Eliza approached him. “May we stay here until you have reached a conclusion?”
Sir Percival grew red in the face as he shook his head. “Certainly not. Not unless you want the filthy tales to spread far and wide that the Penfold children are seeking refuge in the arms of a bastard and pirate.”
Eliza bit her tongue against defending Darius. She considered admitting that he was her husband but knew it would make things so much worse right then. Darius must have thought the same since he hadn’t said anything about their union yet either. “Then what will become of us?”
“Wickham is telling the truth in that he is your guardian. I have the necessary papers. You must go with him until the matter is resolved.”
*
“Over my dead body,” Darius roared. He handed Sarah to Wes and surged forward, his pistol in hand in a blink of an eye. “You will not take them anywhere.”
The baby’s cries added to the growing tension as a handful of Darius’s men gathered at his back. The two guards who accompanied Wickham also drew weapons and met Darius halfway, effectively blocking his path to the earl.
Wickham smiled his triumph. “They will not be in your corruptive presence for one more second of this day. You should take your men and your bastard and leave England while you still can.”
Darius searched the magistrate’s wide eyes looking for any hint of compassion that may lie there. “He only wants the girls’ dowries. Can’t you see how he bends the tales? If it is discovered that Eliza and her sisters travel alone with him, they’ll be ruined well and truly.”
But Sir Percival turned back towards the carriage, dismissing him much the same as most of the people in his life had so far. “They were ruined the moment you took them in, lad. They may yet need a man of Wickham’s character and good standing if they want to claw their way out of the holes you have dug for them.”
Darius growled and tried to advance but one of Wickham’s men threw him back.
A flash of lavender and black caught his eye as his wife and his family were ushered into the other carriage. “Don’t do this, Eliza, let me help you. We can do this—” Oomph. Pain exploded his stomach and Darius crumpled, black spots shimmering in his vision. “Don’t do it,” he whispered, caught off guard and not seeing the second blow coming for his head until it was almost too late.
One of his men deflected that blow and threw a punch that sent Wickham’s man reeling into the other one, blood dripping from his chin.
He ignored them as he sought out Eliza, tried to make her see she didn’t have to go. Bright blue eyes bathed in moisture met his across the snowy gravel, churned up by hooves and boots as men scrambled and horses shied from both the smell of blood and fear. “You can’t save us now, Darius. It’s too late.”
“Bullshit,” he said, but the curse emerged as a barely there growl and then she was gone. The door closed, the henchmen climbed on the side of the carriage and the horses were whipped into action. Tarquin only just managed to drag him out of the way of being trampled.
As Darius lay on the cold ground, fighting to regain both his breath and his senses, he kept seeing the hurt in Eliza’s eyes when it clicked in her mind that he had been behind it almost from the start. The betrayal when she learned she didn’t have to marry a bastard after all. The sheer determination in her eyes and the belief that she was the only person in her life who could save them the way she had already done so many times before.
The final twist of the knot in the rope he could use to hang himself with had been the fact that she had gone. She hadn’t spoken up. She hadn’t declared him her husband and able to take care of her brothers and sisters, of her. It’s too late. You can’t save us.
If he had a title he could have saved them all. If he’d been born to an honourable man on the right side of the blanket, none of it would have happened. If he’d been an unremarkable bastard instead of a bloody pirate, he might have been worth something to her and not considered worse than the mud beneath their boots.
Darius sat, his head in his hands long after the sounds of his future leaving him faded into the irregular beats of his heart ricocheting like a thunderous echo in his head. His men stood around, probably wondering what the hell had just happened. Probably wondering if their captain was indeed a spineless cur who couldn’t even keep the faith of his own wife long enough to make her stand at his side and proclaim him good.
Perhaps this had been the cruel trick coming to sweep his feet from under him? The final blow always came. When he’d been a lad and his grandfather had tried to help him, he’d been happy before the death blow came. When he was a young pirate, full of bluster and a sense of worth for the first time ever, he’d staged a mutiny against the one man who had been more father to him than his own. Why couldn’t things just work out for him? Why did it always have to come to Darius being the last one standing, on his own, useless, worthless, hurt beyond words? It was that hurt he’d been trying to keep from cracking his fragile heart.
“Captain?” Tarquin’s voice seemed so far away and Darius wanted to ignore it, block it out so he could hear only his own self-recriminations.
“Captain, we have to go after them.”
A buzz of consensus followed but Darius knew it was futile. “We can’t.”
Wes squatted next to him and
