Thief of Hearts

by Teresa Medeiros

  Lucy’s chief amazement stemmed from their treatment of her. A drawing room full of the most impeccably mannered gentlemen in London couldn’t have treated her with any more deference. Some, like Pudge, were shy. Others, like Tarn, bold enough to court her favor. Even the murderous Fidget, with his pronounced facial tic, inclined his bushy head to kiss her hand upon being introduced to her one sunny afternoon.

  “My, my,” she whispered to Tarn as the friendly little killer went back to waxing a bolt of sail thread. “They must have heard of my father’s reputation. If any harm comes to me, the consequences will be quite grave.”

  Tarn snorted. “Not any graver than gettin’ their nostrils sliced. That’s what the Cap’n’s promised to any one of ’em fool eno’ to so much as wink at his woman.”

  The Captain’s woman. A treacherous tingle passed through Lucy. “But I’m not …” She hesitated. Perhaps it wouldn’t be wise to refute such a fable. What if Gerard had only concocted it to keep his men at bay?

  She couldn’t imagine why the crew would believe such an outrageous claim. Their captain had managed to avoid her presence at every turn, no easy task aboard a three-masted schooner.

  The glint of sunlight on brass drew her gaze to the lookout nest at foretop. A man stood within its confines, the breadth of his shoulders and the arrogant grace of his bearing unmistakable. Instead of searching the horizon for enemy ships, he had shamelessly trained his spyglass on her.

  Lucy’s breath caught in an odd mingling of outrage and gratification. “The nerve of that man,” she muttered, but Tarn was already out of earshot, scaling the rigging with the lithe skill of a monkey.

  Regardless of what they’d been told, Gerard’s crew seemed to sense that their truce was an armed one. They had a tendency to vanish when he appeared, as if fearing to stray once again into their line of fire.

  At Ionia Lucy had jerked her draperies shut against Gerard’s prying eyes. Here she was free to indulge the childish, but far more satisfying, urge to poke her tongue out at him and practice an insolent hand gesture taught to her by Digby, one of his own grizzled gunners. She wasn’t quite clear on its meaning but she suspected Gerard would be.

  She was correct.

  “Wouldn’t I love to?” Gerard murmured, lowering the spyglass with a rueful chuckle. He could also think of several more compelling uses for that saucy little tongue of hers.

  He watched her scamper after Tarn, holding his breath until she reached a safe perch. He didn’t really need the spyglass. Every detail of Lucy’s appearance was etched in his memory with merciless clarity.

  He would have thought it impossible, but the sun had bleached her hair an ethereal shade paler. Her fair skin was kissed by an apricot glow and her features had lost the pinched look that had plagued them at Ionia. He didn’t know what had done the most for her—the fresh, salty air or escaping the smothering weight of the Admiral’s thumb.

  He wondered again at the wisdom of granting her so much independence. He’d locked her in the cabin originally to keep her out of his reach. Now he had to severely restrict his own movements just to keep from tripping over her.

  She was everywhere he turned: the two braids she’d taken to wearing inclined over a sail as Pudge taught her a difficult stitch; reading aloud from one of Defoe’s novels, his men gathered around her like children around their mother’s skirts; leaning against the forward rail at twilight, gazing pensively across the billows as the damson-tinted sea doused the flaming ball of the sun.

  He was disturbed by the ease with which the dour Miss Snow had enchanted his crew. He knew they were hungry for feminine company in all of its guises, but he was the one starving for lack of it. Her unadorned beauty swept through him like a bracing blast of salt spray. Her chiming laugh tormented him until he began to regret his own charity with a violence that alarmed him.

  He snapped the spyglass shut, knowing there was only one place to take a temper this grim. As he swung down from the foretop, he didn’t see the gamin face that peeked out from behind the capstan to follow his progress.

  Lucy tiptoed through the shadowy hold toward the iron-banded door, recalling her last inauspicious attempt to breach the mysterious chamber. Gerard had disappeared into it less than five minutes before and it had taken her that long to muster her courage to follow.

  Why should she be afraid? she asked herself. After all, he’d expressly forbidden her no area of the schooner, so he could hardly berate her for snooping. She swallowed a squeak of doubt. Could he?

