The wind freshened and the sun reflected off the rippling water like dancing diamonds.

“This is all such … such an adventure.” Amber’s smile was even broader now, showing more of her even white teeth. Her eyes had gone wide with wonder, too.

Jamie looked away from her, feeling things he shouldn’t for an unescorted female. His gaze fell on the water, and through her battery of questions he experienced again the excitement of his first journey.

“So, does your adventure end with the voyage?” he asked. He looked back at her. The attraction he felt for this woman showed him how little he’d known of true desire before.

“End of the adventure?” his lovely rail-partner asked, calling him back from his mental wanderings. That endearing frown reappeared. It made her eyebrows arch downwards in the middle. “I hope the adventure continues for a long time.”

About the Author

As a child, KATE WELSH often lost herself in creating make-believe worlds and happily-ever-after tales. Many years later she turned back to creating happy endings when her husband challenged her to write down the stories in her head. A lover of all things romantic, Kate has been writing romance for over twenty years now. Her first published novels hit the stands in 1998.

Kate was Valley Forge Romance Writers’ first president, and is currently their vice-president. She lives her own happily-ever-after in the Philadelphia suburbs, with her husband of over thirty years, her daughter, their one-hundred-pound Chesapeake Bay Retriever Ecko, and Kali, the family cat.

Kate loves hearing from readers, who can reach her on the internet at kate_welsh@verizon.net

A previous novel by this author:

QUESTIONS OF HONOUR

His Californian Countess
Kate Welsh

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Chapter One

1876—New York, New York

Jamie took a sip of tea and winced at how scratchy his throat felt. Leaning back, he looked around the sitting room of the town house he’d bought and decorated with the best in French furnishings. It was what he’d needed it to be—a fitting setting for the Earl of Adair, a wealthy British lord. When he’d first arrived in New York City he’d needed the businessmen of New York to trust his finances and ignore the rumors his uncle had spread that he was penniless.

They had.

And Jamie had done what he’d come to America to do. He’d invested his late wife’s inheritance in the growing country, filling the Adair family’s coffers to overflowing. His title—Earl of Adair—had opened the doors to success, but he’d unexpectedly found the United States offered more. It offered freedom, something he’d craved his whole life. He much preferred the name he’d lost when he became earl, Jamie Reynolds.

Lord, he was exhausted. He dropped his head back and stared up at one of the crystal chandeliers gracing the ornate ceiling. His eyes wouldn’t focus and the effect blurred the beauty of the teardrop pendants.

He blinked. He hadn’t caught scarlet fever from his daughter Meara. Of course, he hadn’t. The doctor said it was nearly impossible for an adult to contract it. He was only tired. He wouldn’t be ill. He didn’t have time. Now that Meara was on the mend he had to redirect his attention to finding Helena.

Jamie glanced at the breakfast Mimm had laid out as he reached for the newspaper on the silver tray next to him. He couldn’t bring himself to eat, but to sit with his tea and actually read a newspaper felt wonderful—such a normal activity after days of dealing with one crisis after another with Meara.

Then his relief over his daughter’s recovery bloomed into a new worry in an instant. He sat dumbfounded and stared in horror at the masthead. “May sixteenth?” he gasped as he crumpled the edges of the newspaper in his fists. “This can’t be right. How could it be six days since she fell ill?”

But of course, the New York Times didn’t misprint its date. Last he remembered it was ten days into May. He’d still had nearly a week—one last-ditch effort to find Helena before the Young America sailed.

She’d eluded him for months since his search began back in Pennsylvania when the mine owner there told him Helena had run off to New York to catch a clipper to California. He’d hoped to find her before she boarded the ship. But he’d failed. Thank God he’d booked passage just in case he didn’t locate her before the sailing. Today’s sailing. At this point, he’d be lucky to make the ship himself.

So what was he doing just sitting there? He’d not a moment to spare. Jamie jumped to his feet and shouted, “Mimm! I have to leave.”

His rotund housekeeper rushed in. “What on earth is wrong, lamb?”

“Her ship sails in a little more than two hours. I must get to the Young America. Find her. Stop her.”

Mimm arched one of her eyebrows, giving him one of her shrewd looks. “Yer lady love, my lord? ‘Pears to me she’s not sharin’ yer feelings.”

“Helena was never my ‘lady love’ as you keep calling her. You know how I feel about that. I promised her father I’d see to it she was safe. I only offered for her to keep her off her damned guardian’s auction block. Now because I failed to explain why I was offering marriage she’s traveling as an unprotected miss. Her feelings for me are immaterial to my search.” Too agitated to stand still, Jamie paced across the fine Oriental rug, closing the distance between them. He’d given his word to a dying man. A man he very much feared had died in his place.

“You need sleep, not to go hying off after someone who don’t want nothin’ to do with you,” Mimm said. “Besides which, Meara’s out of danger, but not able to face such a journey. And frankly neither am I.”

“And I am not proposing either of you come along. I’ll meet you in California,” he said, then rushed off to see his trunk was packed.

Miriam Trimble had never learned there were things best left unsaid. But she’d been more than a mother to him. He owed Mimm for his very life so he guessed that gave her the right to say whatever she wished.

She eyed him when he met her in the hall outside Meara’s room several minutes later. “I still say this isn’t a good idea. You’re lookin’ a bit peaked to me, me lamb.”

He took her shoulders in his hands. “I’m sorry I snapped before, Mimm. I’m okay, as Americans say. It’s a childhood disease Meara had. You heard the doctor. All I could get is a lesser form. Besides, I don’t have time to be sick and that’s all there is to it.”

“Sickness isn’t all that cooperative, darlin’. I’m worried for you.”

He nodded and shrugged on his coat. “You needn’t be. I’ll be fine. Is Meara sleeping?”

“Aye.”

Meara needed sleep more than a farewell hug from her da. “I hate leaving her after being gone nearly all winter, especially without saying goodbye. Give her my love and tell her she’ll have a great adventure seeing this vast country from the rail car when you all travel to join me in San Francisco. I think perhaps the doctor is right about the air at Cape May. I asked Palmer to see that the house there is opened when he was here … was it yesterday?”

Mimm sighed. “Last evening after the little one’s fever broke.”

Jamie raked a hand through his hair. He really was exhausted. “I’ll make sure there’s a pony waiting in New Jersey for her birthday. That ought to help get her strength back and make up for my missing her special day. Tell her I’ll see her by mid-September.”

“We’ll miss you, lamb. Take care,” Mimm ordered. When he looked back down the hall, she had tears in her eyes.

“I’ll be fine,” he promised, then turned away and hurried from the town house. He couldn’t let the clipper sail without him. He stopped on his way to the docks to see his man of business. There, he and Palmer put in place the plans for Meara and her entourage, as well as the purchase of the pony. Then he hastened down Dover Street to Pier 28 where the Young America, black hull gleaming in the late morning light, stood ready for departure.

He arrived just as several longshoremen prepared to hoist the gangplank off the clipper’s gunwale, making him the last to board. Mindful of his driver carting his trunk behind him, Jamie strode up the gangplank, his knees growing weaker by the minute. He knew he didn’t present the aristocratic image his uncle would expect, but he’d finally gotten to a place where that didn’t matter. America had not only allowed him to amass a sizeable fortune and given him a buoyant sense of freedom; it had helped him put most of the ghosts of his past to rest.

Except for the reason he needed to watch over Helena. Because if he was right that Harry Conwell had given his life for him, Jamie’s past was still a threat to his present and future.

Many of the passengers were on deck, but Jamie didn’t see Helena. He found the steward and asked if she’d boarded. The man returned to him rather quickly with the news that she had and so Jamie began his search again.

