"Then come help me," Courtland said, because the object he had in mind wasn't really packing up their belongings, but getting Cassandra to himself for a while on this, their last night in England.
"All right," she said, getting to her feet. "But first I want to stop in and see Elly and the baby, make sure they're all right. Not that they aren't, but Elly's had her hands full, keeping Jack in bed until he's healed."
"She's not the only one having trouble keeping someone in bed," Courtland muttered under his breath, and then smiled at his poor joke. But he couldn't get enough of Cassandra, not now that he knew that the love he'd thought he felt for her was as nothing compared to how much he loved her now, having almost lost her.
He said his good-nights to Chance and Julia and headed down the hallway to Ainsley's study. Knocked, and was bade to enter.
"Court," Ainsley said, sheaves of paper in his hand, others tucked into the black silk sling he still wore on his left arm, "you're just in time. Help me with these, will you, please?"
"Certainly, sir," Courtland said, taking the papers and piling them neatly on the desktop, noticing that the top sheet was a letter signed by Marianna Warren. He looked around the large room, at the bookshelves missing quite a few volumes, at the map table that he'd never before seen not littered three inches deep in maps and charts. All those years, the Empress had been stored inside that table. "I would have thought you'd be the first one packed and ready to go. It's fortunate that we had time to linger this long, isn't it?"
Ainsley nodded, seating himself behind his desk. "I wouldn't have left so soon in any case. Not until I knew everyone was all right. Poor Jack, he got the worst of it." He looked to the empty couch directly across from the desk, at the permanent indentation in one of the cushions. "And Jacko…"
"He died as he wanted to, sir. Protecting Elly."
"Circles, Court. The world moves in circles sometimes, each one tightening in on the last one. It takes all the energy we have to break the circle, move forward to a new future without dragging the worst of the past with us." He opened the middle drawer of the desk and pulled out the pouch holding the Empress, laid it on the desktop. "What do we do with this?"
"I'd like to see it at the bottom of the ocean," Courtland told him honestly.
Ainsley smiled. "What? The most practical of my sons, willing to toss a fortune into the sea? People have died for this stone, Court, my own wife among them. But a stone didn't kill them. Greed killed them. Greed, ambition, superstition."
"I can speak only for myself, but I doubt that any of us wants the thing in any case, sir."
"Yet it's ours, isn't it, paid for in blood." Ainsley picked up the pouch, held it in his hand for a moment before replacing it in the drawer. "Very well, I'll deal with it. One way or another, the Empress should stay with the Becket family. As I told Cassandra, bad luck wears off."
"Bad luck? But you said the stone was blameless," Courtland pointed out.
Ainsley tipped his head to one side, shrugged. "True. But I also never said I wasn't superstitious. We'll leave it to another generation to decide what's to be done with the Empress. It's enough that my family is being scattered to the four winds."
"Spence and Callie and I will still be with you, in Hampton Roads or nearby," Courtland pointed out, carefully not mentioning Rian, Ainsley's "beautiful boy," once believed lost to them, who would be taking his Lisette to her family home in New Orleans, or Morgan, Chance and Fanny, who would all remain in England. "We…we could stay here, you know. Now that Beales is gone, the Black Ghost is gone."
"No," Ainsley said quietly. "Becket Hall belongs to Eleanor and Jack now. Eleanor would never be truly happy anywhere else. And God knows I've hidden here long enough. I wouldn't have believed it possible seventeen years ago, Courtland, but there's an ending to everything, even penance. I only wish the others could be leaving with us. Jacko, Odette, Bumble, Pike, Edythe and all of the others. They deserved better than they got."
"Yes, sir," Courtland said, pouring his adoptive father a glass of wine and placing it in front of him. "This will be a long night for all of us, saying goodbye to old friends. But new friends await us."
Ainsley lifted the wineglass in a toast. "Then I'll drink tonight to old friends. Good night, Courtland."
* * *
CASSANDRA YELPED satisfyingly when Courtland's hands squeezed her waist as she was bent over a large seaman's chest, trying to make some sense out of the jumble of shirts and smallclothes he'd thrown into it willy-nilly.
"You shouldn't sneak up on me like that," she scolded as she straightened, putting a hand to the small of her back, easing her spine back into line, he supposed, as she'd been bending and stretching for what seemed like weeks, choosing and folding and packing…and then choosing again, folding again, unpacking and packing again. He'd decided that all the fuss had kept her mind away from unpleasant thoughts. "You know, if you continue to refuse to be serious about this, you're going to leave without everything you need."
He slipped his arms around her waist, drew her close to kiss her hair. "If all I take is you, I'll have everything I need."
"Oh, Court, that's so sweet— now let me go, I want to finish this."
He stepped back, and she picked up another stack of shirts from the piles on his bed. He watched her, being so very domestic, and remembered a time when she would sit on a blanket on the beach, playing with her favorite doll. Until she spied him, of course, and forgot the doll in order to get up, follow him, pester him with endless questions while he was attempting to be so grown-up, so very serious.
She'd always been able to infuriate him. And make him laugh.
She'd lost her mother, but Ainsley had made sure that she'd had a childhood…something Courtland had never experienced. When Courtland had watched Cassandra at play he would feel very young…and then, sometimes, very, very old.
But time passes, and has a way of evening things out. Now they were equals. Friends. Lovers.
"I sat with your father for a while after you went upstairs," he told her as she picked up his brushes from the dresser top and then put them down again, probably realizing that he might want to brush his hair in the morning. "He's feeling rather…maudlin."
She stopped what she was doing and turned to face him. "Should I go down to him?"
"No, I don't think so. Let him say his goodbyes in his own way. Now, stop this, all right?"
