Free The Pursuit of Pleasure by Elizabeth Essex

eyes. He’d shown more finesse outwitting the French than he had with Lizzie. She was already sauntering away.
    “Don’t be such an old woman, Jamie. I’m hardly helpless. I never have been.”
    There was that negligent flick of the wrist in dismissal as she strolled out of the room. He shouldn’t have needed reminding.
    “Captain?”
    He took a deep, calming breath and turned to the housekeeper. “Not to worry, Mrs. Tupper. Everything will still proceed according to plan. My wife will not be moving into Glass Cottage. But do you think you might manage a pot of tea, or something from your cottage, for us?”
    “Yes, sir. Straightaway.”
    He didn’t bother to call Lizzie back. He followed her out, to see where she’d gone to slough off his words.
    She had wandered back out the front door, into the garden. He let her roam the flower borders in peace, giving her as much sea room as she wanted. They meandered down toward the cliff top and the viewpoint out over the water, where he turned a weather eye upon the Channel. Experience told him there would be rain again, and soon. Late afternoon clouds were gathering along the edge of the sea, piling up into a threatening blanket of gray. There wasn’t even enough time to get back to Dartmouth. They would be trapped at the Cottage by the weather for as long as the storm lasted.
    Although he was quite used to being as wet as a fish, he doubted Lizzie was. The flat light threw her pale, fine-boned, porcelain skin and vivid hair into greater relief. She looked like a china ornament, so delicate and fragile, despite all her resolute assurances.
    Devil take it, he had no business bringing her out here. He must be getting sentimental, damn it. It had seemed such an easy thing to give her the pleasure of the visit after the casual cruelty of her father’s words, but now, as he looked back at the neglected cottage, framed by the blowing trees in the eerie, flat light, he could feel the palpable danger of the place.
    A danger he was going to orchestrate.
    But he couldn’t tell her that, no matter the stray worm of guilt boring its way into his conscience. His duty could not be changed. Nor put off much longer.
    He satisfied himself by catching hold of her soft, slender fingers. “Lizzie, truly. I don’t like the idea of you being out here all alone in that wreck of a house.”
    An elegant turn of her wrist, and her fingers slipped away.
    “A wreck of a house, is it now? Jamie, really, when day before yesterday it was ‘so lovely and covered with roses’? Why did you tell me about it and bring me all the way out here if you didn’t want me to stay? You must have known I’d be charmed.”
    He had wanted her to be charmed by him and not just by the bloody house. He’d simply used the means at hand. Even if he hadn’t thought about it, he had known deep down she wouldn’t be able to resist Glass Cottage—she would do it justice and see its possibilities.
    Yet he couldn’t push too hard, couldn’t insist or she’d dig in her heels as she was doing now. But if there was anything he had learned in the past ten long years it was patience and diligence. He would be both patient and diligent, and he would carry the day with Lizzie.
    His beautiful, intelligent, defiant wife.
    He came up close behind her. Her hair was fashionably loose and down, a riot of gingery waves cascading over her shoulders, hiding that lovely slide of skin at the back of her neck and the singularly vulnerable tendon that ran down the side. He pushed the heavy locks aside so his breath could whisper along her nape.
    “I’m charmed as well. But not by the house.”
    He drew the backs of his fingertips up along the exquisitely pale side of her neck behind her ear. A shiver skittered alongthe surface of her skin. Very nice. Very responsive. She leaned her neck to the side, all boneless concession. Until she jumped.
    “Jamie, someone’s there.”
    “Where?”
    She flung out her arm. “There was a man.