Then he saw her. Sunlight gleaming in her blond hair, she stood at the rail, looking down at the murky water. He walked over and tapped her on the shoulder. She whirled to face him. Though there was a strong resemblance, this young woman wasn’t Helena. She had the same heart shape to her face and the same perfectly turned-up nose, but rather than blue, she had the biggest, darkest brown eyes he’d ever seen. A poet would say a man could fall into their depths and not care if he were ever seen again.

He felt a primeval punch to his gut. He’d never felt this before. It was attraction that went past that to desire, but was untainted by lust. He was quite unprepared.

She tilted her head and frowned a bit. “May I help you, sir?”

It was only then he realized he’d been staring. He blinked and the deck shifted under his feet. “Sorry. At first I thought you were someone else. But you aren’t her a’tal.” He nearly cringed at the sound of the Irish lilt in his voice before he remembered. He was free. He could talk as he wished. His uncle had drilled repressing that accent into him all his life, but he was his own man now. Jamie Reynolds answered to no one.

“Should I be sorry I’m not her?” the young woman asked.

“Definitely not.” He didn’t know what surprised him most, her sweet, warm smile, her answer, or his. Nor did he know why she’d unnerved him so completely. “Is this your first trip at sea?” he asked, needing, for some reason, to keep the conversation going. He knew he should probably continue his search for Helena, but now that the ship was under way, all urgency deserted him. He pushed thoughts of Helena away, suddenly wanting to know more about this lovely, innocent-eyed woman.

“I was born in California, but my family died of fever. I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle but I traveled overland. I remember little of the journey and only a bit more of the state. This is my first trip anywhere since except to Poughkeepsie, New York. I went to a college there.”

He raised his eyebrows. “College?”

She nodded. “Vassar.”

“Beautiful and intelligent. Not qualities I’ve seen in combination all that often.”

Her little pointed chin notched up a bit. “Are you saying it is mostly homely girls who have good minds?”

She had backbone. He liked that. “I was speaking of London and the young women of its marriage-mart Season. Beauty and pretty manners are prized. Intelligence isn’t.” He hoped she hadn’t noticed the bitterness in his tone.

She blushed prettily and he relaxed. “That was a compliment, then?” she asked, her head tilted a bit.

“Of course. Colleges for women are rare, aren’t they? England has Girton College, but they don’t offer a degree.”

“Vassar does and there will be more colleges that do, I assure you. You find London’s women distasteful for some reason.”

And she was perceptive. “Many of them are only interested in learning how to trap a man into marriage, then to run his house and his life afterward. They aren’t beating down Girton’s doors, I assure you.”

She smiled. “And you had to come all the way to America to escape them?”

“I had other purposes in coming here. It’s a happy coincidence that they’re there and I’m not.”

She seemed to ponder his answer with an adorable little frown wrinkling her smooth forehead. “It wasn’t very smart of them to let you escape.”

He laughed. “So if they’d been smarter, I wouldn’t be here? Intelligent women can be dangerous then. I must remember that.”

It was her turn to laugh. And it was such a low and sensual sound it reminded him he’d been too long without a woman’s warm body beneath his.

She flashed a look at him from head to toe, then gave him a teasing grin when her eyes met his. “You look quite capable of defending yourself against danger of any sort,” she said. Then she did the strangest thing. She looked out over the water and her expression changed from temptress to pixie in an instant. “Oh, look! We’re moving. It’s so beautiful,” she cried, so animated she fairly vibrated with glee.

“We’ve been moving since we began talking.”

“I hadn’t thought there’d be so much water! Which is rather silly of me, isn’t it? It’s only that this is all such … such an adventure.” Her smile was even broader now, showing more of her even white teeth. Her eyes had gone wide with wonder, too. Innocent eyes.

He looked away from her, feeling things he shouldn’t for an unescorted female. An innocent one at that. His gaze fell on the water and through her battery of questions, he experienced again the excitement of his first voyage.

Growing a bit tired, but not wanting this interlude to end, he leaned on the rail and pointed out Brooklyn with its verdant-green rolling landscape, Manhattan and the few landmarks within it that he’d learned to spot on earlier trips.

The wind freshened and the sun reflected off the rippling water like dancing diamonds. The ship vibrated and the deck shifted under his feet. Crewmen seemed to fly up the ratlines. A whooshing sound from the bow cutting through the water filled the air, disturbed only by a drone of conversation from the passengers still on deck or the occasional shout of a crewman going about his business.

“So, does your adventure end with the voyage?” he asked now that they entered the harbor. He looked back at her. It was a lowering thing to admit, but the attraction he felt for this woman showed him how little he’d known of true desire before. He certainly hadn’t felt anything like this for Helena for whom he’d embarked on this voyage. For her he felt only duty and obligation. Perhaps he should be looking for her now, but he had the whole voyage to relay her father’s worry for her safety and to offer whatever assistance she needed.

“End of the adventure?” his lovely rail-partner asked, calling him back from his mental wonderings. That endearing frown reappeared. It made her eyebrows arch downward in the middle.

I must get her name.

“I hope the adventure continues for a long time.”

“Where did it begin, if I may ask?”

“Begin? I grew up in the mountains in Pennsylvania. I’d been to Poughkeepsie, New York, for college, but that city is small, especially compared to New York City. I’d been through there on the way to the school, but I never left the rail station. The cities have been very exciting.”

“Cities, not city?”

She laid her hand over his on the rail and smiled at clearly happy memories. “I stopped off in Philadelphia. For the Centennial Exposition and—oops.” She lifted her hand from his and covered her mouth with it. His gaze flew to her eyes and found them widened. He didn’t know what could have alarmed her when all he felt was the loss of her innocent touch. “I shouldn’t have mentioned our Centennial, should I?”

He smiled. “I took my daughter to see it. I assure you most people in Britain have got over the revolt. It has been a hundred years, after all. Though there are those who still insist on referring to America as the colonies.” His smile widened. “I suppose it follows that a country bold enough to revolt against an ancient power would spawn colleges for women and female adventurers,” he teased.

“Adventurer?” She took a deep breath, which made her breasts swell inside the pretty blouse she wore. “My, but I like the sound of that! I’m an adventurer!”

He dragged his gaze off the sight of her lovely bust line, but it fell on her mouth. Then what she’d said sank into his muddled mind. Jamie laughed as the ship fell out a bit from under them, and by some fortuitous hand of fate, she fell right into him. Glad he was anchored against the rail, he caught her in his arms and enjoyed the feel of her petite form from the instant their bodies came into contact. Then he steeled himself and regretfully helped her get on her own feet.

Flushed, she ducked her head and apologized for her clumsiness. “Not to worry,” he told her, while keeping his enjoyment to himself. “You’ll get your sea legs under you quick enough.”

She hugged herself and shivered. “Well, unless I want to take a chill, I must get to my cabin and unpack. I may come up again after finding my shawl. It’s been nice talking with you. I suppose I’ll run into you again. Large as the Young America is, it is small in the general scheme of life. Thank you for helping occupy my mind. I was a bit nervous about leaving the docks.”

“I didn’t get your name,” he said as she turned to walk away.

She pivoted and shot him that enchanting frown for a split second before her lovely smile blossomed. “No, you didn’t,” she replied, then hurried away.

His bark of laugher turned several heads, but he didn’t care if they thought him odd or gauche. She was really quite refreshing and he was sorry to see her go. But she was correct. During more or less the next one-hundred-and-thirty days if the ship had fair winds, they would see each other constantly. He couldn’t help but be glad of it. He’d get her name when next they met.

Jamie turned back toward the river and leaned his forearms against the gleaming gunwales. After several minutes, his eyes began to burn and the reflected sunlight became annoying rather than appealing. Perhaps his pixie had taken the magic of the sailing with her and perhaps she’d had a good idea about settling in.

