The Wayward One (The De Montforte Brothers Book 5) (44 page)

Blackheath just stared at him. He was outnumbered, beaten, and he knew it. He glared at Ruaidri, his eyes murderous. “You’ll die for this. I promise.” And then, to Andrew, “You’re coming with me.”

“No, he’s not.” Ruaidri had managed to net his flitting thoughts and stuff them back into his pounding head enough to finally trust his own voice. “My mission as an officer in the Continental Navy was to bring that explosive back from England and hand it over to John Adams. I’m sure Lord Andrew will be free to make his own choices durin’ both Adam’s interview and whatever follows it.”

“I will not permit you to hand my brother over to some rebel knave.”

“Ye don’t have a say in the matter.”

Sensing the tension rising between the two once more, Brendan seized the duke’s elbow. “Come, the town’s waking up and you’re not safe here,” he said, his tone growing increasingly urgent. “Let me take you all out to
Kestrel
.”

“I am not finished here, Merrick.”

“Yes,” Ruaidri said flatly, pulling Nerissa close. “You are.”

Blackheath’s eyes were beginning to glitter with cunning intelligence and deadly promise. He looked at Ruaidri and didn’t say a word.

He didn’t have to.

“I told you before,” Ruaidri said. “You’re no longer commanding the world around you from the House of Lords or that miserable pile of rock that’s your ancestral home. You’re standing on an American street, surrounded by Yankee sea captains, myself included, whose decision ’twill be as to whether ye ever make it back England.”

Lucien stared coldly at him. “I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

“You did have the chance and you didn’t. Just as I had the chance, and didn’t. And ye know why I didn’t, Blackheath? Ye know why I held back during our fight? ’Twas because of yer sister and the fact I love her. Don’t think for a moment I couldn’t have ended yer life had I wanted to, but I wouldn’t give her that grief. She’s suffered enough.”

“Big words from a beaten man,” Lucien said coldly.

“Not so beaten. American jails are as capable of holding English dukes as they are British tars, soldiers and sea officers. Your gettin’ out of this
hellhole
will depend on my charity, along with my cousin’s. And the good people of this town, who don’t have a whole lot of use for lofty English ideas and an aristocracy who think they rule the world. Those days are over. Done with.” He offered his arm to Nerissa. “Good day, yer Grace. Perhaps when next we meet, yer way of announcin’ yerself will be a bit more…gentlemanly.”

“You should have killed him when you had the chance,” Cooper murmured beneath his breath.

“I tried.”

Lucien watched them go. Beside him, Andrew stood sullenly, obviously torn between any misguided friendship he had with the Parasite and joining his brother. A little distance away, Merrick’s gaze had moved to the waterfront, past the many masts silhouetted against the brightening eastern horizon to the river’s mouth. It didn’t take a genius to know what he was thinking—of the frigate waiting out there beyond it, a frigate that, O’ Devir had made clear, was now about as accessible to him as a walk on the moon and was now fair game for any particularly enterprising Yankee sea captain—and Merrick, Lucien knew, was particularly enterprising.

He, Lucien de Montforte, was stranded here in this godforsaken hellhole.

And as the Parasite had reminded him, powerless.

He longed to smash something to vent his frustration, to forego the constraints of his breeding and heritage and finish this with either pistol or sword, and then he realized there was one sure way to finish it and it had nothing to do with sullying his hands with more physical violence.

“Nerissa,” he called after the retreating pair.

She turned and looked at him, her eyes wounded, the tears still wet upon her face.

“It is bad enough that you would marry a man so far beneath you,” he said. “It is bad enough that you would marry a man that your family does not accept, a man for whom you have thrown away your birthright, heritage and country, a man who will never be able to keep you in the comfort and luxury in which you’ve been raised and to which you’ve been accustomed.” He waited for his words to sink in, and then he dropped the killing blow. “But for you to knowingly walk off with an accused killer, a man who murdered his very best friend….”

