My Seductive Innocent (40 page)

“Scarsdale’s grand plan for you was to leave you at Whitecliffe and visit you once, maybe twice, a year. He would live his life in London as he always had. And as for loyal, if you consider a man who instructed his mistress to go back to the London townhouse he kept her ensconced in for his visits, then perhaps we simply differ on what loyalty in marriage means.”

Sophia grasped her throat, feeling as if someone had a hand around it and was squeezing until her air was cut off. “I can’t breathe!” she gasped.

Amelia was at her side in a moment, begging her to come away and let them talk. Shaking and clammy, Sophia shook her off. “When?” She hated the hoarse, desperate sound of her voice. “When did he tell his mistress to stay in the London townhome?”

“He rendezvoused with her the night before you were to marry and assured her their arrangement would not be changing. I only know because when I went to visit all the property on the list from the solicitor, she was still there, bold as brass. She claimed Nathan would want her to stay, and then she told me of their liaison the night before he wed you.”

Sophia’s stomach twisted and turned. She slapped a palm over her mouth and ran blindly from the room. Behind her, voices called her name and clattering footsteps rose around her. Aversley caught up with her in the main hall and swiveled her toward him.

Amelia rushed up behind him, tears spilling from her blue eyes. “Sophia, I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to lie. We weren’t even sure of what the truth was. And we thought perhaps he might have grown to care for you. And...”

Sophia clutched her stomach because it felt as if her body was caving in on itself. “I understand why you did it,” Sophia choked out. “Please, I want to go home.”
Home.
Where she had built a future on a lie. Where the man she had thought kind and perfect turned out to be the cruelest man she had met by far. No amount of physical pain she had ever endured compared to the dizzying pain she was experiencing now. She’d never loved anyone the way she had loved Nathan, and she prayed to God she never would again.

W
ith his legs and arms chained, Nathan had no other way to try to rouse the American prisoner in the oarsmen row ahead of him but to spit at him, which he did repeatedly to no avail. Warren had stopped rowing some time ago, and any minute, the corsair guard, Murad, whose duty it was to walk the manned rows of the galley and make sure none of the slaves were slacking, would be coming by their section.

In the past year of captivity on the ship, he had survived by doing three things: planning his escape, which meant knowing the exact times the guards came around to do their checks; reliving every second he had spent with Sophia; and imagining every second he had yet to spend with her. The last had delivered him from the edge of insanity and given him the strength to survive.

Nathan counted down the seconds in his head until the guard would appear.
Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

The guard stopped at the row in front of him and kicked Warren. The man’s head lolled farther to the right, but bound as he was by the chains, he did not fall over. The guard kicked him again, this time directly in the head with a sickening
thud
. Warren still didn’t move. Murad muttered the word for
death
in Arabic, and Nathan turned away and looked out to sea. He would not feel sadness for the man. Not now. He could not afford sadness for anyone.

He forced himself to keep rowing, still staring at the lapping waves in the distance. Sometimes he imagined how peaceful it must be under the water. No pain. No sound. But no Sophia, either. He squeezed his eyes shut and exhaled a long breath. Damn sorrow was trying to creep in.

He refocused his mind by concentrating on what the guard was saying. Arabic was a bloody complicated language, but he’d managed to learn a few words that were repeated often on the ship.
Death
,
beating
,
starvation
,
fight
, and the most pleasant one of all―the one he was waiting for―
attack
. Because when and if this ship ever came under attack by the privateers he knew to be out there somewhere hunting down the slavers, Nathan would escape. It was his only hope, unless they ever took him off the ship to work in the quarries or be sold in Tripoli or Algiers. He would try to escape at that time, as well, if it came, but success was even less likely then.

The major flaw in his plan to escape when under attack was ensuring he was unchained. And the only time he was ever unchained was to fight. The captain was a predictable bloodthirsty man who liked to see a good fight every day, and Nathan had realized quickly that if he volunteered to fight, he would be unchained, which would keep him fit. The downside was he could very well be killed. Those who didn’t fight slept, defecated, urinated, and if they were very good, received a sip of dirty water or a scrap of food when they were not rowing. Those skeletal men died quickly or went out of their minds. In his year on the ship, twenty had died and at least that many had gone mad. But a man could still row while mad. The thought chilled him to the bone, despite the relentless sun that was beating down.

The clanking of Warren’s chains being undone reached Nathan’s ear, but he did not take his gaze from the sea. Watching a dead man being dragged from his place sent Nathan to a dark place that hard to overcome. After a few moments, he heard a faint splash over the steady creak from the rowing. Dark thoughts of the relief death would bring beckoned to him like a siren song. He replaced the sweet whispers with memories of Sophia’s laughter.

“Five minutes,” Jean Luc whispered beside Nathan as he rowed.

Nathan offered the Frenchman a quick nod to acknowledge he’d heard him. He calculated how many times he had pulled the oars today and concluded Jean Luc was correct. They had five minutes until the call for fighting volunteers would ring out over the slapping of the ocean against the wood and the groans of the enslaved men.

