but kept them at her sides, her chin tucked to her chest.

  “Lily.”

  He sounded surprised. He had no right to use her name.

  Lily raised her gaze. She trembled with the urgency to do violence. When she peeled open her lips, she managed one word, fraught with accusation. “Why?”

  Reid had the gall to look confused.

  With that word sitting in the air between them, more came easily to her tongue. “Why did you have to do this to us? Why couldn’t you have let us be happy?”

  “He stole—”

  “I don’t give a farthing what he took from your father. What you’ve done goes beyond fair recompense and into the territory of downright cruelty. You’re a thousand times more a villain than the man you’ve condemned. Your underhanded actions prove it. Blackmail? Kidnapping? You ought to be on trial today, not Adam.”

  As she named his crimes, Reid’s eyes widened. He looked around, past the stir of onlookers now eagerly attending to the quarrel and toward those in the room with the power to detain him. None were close enough to overhear, more was the pity.

  “I ought to bring the Bow Street Runners down on your head.” She didn’t have the wealth to attract their services, not once Adam was condemned to prison or worse. Reid’s interference would be celebrated as a citizen’s arrest, not the crime it had been.

  “Lily—”

  Her fingernails cut crescents of pain into her palms. “Mrs. Darling. You don’t have the right to address me by my Christian name, as if we could possibly be friends after all the pain you’ve caused.”

  Reid’s lip twitched, but he managed to keep his expression otherwise still. “I will not call you by that name. You won’t be Mrs. Darling much longer, I’d wager.”

  That burned her down to the core. “I will always be Mrs. Darling. To my dying day. Just give me an answer so I can wash my hands of you.”

  His eyebrows hooked low over his eyes. “You know why. I tried to warn you about the mistake you were set on making, but you chose him anyway.”

  “Over you, you mean?”

  He worked his jaw. “Yes,” he answered tightly. “Over me. It was always assumed by both families that we would marry. You were always the most intelligent of your sisters, and just pretty enough not to be conceited about it as they are. We were destined.”

  Lily slapped him soundly. He didn’t stagger a foot out of place. The only indications that she’d struck him at all were the hollow sound, the red imprint on his cheek, and the way he worked his jaw with murder in his eyes.

  “Never speak of my sisters that way again. They are not conceited.”

  When he opened his mouth again, she cut him off. She had her answer, but it brought her no solace.

  “And the only thing I was destined to do was to make my own choices regarding my future. I did and I do not regret them.”

  His expression darkened. “We’ll see,” he said, so softly she nearly didn’t hear.

  Given that the courtroom was a froth of movement threatening to boil over at any moment, Lily shouldn’t have been able to spy any one person in particular. However, the man being let through the gate into the courtroom proper caught her eye. She smiled, feeling the savage expression pull her cheeks tight.

  “You may want to wait. It looks as though the magistrate may need to hear your testimony once more before this is through.”

  When he turned, startled, she pushed her way through the crowd to resume her place with her family.

  …

  Adam must be dreaming.

  The magistrate announced, “I believe we have one last witness. Sir Clement Darling, you may approach.”

  He’d seen his father before, from a distance. As a child, he’d thought himself better off for not knowing Sir Clement. However, after he’d escaped the Nemesis, Adam had had a hole in his life in the shape of his brother. Seeking the familial ties he so craved, he’d found his father—not in Northumberland, but farther south. He’d intended to introduce himself but had never found the courage. Through research, he’d learned that his father cared more for the prestige of his position than for meting out justice. Profiting off the backs of honest men, like every other man with a title. Adam hadn’t sought out Sir Clement again.

  Someone, likely the sitting magistrate, must have sent word to Sir Clement that his son had been accused of desertion. It had been years since Adam had crossed paths with him, and those years had loosened his father’s jowls and added lines to his face. He looked no less forbidding, even dressed in plainclothes rather than the magistrate’s black gown and bob wig. He didn’t look at Adam, but Adam’s stomach turned itself inside out with every step the older man took toward the front of the room.

  When Adam glanced instinctively toward Lily, her eyes were shining and her sisters had their arms wrapped around h
er from behind. She had returned to the circle of her family. Hell and damnation!

  Adam’s ears rang as his father vowed to speak the truth. The metal bands on his wrists chafed. He welcomed the pain, using it to keep his expression neutral.