But for the life of him, he couldn’t remember what cabin he’d secured for himself. He started off and realized his legs were less steady than they’d been all day. He made a grab for the rail. The movement of the ship made walking difficult so he stayed put for a few minutes longer. Finally, a boy dressed in what appeared to be a uniform, passed near him. “My name is Reynolds,” Jamie said, his voice sounded rough and strained. “I wonder if you could direct me to my cabin and help me locate another passenger, Miss Helena Conwell.”

The crewmember, a boy of perhaps fifteen or sixteen, stared in obvious surprise for a moment, then his confusion seemed to clear. “Ah. Lord Reynolds, is it? We’d begun to despair, thinking you’d missed the ship.” The lad had it wrong—he was Lord Adair, not Lord Reynolds—but British titles were confusing and mostly unimportant to Americans. That was why he dropped its use whenever possible. But arranging for a specific cabin near a woman who was not in his party had needed a certain amount of diplomacy and prestige, as well as extra funds.

“Sir, are you quite all right?” the crewman asked.

Jamie straightened and shook his head, trying to rid his mind of the swirling thoughts muddling his brain. His mind bounced next to Mimm and all her fussing that he might be ill. It was ridiculous that he could have gotten what his daughter had. Meara’s doctor had all but promised it was only a disease of childhood. But even if Jamie was sick in some more minor way, he still couldn’t let on. They’d surely put him off the ship. Helena was on the Young America and he had to make sure she was safe and that she understood all that had happened.

“I’m perfectly fine,” he answered finally, then stiffened his back and notched his chin up.

The crewman nodded, but looked a bit dubious. “Your cabin is actually across the saloon from Miss Conwell’s. Close as possible, as you requested. This way, sir.”

Jamie’s exhaustion increased as he moved below, following the crewman through the saloon in the raised poop deck until he stopped before a cabin door.

“Stateroom six is yours, sir. The lady’s is just over there. Stateroom three,” the crewman explained and indicated Helena’s door or hatch or whatever the hell it was called aboard a sailing ship. The lad tried unsuccessfully to cover a smirk. “I’ll be steward for both staterooms during the graveyard shift. Just hang that little sign on the door if you’re needing privacy with her.”

Jamie felt his temper instantly rise. “Miss Conwell is a lady, sir, and I’ll thank you to keep that in mind when you speak of her or to her. Her late father was a great friend of mine. I am merely here to pay a debt to him by seeing she reaches her chosen destination unmolested. She is alone in the world or she’d never be traveling unchaperoned.”

The young man had the grace to blush. “I’m sorry, my lord. I apologize for repeating what the doc said …” He cleared his throat, then continued, “I’ll do what I can to put an end to the gossip.”

“See that you do,” Jamie ordered. “The doctor is a drunk from what I saw when I was aboard to arrange passage. I cannot imagine why Captain Baker keeps him on.” Then for some reason he thought of the pixie-woman he’d been talking with. She also seemed to be alone and he couldn’t help be worried for her, too.

“Is there anything more I can do for you, my lord?” the lad asked, looking as if he’d rather be anywhere else.

Jamie was so annoyed he waved him away when he could very well have used his help unpacking. He’d left Hadley, his valet, at the town house. The man was more liability on the sea than an asset and Jamie had no wish to make the poor fellow miserable for the four months it would take them to arrive in San Francisco.

He looked at Helena’s door, tempted to knock, but he didn’t want to give anyone the idea there was even a hint of scandal brewing about her. He had wanted to see her immediately, damn it. It had been weeks since they’d danced at her birthday ball. He’d been disappointed when he’d realized her friendliness that evening had been a ruse. He’d wanted to establish at least a degree of peace between them and he’d failed. That night she’d run from her guardian and it would seem from him, as well.

He felt unsettled and unsure. It was as if a curtain had risen on his life, as if he were part of a comedy. Worst of all, he was as powerless as a marionette controlled by some sadistic specter. Nothing made sense and he could not reason it all out.

Except the vow he’d made at his wife’s graveside. That was written firmly on his heart. He would never again deviate from his chosen course as he almost had with his offer of marriage to Helena. He would only marry again for love. But as he didn’t understand what love meant or trust the nebulous emotion when declared, marriage was for him not a possibility.

It seemed to him that thus far those who declared love expected the object of that rather unstable emotion to declare it in return. Yet those who’d so far declared it to him had deserted or betrayed him. Consequently, the very idea of surrendering his heart to anyone caused a visceral fear to course through him. No, he’d had enough of that painful emotion to last him the rest of his life. His heart was locked up and he’d tossed away the key.

He stood in the doorway, staring at her door. He’d finally caught up to her.

After a while, his thoughts swirling, he wondered why he was still there in his doorway when he felt so very awful. So heavy. His throat so sore. He turned into the room behind him and was hit by a wave of dizziness. He looked around, his mind spinning like a child’s top. Why was the room tipping? Swaying? Why was the room so dark? His town house was always bright.

He looked around again, confusion swamping his mind even more. Where was he? This was not home. He should find out where he was. The room spun out of control as he turned back to the door. He grabbed for it, but missed and it swung away from him. Then the floor rushed up at him as blackness descended. And two thoughts revolved in his head. He needed to confess to Helena his part in her father’s death. And he didn’t know the pixie’s name.

Amber turned and took a survey of her pretty cabin. Yes, it looked perfect. This was the cabin of an adventurer. The handsome man she’d flirted with on deck had called her an adventurer and that had given her the idea to make the cabin reflect her new path in life.

On the wall near her porthole she’d tacked the image of Memorial Hall in Philadelphia painted on rose-colored silk. It looked lovely against the cherry wainscoting. It had come from her unscheduled stay in the City of Brotherly Love. As she’d told the handsome man—that was how she thought of him—she hadn’t wanted to pass up seeing the Great Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and World’s Fair.

Above the bed she’d tacked the postcards from all her adventures. There was one of the Women’s Pavilion and Memorial Hall and some postcards from the Philadelphia Zoo where she’d seen too many exotic animals to count. And all the colorful tickets from everything she’d seen. It was a week she’d never forget.

Taking in the fair and zoo hadn’t been the first adventurous thing she’d done, though. The first had been applying for a post of governess to two small girls of a wealthy California family curious about the state where she’d been born. Then, rather than travel the whole way by train as she’d originally planned, Amber had decided to play decoy to help a friend. She’d left town wearing the clothes of a young woman named Helena Conwell, who was in love with a mineworker Amber had known since childhood. But Helena’s guardian was bent on keeping the lovers apart even though he no longer had any legal control over her. The happy couple had escaped west while Amber, still playing decoy, would travel by clipper to San Francisco while using Helena’s name.

Amber sympathized with Helena’s wish to marry the man she loved. Amber herself would never marry, though. She’d never have the children she’d always wanted, either. Those dreams had vanished the day Joseph died.

He’d been gone a year now. But the memory of his final moments when they’d carried him from the mine, clinging to life, would always haunt her. He’d loved her so deeply, so perfectly, that he’d fought pain and death itself just to see her one last time. The memory brought with it a pain so sharp that each time it rose in her mind she still needed to press upon her broken heart to get past the moment. She would never risk that kind of pain again.

So now she would build other memories.

Alone.

She had no choice in that. She’d given her heart and Joseph had taken at least half of it with him. The rest would remain hers and hers alone.

Now she would help raise two precious little girls. The little darlings had even written her from their home in San Francisco with the help of their mother so they could tell her how excited they were to meet her.

Excitement was what all this was about. Excitement kept the pain at bay. That was why she’d flirted with the handsome man.

Amber used to spend holidays and summers with her friends from Vassar at their families’ summer homes on the banks of the Hudson River near the college. She’d always watched those carefree young women act the coquette and now she’d finally done it herself. But she was a bit embarrassed that she had. He must think she was terribly bold. Or a bluestocking, which she supposed wasn’t as bad. Of course he may have thought she was both. The absurdity of that made Amber giggle. No one at home would believe it of her.

