That old, frantic feeling—making her lungs tight and hot, like she’d dragged too long on a cheroot—starved her of air. Something small she couldn’t save.
She looked desperately about the terrace for someone who might help, but she was alone. What could she do? The creature would not live. The only mercy was to end its suffering, but how?
No. No, please.
She had no choice. She closed her eyes. Her hands shook as she picked it up. Its tiny body trembled, warm and soft.
“Sweet thing, I’m so sorry. So sorry,” she whispered. “You don’t deserve this.”
Her fingers remembered the gesture from when she’d helped the cook with chickens as a girl. A brisk, gruesome pivot of the wrist was all it took to snap the neck.
She released the sob she had been holding and the poor, beautiful bird went still.
Sera sat there for a moment, crouched on her knees, shaking.
She had kept kingfishers as a child, in a cage. Her father had trapped them by the river that ran at the border of her property and he’d given her one as a gift when she was eight. When she’d worried it was lonely, he’d caught a mate. She’d loved those birds. She still thought of them when she wore bright colors. It was one of the few memories from her girlhood that was not tinged with loss.
Until now.
Who would do this? Who could be so depraved?
She looked around again, below the terrace, to the empty coastal path. To the hedges alongside it.
“Who’s there?” she shouted in a voice she hated. “What do you want?”
No one answered.
But she could not stop herself from continuing to scream. “Am I such a threat to you? Me? Why? Why are you so frightened by the mere presence of this woman that you’d kill a helpless bird?”
She fell to her knees, panting.
There was no answer. Of course there wasn’t.
Why had they ever threatened her? Persecuted her? What had the people of Kestrel Bay ever thought they were protecting by making her a figure of contempt?
The answer, of course, was everything and nothing, and so it was appropriate that there was no response to her cry, save the low crashing of the waves down beneath the cliffs.
She stood up and took a cleansing breath. If someone was still watching her, they would only be gratified to see she was disturbed by this.
Better to shake it off.
She would find a box, and bury the bird on the beach at low tide. She turned and walked back to the terrace doors.
A piece of paper fluttered above the doorframe, suspended by a single nail.
It was another woodcut. The same awful image she had winced at in her kitchen. The vile caricature Mr. Anderson’s kind apprentice had removed from her gateposts morning after morning for a week.
The only difference was that this one had a note scrawled crudely at the bottom of the page.
Birds of paradise aren’t wanted here. Beware.
The woman bathed amidst the breakers at the bottom of the cliffs, salty spray splashing her delicate white gown until it strained tight and transparent against her flesh. Her dark hair dripped and swirled around her shoulders, falling to her hips like a mermaid’s. Her wet dress clung to her rounded form as tightly as scales to a fish.
She looked at him as she raised one leg above the surf, her toes dancing in the foam atop the breakers, and peeled her dress up higher, to her thighs. Come to me, she beckoned with her eyes.
Adam wanted to so badly he felt it in his chest.
He walked forward, wading through warm water, slick rocks beneath his feet. She lifted her gown higher, peeling it up over her thighs and then, slowly, over the dark thicket above them. Upward, upward the soaked fabric rose, over her gently rounded belly and the hard, pink nipples of her breasts. She pulled it over her head and let it fall into the surf. Nude, she raised her hands up to the sky and leaned back into the sunlight, her hair blowing in the sultry ocean breeze, tangling in the wind.
He finally reached her. She took his hands and drew them toward her breasts, so that her nipples grazed his palms. Her dress caught around his ankle, floating in the shallows.
He pressed his skin to hers. She was all wet heat. He dragged his hands down around her generous hips to take her buttocks and draw her to his groin.
“Adam,” she whispered.
Yes, yes, yes, his body answered. The sun grew brighter and they were hot and wet where they were joined and pleasure shot up through his legs, slick and salty, churning like the hot turquoise of the sea.
“Adam.”
His eyes shot open.
The room was white with the morning light streaming off the Kestrel, but he was not cavorting in the shallows with a mermaid who bore the exact dimensions of Seraphina Arden.
He was in his bed, in his cottage, and his sister was knocking at the door.
Fuck.
He reached out for a homespun towel by his shaving stand.
“Yes, Marianne?” he called through the door, praying she would not somehow hear the evidence of his shameful state in his voice.
“It’s nearly seven.”
“Thank you.”
He never slept this late. He certainly did not laze in the sunshine, frotting his own sheets until he was late to meet his foreman.
He cut his chin with hurried, irritable shaving, not enjoying the sight of his own reflection in the looking glass, guilt oozing from his eyes like cherries from the lattice of a tart.
His appetites had always had too strong a hold on him, the legacy of his father.
He’d once thought he could indulge them sensibly—responsibly, within the bounds of marriage—but when his lust had cost him Catriona, he’d sworn he’d never in his life bend to such temptation again.
He was a widower. A father. An architect.
That other part of himself, that awful, weak, and wanting part, had no place amidst this life: the ever-mounting building costs and delinquent payments and the endless need to produce a folio of better work to secure himself and Mayhew a place in London’s cutthroat world. To secure a future for the children he’d left motherless. To prove himself better than his father, despite his humbler birth.
His father had chosen weaknesses over his responsibilities—died young, leaving a trail of bastards, Adam and Marianne included, and a bankrupt estate that had passed to some unlucky distant cousin. All Adam had inherited from his father was his propensity for lust and chestnut hair.
But vices thrived in regularity and died out from starvation. One could feel their presence without caving to them. After all, he had his mother’s people’s blood in him as well. The grandfather who’d taught him to hold his head up high and do right by his family no matter what. The mother who’d fought for his education and refused to be cowed by shame.
His father’s yen for pleasure could be contained, if he was strong enough. And after losing Catriona, he’d been so numb, so guilty, that the urge to exercise it almost fell away.
But apparently it had not fallen away entirely.
For Miss Arden, and her sheer gown and her mussed hair and her knowing stare, had awakened that old, persistent hunger.
I’m afraid we have misunderstood each other, he’d told her when she’d invited him to bed.
He was treacherous, a hypocrite. She hadn’t misunderstood a thing.
It had been a week since then, and he was still dreaming of her. His desire for her beat behind his every thought, like an ever-present second pulse.