Page 174 of Once an Angel
any thoughts about slipping a snake into Penfeld's pallet, be warned. There are no snakes in New Zealand."
Her cheek dimpled. "I shall endeavor to put forth my best behavior."
He sensed her best behavior might be more than he could handle. He strode to the door, then paused.
He wanted desperately to question her further, but to do so would violate the unwritten creed of this
land. Too many ships had dumped their secrets, their scandals, and their unwanted convicts on these shores. It had resulted in a privacy hard won and so jealously guarded that a man might honorably
defend it to the death. At least his past would die with him. So Justin bit back his questions, knowing
he, too, might die or kill before he let someone rake open his own raw scars.
"You've no need to fear discovery here, Miss Scarlet. There are many who come to New Zealand to elude the past."
She inclined her head. A fall of curls veiled her expression. "And there are some, sir, who come to find it."
He realized he had become so accustomed to the island's code of suspicion that he hadn't even offered this small, bedraggled young woman his name. She hardly looked the sort of spy the efficient Miss Winters or his rigid father would dispatch.
"You may call me Justin. Justin Connor." He closed the door behind him, never seeing the bitter, triumphant twist of Emily's lips.
* * *
Justin couldn't seem to put enough distance between himself and the hut. He strode through the
cornfield, his long strides eating up the turf. Penfeld trotted along behind him.
"Hell and damnation!" he finally exploded. "A girl simply shouldn't go around looking at a man like that."
Penfeld plucked at his suspenders, more worried about being outdoors without a coat than about his master's consternation. "Like what, sir? I hadn't noticed anything unusual about her looks. A bit on the boyish side, perhaps."
Justin spun around, his voice rising on a note of disbelief. "Boyish? Compared to whom—Helen of Troy? Cleopatra? Besides, I wasn't referring to her looks in particular. I was referring to the way shelooksat me. That ridiculous sparkle in her eyes. That clever little trick she does with her bottom lip."
Justin tugged on his lip to illustrate, but Penfeld only blinked at him dumbly. A trickle of sweat snaked between Justin's shoulder blades at the mere thought of it. As the sun beat down on his bare head, he realized he'd forgotten his hat.
"Blast her anyway! She had no way of knowing what sort of men we were. What if she had given that look to some of those whalers or timbermen in Auckland? They'd have slapped her in a whorehouse so fast, it would have made her curly little head spin."
The valet paled. He became as nervous as a rabbit when anyone mentioned Auckland. Justin had found him in the teeming harbor town four years earlier, wandering the streets in a daze, his handsome suit in rags, a shattered teacup his only possession.
Justin plucked a corn silk from Penfeld's thinning hair. "Nowyou'redoing it. Don't stick out your lip
and go all quivery on me, because Auckland's exactly where I'm taking her. She must think I'm a blithering idiot to have fallen for that old twisted-ankle ploy."
"I've never known you to blither without cause, sir." Penfeld looked as downcast as if his master had announced he was taking the girl to Sodom with a side picnic to Gomorrah.
Snorting with determination, Justin spun on his heel. "I'm going to march right back to that hut, make
her gather her things—"
"She has no things."
Penfeld's quiet words halted him at the edge of the field. A hill studded with tussock grasses rolled
down to the beach. The warm breeze teased the golden clumps into waving fingers.
Penfeld was right, he realized. The girl had nothing. Not even the coat on her back. She had come into
his world as bare and unfettered as on the day she had come into God's.
