His Californian Countess

It surprised her that he was such a good man considering his life under his uncle’s cruel tutelage. No matter what happened between them in the future, she was at peace with her decision to marry him for Meara.

His skin had begun to peel quite severely a few days earlier and, according to the healing book, the disease had about run its course.

The sweating continued into the long, hot afternoon. She changed his soaking sheet several times. The crew had refused to get close to the diseased bed linens, but they did bring her fresh buckets of water so she could wash them. After she changed the bed, she dropped the sheets into a bucket of vinegar and water. After they’d soaked for a while, she rinsed them in a second tub of clean water, then gave them a soak in baking soda. That was how the book, which had almost become as precious to her as her Bible, said to clean everything that came in contact with him.

Their quick wedding seemed forever ago. In her weariness she’d lost count of exactly how many days that was. That she’d become Lady Adair that day seemed impossible. She looked down at herself and chuckled. She’d certainly set the entire aristocracy on its ear if right then they could see the woman the Earl of Adair had married.

Jamie finally quieted and the profuse sweating lessened. He was cooler to the touch than he’d been since the day she’d entered the cabin. By sunset her back ached and exhaustion licked at her heels. Though he’d not awakened since morning, he finally slept comfortably. She was no longer in the least squeamish about the personal nature of the tasks the doctor had pushed her to perform. She bathed him thoroughly, and found it difficult not to admire the beauty of him.

At last she had a few minutes for herself. Behind a blanket she’d hung in the corner, she washed in cool water and changed into one of Helena’s silk shifts. After pushing the buckets of dirty water out to the cabin boy for disposal, she sank onto a pallet she’d made on the floor. Praying they’d both sleep all night and that Jamie was on the mend at last, Amber fell into exhausted sleep.

Soft breathing came from somewhere next to Jamie. From below and next to him. He glanced down and found his golden sprite curled up on the floor amid twisted sheets and blankets. It was the pixie from his dreams.

He must still be dreaming. Only in a dream would someone so lovely and innocent be there, ready to fulfill his most deep-seated wishes. If only she were real.

But whatever she was, wherever he was, he was drawn like a moth to a flame. Wondering which of them would be singed, he slipped from the bed to the floor and reached out to touch her golden hair. As he tangled his fingers in her wavy tresses, he waited, anxious for the burn.

But the fire was only in his blood.

She sighed and turned her face into his hand. He hardened and melted at once. It seemed the most natural action in the world to sink down next to her and pull her close. He captured her chin as he settled his lips over hers. The moan that escaped her called to him. Captured him.

Made him want.

Her.

Made him need.

Only her.

He parted her lips with his tongue and she granted him entrance with another sigh. He tasted sweetness and hunger and prayed it was hunger for him. Sliding his palms lower, he found her fine-boned, delicate shoulders and ever so gently kneaded them. Then he stroked downward over her back, her gently rounded buttocks. Her warmth heated his blood, especially when he realized that only a thin silken shift separated them. That knowledge tempted him as nothing before ever had. Finally his fingers found the hem of her shift.

His palms came in contact with her thighs and he was amazed that her skin was silkier than her shift. He was obsessed with her. “So silky. So soft,” he whispered. He had to have her.

He skimmed his fingertips upward over her thighs and feathered them over her hipbones. She shivered and made strangled little sounds, tempting sounds that provoked a desperate need in him. He wanted to hold those perfect hips and mount her, but he fought the urge. There was all that enticing territory above to explore and he had all day and night. That was the beauty of a dream. He had as long as he wanted or needed. He trailed his fingers over her flat belly. It was even softer than the rest of her.

When he cupped her smooth, tempting breasts, she moaned again and a whispered word burst from her lips. “Please.” And then again, “Please.”

“I know,” he murmured, hoping to soothe her. He didn’t know how he knew what she wanted—what she needed. But this was his dream so, of course, what he wanted she wanted. And he wanted to pleasure her. A dream lover like his pixie deserved his best efforts.

He sought and found her warm, hot center and stroked her moist core, first one finger, then two. With his thumb he circled the one spot he knew would drive her wild.

