It wasn't exactly what she'd feared. She wanted things from him, fantasized and dreamed about the promises of future pleasure he'd made. Her body roused itself at the mere thought of him. If she'd stayed in London she'd have been lost, just as she'd worried.
But the wickedness seemed to stop there. She didn't find herself watching the men of her new village with need. In fact, she'd even tried to look upon them with something close to lust and had failed miserable. The shirtless young men splashing in the sea did not tempt her to anything even close to sin.
It was just Hart.
The salt wind snatched away her sigh, and Emma leaned her spade against the grayed wood of her cottage wall. She would have to whitewash this summer to protect it from the constant caress of the wind, but she would miss the silvery glint of the worn boards.
Emma slipped off her apron and waved to Bess in the kitchen window. Then she headed straight for the path she'd already worn in the waving grass.
Bess couldn't begin to understand the charm of the narrow cliff path and the stone-rough beach below. You’ ll break your neck, she'd warned countless times, but Emma thought the reward worth the risk.
Down on that narrow strip of sand she felt free. Strange, since she couldn't walk more than two hundred yards in either direction. But the steady breeze and the cry of the gulls and the strange green scent of the air. . . it all filled her up, pushed into all the empty places inside her and made her whole. She was young again, seven years old and happy. She was safe. Loved.
But she couldn't seem to carry that feeling back up with her. She certainly couldn't coax it inside to keep her company at night.
"This place is good," Emma whispered as she picked her way down the path. Her foot slipped on pebbles and she banged into the rough cliff face but hardly slowed at all. "My life is good," she muttered instead, determined to make it true. Soon London would be a distant memory. Hart no more than a . . . a . . .
"A footnote," she said, tasting cruelty in the word and trying to make herself believe it.
Something crawled over her neck. She brushed at the sensation, but it remained. Anxiety probably, sprung from her own guilt. She had lied and cheated and used people. Though she'd told herself that Hart was a powerful, impervious man of the world, there was no denying the burn of her shame. She'd hurt him, could only have hurt him more by her calculated disappearance.
Her hand rubbed idly at the nape of her neck, but the sensation remained, even through the hour she spent staring out to the white-capped sea.
He had started in Scarborough, certain that Emma would be naturally attracted to the crowds of the resorts. There was some money to be made there, trouble to find, though at this time of the year the crowds would be less flush than she was accustomed to in London. Still, perhaps the merchant classes were a livelier sort, and more easily swayed by her gentle manners. If she could manage gentle manners for any length of time. But she hadn't been in Scarborough. His week there had been entirely fruitless. He had found no trace of her, no evidence that she'd even passed through. Now he felt he was wandering aimlessly.
If he did find her, he no longer knew who she'd be. She was not the woman he'd thought she was. She was a girl. A daughter, a niece. A quiet young woman remembered fondly in her village.
She was not a widow or a vixen or a roving thief. She was not worldly or experienced. The sensual knowledge he'd recognized in her had been nothing more than the echo of years spent in a den of inequity. Or that was what he hoped anyway. Hoped that she had only seen and heard.
A sense of something misplaced would not stop taunting his brain. He'd been to Denmore's home once, a giant block of cold granite and crenellated towers, but he could remember little more than an impression of dark hallways and darker guests. Whatever memories he might have retained had been jarred from his brain a few days later when he'd proposed to his lover and found devastation instead of joy.
Vague memories aside, he was sure her childhood had been less than it should have been. First her mother had died, then her father and brother. Then she'd been sent to live with a stranger, a great-uncle she'd never met. At least it seemed she had been happy there, for a short time.
Hart no longer knew how to hate her; he no longer knew what to feel. He only wanted to see her and . . .
And what?
Whenever he tried to puzzle it out, his chest hurt, his lungs froze. So he moved blindly forward, tracking a woman who meant not to be found. A woman who'd torn down everything he'd built to protect himself.
"Only a mile more, Your Grace," the driver called back.
Hart nodded absently, fairly certain they'd find nothing here, as they'd found nothing in the other huts and manors and cottages. Every lead seemed like a good one, every land agent perfectly sure that he'd dealt with a woman of her description. But a week of traveling up and down the coast through every village an
d hamlet had turned up two widows, several harlots, and one woman old enough to be his grandmother.
She wasn't here, and if she wasn't on the Yorkshire coast, then she may as well have sailed to America.
Jesus, she probably had sailed to America. And it would take his investigators years to find her, if they ever did. A headache bloomed to life behind his left eye.
"Just coming up on it now, sir. Shall I drive past?"
"Yes." He pushed wearily off the seatback to look out at the view. Green grass, wind-shaped trees, the same vista he'd been studying for seven days. And then a cottage, worn but charming. Chickens pecked at the yard. Hart's eyes began to glaze over.
The far side of the house came into view and two women bent over the furrows and hills of a garden. One of them looked like . . . He leaned closer to the door until the breeze touched his cheek. One of them looked like Bess, and the other. . .
She wore a wide-brimmed hat and a stained apron tied at the waist. Her dress was simple and modest, blue muslin sprigged with little green leaves.
It couldn't be her, laboring in a garden like a drover's wife. She was a baron's daughter, a gentlewoman. Then Hart remembered the extensive plots that had surrounded the burned-out shell of her uncle's home. He remembered that Mr. Bromley had commented on her dedication to the gardens.