He arched her hand toward the window, illuminating her polished nails. Not a speck of paint stained her flesh. And yet she had painted him. She had seen him for no more than two minutes, but she had memorized his features, his muscles, his arse in wretchedly suburb detail.
The blood in his veins burned hotter. Miss Holly Turner had seen him in the raw. Rather unfair he’d not had the same pleasure.
“Ahem.”
The moment she cleared her throat, he released her hand.
“The bones are not broken,” he said.
She quickly stuffed her hand back inside her glove. “I’m pleased to hear that.”
“But your fingers will be sore for a few days.” He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the squab, resisting the temptation to touch her again. He was bloody daft. “What are you doing here, Miss Turner?”
“I would like your assurance, Mr. Hawkins, that you will not reveal my identity as Lord H.”
“And why should I give you such assurance after the trouble you’ve caused my family?”
“I made a mistake. I truly believed I had entered the room of my hired model. I—” She hesitated, as if she’d more to confess, then resumed, “I have a sister, Mr. Hawkins. She is only seventeen and tonight is her debut in society. I don’t want scandal to ruin her chances of making a respectable match.”
“Touché.”
“I regret the embarrassment I caused your own sister. Truly, I do. Oh, Mr. Hawkins, surely you can understand my motivations? Wouldn’t you do anything to protect your sister?”
He would, indeed. And he sensed the woman’s manipulation. But he had no counterargument. He had already sacrificed his former way of life to safeguard his sister’s reputation. He could not reproach Miss Turner for doing the same.
“I paint to support myself and Emma,” she said. “I’m not a heartless wench, as you might suspect. I intended no harm with the painting.”
He studied her from across the seat, her wide eyes and lovely full lips. There was naivety there, as well as sensuality. Cleverness. Even cunning. How had she found herself in this predicament? From what he’d gleamed, she was an orphan. Her late father a viscount. Had he squandered the family fortune, leaving her penniless?
Even more pressing, what was she hiding from him? She had hesitated a moment ago about her “mistake.” But how had she entered the wrong bedroom at the gaming hell?
“How did you come to my room, Miss Turner?”
“I—I was told to go to room nine. You were in room nine.”
“I was in room six.”
She flushed.
“You cannot read, Miss Turner?”
“Of course I can I read,” she shot, indignant. “The number was upside-down.”
He rasped, “What?”
“I think, I mean.” She scrunched her dress between her fists. “I think the number was upside-down.”
“You knew you were in the wrong room?”
“No, I swear . . . Not at first.”
Quincy heard his pulse pounding in his ears. “How could you make the work public? What if I was married? Or a politician? Or a bleedin’ duke?”
“I would never be so reckless, so indifferent. I believed you a sailor, that no one in society would ever recognize you.”
“A heartless wench, indeed.”
“No.” She thumped her fist in her palm, then winced. “It was a mistake. An accident.”
“A fortuitous accident for you, Miss Turner. A grave one for me. Get out.”
“What?” she whispered.
“Get out of my coach.”
“But this isn’t my fault.”
“It’s mine, I suppose?”
Her trembling fingers went to her temples, rubbing them in circular motions. “This is all getting away from me.”
“Aye, your charade is unraveling.”
“I came to propose a truce.
“Bully to that,” he snapped. “Why are you still in my coach?”
“Oh, deuces! This would not have happened if you weren’t so unnaturally beautiful.”
He stiffened. “I beg your pardon?”
Her hands went to her gaping mouth, but then she curled her fingers and fixed her eyes on him with plain heat. “What am I, an artist, to do when confronted with the perfect male subject? Walk away?”
Quincy stared at her, incredulous. She was actually blaming him for the disaster, the shifty wench. She wanted to study him, did she? She thought him the perfect male subject?
“Well, Miss Turner, far be it from me to stand in the way of your artistic pursuits.” He plucked her from the opposite squab, saddling her in his lap. “Take your hands, your eyes . . . your lips and study me until you’re satisfied.”
He brought her flushed mouth down over his. Her seductive lips opened, and she damn well took him up on his offer, raking her fingers through his hair and circling his throat, devouring him.
Blimey, she was insatiable. The harder he kissed her, the harder she kissed him in return. He had never met a woman with such unrestrained passion, and a flame ignited in his soul. An unfamiliar flame. Lust, aye. But something more. A need. A need for . . . He wasn’t sure. He had no word for the curious sentiment. A part of him reached toward the peculiar light. Another part warned him to steer clear of it, that it would burn him alive.
Quincy wrenched away from her, struggling for air. His muscles trembled. Where the hell had all his senses gone? “I accept your truce.”
She voiced hoarsely, “What?”
With great effort, he returned her to the opposite squab, his heart ramming against his chest like a raging bull caged in a stall.
“I will not reveal your identity as Lord H.”
“Oh.”
She gathered her own rampant breath and thumbed her loose hair behind her ears. Her disenchanted expression made him want her even more. It was madness.
Sweet madness.
Quincy opened the coach door. “Goodnight, Miss Turner.”
Her first step quivered before she regained her bearing and descended the vehicle, murmuring, “Goodnight.”