It did. She cried out and tipped her hips as if seeking more, rocking against his hand. “Please,” she sobbed. “I … I need—I need….” She tossed her head and held her arms out to him.

She might not understand all he’d made her feel, but he did. “Oh, yes, sprite, I do, too,” he assured her. They needed to lose themselves in each other. He gave in to all his secret desires. He shifted over her and covered one of her sweet nipples with his mouth and suckled her till she cried out again. Her scent—a combination of flowers and musk—seemed to surround him, then desire overwhelmed him.

He pulled her hips toward his and entered her tight core.

She made a small distressed sound and he tensed. Even a dream lover deserved care and consideration. “It’s all right. Don’t worry. I’ll make it good for you.”

Something was different about this coupling from those he’d had with his wife. Try though he might, his mind was too clouded with passion and need to identify what he’d missed or to consider anything beyond the desire this dream woman had stirred in him. He was no longer sure of even who she was—the sprite or Helena, he could no longer tell.

Knowing he had to coax her back to him, he covered her mouth with his and caressed her lips with his own. When she opened them on a gasp, he twined his tongue with hers. She was soon with him again and he rewarded her trust by carefully pressing forward, then pulling back. He rocked on her till he was buried to the hilt in her sweet depths. “Better? My God, tell me it’s better!”

She nodded, sucking in a breath. “Better than better. Perfect,” she breathed. Her tightness caressed him and rapture called, but he struggled to hold himself in check. He supported his weight on his forearms as best as he could, but soon, shaking with need, he lost himself. All thought fled his mind when she circled his waist with her long, slender limbs.

Somehow he managed to fight back from the precipice of satisfaction, desperate to ensure pleasure for the magical woman in his arms. Sweet breath puffed from her lungs in the rhythm of his thrusts. Then when he could no longer hold off reaching for the ultimate rapture, her muscles began to pulse around him and he gave himself over to the wonder of the dream. Her cries of ecstasy tore through the little room and he gladly followed her. As he emptied his seed into her keeping, he cried out her name.

Helena.

Feeling as if she’d drained every ounce of strength from him, he rolled to his side to keep from collapsing on her. Chilled, he flipped the blanket over them both, and then pulled her along his side, settling her head against his shoulder. Exhaustion closed in on him, but he managed one more coherent thought. Who would have thought Helena would be so passionate a lover? This dream was better than any he’d had before he’d given up the idea of marriage between them.

As the fog in his mind closed in on him, Jamie felt a tear drop on to his shoulder, then another. But he couldn’t manage to ask why she’d cry.

Amber tried to hold on to her emotions, but one tear fell then another and another. How could a heart break and allow the owner to live with such pain? She would rather die than have him know the destruction one word—one name—had wrought within her.

It had all seemed like a dream at first. Indeed, she had had similar dreams for days. With every fiber of her being Amber had believed this was a dream, as well. He’d been so sick and she’d been so afraid to believe he was on the mend that awaking in his arms had truly felt like a secret wish come true.

A fantasy.

A dream.

Then, when things she’d never imagined or heard of began to happen between them, she’d fully awakened and thought the real Jamie had come to her, wanting to make their desperate unromantic marriage a real one. And God help her, after all her protestations that she wanted no man in her life, in her exhausted sleep-deprived mind she’d wanted him. She’d believed the beautiful act they’d performed together came from feelings in each of them that matched perfectly.

Those traitorous emotions had grown against her will while she’d nursed him. Now she’d have to use all her willpower to obliterate them. Because he’d turned the dream she’d awakened to from beautiful reality to a nightmare with the shouted name of the woman he believed her to be.

Not Amber. Not even Pixie.

Helena.

Beautiful, wealthy and proper Helena.

So now Amber lay, silently weeping, unable to move away without risking his awakening and seeing how deeply he’d wounded her. The abyss of troubled sleep claimed her before she could stem the flow of her tears. While she slept in his arms, her dreams were full of confrontations that featured Jamie and Helena with Amber in the role of their child’s governess or some other lowly servant.