But this voyage was about a change as well as excitement. A different life from the one she led as a teacher in the town where the mine had taken Joseph seemed the only way to forget her pain. With any luck someday she would remember the happiness she’d felt in the arms of her own sweet Joseph without the accompanying hurt.

Enough of this! She’d said goodbye to that old life. A life better left behind if she could not share it with Joseph. It was time to greet a new day. One on the high seas!

Suddenly tired from all the turmoil of getting to the pier and the sailing and, yes, of flirting, then remembering all that had brought her to this place, Amber decided not to go back up on deck. She tossed her shawl over the chair in her stateroom and lay on the charming bed. She stared up at the elaborate canopy and realized she dreaded seeing the man from deck again anyway. She’d run out of flippant things to say and she’d been terribly affected in physical ways that she’d never been with Joseph.

After a while she fell asleep, only to have the handsome man invade her dreams, and she felt things she’d never felt before, either. Oh, goodness, she wished she hadn’t had that conversation about “marriage duties” with her soon-to-be mother-in-law. Joseph’s mother had laughed, saying she found nothing of a duty about the experience and if her husband had done his job with Joseph he would make sure Amber didn’t see it as a duty, either. She had told Amber much of what she should expect and feel. And in her sleep, she finally felt most of these emotions. She didn’t wake again until morning’s light beamed through her small porthole. Though

her room was cool, her skin felt flushed and somehow needy.

Damn that handsome man.

Chapter Two

Amber straightened the velvet bow around the collar of her pink blouse. It matched her navy-blue wool skirt perfectly. Then she took one last look at her hair in the little mirror over the dresser. Time to go for breakfast, she told herself, but her gaze remained locked with her eyes in the mirror as thoughts spun through her mind.

Would she see him? Amber bit her bottom lip, unsure if she wished for a “yes” or “no” answer. She supposed she would see him. It was inevitable after all. So when she did, what should she say after the reckless way she’d flirted?

The real question was how she could even face him. And if they did speak to each other, it stood to reason he’d ask her name again. She would be forced to give Helena Conwell’s name. That was the trouble about lies. They seemed to multiply. She sat down on the bed, tempted to skip the meal altogether.

But no. That would only put off the inevitable anyway and it would be cowardly. She’d flirted on purpose. This was her adventure, though she had not named it as such until then. She had promised to travel as Helena. It had even been her own idea and she’d given her word. That thought helped her get a grip on herself. Honor demanded she continue as planned.

She stood, marched to the door and pulled it open. As she turned the key in the door to lock it, she heard a deep groan come from behind her. She whirled and another low moan drifted out of the cabin across from hers. Amber noticed the door stood ever so slightly ajar. Hesitant to offer aid to what sounded like a man, she looked around the deserted saloon. Perhaps she should go for help, but he sounded to be in dire need and Amber had never been one to stand by and do nothing.

She advanced on the door and carefully pushed it open a bit, but after little more than a foot she met with resistance. “Hello,” she called out. “Sir, do you need assistance?”

Another groan was the only answer. Concerned for her fellow traveler, she thanked God she’d worn her own plain blue twill that was un-encumbered by a bustle. She took a deep breath, squeezed around the door and nearly stepped on the gentleman’s outstretched hand. He lay on the floor with his face turned away from her.

“Sir,” she called, her voice trembling as she stepped around him. Then she could only stare. It was the handsome man. He was clearly sick or injured.

She sank down and laid her hand on his forehead. He was burning up. She looked around and hurried across the stateroom to the washstand. After pouring water into the washbowl, she rushed back with a cool cloth to bathe his face.

His eyes opened and he stared up at her with glazed violet eyes. She didn’t know what startled her more—their pure violet irises, or his words.

“Helena?” he asked, his voice weak with fever. “Is it you?” He reached up and traced her cheek with his burning fingers.

She told herself it was the fever that made that slight touch radiate heat through her. It had to be, for she didn’t want to feel anything for one of the men trying to stop Helena from living her life as she saw fit. “How dare you seek to interfere with—” she began.

He grabbed her wrist and seemed not to hear her. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know Franklin was inventing evidence against Kane. Please, believe I didn’t know.” There was such vehemence in his gaze that she found herself transfixed. “Harry was so worried for you as he died in my arms. I must keep my promise. I must protect you, Helena. You must be wary of Gowery. More wary even than you were. He is not what he seems.”

Amber decided not to argue names or intentions at that point. “Yes. Certainly,” she told him in her gentlest tone. “Put all that from your mind. Right now you must get to your bed. Let me help you.” She might well have saved her breath for he seemed to lapse into sleep. She tried to tug him upward, but he was dead weight. Kindness had failed … “Listen to me, you large galoot. Sit. Up.”

“Yes, Mimm,” he answered and rolled up onto his knees. “I’m hot, Mimm. I’m so hot.” He dragged himself to his feet with help from her. Once standing, he looked in her eyes. “Goodness, Mimm, you’ve shrunk. But you’re very pretty, suddenly.” He frowned. “You’re not lookin’ a bit like yourself.” Once again she heard the touch of an Irish accent in his speech and fought a smile.

“Come … You’re not far from the bed. One foot in front of the other,” she ordered as they wove across the floor. And then his weight got the better of her and he toppled, pushing her on to the bed. Stunned, she lost her breath as he landed half on top of her. Amber tried to shift out from under his body, but no matter how she squirmed and tugged, she couldn’t get her dress free. Desperate, she pushed on his shoulder so she could take a breath. He opened his eyes and stared into hers. “You aren’t Helena.”

“No, I’m Amber.”

“You’re my pixie. Did you just appear there?”

“No. You fell upon me,” Amber explained. She’d been so busy trying to help him, she’d forgotten all about the fact that the handsome man knew Helena. But her anger had cooled. He seemed to only want to help the woman she’d promised to impersonate. He’d talked as if he were an old friend of her family’s, but not a friend to Helena’s guardian.

A knock sounded in the cabin. “Is there a problem, ma’am? I heard a shout.”

“Oh, yes,” she called back. “I came to this man’s aid and he’s collapsed on top of me.”

“Has the gentleman perished?” he asked, sounding suspicious.

Her patient tried to push himself off her. “Are you my angel instead?” he asked. “Am I dead after all?” He stared at her with heartbreak in his violet eyes. “What will happen to Meara?”

His eyelids drooped closed then and his weight pressed more heavily on her. “He’s not dead, but he is very ill,” she called the man at the door. “I just need help to get up, then we can summon the ship’s surgeon.”

“You’ll have to extricate yourself,” the man at the door shouted. “I am a minister—Reverend Willis. I will pray for the man, but I fall ill very easily. I shall go find the doctor, though.”

“Then find him quickly, for God’s sake!” she shouted back, though she had to admit it came out like more of a croak, what with a man’s weight all but crushing her.

In the next moment, she managed to twist herself free, but her skirts were still trapped under him. So there she sat, showing more ankle than she had since she was in short skirts, but at least she was no longer trapped.

The doctor bustled in, wearing a rumpled light-colored suit of clothes and dingy waistcoat, his face bearded, a pair of glasses perched on his florid nose. And enough alcohol on his breath to knock out a room full of sailors. “What is this about a woman of ill repute trapped under a sick man? And why didn’t I know you were available?”

“How dare you!” Amber gasped and stared at him in speechless horror. Then she took a deep breath, trying to get hold of her anger. From the other girls at Vassar she’d learned that disdain got a woman further than anger. Amber notched her chin higher and tried to look down her nose at the man who stood half a head taller than her. “I am nothing of the sort!” She shook with rage inside, but explained in a cold haughty voice how events had transpired.

The doctor nodded and walked around behind her. His only response to all she’d said was a short phrase. “Do not leave this cabin.”