"But you've made such a mess— don't do that! I took everything out of the chest to fold it, put it back in correctly, and now you're— Courtland!"
But Courtland had already scooped up all of the clothing on his bed and dumped it back into the chest. "There, all done. I like my way better."
"Well, I don't. We're going to be in close quarters for several weeks on the
Isabella,
and every time you want to find a clean shirt, you'll be dumping everything on the deck and— "
He grabbed her, picked her up, and tossed her onto the bed. "There. That's how I like to see my bed. With you in it."
Cassandra rolled her eyes and then scooted to the head of the bed, pushing up the pillows so that she could sit propped against them. "Well, you could have simply
said so,
you know."
"I thought about it," he told her, unbuttoning his shirt as he put a knee up on the bed, "but that was more fun."
She pulled the ribbon from her hair and her curls tumbled free. "Fun? I love you, Courtland. I don't know why anyone would call you stodgy."
"I love you, too," he told her, reaching for her, grinning. "Do you realize, Callie, that by this time tomorrow night your father will have married us at sea? This is your very last chance to be a wild, wanton woman. Not that you haven't had considerable practice these last weeks."
She leaned over, finished opening his last few buttons for him, opening the buttons on his buckskins, teasing him with the lightness of her touch, the surety that she could rouse him with only that slight touch. "My last night as a wanton? Not according to Morgan, it isn't. There, all done." She turned her back to him, lifting her hair from her neck. "Now help me with my buttons, the way you did the first time I wore this gown."
"Not yet a wife, and already giving orders," he said as he knelt on the mattress and began opening the small satin-covered buttons that began at her nape and seemed to go on forever, especially as she was wriggling about now, one hand beneath her skirts, rolling down her silken hose. "No, leave them." He bent to kiss her nape, nuzzle against her soft, perfumed skin. "Please."
She eased back against him and he gently pushed down the top of the gown Morgan had ordered altered for her, the one that seemed to demand a complete lack of underpinnings, and learned that this was still true. He'd hoped that was the case, all the evening long.
He cupped her bare breasts as she arched her back, tilted her head, giving him total access to her long, slender throat. He kneaded, gently pinched, lightly stroked, feeling her nipples tauten, watching as her chest rose and fell rapidly, the effect of his touch on her fueling his own passion.
They'd made love nearly every night for the past few weeks. Sometimes gently, slowly, building their passion, prolonging their combined release. Sometimes quickly, fiercely, as if to chase the world away, put the past behind them, live only in the moment. Tonight, their very last at Becket Hall, it would seem, would be one of those nights.
"Yes…so good, Court. So good…damn this stupid gown!"
She lifted herself slightly, began working to hike up her skirts, her tugging becoming more frantic as he rubbed her nipples between his fingers and thumbs, her breath coming faster, her soft moans of pleasure urging him on.
Some small disinterested part of him heard the thin fabric rip.
With a frustrated cry, she pulled away from him before turning about, all but attacking him, and he pulled her close, between his thighs, as she wrapped her silken-clad legs around his back. He held her balanced just above him as she reached down between their bodies. Finding him. Guiding him…
She ground herself against him as he moved deep inside of her, their movements mirroring each other, holding on, flying high. Falling, falling…falling through time and space and future and past, only to find each other…and hold on…hold on…
* * *
COURTLAND TIED the strings at the top of Cassandra's cloak and kissed her before pulling the hood up and over her curls. It was cold on the terrace as the sun had yet to make its way above the horizon far out in the Channel, so that they were caught there in a thick, otherworldly, predawn Romney Marsh mist.
"Do you think I'm being silly?" she asked him, raising her hand to his cheek, biting her lip to keep from crying as he turned his face into her palm, then kissed her fingertips.
"No. Everybody says goodbye in their own way. This is yours. I like it."
Holding hands, they walked down the stone steps, the wind that would soon fill the sails of the two ships whipping their cloaks around their legs. They crossed the wide sand-and-shingle beach, bits of watery ice from last night's rain crunching between the pebbles as they stepped carefully toward the tide that was coming in to meet them, that would soon carry them away to a new life.
She could already see men climbing into the riggings of the
Isabella
and the
Respite,
doing whatever sailors do to prepare for a voyage, and she squeezed Courtland's hand. "It's happening. It's really happening. We're really leaving."
Courtland turned her around, his hands on her shoulders as he stood behind her, to watch together as the winter sun at last made a rare appearance and the many windows of Becket Hall began to blaze as if the entire building was on fire. She felt some of that reflected warmth melting something in her breast as she committed the sight to memory, hoping she would be able to see Becket Hall this way again someday, but not knowing if she ever would.
She raised her hands to cover his, sighed. "Our last morning…" she said quietly.
"No, sweetings," he told her. "Our very first…"
EPILOGUE
Hampton Roads
January, 1816
HE LEANED DOWN, lifted the latch that held the gate shut on the white picket fence, and stepped inside the winter-brown garden that still seemed to radiate a sense of order, of belonging…and the promise of another spring to come.
A tall man, no longer young, not yet old, the years and the silver in his dark hair rendering him even more handsome than the youth he'd been several lifetimes and heartbreaks ago, he walked with a grace that was innate to him, even as his heart threatened to break free of his chest.
He saw her a moment later. She had her back partially to him as she snapped off the hard, round heads of last summer's roses.
He'd seen her only once before, nearly four years earlier, but her face remained clear in his mind. Her body, lithe and tall, her smile open and honest, her light brown hair cut unfashionably short, suiting her intelligent gamin face, highlighting her wide green eyes with the small laugh lines around their edges.
