To Taste Temptation (Legend of the Four Soldiers #1)(84)

—from Iron Heart

It was late and she was tired, but she still felt him before she saw him. Emeline’s heart gave a wild, joyous leap, entirely outside of her control. He was here. Samuel was here. She turned from her vanity table where she’d been brushing her hair in preparation for bed.

He stood by the door that connected her room to a small dressing room. His face was battered, his left eye swollen and black, and he held one hand against his side as if something pained him there. She stared at him, not daring to believe, trying not to breathe in case he evaporated from her sight.

“Your hair is beautiful,” he said softly.

It was the last thing she expected him to say. It made her self-conscious and oddly shy. He’d never seen her with her hair down. Never seen her in such a normal, homey setting.

“Thank you.” She set her brush down on the vanity table and nearly knocked it to the floor, her hands were shaking so badly.

He glanced at the brush. “I’ve come to say good-bye.”

“You’re leaving so soon?”

For some reason, she hadn’t expected this, either. She’d thought she would be the one to leave first, after her marriage to Jasper. But that was silly, of course. Samuel had to return to the Colonies some time. She’d always known that.

He nodded slowly at her question. “As soon as I finish my business, Rebecca and I will sail.”

“Oh.” There were thousands of things she wanted to ask him, thousands of things to say to him, but somehow she couldn’t give voice to her real thoughts. She was stuck in this awkwardly formal conversation instead. She cleared her throat. “Is it shipping business? Or the business of finding who betrayed your regiment?”

“Both.” He ambled into her room, pausing to pick up a china dish from a side table and turning it over to look at the bottom.

She swallowed. “But surely it will take weeks, maybe months to find out who—”

But he was already shaking his head. “Thornton’s the traitor.” He replaced the dish.

“How do you know?”

He shrugged, not looking particularly interested in the subject. “He isn’t really Thornton. I think he’s probably another soldier, MacDonald, who was under arrest when we were attacked. MacDonald somehow took Thornton’s place.”

She frowned, plucking at her wrap anxiously. She wore only a shift and the silk wrap; her feet were bare. She felt vulnerable with him prowling about her private rooms. Vulnerable, but not afraid. There was something inevitable about this scene, as if she knew all along that Samuel would someday enter her rooms. She only wished she could hold him a little longer. She looked down at her trembling hands in her lap and asked another question, delaying what would come.

“Wouldn’t Thornton’s friends or family have turned MacDonald in?”

“Most of Thornton’s friends were killed at Spinner’s Falls. Maybe all of them. As to family”—Samuel fingered the heavy brocade curtains hanging on her bed—“they were dead, too, all except his wife, and she died soon after Thornton, or MacDonald, returned home. I imagine he killed her.”

Emeline caught her breath at the casual comment. “Why are you doing this, Samuel?”

He looked up at her tone. “What?”

“Why are you bent on following this trail?” She leaned forward, wanting to cut through his defenses as he had cut through hers. They had so little time left. “Why spend all this effort and money pursuing the man? Why, after all these years?”

“Because I can and the others can’t.”

“What do you mean?” she whispered.

He dropped the curtain and turned fully to her. There was no artifice, no shield in place to keep her from seeing the desolation in his face. “They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

“Jasper—”

He laughed. “Even the ones who survived are dead, don’t you see? Vale may joke and drink and play a fool, but you’ll be wedding yourself to a corpse, never doubt that.”

She stood to meet his awful despair head-on. “I do doubt that. Jasper may have his demons, but he’s alive. You saved him, Samuel.”

He shook his head. “I wasn’t there.”

“You ran to bring help—”

“I ran away,” he rasped, and she shut her mouth, for she’d never heard him say it aloud. “At the height of the battle, when I knew we were going to lose, when I knew the Indians would overrun us and take scalps from still-living men, I figured there was no longer any point in fighting, so I hid. And when they took Vale, Munroe, your brother, and the other men captive, I ran.”

She ventured close to him and grasped his coat in both fists, feeling the wool on her fingertips. She stood on tiptoe and brought her face as near to his as she could. “You hid because you knew that it was pointless to die. You ran to save the lives of the men captured.”

“Did I?” he whispered. “Did I? That’s what I told myself at the time, that I was running for the others, but perhaps I lied. Perhaps I ran merely for myself.”

“No.” She shook her head desperately. “I know you, Samuel. I know you. You ran to save them, pure and simple, and I admire you for it.”

“Do you?” His eyes seemed to focus on her face finally. “Yet your brother died before I could return with the ransom. I failed him. I failed you.”