And with that ominous statement, she felt a tug as he yanked her skirts free. Sparing her no more than a glance when she hopped down off the high canopied bed, he went about examining his patient, unbuttoning the man’s brocade waistcoat and fine cotton shirt. Then the doctor began muttering and swearing.

Averting her gaze, she backed toward the door. “Well, thank you very much for your help. I’ll just return to my own cabin.”

“You will remain here, my dear.”

She froze. “Why?”

He turned to face her. “You may wish you hadn’t meddled. You have been exposed to whatever disease this man has. You must be quarantined with him for the duration.”

“The duration?”

“Of his illness and yours should you fall ill.”

“I most certainly will not! I won’t get whatever he has. I’m extremely healthy. Besides which, I am an unmarried lady. I cannot stay in here. I have a stateroom just across the saloon that is paid for. If necessary, I shall go there until you’re convinced I will not take sick with whatever has stricken him. What, by the way, is wrong with him?”

“He is a victim of scarlet fever.”

Normally she wouldn’t question a physician, but this man had clearly been drinking. “Isn’t that a child’s illness?”

“I have seen it in the odd adult. And he is quite seriously ill with it.”

He sounded so positive. “Oh, the poor man.”

The doctor narrowed his eyes, pegging her with his penetrating gaze. “And you will stay and lend yourself to nursing him. If not, he’ll die.”

Her ears had surely failed her. “Lend myself toward nursing him? I spoke with him only briefly on deck! And, as I told you, I am unmarried.”

The doctor locked his gaze on her. “Do not take me for a fool. Or simply a drunk. I am quite sober today. Lord Adair asked for a stateroom near yours. I was there when he booked passage. And I found you trapped on the bed with him.” He shook his finger at her. “You apparently know the man quite a bit better than I. If you refuse, you would be signing this man’s death warrant. He may not survive anyway. But I cannot help that.”

“Not help it? You are supposed to be the ship’s doctor.”

He backed toward the door. “There are many others aboard who may need my care on this voyage. For their sakes, I cannot help him at the risk of my own health. If you refuse, the captain might well order him cast overboard rather than wait until he perishes.”

Her heart wrenched. Could he do that? “You will not!” Her gaze shot to the man on the bed. To think of the kind, funny and, yes, handsome man, who’d teased her being thrown away like refuse broke her heart. If she declined, he would at best be left to his own devices and would most certainly die. Women back home often nursed injured miners. If they could do it, she could do it, too.

She looked back at the doctor and bit her lip. “I know less about nursing than I do about him,” she admitted. “You called him Lord Adair. What is his Christian name?”

“I believe I remember him saying he preferred to be called James … no … it was Jamie. Not at all what one would expect from Britain’s ruling class. Am I to assume you are willing to care for him?”

She took a deep breath. “You give me little choice if he is to have any chance, Dr…. uh … what is your name? I think I should know the name of the man coercing me to do something so far beyond my experience and propriety.”

“I am Dr. Bertram Bennet, late of New York, and ports east, west, north and south.”

“Fine, Dr. Bennet, what do I do?”

“Bathe him with cool water to lessen the fever. I will see nourishing broth is delivered to keep up his strength and—” he whipped off his worn black neckcloth “—put this on the door if he perishes.” His eyes softened a bit. “We will have to consign him to the deep if he does. It is the way of the sea.”

“Have you no powders or remedies?” she demanded as the doctor made for the door.

He stopped and sighed. “I will send something for the fever, but it rarely works for a pernicious disease such as scarlet fever. Mostly I believe such illnesses must run their course.”

“Doctor … what … what about his … um … his clothing?” she managed to ask, her cheeks burning like fire. She was sure he would need to be undressed. How else would she bathe him? How had she gotten herself into this? Oh, yes. She’d forgotten adventures often lead to difficulty.

The doctor considered her, raising one of his eyebrows. Her cheeks heated further. “Perhaps you don’t know the gentleman as well as we all believed. Just cut his clothing off. He can afford the loss. The earl is as rich as Croesus. I will have your trunk pushed in here. I am sorry your life has been thrust on this new path. Do you know why he insisted upon a cabin near yours?”

“From his ramblings, I have deciphered that he was a friend of … my father.” She hesitated. Lying was difficult for her.

“That is what he told the steward, but no one believed it,” Dr. Bennet said.

“He was apparently with my … uh … father at his death. It has left him feeling some duty to see to my safety.”

The doctor nodded. “I hope for Adair’s sake he has the chance to fulfill his mission.” Then he turned away sharply and left, closing the door with such a resounding thud that Amber jumped. It felt as if the door had closed on every plan she’d made for the rest of her life. As if nothing would be the same again.

She turned back to the bed and took a deep breath. The earl didn’t look very lordly at the moment. He looked rumpled and sick. And he needed her help. She wanted him to get well, but if he did, she wouldn’t look forward to his learning of the ruse that had put both of them aboard this ship.

If he was to get well, she first had to deal with his clothing. After the dreams she’d had all night long, she didn’t know how she would care for him so personally and not think of them. But she had no choice.

He murmured and tossed on the bed as she rummaged in his trunk. She found only a straight razor and a rather nasty-looking double-edged knife. The latter didn’t look as if it should be part of the accoutrements of an English earl and that gave her pause. What kind of man was he really? She especially had to wonder after not finding any sort of nightshirt. That, too, was outrageously scandalizing—at least to her.

She walked back to the washstand and wet a cloth to place it on his burning forehead, then, using the razor, split his seams, unable to just destroy such fine clothing. She had just finished when a cabin boy quickly shoved her trunk into the room. She rolled her eyes. There was a perfectly acceptable pair of scissors that would have made the job ever so much easier.

Next arrived the powders the doctor had promised. By the time she got the powder mixed with water and into him, her blouse was soaked. Since it had gone nearly transparent with the water, she decided to change. While she rummaged through her badly packed things, the earl called out for the woman named Mimm and someone named Meara.

Amber quickly changed her blouse and put on an apron. She thanked God she’d added her serviceable clothes to the spectacular wardrobe

Helena Conwell had given her. Then she pulled out her grandmother’s carefully written book of remedies and medicines. Her aunt, the wonderful woman who’d raised her from an early age, had added some of her own. She quickly looked through it for any reference to scarlet fever. What she found worried her. He was in for some hard days ahead.

And so was she.

She dropped the book in her lap and sighed. The healing book hadn’t contradicted the doctor, but it did add some suggestions. She quickly went to the door and asked the cabin boy stationed there to request several herbs she was supposed to make into a tea.

“Oh, my head,” Amber heard the earl mutter as she turned away from the door. He stabbed his hand into his hair as he tried to sit. “What in God’s name did I drink last night?”

She rushed to the bed and pushed him back down. “You are quite ill with scarlet fever.”

“Pixie. What are you doing here?” he asked, his voice very hoarse and a little slurred; she saw that it pained him to speak.

“I heard you earlier. You’d collapsed. I foolishly entered your cabin and sent for the doctor. He quarantined me in here with you. I’ve been named your nurse, your lordship,” she said, leaving out the embarrassing, yet pertinent, facts.

This time he managed to sit up. “Oh, please, do lay off the your lordship business. I’ve become rather fond of American lack of deference.” He looked down at himself, then back up at her. “It seems as though we should be on a first-name basis.” He glanced again at his lap. She had left him in only his underdrawers. The sheet slid to his waist, leaving his torso quite bare, and she couldn’t look away from the sight of his muscular chest.

Then he sank back to his pillows. “Devil take it! I cannot be ill. My daughter was, but I thought myself above it.”

“Do calm down,” she begged, noting his overly bright eyes and the very scarlet look of the rash covering his body. “You’ll get well. See if you don’t.”

“I won’t see anything at all if I don’t,” he grumbled crossly.

