Eliza snatched her boot up before Darius could touch her again, however innocently, and pulled it on, knotting the laces with more urgency than finesse. “Thank you for your hospitality, my lord.”
“Please call me Darius. I am no lord, Eliza.”
A shiver traced along her spine when he murmured her given name, despite her asking him not to do so. She didn’t respond, didn’t argue, barely batted an eyelid. She just needed to be gone from there. “Thank you for your hospitality, Darius. I really must be going before the children worry.”
“Duncan will accompany you to your door,” he replied, much to her very great relief.
Dropping a curtsy, the best she could with her ankle smarting and her stomach churning and the blood in her veins roaring in her ears, Eliza turned and quit the room before he changed his mind and came with her.
She’d dodged more than one bullet that morning but with his studied gaze prickling her senses all the way down the long drive, Eliza knew it wasn’t over. If wishes came true, she would never see Darius again but she was no longer a girl who put stock in such fanciful things. She was a desperately terrified woman who believed the Fates hated her with a passion bordering on the edge of lunacy and she had nowhere to hide, nowhere to run to and everything to lose.
The coming days would see if she survived once again or if she was indeed doomed the way her father intended when he’d taken his pistol in hand and left the world of the living.
She hoped he was burning in hell right now.
She hoped she wasn’t soon to join him.
Chapter Three
Darius wasn’t particularly comfortable nor intimate with guilt. He didn’t feel it over his years as a pirate, or the following years as a privateer. He didn’t wake from nightmares about the lives he’d taken or the ships he’d sunk. What point was there in feeling bad over events that had already transpired and therefore could neither be undone nor forgotten? Better to ration with the mistakes of the past and move on from them, learn from them. Not that he did. He still seemed to fall into the same holes. The only thing that had changed over the years was the speed at which he could climb out of said holes.
Feeling another figurative hole in his very near future, he should have fled in the opposite direction. Unfortunately for him, guilt bit at his insides over the state of his neighbour’s well-being. It had eaten at him for most of the night. He felt a great deal of agony for causing Eliza’s injury and then not seeing her home. It had been her wish to go alone and he, like the gentleman he was attempting to portray, had let her go. Not entirely alone since he’d sent one of his men along. The polite course of action would have been to accompany her back to her estate, apologise to her father for almost shooting her in the back, and then forget all about this part of the matter.
But he couldn’t. It was almost as though her body had imprinted itself to his arms and he couldn’t overlook how little she weighed or the fire she answered back with, the sass she threw his way when he attempted to lighten the moment or be funny.
Darius certainly could never say why he and his men had just cut down seven fine pines that likely would have grown into excellent pieces of timber to be used to make a table or chairs or a bed. It wasn’t his guilt over sending her home to explain to the brothers and sisters that they couldn’t have a tree because he would accuse them of stealing said tree and set the magistrate onto them.
The fear in her eyes, the fear she’d tried to hide, had been genuine and instant. He should have hounded her about it then. But gentlemen did not hound ladies. This much he knew.
But you could have asked more firmly.
Damn it all, it was not guilt! He was curious. He didn’t get to ask her how many brothers and sisters she had or what the scandal had been that she’d mentioned and then very quickly wandered off to a different topic. He was curious, not worried. And he certainly hadn’t shaved just for her. The beard had been making his chin and cheeks itch like the devil. With a bare face and his hair pulled back at his nape, the cold wind bit harder than the day before.
If he had to go so far as to admit anything else, it was that he was making amends. He didn’t need a war with his neighbour’s daughter. He needed Penfold onside, sooner rather than later, or war with his daughter would be far easier than the alternative.
“I’ve seen brothels turned out better than the ruin they’re living in,” Duncan, a sailor of around fifty years, said gruffly to his left. He’d said much the same when he’d returned from Penfold’s estate the day before.
“I bet you have,” Marcus said with a loud laugh at the back of their ragtag crew.
Who wouldn’t be curious about her living arrangements when it was reported that the house his neighbour resided in seemed to look as though it would collapse in the first of the spring rains?
Darius bet Duncan exaggerated and wanted something to do. It bored them to be respectable and it grated on all the lads’
