Cold Comfort (A New Adventure Begins - Star Elite 5)

Emmeline had good reason to dread the day ahead as well because half an hour after Oliver had left it grew considerably worse. Firstly, Mrs Wattling manufactured a reason to return and ask her probing questions about Oliver. Emmeline struggled to know what to tell the woman because she didn’t know that much about him herself. But Emmeline couldn’t admit that to her neighbour because she suspected that Mrs Wattling had passed by the kitchen window and seen her in an intimate embrace with the man. It made Emmeline feel terribly wanton to have kissed a man she barely knew. Strangely, while shockingly out of character, it was wonderfully liberating to be free of the restraints of her ordinary, somewhat staid life. Throughout her life, Emmeline had never done anything to cause anybody any alarm. She had been a dutiful daughter, and had done everything anyone had asked of her and more besides because Caroline had brought so much trouble to the family home. Today’s liaison with Oliver was the most scandalous Emmeline had ever been, but it had been daringly rewarding.

“I have never done anything, been anywhere, or experienced anything I truly wish to experience. It’s been terribly boring. Maybe it is time that I did do something for myself for a change, and damn the consequences?”

The more she contemplated it, the more Emmeline began to understand the strange, almost haunted restlessness that had plagued her over the last several months of her life. It had started not long after her last altercation with Caroline, when her sister had wanted to know why she didn’t live her life but chose to remain within the stuffy confines of the family home instead.

“Just because you choose not to live doesn’t mean we all have to be confined to our caskets, do we?” Caroline had said.

“Oh, how right you are,” Emmeline murmured, flopping into a chair beside the fireplace.

She picked up her sewing and then put it back into the basket. Emmeline then wandered into the study and selected a book only to put it back having done nothing more than rifle disinterestedly through the pages. Aimlessly, she wandered from room to room, listening uncomfortably to the silence that followed her. It was interspersed with her repeated sighs, but there was nothing she could do about it. She was bored and wanted something – more.

“It isn’t him. It cannot be him I am yearning for. It is more than that. I want something more out of life; an adventure.”

With nothing else to do with her time but watch the clock go around, Emmeline allowed her thoughts to turn to what really troubled her. The sense of facing something unseen, a silent challenge that put her in danger and threatened her life as she knew it, had started to make its presence felt. She could ignore it but she knew it would stay where it was, waiting in the darkness at the back of her mind to haunt her dreams with thoughts of what might have been, or could be if she was bold enough to take a chance and accept the danger and the difficulties it threw at her.

“It isn’t him I am going to do this for. It is me,” she reiterated more to herself than to anyone else. She was all alone in the house. There was nobody else to talk to; nobody there to listen or answer her. “Maybe that is the problem? Maybe my problem is that there is nobody here to listen anymore? With Caroline gone now, what else do I have in my future? Who else do I have in my future?”

Maybe I need some adventure, and if helping the War Office with this investigation is it, what harm can there be? Oliver has assured me that I will be shown how to protect myself. That can hardly be a bad thing, can it?

Emmeline pursed her lips, but quickly blocked out the nagging voice of reason which immediately asked her what her father would tell her to do. He wasn’t there to advise her. She knew he would strenuously object, as he usually had whenever either of his daughters had wanted to do anything he hadn’t deemed at all ladylike.

“And therein layeth the problem. While I was willing not to rock the boat, Caroline was. If he had just allowed us to breathe a little, maybe none of this would have ever happened?”

But the kidnap victims hadn’t done anything to rock any boats either and their lives had been taken from them just as cruelly as Caroline’s had been taken from her.

“Maybe a little adventure won’t hurt,” Emmeline decided, squaring her shoulders and shaking off her nagging doubts. “I have to do this.”

She repeated that over and over until it became a mantra which rattled around inside her head for the next several hours. By early evening, though, she was going quietly out of her mind. By the time eight o’clock arrived, Emmeline was decidedly nervous yet excited by the prospect of being able to see Oliver again. Restless, and determined to put on a sensible front, Emmeline had changed her dress twice but then changed back into her original outfit, mostly because she didn’t want to give Oliver the impression that she was trying to impress him in any way.

By the time the clock edged past eight o’clock, Emmeline was thoroughly exhausted, out of sorts, and fed up with her lot in life, but mostly, she was impatient to see Oliver again.

“I cannot go through another day like today. I almost wish that I had gone into town with him like he asked,” she muttered in disgust.

While she had made her mind up to help him, she was still nervous of his arriva

l because she now knew that Oliver’s presence in her life was going to bring her turmoil.

“Adventure. That is what I shall call it. It isn’t upset, turmoil, or upheaval, it is adventure. My life is about to become adventurous. I am, after all, going to be helping the War Office.” She smiled at the thought of that because it seemed so ridiculous to contemplate that she, Miss Emmeline Elkins from nowhere important, was going to help the massive, war fighting Government organisation like the War Office. They needed her.

Shaking her head in disbelief, she struggled to wipe the bemused smile off her face as she gazed helplessly at the door and settled back to wait. When she realised what she was doing, Emmeline forced herself to move into the parlour to sew for a while.

“Damn it,” Oliver growled, slamming his saddle bag onto the kitchen table with another muttered oath. He was in a foul temper, and so hungry he was ready to start chewing on the table.

“Bad day?” Niall murmured, only briefly taking his eyes off the papers in his hands to look disinterestedly at his colleague.

“You could say that.” Oliver sighed and slid into the chair opposite.

“How did it go with the chit?”

“She is going to help,” Oliver sighed.

He groaned when his gaze slid to the clock across the room and he realised it was well past midnight. It galled him that he hadn’t stuck to his promise, but there was little he could do about it now. Even if he did venture to the village, Miss Emmeline Elkins would be abed. There was no earthly possibility he could call upon her. He would have to wait until tomorrow, and then he would have to apologise for not going to see her as he had promised.

“What?” Niall demanded when he heard Oliver growl another epithet. “What’s gone wrong now?”

“Every damned thing. I say, you wouldn’t want to go-”

“No.”