Chapter 13
Archer had his hand in his pocket—where he kept her absurd little pearl-buttoned glove—when Ruby appeared at the mouth of the cove.
He’d known she was coming. Bloody known it.
He’d spent the entire morning and afternoon peering over his shoulder whilst also receiving and then frantically hiding colorful French silks.
Honestly, he’d suspected she’d come sooner—had been rehearsing various explanations and deceptions for when she invariably found him out.
He almost wanted her to catch him. Part of him—a stupid part, the part that had stuck her glove in his pocket each morning for three days running—wanted to tell her the truth.
But when she finally appeared, she was flushed and disheveled, her pretty beribboned frock sandy and windblown. Her hand was in a fist at her breastbone, and her eyes were huge and terrorized.
His whole body shot to alertness. “Ruby? What is it?”
“Captain Archer!” She barely got the words out past her uneven breaths. “Thank goodness I’ve found you.”
It didn’t seem wildly surprising, considering he was about forty feet from where she’d discovered him three days earlier. “What’s wrong?”
“The Scourge,” she gasped. “It’s here!”
Archer stared at her in frank astonishment. The Scourge? What in the bloody, bleeding—
“The what?” he demanded. Surely he had misheard.
“The Scourge,” she said again. “It’s here—just past this cove. It was after me. Hunted me. I scarcely managed to get away!”
“What?”
He was typically more adept at talking, but then again, under typical circumstances, invented monsters did not come to life and stalk ladies-in-waiting on the beach.
She caught his hand and dragged him down the sand. “I’ll show you.”
He yanked at her hand to stop her. If there was something after her—not the Scourge, for God’s sake, because Lamentation had invented it, but something—surely she need not run directly at it.
Though, on the other hand, of course she would. She seemed to have a knack for hurling herself directly into trouble instead of fleeing it.
She freed her fingers from his grasp, then broke into a run. She tossed him a glance over her shoulder—a quick blue challenge. “Come on! Before it gets away.”
Shouldn’t she want it to get away? Did she mean for him to subdue whatever it was with his bare hands?
“Wait,” he hissed. “Slow down.”
She ignored him and darted around an algae-covered cliff face, her slippers leaving hasty footprints as she ran. The tide was coming in again; Archer’s boots shifted in the damp sand.
He ducked around the corner and nearly knocked her over. She’d stopped to look out at the beach, and all of his body collided with all of hers: softness and heat and trailing, tangled ribbons.
He caught her waist to steady them both and then, hastily, thrust her behind him.
“There it is,” she whispered, her gaze fixed on the sea. “The Scourge of St. Petroc’s. In the flesh.”
He followed her gaze, searching for the thing—the monster—that had frightened her.
He froze, looking out at the water’s edge.
The Scourge of St. Petroc’s, it appeared, was a seal.
An enormous, scarred, spotted bull seal, for some baffling reason nowhere near the colony that lived on the other side of St. Petroc’s.
He was making his way ponderously out into the ocean, but he stopped at Ruby and Archer’s approach.
As they watched, the seal lifted his head and emitted a long, high-pitched, bone-chilling moan.
Archer froze in horrified anticipation. Did seals . . . charge?
To Archer’s relief, the seal dropped his head and resumed his trek into the ocean.
And behind Archer, Ruby giggled.
He spun to face. “What the devil—”
“I’m sorry,” she said—she did not look sorry in the slightest—“but your face.” She clapped a gloved hand over her mouth, but more laughter broke out around the edges.
“You ungovernable little—” He caught her waist and dragged her backward into a small hollow in the cliff’s face. She tried to dig in her heels, and one of her slippers fell off, sticking in the sand. “You knew there was no Scourge.”
Her face was tipped up to his, all amusement. Somehow her fingers had locked around his upper arms. “I knew,” she said. “I’ve always known.”
He tucked her into the hollow, her back against the damp rough shelf of stone. “Why would you—”
“It was a mad notion, I know.” Her laughter was still there, in her voice, in the peach-tender curve of her mouth.
“I kept running into that fellow when I was trying to find your hiding place on the beach. And it struck me that if there was a rumored legend about a monstrous sea beast, he was probably the cause.” Her eyes were bluer than he’d ever seen them, and her hands were still on his biceps.
“He did not truly hunt me. I was joking about that bit.”
“God,” he muttered. “Lunatic. Witch. You wouldn’t laugh like that if I’d met the damned thing on the field of battle and been eaten for my trouble.”