Bang
. He saw the fatal shot hit home as the blood drained from the Parasite’s face.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nerissa said uncertainly, and tried to continue on.

“Don’t you? Do you mean this vermin you’ve wed hasn’t told you?” Lucien’s smile was coldly triumphant. “Josiah Brown. A duel, 1776. You shot him, didn’t you, O’ Devir? Your very best friend in the world, and all over a woman you both purported to love.” The blows he’d dealt the Irishman during the fight were nothing compared to the damage his words now caused, and Lucien felt a dark and savage satisfaction as he watched stunned denial and fear, yes fear, steal the color from that rascal’s hated face. “Dolores Foley was the wench’s name, wasn’t it? And she’s dead now, too.”

The Irishman looked as though he’d been stabbed through the heart with a knitting needle. “I didn’t kill her.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Lucien said loftily, and gave a dramatic sigh. “You didn’t need to. But you did kill Brown, you were convicted and sentenced to hang, and it was only your friend John Adams’s brilliance that got you out of the noose in an appeal that should never have been made.”

O’ Devir flushed with rage. “Ye know
nothin’
of what happened.”

“Oh, I know all of it. Have you told my sister about this particular little…tidbit of your past?”

By the dawning horror in Nerissa’s face, he had not.

“I think we’ve all heard enough,” Brendan said, nodding for his wife to join him as he took the duke by the elbow and tried to force him away. “Some things are over and done with, and that’s one of them.”

“Ah, well…always best to know everything there is to know about a person before you marry them,” Lucien murmured. His smile was pitiless and cold. “You’re correct, Merrick. It is time to leave.”

Chapter 31

The walk back to the house seemed to take forever.

Nerissa was reeling from shock. A baby, which certainly explained her nausea these past few days and her sudden penchant for tears. Lucien showing up here in all his high-handed glory, Lucien who had once said he would never again meddle in another’s life after his manipulations had nearly killed his wife and taken the life of his unborn child, Lucien who did not seem to have changed one iota,
not one damned bit
.

The tears clawed at the back of her nose, prickled her eyes and began to spill down her cheeks.

But Ruaidri….

He walked beside her, silent, bleeding, enigmatic.

“Is it true?” she asked, as they reached the anchor at the bottom of the drive where Brendan’s family lived.

He would not meet her eyes. “I was going to tell you when the time was right.”

“So it is true, then.”

“Aye. All of it.”

“You murdered your best friend? And killed a woman?”

“I didn’t kill her. She’s probably not even dead for all I know.” He looked away, his face closed-up, his eyes dark with pain. “She was like that, ye know. Came and went. Attached herself to the hero of the moment, fell madly in love with him and the moment his star began to set she moved on to someone else.”

“I… I can’t believe you didn’t tell me any of this,” she whispered, her world crashing down around her.

“I told ye, I was waitin’ for the right time.”

“To tell me you
murdered
someone?” her voice was high and thready. “People who love each other don’t keep those kinds of secrets, Ruaidri!”

“Well, lass, ye weren’t exactly forthcoming about things yerself.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Ehm…a baby?”

“I didn’t know. It was Mira who put it all together, not me. Besides, if I’d known I would have told you. It’s not like I deliberately kept something from you!’

His jaw tightened, and she saw him take a deep and steadying breath. “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“When were you planning on talking about it? Next year? Next decade? Next century?”

“Ye’re makin’ a scene.”

“I can’t believe this!”

“Believe it. It’s true. Josiah Brown was my best friend, a former shipmate and eventually fellow captain. I killed him. Shot him dead. Your brother was wrong about a lot of things, but he got that one right.”

“So you don’t deny it, then?”

“There’s nothin’ to deny.”

She walked the rest of the drive up to the house and sat down heavily on the steps. This man that she had married, this man whose past was as known to her as what lay beyond the moon, this man who had not quite lied to her but who had withheld a critical truth, moved to catch up. He reached down for her and tried to touch her cheek. She turned her head away.