  The sitting magistrate asked, “Sir Clement, what is your relationship with the accused?”

  Sir Clement spared only the briefest, most dismissive of glances for Adam. “I have no relationship with the accused. I have never met him.”

  Adam couldn’t breathe. He’d never spoken to his father. In fact, Sir Clement had never been more than a figment of his imagination, at times the villain and at times the doting father. But hearing Sir Clement disown him cut him to ribbons. Before now, there had always been a possibility…

  Perhaps he didn’t know.

  And he never would. Adam had held his brother as he’d died. He hadn’t protected him. He’d barely protected himself.

  Sir Clement would grind Adam beneath his boot if possible. It was a cruel twist of fate that, in a moment of need, his father was exonerating him instead.

  “My son died on board the Nemesis nine years ago. His body was returned to me. I buried him in the family plot in Northumberland.”

  Adam would never inspire the depth of emotion lacing his father’s voice, nor the tremor in his mouth as he fought for composure. To Sir Clement, Adam was nobody. I have no relationship with the accused. And he never would.

  If it was the last thing he did, Adam vowed to give his child more. So much more.

  With surprisingly steady hands, Sir Clement held out a miniature to the magistrate. “This is a portrait of my son, painted when he turned eighteen. As you can see, there is at best a passing resemblance. You have the wrong man. I beg of you, drag my son’s memory through the mud no longer.”

  The mutters circulating the room intensified the ringing in Adam’s ears. He felt divorced from his body as the sitting magistrate peered at the miniature. He overturned the charges to the uproar of those watching. Adam was…free.

  He held himself still, the din churning his thoughts, as a guard unlocked the cuffs binding him to the chair. His knees had turned to jelly and he wobbled when he rose. Dimly, he heard his wife call his name.

  Tears streamed down Lily’s face. She tried—unsuccessfully—to climb over the railing to get to him, her sisters and mother cautioning her to no avail. Adam crossed to her. Slowly at first, testing his steps. Then in ground-eating strides. She threw her arms around his neck, all but choking him in her enthusiasm. The wood of the railing between them dug into his hips, but he didn’t care. He had her. He finally, blissfully, had her all to himself.

  The courtroom was cleared in preparation for the next case, but Adam didn’t loosen his hold. Lily smelled divine. She felt like heaven. He was never going to lose her again.

  When his shoulders started to tremble beneath her touch, she whispered in his ear, “Adam? Are you unwell?”

  The magnitude of this moment crashed over him. The implications… He’d never thought he’d walk free again. Now that he had, he was lost. His one anchor these past long years was dissolving beneath his touch. “I can’t give up Adam’s name.” Tears burned his eyes. “It’s all I have left of him.” He buried his face in her hair.

  “Then don’t.”

  She made it sound so simple.

  “The magistrate may have been convinced, but my former captain hasn’t returned to London yet. If he does…”

  Lily pressed a gentle kiss to his shoulder, one he felt even through the stiff cloth. “When someone comes looking, be someone else. Be Adam King. You’ve done it before.” She paused, then added in a hoarse voice, “I think Mrs. King has a nice ring to it, when you’re of a mind to make me an honest woman.”

  He shut his eyes in pain. “As soon as may be.” He wanted to be hers in every way possible, so much so that he couldn’t bear the thought of letting her go even long enough to cross the wooden barrier between them. “But I cannot stay in London. You can’t—”

  “Shhh.” She rubbed his back. “I know. I found the deed. I’ve hired a solicitor to manage our interests here until we can dispose of them. We’re set to leave on the next coach.”

  He tightened the band of his arms around her, crushing her to his chest. She didn’t protest. “Your family?” She’d always protested leaving London before. That she’d changed her mind sounded too good to be true.

  She pulled back enough to look at him with shining eyes. “Our family. They’re coming with us.”

  Taking a shuddering breath, Adam lifted his gaze to each of the women in turn. Willa, in all her ferocity, reached out to grip his arm. “You’re our family, even when you frighten us half to death.”

  Sophie, the crinkle in her eyes the only crack in her composure. “Especially then.”

  And Mrs. Bancroft, who lifted a tentative, trembling hand to him. “I think we all need a fresh start, don’t you?”

  He took her delicate hand, his eyes clouding with unshed tears. “Yes.” His voice was too thick to elaborate.