Her grandmother’s book had warned of nervous irritability and this was certainly a change from what she’d seen of him on deck. “I don’t know much about caring for the sick, but I promise to follow all the doctor’s instructions. And I have my grandmother’s healing book for guidance, as well.”

“Are you speaking of that drunken sot I met the day I booked passage?”

“He was quite sober today, I think.”

“Oh, lovely!” he groused and tried to sit up again. “My life is in the hands of a drunken doctor and the observations of a backwoods grandmother and her granddaughter who is barely out of the schoolroom.”

“Well!”

His over-bright eyes widened and he grimaced, then put a shaking hand to his forehead. “I am so sorry. I’m not usually so easily annoyed. Where have my manners gone?”

“You’re sick. But perhaps you’re hungry. I have some broth for you.”

He shook his head. “No, I’m not in the least hungry. What I am is worried for my daughter.”

So he was married. That should make caring for him easier. She set to bathing his face and neck to lessen the fever. “What is your daughter’s name?” she asked, needing to learn as much as possible about him in case a letter had to be written to his kin.

“Meara,” he said quietly. “She’s only seven years old. I’ve raised her here with the help of my old nurse.”

“Do mothers in England not help raise their children?”

“She died a few months after Meara’s birth.”

“I am so sorry. I understand your worry for your child. But have you no family to care for her? Not that I think you will not survive,” she added quickly.

“I became the earl at a tender age. My uncle was my guardian and he made my life miserable. If I die, Meara would have him as her guardian and he will succeed me. What if I die of this?” He grasped her arm in a steely grip and gazed up at her with fever-bright eyes. “I can’t die!”

Before Amber could respond, he started to breathe oddly. Almost panting. After a minute or so between breaths he said, “Oh. God. Chamber pot. Hurry.”

She got the pot to him before he was violently sick, losing all the medicine she’d fought to get into him. She stood there, feeling inadequate and embarrassed for him.

When he was finished, he nearly pitched out of the narrow bed from weakness. Amber made a grab for both his shoulder and the pot. She pushed him to the pillow, then took the foul-smelling pot to the porthole and dumped it. The sea air smelled so refreshing she left it open.

When she looked back at him he was no longer awake, lying so still it frightened her till she saw his chest rise with a breath. Her worry over treating him as a patient, after the sensual dreams she’d had, vanished. She hesitantly laid her hand over his heart. And wished she hadn’t, for his heart didn’t beat at the same rate as hers. It fluttered in so quick a rhythm she could scarcely count the beats.

His skin beneath her hand was dry and burning to the touch. His neck, shoulders and most of his torso were bright red with the rash. And her only weapons in the battle were a cool cloth, the powders Dr. Bennet had given her and the herbal teas she’d concocted.

She worked at it hour upon hour. Sometimes she wiped him down and, occasionally, when her arms and legs grew too tired to work, she covered his torso, limbs and forehead with wet cloths. That respite gave her the strength to begin all over again.

Twice more through the night she spooned the powders mixed with water into his mouth. She constantly tried to get him to drink the tea. He was often like a little bird, taking what was offered, but with his eyes shut. Other times he shook his head, refusing anything nourishing.

He developed a rattling cough about the noon hour the next day. She looked in her book, but neither there nor in the doctor’s instructions was a cough mentioned. Exhausted, with little sleep since the first night aboard, Amber sat next to his bed, put her head back and slept.

In her dreams Lord Adair visited. Manly, healthy and hungry—for her. Now that she knew his name she moaned it aloud as he kissed her. “Jamie.”

Chapter Three

Jamie woke, his skin on fire. His bed pitched and tilted, making his head swim. “Stop!” he yelled and was immediately sorry. He took a gasping breath past a throat that must have been sliced to ribbons by some fiend with a knife. Then someone raked fire across his chest. But the fire was cold. He shivered. Cold should feel good, but it made his skin burn all the more.

“I’m so sorry,” a sweet voice crooned. “I’m trying to keep your fever down. Maybe if I just laid the cloth on your chest. Would that feel better? I’m sorry I didn’t know this hurt you so.”

The voice. He knew that voice. He forced his eyes open. “Pixie? Is it you?”

“My name is Amber. I do believe thinking of me as Helena is less annoying than this fixation you have with pixies. Why do you persist in this?”

What a foolish question, he thought. “You look … like a pixie,” he gasped. “Tiny.”

“I’m quite capable.” His pixie grew somehow, then seemed to float over him, frowning down at him. Her frown wasn’t the least threatening, though. It was quite the most adorable frown he’d ever seen. He smiled at that. Although he felt like death, she lightened his spirits. “Ever met … a pixie?” he challenged. “Wily … creatures. Eire’s full of … the little people.”

“But we’re in America. Well, not exactly there just now, as we’re on the high seas, but this is an American ship. It’s even called the Young America.”

He struggled to grasp that. “On a ship? Why am I … on a ship?”

“You were searching for Helena Conwell and mistook me for her,” his pixie explained.

He was looking for Helena? Oh, yes. He had to make sure she was safe. And he’d left Meara in New York recuperating. He swallowed. Oh, God. He was sick. He wasn’t supposed to get sick. Not like this. What if he died and left Meara to the mercy of Uncle Oswald? She wasn’t safe.

Tears blinded him and he closed his eyes to hide the depth of his emotions. “Meara,” he said, wanting to explain why his lovely nursemaid had to make sure he lived, but the name came out sounding as if he were crying. He kept his eyes closed, feeling the tears he couldn’t stop run into his hair. Embarrassed and desperate, he decided to hide in the sleep that called to him. He’d hidden the real him for years and done a good job of it. He could do it again.

The next time he woke it was night and a lantern lit the room. He lay, watching the lantern swing to the same rhythm as the rocking of the room. Why would a room move? he asked himself. Earthquake? He’d felt minor tremors in California, but those never made the room rock this way. He closed his eyes, dizziness swamping him, and groaned.

“Jamie?”

It was the pixie calling softly to him. She laid a cool cloth over his forehead. He opened his eyes again. Bathed in the light from overhead, he saw her. “You’ve returned,” he said, then winced at how painful his throat was.

“I didn’t leave. You fell asleep. You must try to stay with me this time. Could you eat some fresh broth?”

He shook his head. He hated to disappoint her, but he couldn’t imagine eating anything with the room swaying as it was.

“We could talk,” she said hopefully.

He winced. “Hurts.”

“Then I’ll talk.”

And talk she did. She told him about her adventures. About her visit to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where she’d worn her Easter finery on their famous boardwalk by the sea. She told amusing stories about the students she’d taught, and about going to college and the wealthy girls who’d been kind and shared their clothes and family holidays with her.

He fell asleep again to the sound of her sweet voice and she followed him into his dreams. But worry followed him, too. He was suddenly young again and Pixie was his teacher. Uncle Oswald was there and Jamie was under his uncle’s control again.

Then Meara was in the house.

And it changed. It was wrong. Now the object of his uncle’s ire was Meara. And as a young boy Jamie tried to protect her, but had no power to do so. He screamed her name as the blows fell on her and he cursed his uncle to hell.

His eyes flew open to find his magical pixie staring down at him with concerned eyes. “You shouted. Are you all right? Can I help?” she asked and took the hot cloth off his head.

“I’m worse,” he whispered and grabbed her wrist after she set the cooled cloth back on his forehead. “You know I am.”

She covered his hand with her free one. “You’re warmer. I’m trying everything I know.”

He let go of her. “I know you are … Pixie.”

“My name is Amber. I’m not magic,” she said, and there were tears in her eyes and voice. “If I were, you’d be on the mend.”

“How long?”

“Don’t talk like that. You have to get better for your Meara.”

“Not till … I die. How long … have I … been sick?”

She wiped her pert nose on a dainty handkerchief. “It’s been a week.”

