Read Online The Passions of Emma by Penelope Williamson - Free Book Online

herself back, saving it, and she had a terrible fear she would end up saving it forever. That she would die with whole parts of herself unused.
    When she stepped out of the trees onto the beach, the wind came whipping up off the bay with a lacing of rain that stung her face. She lowered her head and so didn’t see the man standing on the dock until she was almost upon it.
    The dock was part of a boathouse that thrust out into the tossing waves. It was where Emma’s slender little racing sloop, the Icarus , was spending these early days of spring, awaiting the first sail of the season. Emma could hear the muffled creak of the boat’s masthead, the slap of water against her hull. Willie’s boat had been kept there as well, but his slip was empty now.
    And that man, that rough and swaggering Irishman from the hunt, stood at the very end of the dock. Her dock.
    He must have seen her coming before she saw him, for he was facing her, his back to the wind and water. In the failing light she couldn’t see his face, but his very presence stopped her in midstep on the beach.
    A seabird wheeled and cried overhead. The foamy waves made hiccuping sounds as they washed over barnacled rocks and speckled pebbles. The wind tore at her hair, pulling it free of its pins. Her hairswirled around her head, a wet shroud that smothered and blinded her. They both stood unmoving and they might have been the only two people on earth.
    She broke the spell by reaching up to capture her hair. She wrapped its thickness around her wrist so that she could see him better. “You were going to steal my sloop,” she accused, although she had no proof of it, beyond that he was in a place where he should never have been.
    “Ah, Dhia ,” he said in his ruined voice, and the sound of it was like the pull of a dull saw through wet wood. “‘Steal,’ you say. Such a harsh word, that.”
    She suspected he was exaggerating his brogue, flaunting his Irishness. Just as he was flaunting the great size of him. He stood dark and tall against the gray water, with his shoulders thrown back and his legs splayed wide, absorbing easily the roll of the dock’s weathered boards on the waves. His black wool pea coat flared darkly in the wind.
    He made her think of pirate skiffs slinking over moonless waters, of cloth-muffled oars and the black, silent shadows of dangerous men.
    “This is private property you’re on,” she said. Her own voice sounded rusty, as if she hadn’t used it in a hundred years. “The whole of Poppasquash Point belongs to us Tremaynes, and you’ve no business setting so much as a foot on it.”
    He threw his head back dramatically, his eyes beseeching the wet slate sky above. “God save us all. The next thing she’ll be telling me is that the Great Folk own the very air I’m breathing.”
    He startled her by moving suddenly, so fast it seemed he was off the dock and coming at her before she even had time to think about running.
    The closer he came, the larger and more frightening he seemed, and yet she still didn’t run. He came right up to her until only a hand’s space separated them.
    Her head fell back as she looked up at him. There was somethingstriking about his face, even with the scars and the bent nose, or perhaps because of them. He had brave but somehow broken eyes, and they were beautiful. The color of bottle glass that has been polished by the sea and glazed by the sun.
    He stared down into her upturned face, and she waited with her heart pounding louder than the surf in her ears for him to do God knew what. But instead he simply stepped around her, passing by her so closely she thought the sleeve of his coat might have brushed her cheek.
    She didn’t watch him go. Indeed, she walked away from him, in the opposite direction. She pretended to be fascinated with the beards of wet green moss that wrapped around the pilings of the dock, while she listened for the scrape of his boots on the white sand. When all she could hear