The Pirate's Duty (Regent's Revenge #3)(60)
~ Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 20 October 1809
Oriana urged her mare into a gallop as the relentless surf, a thunderous ebbing and flowing mass, crashed onto the granite rocks beneath the jagged clifftops. The coastal path led away from the vicarage, from safety, and from John, to Nicholas and the Marauder’s Roost. The trail was the obvious route the wagon would have taken and the fastest way to catch up to Nicholas.
The boy had never left without her before, especially without requesting more of the food Mrs. Pickering had prepared for him. Crestfallen, Oriana thought about the way Nicholas looked forward to the indulgences he didn’t receive at home. Farm life was hard, and he was always hungry.
Panic seized her heart, squeezing the organ until she felt as if she couldn’t breathe. The wind tore at her silk skirts, whipping them away from her hips, and her hair danced fitfully about her face. She swatted it away and reached up, lowering her bonnet over her head and relishing the salty tang moistening her skin. She prodded her horse faster over the uneven ruts sprouting with fresh grass, gorse, brambles, and sweet-smelling flowers that clung to what little dirt there was to be found on such rocky ground.
As the afternoon waned, fluffy wisps of white, heaving over the ever-changing horizon like weightless cream, absorbed a spectrum of color. Through sunshine and shadow, dawn and dust, the elements transformed and clouds thickened into a leaden gray. It would be dark soon and rain would make it harder to follow the wagon’s trail.
Feeling alone, small, and miserably lost in a world determined to spin out of control, Oriana had tried to better people’s lives—Nicholas’s life—but nothing she did would ever be enough. As a businesswoman in a place where men were men and women were, well . . . birthed for the specific purpose of pleasing men, she’d saved and scraped to get by, giving the majority of her income to the poor. All she had left to give was love to a man she’d reluctantly trusted.
Was John responsible for Nicholas’s flight? Did he say something to offend the boy? Saints preserve her . . . Did Charles have anything to do with this?
Lost in her thoughts, she failed to recognize that her bonnet had loosened from her head, only noticing when it flew off.
“Oh!” She looked over her shoulder, watching the foolish piece of finery tumbling end-to-end, and in doing so, she spied someone following her in the distance.
Sunlight glinted off horse and rider, merging the two together as one. Man and beast, sculpted muscle and sinew, confidence paying tribute to power. The agile rider’s blond hair whipped about his head. His broad-shouldered, dark-blue knit-frock disappeared momentarily as he bent at the waist and slipped off the saddle, hanging precariously off to the side to capture her bonnet. Then, like a silver-tongued droll teller segueing to another story, the man swung back into the saddle, sitting erect once more.
“Oriana!” he yelled, racing straight toward her and waving her bonnet.
“John!” Oriana gasped, exhaling with relief when she recognized his voice. But where had a fisherman gotten that type of equestrian training? She only knew six men who could ride astride with similar dexterity, and they were all Seatons!
She slowed her horse into a trot, desperate to be reassured that Nicholas had left the vicarage of his own accord. But what if he hadn’t . . . What if—
“You lost your bonnet,” John said as he came up beside her, not a bit out of breath.
John’s noble rescue made her belly tighten, and a strange warmth coil around her heart as she quickly snatched the bonnet from his fingers, determined to unleash her fury. “Do not for one moment think ye can show up, perform such a darin’ act, and talk your way into my good graces. What did ye do to Nicholas?”
“Do?” John squinted, his eyes glazing in the sunlight. “I didn’t do anything to the boy.” Grateful to discover John wasn’t involved in Nicholas’s disappearance, Oriana lowered her guard long enough to be stunned by his next statement. “Why are you risking your life by riding so close to the cliffs?”
“Nicholas is like a brother to me. I was chilled to the marrow when I found his discarded hat in the coach house.” She pounded her chest with her fist. “He would never leave without tellin’ me. Never!”
“Nicholas and the wagon are gone,” he said, stating the obvious. “Would the boy have any reason to leave on his own?”
She shook her head, trying to mask her fear that something horrible had happened. “He would never leave without finishin’ his pasties.”
John grumbled an unrecognizable sound as his brows knit together. He rose in the saddle, leather tack grinding under his weight. He glanced out to sea before arrowing his stare in the general direction of the Roost, a distant knob on the far side of the hill.
“You have a point,” he said, his voice carefully controlled.
She raised her chin defiantly and attempted to turn her horse away.
John grabbed the reins, narrowing the space between the two beasts, preventing her escape. “I would never hurt the boy, Oriana. I am not your enemy.”
Anguish churned inside her like a tumultuous surf, battering down the fortifications buttressing her heart. Shame flooded her. If Nicholas’s disappearance was Charles’s doing, if the boy had been kidnapped to get back at her, she wasn’t sure she could go on.
Perhaps that was for the best. She was a danger to anyone who got too close.