“I can’t believe you kept this from me,” she said, dabbing at her eyes.

“I didn’t murder him, Nerissa. Murder is intent. I never intended to kill him. It was an accident.”

“An
accident
?”

Ruaidri sat down on the step beside her. She stiffened, angry with him and deservedly so. “An accident,” he repeated. And then he drew a deep breath, put his bruised and aching head in his bleeding hands, and forced himself to go back through the years, to a tavern in Boston after he’d lost his ship, the people’s acclaim, his pride following his humiliating capture as the Irish Pirate. A time when Dolores, who was little more than a courtesan but whose buxom beauty and bold eyes had been his undoing, still loved him. But Josiah’s sun had risen as Ruaidri’s had set, and Dolores had dropped him like an anchor in harbor, quickly hitching her wagon to the new hero instead. The pain at being betrayed by both his lover and his best friend had eviscerated what was left of his pride and happiness. Yes, he had loved her, yes, he’d been angry, yes, he’d accepted the challenge at daybreak thrown down by Josiah after Dolores, who was thrilled to have two of the most famous men in Boston fighting over her, drove them into a duel with a few well-placed taunts and lies in Josiah’s ear.

“It was daybreak and there she was, standin’ under a tree watchin’…and she was smilin’,” Ruaidri said. “We both turned and fired at the same time. Josiah was tryin’ to kill me, because that’s what love does to a man who thinks he’s been insulted, who thinks the woman he loves has been wronged. His shot winged my arm. Mine was meant to miss him and didn’t. I spun and fired just as he did and he lunged to the left as I pulled the trigger, tryin’ to lessen the target he made. And I’d jerked the gun to the left to avoid hittin’ him. He and the ball collided. He took it in the stomach.” Ruaidri sat slumped and looking down at his boots, his bloodied knuckles thrust up through his hair and curling to grip it in hard fists. “He died in agony, cursin’ me in his final breaths. And now ye know.”

“And Dolores?”

“She left. Just turned around and walked away and I never saw her again. Probably ended up on a ship somewhere, tryin’ to get her hooks into the next probable hero. She liked sailors. I don’t know what happened to the manky bitch and I don’t care.”

A long moment went by, with neither of them looking at the other.

Blood ran steadily down Ruaidri’s knuckles, seeping into his hair.

And Nerissa suddenly felt exhausted.

She looked over at him. “Why didn’t you tell me, Ruaidri?”

He straightened up and looked off down the drive, toward the river. “Because I was scared, Nerissa. That’s why.”

“Scared of what?”

“Scared that ye’d leave me if ye knew the truth.”

She looked down, tears filling her eyes, and fingered a knothole in the steps. “It hurts me that you didn’t trust in my love enough to confess something so important.”

“I’m sorry, Nerissa. I made a complete hash of it.”

“Yes, you did. My brother hurt me terribly with his actions. And now you, by your failure to confide in me…you have hurt me as well. At the moment, I don’t think I can trust anyone anymore.”

“I’m still the same man I was before ye learned any of this.”

“You may be the same man, but I’m not the same woman. An hour ago, I believed in you. You were my hero, my knight in shining armor. Now I’ve been wounded by two of the people I love most in this world. Both of you treated me as though I was something fragile, breakable, unable to handle the truth or even make my own decisions. Both of you have let me down.” She got to her feet. “I need to go rest.”

“I’ll come with you. We’ll talk.”

“No, Ruaidri. I wish to be alone. Go back to
Tigershark
. Get Jeffcote to stitch you up before you bleed to death all over again.”

“Nerissa, please—”

“Better yet, go take Andrew down to Adams and get it over with so that he can move on with his own life and get back to the woman he loves. I need time to think, to make sense of all that I’ve learned today, and the last two people I want to see right now are you and Lucien.”

She got up, opened the door, and without a backward glance, went inside.