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Chapter 14
What was she going to do about it? That wasthe question that had haunted Serenity throughout her bath.
Kristen should have been an interrogator or a solicitor, with her ability to strip back delusions and reveal the truth.
What could she say? The woman was incredibly sharp of mind. And the only way Serenity had gained peace was by pleading a headache.
Now alone in the room, dressed in the blue cambric and sitting on the fainting couch in front of the open windows, Serenity allowed her thoughts full rein.
She was in love.
The truth of it had hit her hard, and yet she wondered how she could have been so blind to the truth all this time.
Why else would she have even cared about his past?
It certainly wasn’t because she’d written a silly old legend only to learn that legend was a man.
It was because she felt deceived by the man she had given her heart to.
“What am I going to do?” she murmured to herself.
She toyed with the purse of money that rested in her lap. Mr. Rodale had given it to her to buy safe passage home. The faded brown leather pouch was threadbare and ragged around the edges. From the moment he’d given it to her, she’d felt guilty. But at the time, she’d been desperate to leave. And she’d promised to get his money to him as soon as she returned home. Of course, she didn’t really know how to do that, since he would be at sea.
But she would have been home.
Home.
The word was so sweet. She would see Honor and Jonathan and her father. Douglas.
She smiled.
But she would never again see Morgan.
Closing her eyes, she remembered the feeling she’d had the day in the shop when he’d swept into her life like the phantom she’d written of in her story.
The feeling she’d had the night he’d shown up at her party to seek her out.
But most important, she remembered the feeling she’d had that night after he left her in the library—that she’d slammed the door on some kind of opportunity.
Morgan.
He was her knight in shining armor. Her dashing pirate prince who…
Who could break her heart by refusing her love.
It should be easy! she lamented to herself. She should be able to go downstairs this instant and say, Morgan Drake, pirate or not, I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.
But it wasn’t that simple.
Nothing in life was ever that simple.
“Good Lord, what if he laughs in my face?” she whispered.
He might. And who would blame him? Here she was, some boyishly framed miss who needed glasses to read and who spoke words of social reform. A woman who made him mad enough to chop down his own door.
He’d probably had lots of women throw themselves at him. Lots of beautiful women. Sophisticated, know-their-place women.
And not one of them had ever been able to hold on to him. Their failure gave her little hope.