They had been sitting beside each other for an entire year, and Jean Luc was one of six men, other than Nathan, who volunteered to fight regularly. They didn’t ever have to fight each other because the captain, smug bastard that he was, always matched one of the corsairs against a prisoner. That was very lucky because one thing Nathan understood about himself was that he had lost whatever morals he had once possessed. He was now just as barbaric as his captors, and he wasn’t certain, if faced with the choice between his own death or Jean Luc’s, that he would not kill the Frenchman.

The thought made his skin crawl, as if trying to get away from his mind. Killing had become a necessary part of living. Sometimes the captain would say the fight was to the death and sometimes until first blood. Six times it had been to the death when Nathan had fought. He had killed six men. As he rowed, his fingers tingled with the memory, making knots form in his gut.

Would he ever be able to confess to Sophia what he had done? Her image appeared in his mind in perfect detail. She smiled her radiant smile and her cerulean eyes, which matched the color of the sky above him on many days, twinkled. She worried her lip for a moment before tugging on her short, dark hair with her slender fingers.

He wanted to tell her that he loved her. She’d offered him her unconditional love, and he’d been too goddamn afraid to accept it. He’d feared that the moment he took what she offered, she would snatch it away or show herself to be someone other than who she’d portrayed. He’d been a fool. The only thing he truly missed other than freedom was
her
.

If he ever had the chance to see her again, he was going to take everything she wanted to offer him. He was going to drink her in. Breathe her. Cling to her. Cherish her. And lavish her.

He wanted to start his life over with her and see all the possibilities for happiness in the world, and all the promise of love between them, just as she saw it. She was stronger than he’d ever been.

“It’s time,” Jean Luc rasped.

Nathan blinked, clearing his thoughts as the call for a fighter rang out. He raised his hand, along with Jean Luc and four others, and they waited in tense silence to see who would be chosen. Nathan had not had a turn in four days and he desperately needed to stand up, but he gritted his teeth in an effort not to show his desperation. The guard stopped in front of him, then moved on to Jean Luc before turning back and smiling while saying the Arabic word for
Killer
.

He tensed at the moniker the guards had given him. They meant it as a compliment, yet it destroyed another piece of his humanity every time they said it. Within moments, he was released and standing away from the galleys, holding a chain for a weapon and facing his opponent. He stepped from foot to foot, awakening his body. The time the captain was giving him to get used to standing was close to gone. The captain never gave more than four minutes.

Nathan stared at his opponent, a bald-headed, hulking giant. He didn’t know the man’s name, but that suited him just fine, especially since the captain had called for a fight to the death. During these fights was the only time the slaves were allowed to talk, and like a faint hum that came from somewhere far off but increased as it neared, the chants from the galley grew until they seemed to vibrate the salty air and the slick deck. The thundering cry to kill burrowed through his flesh and into his bones. His heartbeat sped as his muscles tensed and rage thicker than blood flowed through his veins.

The captain called out to begin, and Nathan surged to attack. Waiting was futile and showed weakness. His opponent was surprisingly agile for his size and managed to almost avoid Nathan’s first swing of his chain, but the clattering metal caught the giant at the last second and wrapped around his right ankle in one full circle. Nathan barred his teeth as he yanked the chain with enough force that his biceps strained painfully and burned as if torched from within. But he did not relent. He welcomed the pain because it meant he was still alive.

With pull after grunting pull, he dragged the corsair to him as the man growled and struggled to get free. But the guard’s bulk hampered his flexibility and made twisting to reach his ankle impossible. Nathan took full advantage of his downed opponent, stepped toward him, and stomped down on his head with all his burning, searing rage. The brittle sound of something snapping pierced through his rage. He’d broken the man’s neck. Bile immediately rose in Nathan’s throat, but he forced it down as he always did. He could not afford a conscience when it came to the corsairs. They would be happy to kill him or sell him to a lord who wanted to use him in ways that he refused to contemplate.

He stepped back from his dead opponent, expecting to be rewarded with the usual cup of ale, but urgent shouts came at him from all directions. Nathan looked around, not understanding what they were saying. The corsairs scrambled across the deck toward their guns, and the word
attack
rang in his ears. For a moment, he thought he was hallucinating, but when he glanced across the shining, shimmering sea, a ship waving the British flag came into view. And in seconds, Nathan was darting toward the edge of the slave ship, ready to jump into the water as the British fired upon them.

S
ophia spent days alternating between huddling under her coverlet and pacing the floor of her bedchamber. The thing both situations had in common was that crying, wailing, and bemoaning herself for her stupidity accompanied them both. She continuously replayed the last year in her mind, how she had thrown herself, heart and soul, into becoming a duchess worthy of Nathan.

“Saint Nathan!” she muttered. She’d made him faultless in her mind. He was so perfect he could not imagine loving a woman like her. Bitterness clawed at her.

He’d pitied her. He’d not wanted to be around her. He’d planned to leave her at Whitecliffe while he carried on with his mistress in London. He’d lied to her face about bedding the woman, and she’d drunk in the lie as if it were a delicious cup of steaming chocolate. He’d been cuckolding her before they were even married.