Jamie stirred and Amber woke with a start. Morning light flooded through the porthole, illuminating the cabin and sending reality crashing in on her like a mighty wave, assaulting her heart and soul. Everything between them last night had been a fraud.

She recoiled and tried to scramble away when Jamie’s gaze fell upon her face and anger marched across his features. He tightened his grip on her shoulder and pushed himself up on one bent arm, staring down at her with narrowed, furious eyes.

It was then that she remembered she was ignominiously nearly naked in the arms of her counterfeit husband. He’d taken her body when he thought she was his high-society love. Or maybe it was she who was the counterfeit in this marriage. After all, it was she who was not the woman he thought he’d wed. She was not his precious Helena.

Amber wished he’d say something.

Anything.

“What is this about? Was our meeting on deck an accident, Pixie?” His beautiful mouth twisted in a sneer and “pixie” ceased to be a sweet pet name. “I thought you were a disadvantaged innocent, forced to travel alone.”

“I had my reasons for being alone.”

“I must wonder if your reason was to lure me into this trap so you could then demand marriage. It worked for my late wife, but I won’t be trapped that way again. I care not about my reputation here in America.”

Amber felt her temper rise. Now she scrambled away, dragging the blanket with her as she stood. What did she care if it left him naked and exposed? She’d bathed him and cared for his needs for days on end. She could look at his naked form all day and feel nothing but contempt.

But then he stood in all his naked glory—bold as you please—and captured her gaze with his own narrowed, hard-as-amethyst eyes. It was she who broke away from their locked gazes. When her lowered eyes fell on to his manhood, her face heated in a betraying blush. She looked away quickly, but the damage was done. And that set fire to a temper few had ever seen.

“Luring you into marriage?” she shouted. “You must still be suffering from delirium. Your uncle has apparently already done his worst by freezing your heart. I did not need to trap you into marriage. We’re already married. It was you who begged me to marry you to protect Meara. You promised an annulment if you survived the fever and I wished for one.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but she rushed on, not caring what he planned to say. She had heard all she wished. “It was you who crawled on to my pallet last night and made annulment impossible. This is my thanks for caring for you all these long days? I should have let the captain toss you overboard. You endangered everyone on board just to follow your obsession with Helena!”

She stormed out into the saloon, her shoulders and back stiff as the deck she’d been sleeping on. Still wrapped in the blanket, the neckline of her pretty silk shift peeking out, she was mortified to bump into the ever-present cabin boy. But she raised her chin and stomped by him, refusing to show her embarrassment.

“Have my trunk sent to me,” she told the boy over her shoulder as she stalked across the wide, elegantly appointed companionway and saloon. “I’ll stay in my cabin under quarantine for the rest of the voyage, if I must, but I will not spend one more day in there. With him.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the boy answered, staring at her as if she were mad.

Perhaps she was.

Because she was afraid she’d fallen in love with that … that obnoxious person whose miserable life she’d probably saved.

Then her tears welled up again as she remembered all he’d revealed during his illness. He was a good man, worthy of her love even though he didn’t want it. It had been the scars of his youth speaking just now. She knew that, but she

hardened her heart. She’d never wanted to care. To love.

And she wouldn’t.

She just wouldn’t!

Chapter Five

Jamie’s hand trembled as he ran it through his hair. He sank to the bed. His mind was less foggy; still, he was not completely sure of a good part of what had happened, in particular why he’d been standing naked, arguing with Amber. He winced when the door slammed behind her.

He sighed. Pixie was Amber. That much he was sure of. Their meeting on deck was engraved in his mind clearly, in sharp contrast to the murky uncertainty of the present.

He closed his eyes, trying to sort the jumble of images swimming to the surface. And now, God, now even snatches of the past days started to come into focus.

Too late.

He groaned. He remembered the burning fever. The pain of being touched. He would have died without her selfless care. Amber had agreed to marry him for Meara’s sake when he’d been so sure he would die. She’d tried to give him hope, but she’d finally agreed to the marriage. Only after warning him she’d be unsuitable as his countess, however.