As soon as she cleared the door, he slammed it closed and hammered on the roof, the driver taking off at breakneck speed.
CHAPTER 4
“What am I to do?” She traced the contour of his cheek bone, her fingertips slipping over his chin and down the center of his throat. She murmured, “So unnaturally beautiful,” before she took his lips into her wicked mouth—and he let her.
He weaved his fingers through her lush, unruly red hair and cupped the back of her head, holding her tight, pressing her more firmly against his body. Heaven, he thought. Pure heaven.
His muscles hardened at the salacious thrusts of her mouth, at her intimate exploration of his lips. He opened for her and welcomed her probing tongue with the excitement of a virginal youth, trembling with green want.
How could she do this to him?
How could she take him back to a time when he’d no experience with women? And she an innocent herself? But somehow she had opened a door long closed to him. And he walked through it with renewed hope . . .
A fist jabbed him in the shoulder.
“Wake up, pup.”
Quincy grunted as the enchantment shattered and he found himself back in his bedroom, nursing a superb headache. He had taken opium paste in the form of sugar coated capsules to suppress his hellish nightmares; to forget every secret he had to keep and every reputation he had to protect; to forget the profound desire he had for one impudent wench.
To forget himself.
Slowly he rolled to the side of the bed and sat on the edge, elbows on his knees, a blanket covering his groin. He always slept in the nude.
William stood over him, arms akimbo.
“What the hell do you want, Will?”
“What happened at the ball last night?”
Raking his fingers through his mussed hair, Quincy yawned. “I confronted Lord H. She won’t be making any more portraits of me.”
“Anything else?”
Quincy focused his bleary eyes on his brother, the man’s tight expression indicating he was waiting for more news. “No. Nothing else.”
“Lord H didn’t stumble from a coach with the Hawkins family crest, her hair askew, her face flushed?”
“Shit.”
Quincy slumped his face in his hands. She had been seen. The wench had been seen—with him.
“You really have no self control.”
At the condemnation in his brother’s voice, Quincy stiffened. To be denounced for an affair without the fun of actually having one was unrighteous. “She came to me.”
“Aye, I know. All women throw themselves at your feet. How can you resist any of them?”
Damn Holly! She’d had the audacity to blame him for the painting’s creation, and now she’d botched every other area of his life, for even under the opium’s sedate effects, Quincy knew where the conversation with his brother would end—with his doom.
“The duke’s gone off to obtain a special license. We sail in three days, so the wedding will be the day after tomorrow—unless you’re resigning your post aboard the Nemesis?”
“No!”
“Fine. The day after tomorrow it is. It will be a simple affair, family only, no fancy wedding clothes. A church ceremony. A wedding lunch. And it’s over.”
Over, indeed. “Will, I can’t—”
“Aye, you can. And you will. Do you understand what you’ve done? Miss Turner is the daughter of a late viscount. She is gentry. You will make this right, even if I have to plant a pistol in your back and stand behind you at the altar.”
“She did this,” hissed Quincy. “She did this on purpose to trap me into marriage.”
A poor viscount’s daughter with a younger sister in need of a wealthy match. Wouldn’t it be grand if she snagged a fool with connections to a duke and duchess?
“Well, if you’re so easily trapped, then you deserve your fate.”
Quincy fisted his palms at his brother’s unfeeling remark. It was all logic and cool headedness with William. He had no heart. He had no understating of passion and how it bewitched the mind. He had never known such an outbreak of ecstasy or its potentially ruinous effects.
Quincy seethed between clenched teeth. “I won’t marry the wench.” He would not let her steal his likeness and his life.
“Then leave,” said his brother.
“What?”
“Leave this house, leave my ship, leave England. And never return.”
For a second, Quincy’s heart stopped pumping. A coldness came over him; the ice pierced him right to the bone. “You would banish me?”
“You banish yourself if you choose to disgrace Miss Turner and her teenage sister, making them pariahs. This isn’t the sea, Quincy, and you’re not a pirate anymore. You can’t take what you want, consequences be damned.”
William stalked from the bedroom without another word, without even a gesture of encouragement or support or compassion.
Quincy cursed his stonehearted brother, willing a tempestuous wench to one day storm his orderly life and wreck it to bits.
But his anger quickly shifted back to Holly, and the coldness returned, rooted itself deep in his heart.
CHAPTER 5
Holly ignored the stinging heat from the wood burning stove as she threw sketch after charcoal sketch into the snapping flames. She had to clear out her art studio, a converted potting shed at the rear of the cottage. In light of the scandal she’d caused, she had no choice but to sell the little house on the outskirts of London and move with her sister to France or Switzerland. Perhaps salacious gossip would not follow them to the Continent.
After burning a large pile of female nudes, she came across her drawings of him. Her heart throbbed and her fingers trembled as she gazed into his mesmerizing eyes, hooded under dark brows. She had sketched him from memory, and her memories of him had been dreamlike in nature. Soon she had realized her previous portraits had been rigid, anatomical studies. His painting had been her first truly inspired work.
A lump welled in her throat until she had the most unladylike urge to scream. She slipped his likeness into the fire, sheet after detailed sheet of his eyes, his lips, his muscular shoulders, his naked backside, until only one illustration remained.
