She hung the lantern back on its hook, reminding herself that he had spoken perfect English up to this point.
Yet wouldn’t a Spanish spy know English? Had he arrived to ready the island for invasion?
Roselyn reined in her panicked thoughts. He had been in battle and was barely clinging to life, which was not how a spy would come ashore. He had been fleeing from the Spanish—or so he’d said.
And since many Englishmen knew Spanish, she couldn’t label the man an enemy with so little proof.
“What is your name?” she whispered, knowing he couldn’t hear her.
~oOo~
For two days the sailor moved in and out of consciousness, and Roselyn began to regret that she hadn’t brought him to her cottage. She was constantly running for supplies, for broth to dribble between his lips, for soap to clean his body and his matted hair and beard. She deliberately chose his most unconscious moments for such “baths,” then tried to tell herself that her hands weren’t shaking from performing such intimate acts on a strange man.
He occasionally mumbled unintelligible words, though once he asked a lucid question: “Do you live on my land?”
Before she could even think what to reply, he was asleep again.
But always she worried about being discovered by the Heywoods. She could never put them in the way of a possible Spanish plot. Francis had been more like a father to her, his children were practically her siblings, and they had been nothing but kind in the year since she’d fled to the Isle of Wight. She couldn’t involve them in this new problem she’d created for herself—not again. She could last until the sailor was well enough to turn over to the militia.
~oOo~
Late in the afternoon, Roselyn returned to the shed with a thin stew for the sailor’s meal. She paused in the doorway, watching his face in a shaft of sunlight. The swelling from his bruises had subsided, and beneath all that long hair and beard, he seemed to be a handsome man. In his sleep, he turned his head, and his hair fell away from his brow.
She frowned, feeling a prickling sensation on the back of her neck. She walked forward as if in a dream and knelt beside the man, setting her tray on the dirt floor.
Roselyn felt a dim sense of panic reach her, grasp her, until she almost couldn’t swallow. With a shaking hand, she pushed the hair off his hot forehead, as a nobleman would wear it.
Beneath the mottled purple and green bruises and the ragged beard was the face of Spencer Thornton—her betrothed.
Chapter 2
Roselyn scrambled away from Thornton, accidentally kicking over the bowl of stew. She pressed her back against the wall and stared wildly at him, waiting for him to awaken and remind her of all the sins she’d committed.
She suddenly had a vivid recollection of the eve of her wedding, remembered his face looking her over with a casual cynicism and then looking away in disinterest. Her guilt for her own part in that disaster was swallowed by a sudden flaring of outraged anger at him, at her parents, for what they’d all forced her to do. Remembering it made her stomach clench.
Just when she thought her life was proceeding at an even pace—she had a place to live, a way to earn her livelihood, and a few friends who cared about her—she had to face a ghost out of her past.
Not a ghost, she told herself, but a man who’d wronged her—a man she, too, had wronged, she forced herself to admit.
And he was no common sailor.
Roselyn thought again of the foreign words he’d mumbled. His mother was Spanish; naturally he knew the language. Yet what was he doing with the fleet—and which fleet was he with? Did he hold alliances with Spain that she knew nothing about?
Sliding down against the wall, she buried her face in her hands and shuddered. Why was this happening to her? She had tried to escape Thornton—and ended up shackled to Philip, a man no better, who wanted her only for the same reasons Thornton did: money and power.
Just when she’d come to terms with living her life alone, Thornton reappeared. She remembered the words he’d mumbled,Do you live on my land?Could he have bought property near Shanklin?
~oOo~
That night Roselyn couldn’t sleep. Questions and fears raced through her mind, but she didn’t want to confront them. She rose and dressed by firelight, then went out into the night with only the moon to guide her. She wanted to walk in peace, to feel the breeze on her face, to inhale the soothing smell of flowers and the sea.
Yet when she found herself near the shed where Thornton lay, she was not surprised. Everything she wanted to escape had to do with him. With a heavy sigh, she opened the door.
A shaft of moonlight cut across the pile of drying grass—but Thornton wasn’t lying upon it. The blanket she had covered him with lay in a heap on the ground.
For a moment she remained frozen with shock, then came back to herself and quickly searched the shed. He was gone.
Had someone discovered him and taken him away? Surely Francis Heywood would have been notified, and the sound of men’s voices as they trudged to the shed would have alerted her.
