The Elusive Bride by Stephanie Laurens Read Free Book Online

into account.
    But at this moment, she was content. She fully intended to work on him, on encouraging him to allow his attitude to her to grow less stilted. A moment’s consideration had her stating, “I believe I’ll take an amble about the deck.”
    That brought an instant frown—as she’d expected.
    “It would be safer to go back inside the main cabin.” He stepped back from the railing, frowning down at her.
    She smiled sunnily back. “If you’re on watch, perhaps you should walk with me—you can view the rest of the barge as we go.” She didn’t give him a chance to refuse, but turned and started to stroll down the walkway between the cabins and the barge’s rail.
    Then she turned and smiled at him over her shoulder. “Come on.”
    Gareth couldn’t resist. Feeling inwardly grim, he found himself following in her wake—responding all too definitely to that alluring smile.
    To his inner self she was far too attractive, and with every passing day, with each new fact he learned about her, grew only more so. She was distraction, and fixation, and potential obsession, and he knew he should back away, but…unlike the men under his command, she was elusive and difficult to manage, and—as she was demonstrating—their journey was going to make keeping his distance close to impossible.
    He joined her as, holding back her waving hair, she excitedly pointed to a cormorant diving in the waves. And he wondered why, instead of feeling weighed down, his heart felt light—lighter than it had in a long, long time.

Three
    5th October, 1822
Before dinner
My cabin on our barge heading for the Red Sea
    Dear Diary,
    Matters are progressing as I’d hoped. It’s said that one learns the truth about people by observing them under stressful conditions. Our journey looks set to provide such conditions, and I have great hopes of learning all I need to know of Gareth—enough to be absolutely certain that he is the one and only gentleman for me.
    My hopes are high.
    E.
    L ate that evening, while strolling the deck, eyes scanning the waves—increasingly choppy as they passed through the straits, the Bab el Mandeh , as the crew called them, that led into the Red Sea—Gareth found Bister in the stern, seated on a coil of rope polishing his knives.
    His batman looked up, nodded, and continued to buff. “No sign of any of those idiot fiends.”
    Gareth lounged on the railing nearby. “Why idiot? They nearly did for Miss Ensworth in Aden.”
    “Which proves my point. They should have laid low and taken us out first, then Miss Ensworth would have been a sitting duck. Only Mullins has a clue how to fight, and they separated him from her easily enough.” Bister held up a knife, examined its edge.
    “Not everyone has had the experiences we’ve had, but it would be unwise to treat the cultists too lightly.”
    Bister nodded sagely. “Never underestimate the enemy.”
    “Indeed.” Gareth looked away to hide his twitching lips. Bister was barely five and twenty. He’d joined Gareth when he’d been all of seventeen—just as gullible and inexperienced as Jimmy.
    “Meant to mention.”
    Gareth turned back, brows rising.
    Bister kept his gaze locked on his blade, kept rubbing. “Miss Ensworth. Jimmy said as she was supposed to go home via the usual route—booked on a ship of the line to Southampton via the Cape. But a day or so before, she up and changed her mind, and decided she should go via Aden.”
    Gareth let a few seconds go by. “Did she give any reason for the change in route?”
    “Nope—just that she’d taken it into her head to go this way, rather than the other.”
    “When, exactly, did she change her mind? Did Jimmy know?”
    Bister nodded, still absorbed with his blade. “His uncle heard first, as you might imagine. Jimmy said it was a bare two days before they set out—they left on the seventeenth.”
    Gareth and his household had departed on the fifteenth—the day Emily Ensworth had decided to change her