Elinor reached across the table and lifted up her chin. “I’m not saying it must be this man, right now. But wouldn’t it be such a wild revenge, Sera? If you fell blissfully in love with someone who adored you?”
She would not state the obvious: No one adores me for long.
Elinor yawned, which Sera seized as an excuse to end this conversation. She leaned up and kissed Elinor’s cheek. “Try to get a little sleep.”
Adam sat up and worked on the armory plans, determined not to think of Seraphina. If she did not want to factor into his thoughts as anything other than a body, he would bloody grant her bloody wish.
He let out a sigh of pure disgust.
Fuck.
What had he been doing?
Fuck.
The sun was beginning to break through the night sky and his hands were cramping by the time exhaustion overcame the circling of his thoughts.
He scribbled a note to Marianne not to wake him up, left it on the kitchen table, and climbed into bed, relishing the fact that one could not think when one was sleeping.
He dreamt of violent churning water and ominous cliffs, craggy with the promise of a fall. He dreamt of gales and storms and shipwrecked vessels crashing against breakers.
Of whirlpools.
Of drowning.
But then the water calmed and the sun rose over it in a startling pink glow, and on the beach was Seraphina in her gauzy gown, walking toward the shore.
As she walked, her body swelled, until her breasts strained against her shift. Her stomach was round in a way that was unmistakable and made him ache. She paused and smiled and let the water soak her dress as she walked toward him, the white chemise becoming sheer and clinging to her roundness. His cock and nipples and the filaments of skin along his spine all rose because she was so full and beautiful and he had made her that way.
“Adam,” she said, her voice unfamiliar with joy. The same joy that fluttered in him, for they had made a child who would someday splash in the shallows of this cove.
He moved toward her, this magnificent, earthly creature, his Seraphina. He cradled the promise of their family in his heart as he finally reached her and pulled her toward his body, and she was warm and soft, her skin heated by the sun and dripping from the spray. He kissed her, and she tasted of salt and of the sea. Her belly brushed against him and he feasted on her, carnal and possessive and a beast.
Waves rose around them and lifted her dress into a swirl above the water and he grabbed her hips so he could join with her, fill her up with his hunger and his love.
“Adam,” she whispered.
“Sera,” he murmured, closing his eyes, lost to all but feeling, and he drove up to find his way deeper inside her, when a wave came crashing from behind and sent them tumbling below the surf. He felt her move away as he struggled to lift his head above the cresting sea. Her shift floated just beyond his reach. His nose and lungs and eyes all burnt with salt but he dove back, but he could not find her, and when he came up for breath, the sky had gone a purpled green. The air was cold, and she was nowhere in the churning water.
“Sera!” he shouted.
“Ser—” Another wave knocked into him and he was at the bottom of the ocean, a hundred feet below, and he saw a glimmer of her dress above him, and he swam, fighting to reach the surface, and when he got there, choking, he could not see—
“Adam!”
Oh, thank God.
“Adam!”
He opened his eyes and it was bright again, light streaming through the windows of his Cornwall cottage.
His sister was standing over him, saying his name.
“Adam, you were shouting,” Marianne cried. “What is the matter?”
Fuck.
Chapter Eighteen
Seraphina fell asleep at her kitchen table next to a half-empty bottle of wine, like a joke about a bitter woman who’d someday die alone and be eaten by her dogs.
“Dear God, Tompkins, why didn’t you rouse me?” she yelped, when she discovered this unhappy circumstance.
Tompkins looked at her without amusement. “I tried. Three times.”
“I feel awful.” More precisely, she felt like she was made of stiff linen creased by a blistering-hot iron, then crumpled into a drawer by a vengeful maid.
Tompkins ignored her groan, plucking the wine bottle with distaste from the table.
“Oh stop,” Seraphina muttered at her. “I know, I know.”
Tompkins turned around. “Do you? Because I’ve pulled you from the floor more often than I care to recall in the last month. You’re making yourself ill.”
“How fortunate I don’t pay you to look after my health.”
Tompkins crossed her arms. “I am worried about you.”
Sera softened. She walked across the kitchen and draped her arm over Tompkins’s shoulder. “I know. I’m going to be better. Now that Elinor is free, there is less to worry me.”
Tompkins sighed. “Mr. Anderson is here to see you.”
“What?” Sera hissed.
Tompkins gave her a glinting, somewhat evil smile. “He’s waiting in the parlor.”
God help her. She’d hoped their disagreement would be the kind that faded away from inattention. She did not want to have to look at his face while the memory of her rotten words was still fresh enough to recall verbatim.
“Can you give him tea to distract him while I try to make myself look like someone who did not sleep on her kitchen table?”
“I should tell him exactly where you slept. He’d give you a blistering lecture, I suspect.”
“Yes, Tompkins. Luckily, I have already received one from you.”
She went up to her room to make herself presentable as best she could, though she looked haggard in a way that could not be disguised by pretty dresses. She could not remember the last time she’d slept more than a few hours in a night.
Well, why bother trying to hide it? Surely he was only here to tell her in the light of day that he no longer wished to see her. She did not need to look like a dew-damp milkmaid beauty for that.
She threw on a drab old brown dress that hardly fit her anymore and went downstairs to face him.
“Sera,” Adam said, turning toward her at the sound of her feet on the stairs.
He clutched a handful of flowers. A bunch of spring squill and sheep’s-bit and sea pinks, the kind that grew along the coastal path.
He had obviously picked them himself.
He silently held them out to her, his face solemn.
Oh hell and damnation but the sight of him moved her.
Bloody why?
What kind of foolish woman, knowing what she knew, knowing who she was, knowing the realities and possibilities of the world as well as she did, would see a man like him clutching a bouquet of handpicked wildflowers and feel a surge of anything other than pure dread?
What was this heart, that never stopped fluttering at things it had learned long ago only brought despair?
“Adam,” she sighed, staring warily at the flowers but not reaching for them, “thank you, but I’m not—”
“The kind of lady men bring flowers to?” he supplied, lifting up the corner of his mouth.
It both flattered and exasperated her that he knew what she was going to say. “Am I so predictable?”
He leaned back against the kitchen door and looked her up and down. “I don’t know what you are, Seraphina Arden. I just know I’m sorry for last night, and I wanted to apologize for storming out of here.”