“You needn’t worry.” Her eyes sparkled. “I was prepared to hold you back by any means necessary.”
He crowded closer to her—damned impossible woman, she deserved crowding, deserved to be knocked off her feet and unsettled. “You don’t think I would’ve won?”
“Against a fifty-stone bull seal? To be honest—no.”
“I can’t think what I’ve done to deserve such little faith. Did you note the part where I put my body between you and the mysterious Scourge?”
Her eyes were on him—on his face. “I noted it,” she said.
Her voice had gone soft. All of her was soft—soft and unbearably close. Without his strictly intending it, his hands found hers, and he tugged at the fingers of her gloves.
But she closed her hand to stop him before he reached her skin. “I brought you down here,” she said quietly, “because I wished to be alone with you. I wanted to tell you that I know, Archer.”
He looked at her—her clear, encompassing gaze—and felt a cold wash of fear.
He tried to make his voice light. “About the Scourge? You’ve proven that well enough.”
“Not just the Scourge. I know everything.”
As always, he felt exposed by her. Vulnerable. He didn’t know what she thought she knew. “‘Everything’ seems a high bar,” he murmured. “Even for you.”
“I know that you truly are the steward of Pomeroy House,” she said, “though you use it as a cover for your smuggling operation. And I know that the rest of the house’s staff is . . . not. Not staff. Not meant to be there. They’re yours, aren’t they? Your people. Your crew.”
His heart clenched, and if he hadn’t been holding her hands, he might have stumbled backward.
His crew. She knew about his crew.
An agonized tangle of emotions tightened his throat, cutting him off from speech. Relief—some part of it was relief, that he no longer had to lie and dissemble, that he could stop trying to skip out from the purview of her damned relentless eyes.
But more potent than his relief by far was his fear. Fear that she might use her knowledge against them all, that she would put an end to their living as quickly as she’d eviscerated the Quenby scheme—and as ruthlessly.
And Quenby. Bloody hell. Surely she’d not put that together as well?
Perhaps she had. She wasn’t done talking. Her voice was low and desperately, painfully earnest. “I brought you down here because I wanted to tell you that it doesn’t matter to me—to any of us—how you came to be here. We’re not going to reveal your secrets to House di Sangro or my . . . my father.”
His chest hurt. Her words seemed to have hit him directly in his solar plexus, as solid as cannon fire, and he couldn’t sort out how to respond.
She knew about his smuggling, and she knew about his crew, and it seemed to him that she held their future in her small gloved hand.
Four months ago, he had stood at the side of a room and watched her put his carefully crafted scheme to the flames.
And now she was asking for his trust—asking him to believe that she would not do it again.
It doesn’t matter to me how you came to be here, she’d said.
Somehow, he wanted to believe that she meant it. He wanted to believe that it did not matter where he had come from, but only that he was here, on the beach, with her.
Slowly, her gaze dipped to where their hands were entangled, and she closed her fingers around his. Gently, as though she thought he might flee.
And then she looked up. “Tam and Alice and I are no more meant to be here than your crew. We are not ladies-in-waiting to Princess Serafina. It is a scheme of my own devising because I wished for freedom. For a different life.”
His heart beat hard against his ribs. Surprise rocked him, bright and sharp as an electric shock.
She moistened her lips. “If you asked for our letters from the Princess Serafina,” she said, “I could not give them to you. No one knows we are here. Not even my father.”
He stood motionless, off balance, staggered by the percussive force of her words. Not by the revelation of her scheme—that much did not startle him—but by the way she had given the information up.
If you asked for our letters, I could not give them to you.
If he wrote to Signor Neri, he could have her evicted from the house. If he told her father, her dream of a different life would vanish like so much smoke.
What mad impulse had led her to trust him this way? Through what insane store of courage and fortitude could she put her faith in him so utterly?
“Ruby,” he got out. His voice was hoarse, and he found that he was gripping her hand.
“I don’t want you to be afraid,” she said. “That’s why I’m telling you all of this. We won’t use the truth against you. We will not harm your crew.”
He had to force his jaw to loosen. Had to push the words out, all grit and rasp. “You think I’m not afraid of you?”
She blinked. Her lips parted. “I’m—sorry?”
“You terrify me.” He put his free hand to her cheek. His thumb just touched the corner of her mouth. “You and your damned honesty. Your stupid reckless courage.”
Her chin came up. Blood rushed to her cheeks, warm beneath his hand. “I did not come down here to be insulted.”