That meant she’d been willing to protect his child. As far as he was concerned, that proved she would make a wonderful countess because she’d make Meara a wonderful mother.

And he wasn’t being in any way selfless, resigning himself to marriage to her because he suddenly recalled another of his lost memories—their lovemaking last the night. Memories of her skin, her hair, her scent.

As he went over those moments on her pallet, he knew he’d made an even more egregious error than he’d feared. Rising in his mind like a condemning specter was the look on her face—in her eyes—as he’d made her his. Her uncertainty of the unknown had all been written there. Then her expression changed to the one she’d worn as she scrambled to her feet and faced him this morning.

What had he done? What had he destroyed?

Jamie pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed again. The answer to that was as simple and as complicated as human nature. He’d allowed his past to color the present. He’d painted Amber with the motives of his late wife, Iris, a social-climbing whore, and of his cruel, manipulative guardian.

A knock at the door drew him back to the present and his eyes flew open. Hope that Amber had decided to return surged through him. Refusing to greet her naked as the day he was born, he made his way to his trunk and hurriedly located his dressing gown. After shrugging into it and knotting the tie at his waist, he hurried to the door on wobbly limbs. “I’m relieved you’ve reconsid—” he said as he pulled the heavy door open.

And his heart fell.

The drunken doctor he’d met the day he booked passage was not the person he wished to see. The older man wore an imperious look on his face as he said, “I’m told your nurse has deserted you.”

“I no longer have need of nursing care, and where my wife is cannot be of great interest to you.”

“It is of great interest to me until I’ve become certain she’s not about to take ill. I must pronounce you healthy, as well.”

Jamie spread his arms in mock surrender. “By all means.”

The doctor took no time at all in making the pronouncement that Jamie had indeed come out at the other side of an illness that should by all rights have killed him. Jamie did not waste his time telling the doctor that he’d been doing that all his life, thanks to good women like Mimm and the pixie. Amber, he corrected silently.

Her name was Amber.

He rested a few minutes and began to dress so he could go talk to that young lady. His wife. His countess. He’d only managed to don his small clothes and trousers when another knock sounded hollowly in the room. He was less hopeful this time about who might be there. Yet he was still disappointed when a young boy in uniform stood there.

“I’m to fetch her trunk, sir,” he said without preamble.

“Trunk?”

The cabin boy looked behind him at the door across the saloon. “The lady, sir. She said I was to fetch her trunk.”

“Her cabin is that one? I was told that cabin was assigned to Miss Helena Conwell.”

“Oh, no, sir. That confusion was put to rest days ago along with all the rumors about her … uh … her character. She and the one you was expecting switched travel accommodation, ya’ see.”

“No, I don’t see. Is Miss Conwell elsewhere on the ship?”

“Oh, no, sir. She never boarded.”

“But when I came on board you said she had.”

“‘Cause she give her name as Miss Conwell.”

Jamie felt his head would split open at any moment. Perhaps too much information was flooding into his brain box. “So how was the confusion cleared up?” he demanded, frowning, not even sure he wanted to know. Had he been duped into this voyage? If that had been the intent, he’d fallen into the trap. He could be with Meara right then or looking for Helena. Perhaps that had been the plan.

Plan?

He was nearly sure neither Helena nor Amber would have targeted him as the butt of a prank or worse. Amber would have been trying to do what he, Jamie, had been trying to do. Protect Helena from Franklin Gowery. He was the man Helena had been fleeing. Not Jamie. And if Jamie had handled things with Helena better, she’d have run to him. Not away.

“We got her real name when she was to marry you,” the boy said, calling Jamie back to the problem at hand. His wife and who she was. “She gave it so the reverend could fill out marriage papers, and for the ceremony.” He sounded as if he were explaining the thing to a dolt. And that was how Jamie felt. “I was in the hall,” the boy went on. “The second witness, sir,” he went on. “I was round a lot, giving the lady water to wash yer sheets and … um … such. Always smiled even though she was all done in most of the time.”

