Her hand fluttered to her throat as she watched him fight. Silently she screamed as men thrust and parried. Not knowing what she did, she dipped low to the deck, grabbing up a sword.
Robert Tarryton had turned. Amanda watched as he leapt to the rigging by the mainmast, then catapulted into the sea.
“So you’d give fight, eh?”
A cheerful young man in West County buckskins and a bloody shoulder stood before her. She looked down at the sword in her arm. It was covered with blood too. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cast the sword down and back away screaming. She’d never seen bloodshed like this before. War had always been distant; battle something one heard of in glorious accounts that didn’t mention the cries of the dying. She shook her head, but the lad had grown serious. “Milady, if you must give battle, then I shall engage you so!”
“Highness!” someone yelled out. “The woman must be Highness!”
Amanda held up her weapon in terror. She didn’t want to kill the man, nor did she want to die in a pool of blood, there upon theLady Jane. “No, I shall not fight or surrender!” she claimed, thrusting the sword forward in warning so that the lad fell back. Then she turned and raced blindly back toward the captain’s cabin. Men streamed after her.
She raced through the door, breathless, slamming it closed behind her. Her Highlander was there, rushing forward to meet the enemy, carrying his loaded Brown Bess. He never lifted the weapon. A sword was thrust through his heart, and he came crashing down at Amanda’s feet. “Dear God, no!” she cried, falling to his side, trying to staunch his wound.
It was over, she realized. There was silence on the deck.
But the echo of the shots had barely ceased, the ring of steel had just gone silent, when the door to the captain’s cabin burst open, the wood shuddering as if it would splinter into a million fragments. A man stood there, towering in the doorway, framed by the combination of sea mist and black powder that swirled upon the deck. He was exceedingly tall, broad shouldered, lean in the hips, legs firm upon the deck. He stood silent and still, and yet from her distance, Amanda felt the menace of his presence, felt the tension hot upon the air.
Amanda’s mouth went dry. She didn’t know whether to exult in his surviving, or damn him for not dying.
She did not scream, nor even whisper a word. She looked up quickly from where she knelt at Lieutenant McDougal’s side, still trying in vain to staunch the flow of blood that poured forth from his chest. McDougal was dead. There was really no more that she could do for him.
And she had to face the man in the doorway.
Amanda grabbed the lieutenant’s Brown Bess, staggering up with the heavy and awkward five-foot gun. McDougal could help her no more, and she had never needed protection so desperately. She stared at the doorway, at the man who had come for her. Although she was determined to fight, still she trembled, for the look in his eyes made her heart shudder, as if a blade had cut cruelly into the very depths of her.
Cameron. Lord Eric Cameron. Or Major General Lord Cameron now, she thought, near hysteria.
“Eric!” she whispered his name.
“Highness,” he said. His voice was deep and husky, sending shivers down her spine. Watching her, he removed a handkerchief from his frock coat and wiped clean the blade of his sword. She braced herself as he kept his eyes upon her and sheathed his sword at his side.
“How intriguing to see you,” he murmured. “You, milady, should be tending the home fires. And as I am a special adjutant to General Washington, I should be with him. But how could I be when I received an urgent request from Brigadier General Lewis, commander of the Virginia militia, warning me that our arms and my very home were in danger. That we had all been betrayed.”
“Eric—”
“Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s gallant royal governor—who now decimates her coast—was driven from Williamsburg in the summer of 1775, but as you know so well, Highness, he took to the sea, and from H.M.S.Fowey, he descended upon the towns, harrying them in the name of the king. He always seemed to know so much of what was going on! Then on New Year’s Day this year he burned Norfolk to the ground with the seventy big guns of his fleet, and he continued to haunt the Tidewater, attacking my very home, milady.”
“If you would listen to me—”
“No, Amanda. I listened to you for too long. I kept believing that some sense of honor would keep you silent, even if we did not gain your loyalty. And now, well I know the full truth of it.” Eric spoke so softly. Still she felt the sizzling heat and tension behind his words, the energy behind his quiet stance. “Put down the gun,” he warned her.
Dread filled her. She had chosen her course. If she was not guilty now of the treachery he suspected, she had still chosen her own side in the conflict. She held her head high, trying not to show her fear. Once it might have been a game. Like chess. Check, and check again. But even when they had played and he had allowed her to seek certain advantages, the warning had been there. Nay, the threat, for he had told her that she would pay if he ever caught her betraying him.
And now that she was innocent at long last, she’d been caught!
He stood there so tall and unyielding. As the powder and mist faded, she saw him so much more clearly. His taut white breeches defined the rugged muscle and sinew of his thighs and the navy frock coat with the epaulets upon the shoulders emphasized the breadth of them. His hands were gloved, but she knew them well. Knew their tenderness, and their strength.
It was the power of his eyes that held her now. Those startling, compelling eyes. Silver and indigo steel, they stared at her with such fury that she nearly forgot that she held the loaded gun. Amanda could barely hold the unwieldy weapon, but she couldn’t let him see that. She couldn’t falter; she could never surrender.
She wanted to cry out. She wanted desperately to remind him that she had never turned her back on England, that she had always been a loyalist, and could only follow her heart, as he had followed his. But he was not angry because of her beliefs. He was angry because of all that he believed she had done.
“I am innocent of this!” she told him heatedly.
His brow arched with polite interest. “You are innocent—Highness?”
“I tell you—”
“And I tell you, milady, that I know full well you are a British spy and the notorious ‘Highness,’ for I oft fed you misinformation that found its way to Dunmore’s hands. You betrayed me—again and again.”