“And you’re … so tired … else you wouldn’t … be crying … over me.” Her image wavered and he tried to see her more clearly, but to no avail. “Don’t even like me,” he muttered. “Never have.”

Amber frowned and pushed an annoying stray hair off her forehead. What was going through that fevered mind of his? “It isn’t true that I don’t like you. I hardly knew you before needing to care for you. If I didn’t like you, I’d have told the doctor to go hang.”

He narrowed his eyes as if trying to puzzle something out. “Would you marry me, Helena?”

Disappointment pressed in on Amber. He’d seemed to know her. And now he didn’t. He’d closed his eyes again. Amber called softly to him, but she knew it was futile. She’d lost him again.

As long as she didn’t lose him altogether. He was so worried about his poor motherless daughter. It was poignant, but confusing. Why was he not with her? Would he neglect the child he loved because this obsession of his with Helena was so all consuming? Sadly it seemed to be. He’d just asked the woman to marry him, hadn’t he?

It made her a bit cross with him. He had a child who relied on him. What she wouldn’t give for the chance to be a parent. Nothing would be more important to her than her child. She knew what it was like to be orphaned. The loneliness and grief had nearly torn her apart on that long train ride east. But she’d been lucky enough to have her aunt and uncle meet her and envelope her in loving arms. Even though Aunty had been sick for so long before she was gone, too, Amber had been secure in the love of the adults in her life even when it was only her and Uncle Charles.

It wasn’t long after Aunty died that he began talking of her going to a two-year boarding school where she’d be further educated with the idea that she would advance from there to Vassar. It wasn’t merely the education he’d wanted for her, though. He’d wanted her away from the coal patch. And away from men like Joseph. Men who were miners. Men who could go to work one day and never return. He’d wanted more for her than pain and loss. So he’d sent her away where someone else could see she met the right people.

But as soon as the ink was dry on her prestigious diploma, she’d moved back to the coal patch, to a town where the mine owner wanted to educate the children of his miners. And there she’d met and fallen in love with Joseph—a miner. Then, just after the banns were read the third time, Joseph died.

She’d continued to teach, but the heart had gone out of her. In the state she was in, she’d nearly let Joseph’s mother push her on her other son. She’d woken up one day, looked around at the soot and death and seen Uncle Charles’s wisdom. And that had put her right where she was now.

Coming to care too much for a man she was beginning to fear was about to die.

Amber shook her head and went back to bathing him, careful of the rash he’d said hurt when she ran the wet cloths over it. She’d checked her grandmother’s book and sure enough, it mentioned that the rash was painful and burned.

“No, Uncle Oswald. Please don’t! No! Damn you to hell for hurting her!” Jamie called out, tossing on the narrow bed.

Amber grabbed his shoulders while trying to hold on to him. The stool she stood on rocked under her feet. “Jamie! Calm down,” she ordered in her schoolroom voice.

He stilled instantly and opened his eyes. His voice rawer for his shouting, he rasped out, “You can’t … let it happen. She’s sweet and innocent. He … he’s a monster.”

“All I can do is keep taking care of you.”

“Marry me. Be Meara’s mother. She needs you. You don’t know what he’d do. He’d break her. Nearly broke me, but I had Mimm and Alex. She’d love you, Pixie.”

He knew her again. He knew who he was asking—begging to marry him before it was too late to help his child. Could she do it? Could she marry him and care for the child he spoke of with such love? She’d wanted children for as long as she could remember. But she’d buried that dream with Joseph.

“Don’t think it … to death.” He chuckled, but it was a heartbreaking sound.

Amber wanted to remember the man on deck, handsome and smiling and kind. Not this hollow-eyed near-corpse. She forced her thoughts to his strange proposal. “I’m all alone, Jamie. How could I care for a child?”

“How can you not? I’m dying. You know it. I know it. There’s money. You wouldn’t have to worry about means. That old pile in Ireland would go to Oswald and he can have it along with the title he’s wanted my whole life. But please don’t let him have Meara. You have to promise to protect her.”

“He’s powerful. He’d take all the money, Jamie. I couldn’t fight him. I’m going to be a governess in California. What kind of life would that be for a little girl who should have been wealthy?”

He frowned, looking thoughtful. “I’ll write a codicil,” he said at last.

“You could barely hold a pen.”

“Then you write it. I’ll sign it. Make Captain Baker witness it. Figure it out. Save her, damn it. Please. At least let me rest in peace.”

“Stop it! I’m not letting you die! Then you’d be stuck with me when all this turns out okay. I’m not countess material no matter where I spent the years I was at college.”

Again that thoughtful look entered his eyes. “Then, if I live, when the voyage ends, we’ll annul it.”

Amber bit her lip. A child. A little girl who’d be all alone but for a man her father clearly loathed. He said there’d be money so Meara would never want for anything. There was little she could do but agree and that made it just a bit vexing. Everyone else’s problems kept forcing her into doing outrageous things.

“All right,” she said, annoyed. “I’ll call out to the young man assigned to us. He can see if the captain will do what you want about the codicil and if the minister I met will marry us. He’s very afraid of becoming ill, so he may refuse. He most likely should.”

“So fierce, Pixie.” He reached up and traced her jawline.

She shivered at his touch.

“And fierce is what I need just now. Protect my princess.”

“You most likely won’t remember all this when you wake up again, but I’ll ask.”

Amber knocked on the door and asked the cabin boy to fetch Captain Baker and the reverend. Then she went back to the bed with her notebook. “Are you still with me?”

“Aye. Write this. To the firm of Bootey and Fowler, New York, New York. This is a codicil to my last will and testament. I hereby appoint my wife …” He waved his hand weakly toward her notebook and swallowed. After a breath and a long pause he said, “Put your whole name there, Pixie, and … uh … add the date … my wife as guardian … to my Meara … Reynolds, my daughter.”

He stopped talking, closed his eyes, then, just when she thought that was all he wanted to say, he blinked his eyes open and added, “She is to administer the trust set up at the Brooklyn Trust Company. The rest of my financial estate shall pass into her ownership. Under no circumstances should any other individual lay claim to any part of my estate or to the guardianship of the child, Meara Reynolds.

“That ought to do it,” he said. “Where the hell is Baker? And that minister.”

A knock sounded on the door and Amber hurried to it. “Captain E. C. Baker, ma’am. What can be done to assist you?”

“The earl wishes to—to—” The words stuck in her throat. “He wishes to marry me for the sake of his daughter. He fears he will perish and leave her orphaned.”

Reverend Willis had apparently accompanied Captain Baker and he shouted through the door, “You wish me to perform a marriage ceremony?”

This bellowing through the door was just stupid. It had been a week and a day and she had not sickened. She flung the door open and was surprised to see a well turned-out officer standing next to a tall, thin man in unrelieved black. Captain Baker had tightly curling salt-and-pepper hair and a full closely trimmed beard to match. After her meeting with Dr. Bennet and his smelly liquor breath, she’d not known what to expect of another ship’s officer. “No, he does,” she said. “I think this an absurd idea, but there is his motherless child to consider, though I have assured him he will live through this sickness.”

“I am sorry Dr. Bennet has caused you so much trouble. He should have quarantined you in your cabin and cared for the man himself. Unfortunately, the best doctors do not accept positions on sailing ships.”

“We are well past that point now, sir.”

“The will,” Jamie rasped from the bed.

“What was that?” Captain Baker demanded, frowning.

Of course, he had not heard. It had been said much too softly to have been heard even the seven or eight feet to the door. “The earl has dictated a change to his will. He wants you to witness it.”

“My dear young woman, this is unconscionable. You are clearly taking advantage. I do not think this is wise, milord,” E. C. Baker called into the room.

“My … idea,” Jamie rasped back louder than before, then took a gasping breath.