For a moment, she considered keeping the last pictorial of him but quickly dismissed the fancy and tossed it into the consuming flames. She watched the charred paper curl and blacken and finally turn to ash, much like her life.
Holly heaved a deep breath. After years of seclusion, hoping for the day when she and her sister might return to the folds of the upper crust, she had ruined everything by chasing after Mr. Hawkins. She should have found another, more appropriate time to beseech his discretion, but she had feared so many things. What if he refused to ever see her again? What if he went straight from the ball to the gossip sheets and revealed her identity as Lord H?
Ironically, her identity as the erotic artist remained a secret. But now the whole world believed her the man’s mistress.
She took another deep breath to calm her pounding pulse. A benevolent gentleman might do the honorable thing and ask for her hand in marriage, saving her reputation, but Mr. Hawkins had confessed he only pretended to be a gentleman. Besides, almost two days had passed since the shameful incident without a single word from him.
Holly had no hope.
Pushing aside her grief, she next found a melancholy rendering of her mother. She traced the outline of the woman’s fine profile with her fingertips, her lips quivering with longing. How she missed her mother’s encouraging voice and high spirits. Her sparkling, effervescent laughter and tight, comforting embraces.
It had pained the viscountess beyond measure, quitting society and all its privileges after the disgraceful death of their father. A few loyal friends, like Lady Brimsby, had written to the woman with news and other babble, but the estrangement from the glittering world she had known and loved had broken her heart. And like a songbird trapped in a cage, their mother’s musical voice had turned mournful, then silent. Even the companionship of her daughters had not been enough to assuage her sorrow. She had simply withered away and died.
Holly set aside the drawing of her mother as a keepsake. Her soul swirled with both dark and bright memories, lost hopes, then renewed faith. The welter reached its zenith when she came across the last image in the pile.
Her lips pinched as she stared at the sophisticated portrait of her late father, David Turner, Viscount Cavendish, with his neatly trimmed beard and well manicured moustache. She had captured the kindness in his eyes and his love for pleasure in the old sketch. But the longer she studied the image, the more her fingers squeezed the paper until it creased and distorted his tender face.
“Stop, Papa! Stop this instance!”
Her father lifted his defeated head. “I cannot stop, Holly. Not until I’ve restored everything that I’ve lost.”
“If you do not stop now we will all perish.”
“Holly, trust me. I will make things right.”
“No,” she cried. “I do not trust you anymore, Papa.”
The viscount had adored his family—but not as much as he’d adored gambling. While there was nothing uncommon about a wealthy lord wagering at the card table, Holly’s father had taken the pastime to an extreme, losing the family fortune. He had then committed an even greater transgression by taking his life and abandoning his wife and children in poverty.
She would never forgive her father for his reckless, selfish behavior. He had wrecked all their lives. And now, perhaps fittingly, Holly had soiled the already tainted Turner name, for her sin was now her sister’s sin. Her misfortune, Emma’s misfortune. And their lives were about to change in dramatic fashion. Again.
Holly threw the likeness of her father into the fire and closed the iron door with a thick wool rag. She then collected a sharp knife from the nearby table, prepared to slash every canvas in the stu
dio.
She started.
In the doorframe, a shoulder against the wood, arms folded across his wide chest was Mr. Hawkins. He was dressed in riding attire, his wind-whipped locks loose around his sensual face, his smoldering eyes on her with great intent.
She resented her inescapable response to his presence, the shivers that rolled down her spine, the palpitations of her heart, and she gripped the knife even harder in her fist.
His gaze dropped to the blade. “Planning murder, Miss Turner?”
“Of a sort.”
She walked over to the nearest canvas, removed the drape and stabbed the unnamed image. She twisted her wrist and sliced the canvas over and over again until the portrait was unrecognizable.
She then skirted toward another, unfinished painting. “What are you doing here, Mr. Hawkins?”
As she carved the second canvas, she sensed his movements at her backside and stiffened.
“I’ve come to tell you we’re getting married.”
Holly paused, her heart in her throat. Had she heard the rake right?
Slowly she turned around, the knife still in her quivering hand. “What?”
“I trust you will be sensible about the matter, Miss Turner.”
Holly opened, then closed her lips. He had come to propose? “Now?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You’ve come to propose now? Not yesterday? Not the night the scandal broke?”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t in a rush to tie a noose around my neck.”
Her grief, fear and humiliation, cramped inside her for almost two days, escaped her throat in a gasp or cry or croaking shriek, she wasn’t sure. She dropped the knife and stared at him, incredulous.
“My brother-in-law, the duke, has procured a special license,” he went on in the same flat vein. “We’ll be married tomorrow.”
“How could you do this?”
He glowered at her. “Do what?”
“Make me wait? I thought you had forsaken me? I thought I would have to leave England, uproot my sister.”
“It was only fair under the devious circumstances.”
“What devious circumstances?”
“You trapped me into marriage,” he growled, his eyes alight. “If you suffered for it a few days, I’m delighted. I will have to suffer for it a lifetime.”
How To Seduce A Pirate (The Hawkins Brothers Series) Page 3
