“Did it?”
“No. She looked at the body but she didn’t see it. She said that she had to get back to the house to be there when Davy returned from Ghost Island.”
He took a breath. “My family was quite angry with me when I returned home. They thought Ardis should be in bed. There was an awful scene and everyone was on her side and against me. You would
have thought I was a monster and wanted to hurt my own sister.”
She could hear the hurt that was still in his voice.
“In the end it was my mother who asked me what I wanted to do with Ardis, and I said that I wanted to take her with me to Ghost Island, just the two of us. My mother packed food and blankets for us and, while everyone else protested, I rowed Ardis out to the island.”
“What did you say to her?”
“I didn’t know what to say at first, but every time she mentioned Davy I told her he was dead. She ignored me. She acted just as she always did, but there was a certain wildness in her eyes that I hadn’t seen before. By the third day I couldn’t stand it anymore. She mentioned Davy and I grabbed her and shook her and screamed at her that Davy was dead and that he was never coming back again.”
He clutched Maddie closer to him. “Ardis began to fight me, fight me as hard as anyone’s ever fought before. She wanted to get away from me. I didn’t know what she wanted to do if she did get away, but I wasn’t releasing her to find out. I tried to keep her nails away from my face, and when she kept kicking me, I sat on her legs and removed her shoes.”
Maddie looked up at him, but he put her head back down.
“I don’t know how long she fought, but it was a while. An hour or more probably. I thought she was getting tired, so I relaxed my hold of her and she slipped away from me as quick as an eel. I ran after her but couldn’t find her. I guess my senses were dulled or something, because she sneaked up behind me and hit me with something. It dazed me, knocked me out for a few minutes.”
“What did she do?” Maddie felt her heart pounding in sympathy for the girl.
“I think she meant to drown herself, for she was swimming toward the mainland. It took me a while to find her, and by then she was so far out that I wasn’t sure if that was her head I saw or a lobster trap. I went after her. She’s a strong, fast swimmer and I thought I wasn’t going to be able to catch her.”
“But you did.”
“I did. And when she began to fight me in the water, I hauled her up and clipped her one on the jaw, knocked her cold, then swam back to the island with her. We were both freezing, and I knew there was no time to build a fire, so I stripped off her clothes and mine, down to our skin, pulled her onto my lap, wrapped four blankets around us and tried to get us warm.”
“And that’s when she cried,” Maddie said softly.
He didn’t say a word for a moment. “When she woke she spoke so softly I could hardly hear her. She said that she and Davy had decided to wait until they were married before making love to each other. They had decided that they knew so much about each other that they would save this one thing for later. She said that she had always known that when she sat, nude, in a naked man’s arms, they would be in Davy’s, not in her brother’s arms and certainly not in the arms of her ugliest brother.”
Maddie didn’t look at him, for she knew that there were tears in his eyes as well as in his voice.
“Ardis cried then. She cried the rest of the day and most of the night. I built a fire and got our clothes dry and we dressed and still she cried. I got her to eat a little lobster but nothing else. She—”
He broke off, and Maddie knew that he couldn’t speak of it anymore. She lifted her arm to put it around his neck and pulled his face down so that it was buried in her neck. “I’m so sorry, so very sorry.”
Chapter 11
She held his face against her neck for some time. So, this was the cool, perfect Captain Montgomery. This was the man who seemed to know how to do everything. This was the man who told people what to do and how to do it.
She stroked his hair and held him, and it occurred to her that she’d never been as close to a man as she’d become to him. In all the years she’d been traveling around the world with John’s help, she’d been able to keep her distance from other people. It had been easy to keep up the façade of being a duchess, but with this man she wasn’t able to keep up any façade.
“What’s this?” he asked, moving his head and taking her hand in his.
It was Laurel’s ring that she’d slipped on her little finger. “Nothing,” she said, and snatched her hand away.
“I can tell you anything about myself, but you can tell me nothing about you, is that it?”
She wanted to protest that what he was saying was unfair, that there were reasons that she couldn’t tell him about herself, but she didn’t. Maddie remembered the man saying that those who held Laurel were angry that an army man was following her.
She moved off his lap. “I have told you at least a thousand times, Captain, I neither want you nor need you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going down to the camp.”
He stood and caught her arm. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s night and you’re tired and you need rest. We’ll spend the night here.”
Spend the night with him? It was one thing to sleep in the tent with him nearby but quite another to sleep in the open with nothing between them but a little mountain air. “I’m going down the mountain.”