Jamie heard everything the lad said, but one fact stood out, reminding him of the overarching truth of the situation. Not only had she been trying to protect Helena, but she had saved his life. His anger at her deception, while perhaps justified in some way, was immaterial when weighed against the truth of it. Amber had saved his life, and at the risk of her own. She was his wife now and though he knew things about her—that she was sweet and bold, caring and brave—he had no idea of her full name. “Amber what?” he demanded, not feeling the least in control of his own destiny at the moment.

“Her name?” the cabin boy asked. At Jamie’s nod he said, “Her name was Dodd, sir. Miss Amber Dodd.”

Jamie nodded. Was. Yes. Of course. Now he supposed it would be Amber Reynolds. Countess Adair. Lady Adair. Oh, God! He was married.

“May I get the trunk for her?”

Once again, remembering how he continued to appear, Jamie stepped back and waved the boy in. “How did it get in here, anyway?”

“I was permitted to bring it as far as the door. And … uh … just now she … um … she seems in great need of her clothing.”

Jamie cringed for the second time in less than an hour. She’d looked a bit like Venus Rising earlier, but now he realized she’d stormed off like that. It would be talked of endlessly aboard the ship, for lack of anything more interesting.

“I would appreciate it if you would keep that part of all this under wraps,” he told the boy. “I wouldn’t like to see the countess embarrassed because I became a difficult patient.”

“About how she wasn’t dressed after the fight you two had, you mean? Oh, no, sir. I didn’t even tell the doctor. His lips get to flappin’ when he’s in his cups. Just said she was wantin’ her privacy now that you were on the mend. That’s what brought the doctor. I had to tell him, as I was ordered to, if either of you left the cabin. But I wasn’t ordered to say what she was wearing—or wasn’t—when she left. She was quite upset, sir.”

Jamie couldn’t fight a wry smile when he remembered her wonderful Irish temper exploding all over him. That thought lightened his mood a bit. “Yes, I believe she was ready to attempt to do murder when she stormed off. I did not remember our marriage and was confused as to why she was in my cabin in her state of undress.”

The cabin boy’s eyes widened. “That would do it, sir.”

Jamie was tempted to loiter about in the saloon as the boy dragged the trunk across to the pixie’s door, but he didn’t want to risk another explosion in front of the lad. He did not even know why he’d stood there trading confidences with a stranger barely out of short pants. A cabin boy was certainly far below his station, but that was one of the things he liked about America. Birth was of no consequence.

When the door had closed behind the boy, Jamie knew why he’d stood there chatting. He was lonely.

He didn’t know how to win her back, but he knew he wanted to. Needed to. She could even now be carrying his child. He would think of something while gaining his strength. He’d leave her alone, then he would find a way to tempt her back to him. Like it or not, they were wed. This voyage would last at least another three months, and he had this time to woo his wife. They might as well make the best of the situation.

Amber, having donned a wrapper she’d left hanging on a hook behind the door, forced herself to smile at the young cabin boy, hoping he didn’t notice evidence of the tears she’d dashed away when he’d knocked. He set down her trunk and turned toward where she stood in the doorway.

“Is that all, my lady?”

Amber blinked. The title weighed on her. And now she was stuck with it. “I’ll have a coin for you once I unearth my funds from somewhere amongst my things. Thank you for all your help while the earl was ill. Have a lovely day.”

She nearly sobbed as she hastily closed the door behind him. She should not have mentioned his lordship. Anger toward him had quickly given way to heartbreak and she didn’t want to chance creating more gossip about their relationship. Though she knew it was probably impossible on this voyage, she didn’t want her name linked further with his.

She wanted no link to him at all.

Liar, whispered her secret heart.

Amber sank to the boudoir chair in the corner of her stateroom, trying to hold back her tears. She was afraid if she gave in to the need to cry out her pain and disappointment she’d never be able to stop.

It was hard for her to believe that not long ago she’d looked around this room and been so excited about all the possibilities and adventures ahead of her. That marriage was the last thing she’d wanted for herself.