“I’ve disputed this,” Amber told the captain. “He is resolute. And this arguing is sapping his strength.”

The captain pursed his lips and stroked his beard as he thought over the problem. “Very well. Has he signed this codicil to his will?”

“I thought it would be better if you sign before he touches the page. I have a health book that says objects the sick person touches can carry infection.”

Baker raised an eyebrow and stared as if considering her. Then he nodded. “Fine. We will do the ceremony first,” Baker said to Reverend Willis.

Willis nodded back. “I’ll need the names.”

“The man taken ill is Lord Jamie Reynolds, Earl of Adair, and this is Miss Helena Conwell.”

“Excuse me,” Amber interrupted. “My name is Amber Dodd. I am merely traveling in Helena’s stead. We traded places in our accommodations.”

“So you truly didn’t know the earl?” Captain Baker asked.

“I didn’t. It was a bit of a mistaken identity,” she said. “Helena failed to inform the earl of the change in her travel plans.” She glanced at the bed. “Jamie, are you still with us?”

“What’s holding … this back?”

She looked toward the men in the doorway. “Captain? Reverend?”

Reverend Willis cleared his throat and motioned Amber back to the bed. “I don’t know how to address a man of English peerage so we’ll just go with both his names. Make sure this is all legal and binding. Jamie Reynolds, Earl of Adair,” he said in a loud voice, “do you take this woman, Amber Dodd, for your lawfully wedded wife?”

“I do, Pixie,” Jamie rasped and smiled sadly.

The minister went on, unaware of the poignant moment. “And do you, Amber Dodd, take Jamie Reynolds, Earl of Adair, for your lawfully wedded husband?”

“I do,” she said.

Amber was grateful he had dispensed with all the promises they’d likely never be called on to test. And he certainly needn’t mention that death would part them. It was standing in the room, a dark witness, ready to claim him.

Captain Baker then read aloud the codicil and signed it at Jamie’s nod. Then Jamie scrawled his signature upon it. She returned to the door. “I will pray for his life, ma’am,” the captain said.

“And I will continue to do the same,” Reverend Willis added. “I will also write up the marriage papers and give them into the captain’s keeping.”

She nodded her thanks, then closed the door.

“It is done then?” Jamie asked.

“It is, but the entire affair was unnecessary. You’re going to get well. I’ve promised, haven’t I? I never break a promise.”

His energy spent, he nodded slightly, smiled sadly, then took a ring off his little finger and slid it on hers. It fit. She wondered if that was prophetic. And if it was a prophecy, what did it mean? Was she destined to wear it as his widow or, queer thought that it was, did it mean they were destined for each other? Whichever it was, while she stared at her left hand, he fell back to sleep.

Amber stored the codicil in her trunk and resumed bathing him, fighting the fever ravaging his body. She wanted him to live, but the longer he hung on, hovering between life and death, the more she cared about him. She prayed that if he were to die God would take him before she cared even more for him. But then she quickly revised her thought because the truth was … she already cared for him too much.

And now she was married to him.

This adventure had become her worst nightmare come true.

Chapter Four

Jamie opened his eyes and found her standing over him. He’d never have thought such selflessness would be part of her character. And the plainness of her dress and even plainer hairstyle surprised him, too. He hadn’t thought Helena, an upper-class princess, would own a garment so worn and simple. “Oh, you’re back again,” she said in that sweet voice. It lured him from sleep time and again even though pain awaited.

“And you’re still here,” he quipped, scarcely recognizing the hoarse sound of his own voice.

“I promised you I’d be here. Will you try to take some broth and tea? I think my grandmother’s recipe is keeping your fever down a bit.”

Just then sunlight flooded through the skylight and illuminated her lovely face. It wasn’t Helena. It was Pixie. He struggled to gather a name from his fevered brain. She was Amber. He’d thought she must be part of a dream, but she was real. So he had met her on deck.

Jamie nodded to her question about the broth and tea. He didn’t feel up to eating or drinking, but he didn’t want to disappoint her. She was taking care of him. The least he could do was cooperate and help himself.

Her lovely smile made the agony of swallowing worth the pain. He didn’t feel the same way when he tasted the bitter liquid he’d watched her mix with water and the contents of an envelope. “That last … quite disgusting,” he complained.

She laughed and laid a cool cloth on his forehead. “Your opinion of the doctor notwithstanding, we need to do everything we can to get you well. Meara is counting on us.”

Us? Jamie frowned as a fog rose between them and he felt his mind begin to descend into chaos. He fought to hold on to clarity, but could feel it slipping away. “Meara? You know my wee one?”

The pixie frowned. “No, you told me of her nearly a week ago. It’s easy to see how much you love her.”

Meara. His sweet trusting little angel. He shouldn’t have left. “Been … away … too much,” he tried to explain. He wanted to hide in his mind. He forced his eyes open and beheld captivating Helena. She floated next to his bed. Seeing her there made no sense. She hated him. But she needed protection. He had to make her see reason. “I gave … my word.” Speaking had grown agonizing, but she had to understand. “His blood … on my hands. Promised … Least … I can do. Died to save me.”

Amber sighed. So she was Helena again. Why did that bother her so much? She stared down at Jamie’s tortured expression and forgot her own upset. She knew the story of Harry Conwell’s murder and it clearly haunted Jamie.

He stared up at her, now engulfed in delirium. She decided to play along. What difference did it make if a delirious man thought she was someone else?

“It wasn’t your fault,” she told him. “It was someone angry over his mining interests.”

“Not sure,” Jamie whispered. “Gowery said … but … I wonder—” His eyelids slid closed.

He was gone again, but he had been lucid for a longer time than he’d been in nearly a week. Since the day he’d pushed her to marry him.

Amber plunked down on the stool next to the bed. Lord above! She’d married him. She’d come to care for him. And he could still die. His fever kept spiking toward sundown. She wanted to believe he’d live so badly, but even his recovery posed a huge problem for her—for her heart. While he’d been lost in delusions and delirium, she’d seen the honorable man his unguarded mind revealed him to be. And more and more she became ensnared and enthralled by a pair of fevered violet eyes.

Several hours later Jamie’s fever spiked again. It raged for hours as if in response to her refusal to give up hope. Then he began sweating and she prayed the fever would break for good.

Exhaustion pressed in on her as she blotted his forehead to keep the sweat from running into his eyes. He tossed and turned and once again muttered names and the occasional coherent phrases about his terrible upbringing and his need to protect his child from the same man English law would have made her guardian.

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.

Now she just wanted to hide in there and forget the rest of the world even existed. Especially a certain English lord across the saloon who thought he was so utterly desirable that she would stoop to trapping him.

Humph! More like the other way around. She opened her trunk and looked for something to wear. Something to make her feel confident. “Of all the nerve,” she muttered and pulled out a no-nonsense traveling skirt and blouse. “He begged!”

Begged her to wed him.

The last thing she’d wanted was marriage to a dying man. A man to grieve for. “The very last thing.”

Then, after fighting for his life for days on end, after learning what a good man he was, after finding love in her heart for a man once again, she’d awakened to his fiery kisses and bold caresses. She’d thought he felt as she did. That he must. That they were fated for each other.

Then he’d called her Helena.

She slammed the trunk shut and plunked herself down into the chair. The whole mess was so ironic. It was Amber who’d come up with the idea for this travel charade. She’d felt sorry for Helena Conwell and had felt a kinship for her, as well. They’d both lost their parents and had both been passed into the care of another. Rather than finding a person like Amber’s sweet and caring Uncle Charles, Helena had been saddled with Franklin Gowery, one of the most feared and hated men in the entire Pennsylvania coal patch.

It angered her beyond bearing that this was her fault. She felt stupid and foolish for trusting Jamie Reynolds, Earl of Adair. Father of Meara. Meara, the stepchild she’d thought she would raise alone.

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