  Lily stood on tiptoe to press her lips to his cheek over his beard. “I’m not letting you walk away from us again. At last, we’ll finally have the future we so deserve.”

  He relaxed into her embrace. With Lily by his side, he would have everything he’d ever wanted. “Yes, love. We will. I promise.”

  Epilogue

  Lily bent over the table in the small workroom of the new jewelry store they had opened in Ashton-under-Lyne. It wasn’t nearly as big nor as prosperous as the one Papa had held in London, but here, she was free to create whatever she pleased. Lately, that had been Egyptian-inspired brooches, necklaces, and other jewelry. Word had spread from here all the way to Newcastle and brought in commissions through the post. Lily knuckled her back, sore but satisfied at her progress.

  As she used pliers to shape a particularly intricate knot in the center of this brooch, she listened with half an ear to Adam’s voice, letting it soothe her. It drifted in from the storefront, which he handled as her partner when she didn’t need him on the forge.

  “I’m only the face. My wife is the talent. You’ll have to ask her regarding your request. Let me fetch her for you.”

  With a groan, she straightened, cracking her back. She set aside her pliers and turned on the stool just as Adam entered the doorway. He was dressed in London fashions to impress the rare nobleman who ventured past the shop. At home, he usually walked around in his shirtsleeves and stocking-clad feet. Although Lily preferred him that way, she had to admit, he filled out a jacket to distraction.

  “Let me help,” he said when he noticed her trying to stand.

  She shook her head, bracing her hand against the bench to gain her feet. “I’m not laid abed yet.”

  Despite her protests, he braced her elbow and let her use him for leverage. “You promised to share your burden with me.”

  Upright, she rested her hand on the pronounced bulge of her belly. “I’m afraid this is something I have to carry on my own. I’ll be happy to share the burden with you after the birth.”

  He kissed her cheek, lingering. The brush of his mouth, as always, made her shiver with anticipation.

  “There’s a young man up front asking about commissioning a ring.”

  Lily strode for the door, leaving him to follow. “Let’s not keep him waiting.”

  The man in question appeared younger than she, though not by much. His clothes were simple but in good repair. He toyed with a gray beaver hat between his hands. As he spotted her, he straightened. Anxiety was written in the lines of his body.

  “Madam, I’m told you create one-of-a-kind rings? I need one for my betrothed. A ring fit for a queen, only…” His cheeks turned ruddy.

  Lily smiled kindly. “Without costing a year’s wages?” she guessed.

  He nodded, abashed.

 
She had been asked to make that sort of thing from the townsfolk a few times since opening her shop. Although the village was flush with jobs, the number of wealthy patrons nearby were few. That suited Lily well enough. Her commissions from Newcastle upon Tyne would carry her through lean months, and she had learned to shape intricacies in silver wire that looked as resplendent as the jewels of the rich. Willa’s newest passion, fashioning beads made of pottery, had contributed to a new style of accessory slowly catching on in Ashton and the neighboring towns.

  “I’m certain I can devise something that won’t reduce your income overmuch.”

  Bald relief crossed the young man’s face. “Thank you. You see, her father isn’t particularly keen on me. My family doesn’t come from as great a wealth as hers.”

  Lily beckoned the young man closer to the counter near the front of the shop. When she turned in search of a stool, she found that Adam was already hefting one. She waited for him to position it before she sat.

  “What sort of woman is your betrothed?”

  A smile teased at his lips. “Stubborn. Outspoken. She told old Murdock she’d accept no one but me.”

  He looked as proud as a cockerel.

  “She sounds like a worthy woman. Is she tall? Short? What color is her hair?” Lily narrowed her eyes. “Murdock… She wouldn’t be one of the granddaughters, would she? Eloise or Clarissa?”

  The young man brightened. “You know her? Clarissa, she’s to be my bride.”

  “I know her. She’s close in age with my youngest sister.” Eloise, on the other hand, had been one of the first friends Lily had made in town. With her family to help in the shop and contribute in other ways, she no longer had to spend her every waking moment at work. She’d made several friends.

  Thinking, Lily tapped out a contemplative beat with her fingers. “If it’s a ring fit for a queen you want…”

  She turned on the stool. Adam had already fetched the satchel of letters she kept handy. She smiled at him warmly. “Thank you, darling.”