Read Online Silver Tears by Becky Lee Weyrich - Free Book Online Page B

demanded.
    A wry smile twisted the captain’s lips. Didn’t he wish!
    “Well, what about it? Do you?” Gunn insisted.
    “Marry her in a minute,” Hargrave said, trying to raise his head. The effort cost him dearly, and he fell back. “She won’t have me.”
    Gunn frowned at the man. He must be delirious. Gunn had seen her steal in here last night. He’d witnessed their intimacies. “What do you mean, man?”
    “She came all this way to marry you. Told me so on the ship.” His strength was fading fast.
    “Why me? You could take her back to England, give her a fine life.” Every word twisted like a knife in Gunn’s guts, but he had to be sure he was doing the right thing.
    “I could,” Hargrave answered weakly. “Yes, I’d like to.”
    “Well, then, why don’t you?”
    “She turned me down.” He roused a bit and lifted his head. “Look at me, Gunn. Which of us would you choose? I’m nearly as old as old Lord Geoffrey.”
    The man exaggerated. He was perhaps forty, Gunn figured. Gunn himself would soon be thirty-five.
    “Age has nothing to do with it,” he told the captain. “Does she love you?”
    Hargrave managed a weak laugh. “She doesn’t even like me. She’s determined to marry you, Gunn, you bastard!”
    Gunn still was not convinced. “She kissed you last night. I saw her.”
    The captain’s eyes closed and his tongue came out to glide over his dry lips. “Did she?”
    “You mean you didn’t know?”
    “Thought I was dreaming… too good to be real.”
    “Well, dammit, man, it was real! You still say she wants me? Then why was she in here kissing you?”
    Hargrave, in spite of his pain, chuckled. “If you’re trying to get rid of her, I’ll take her. Just let me rest a bit.”
    “No, dammit! You’re going to stay awake and talk to me.”
    Jonathan Hargrave’s eyes closed. The confrontation had obviously exhausted him. The captain had told Gunn what he wanted to hear. Now guilt stabbed Gunn for the trick he’d played on Alice. What must she be thinking right now? Would she ever understand and forgive him when he tried to explain why he’d done such a thing?
    Gunn meant to go directly to Alice’s room after leaving the infirmary, but the afternoon shadows grew long before he took any action. He could not summon the courage to go to her and beg her pardon. By now someone must have told her the meaning of the three feathers, and she would refuse even to see him. He couldn’t blame her, actually—he had only himself to blame.
    The hours ticked by slowly for Alice. At first, she cowered behind her locked door, dreading Gunn’s forceful knock. How could she live up to such a bargain? The truth was plain and simple: She could not. The very idea of sharing her husband with another woman went against everything she believed in. She had refused to take a lover while she was Lord Geoffrey’s wife; she could not abide the thought of her husband having someone else.
    As the afternoon shadows went from dove-gray to purple, Alice’s resolve began to waver. This wasn’t England after all. This was a new land with new laws. What did she know of savages and their customs?
    She tried to think what it might be like sharing Gunn with Ishani. What would he require of the two of them? Would he bed them both at once or on alternating nights? Would he expect her to know all about how to love a man? After all, she’d been married before. She sighed disconsolately. Her husband had been old and infirm. Wouldn’t Gunn realize that? She thought back to her wedding and recalled her strange first night as a bride.
    After the near-riot following her mother’s hanging, the lord had whisked her away in his carriage. She could still remember the numbing cold, the rain that turned the road into a gray river, the hopeless ache in her heart. She had allowed Lord Balfour free rein with her life because she was incapable of going on alone.
    They rode all night. By dawn her whole body felt pounded and bruised,