  She pressed her ear to the door. Much to her relief, she didn’t hear any screams of agony or desperate voices pleading for mercy. She did hear the cadences of male voices, raised slightly as if in anger.

  Gerard’s clipped words were muffled by the thick oak, the answering drawl even more pronounced than his own. Lucy frowned. She didn’t recognize Apollo’s bass rumble, Tarn’s brogue, or Pudge’s timid murmur. She concentrated harder, deciphering snatches of conversation between each pause in the heated dialogue.

  Gerard was saying, “… no one to blame but yourself … still be safely tucked in her own bed if it weren’t for your little indiscretion.”

  Lucy’s mouth fell open. As far as she knew, she was the only her within a thousand knots.

  Her fascination with herself as a topic of Gerard’s conversation enabled her to translate an entire retort from his companion. “Ah, yes, but would she be alone? And as I recall, you seduced more than a few bored noblemens’ wives in your heyday.”

  Gerard’s reply was succinct to the point of obscenity. Lucy recoiled. His master gunner, Digby, spoke profanity as if it were a second language, but even he hadn’t taught her that particular phrase.

  Gerard’s companion seemed to be more amused than alarmed by the anatomically impossible suggestion. His reply floated toward the door on wings of sarcasm. “… locked me up for my protection or hers?”

  Rapid footsteps approached the door. Lucy barely had time to dart around the corner before it flew open. She crouched in the shadows as Gerard emerged. He didn’t look nearly as angry as she’d feared, but perhaps, she thought grimly, she was the only one capable of inciting him to a truly murderous rage.

  Her heart sank as he locked the door behind him and pocketed a brass key. She huddled in the dark long after he’d passed, shaken by the realization that she wasn’t the only prisoner aboard the Retribution.

  Late that night, Lucy lay alone on the aftercastle, a discarded pile of sail her pillow and a vast sprinkling of stars her only blanket. The Admiral had taught her to think in rigid shades of black and white, but now she found herself wandering in a gray netherworld, unable to separate shadow from substance and no closer to solving the mystery of Captain Doom than when she’d begun.

  Was he the man who had vowed to guard her life as his own—tender, patient, fiercely protective? Or was he a man hell-bent on vengeance—embittered, ruthless, cynical, and quick-tempered? For the first time, her bewildered heart was forced to entertain the notion that those two diverse men might be one and the same.

  His men seemed to both revere and genuinely like him. He maintained discipline with an iron fist and ready wit, yet rarely impinged upon the freedoms they held so dear. While the Admiral’s fierce reputation had been measured by the number of stripes he’d inflicted on his crew’s backs, Gerard’s threats of reprisal for infractions of the Retribution’s code of law were just that—threats. His men respected him too much to test the limits of his patience. They seemed, to value his praise more than they feared his punishment.

  They were men who did not give their loyalty lightly, yet Lucy had discovered in the past few days that there wasn’t a man aboard who wouldn’t consider it an honor to lay down his life if their captain required it.

  Do you know what it is for a captain to outlive his crew, Lucy?

  She was the only one who knew it was the one sacrifice he would never ask of them.

  Exhausted from battling the present, Lucy closed her eyes
to float in a haze of memory. Gerard puffed a smoke ring at her nose, his eyes sparkling with mischief behind Pudge’s homely spectacles. He dusted a sprinkling of cinnamon from her lower lip with his little finger. He twirled her in the dizzying arms of a waltz, his powerful hand encompassing the small of her back.

  She was so beguiled by her visions that she didn’t even start in surprise when her eyes drifted open to find Gerard leaning over her. Her dreaming hunger for him was such that she couldn’t stop herself from reaching up to trace his beardless jaw with her fingertips.

  She blinked, lost in a mist of confusion. A dream indeed, for this was a different Gerard. A Gerard unscarred by time and disillusionment. A Gerard whose bright eyes were unshadowed by cynicism. Her own guilt must have led her to conjure up this creature. This was the Gerard who might have been had it not been for her father’s treachery.

  She had neither the strength nor the will to resist as his beautifully carved mouth descended on hers. Her lips parted without coaxing for a kiss that was dazzling, deft, and provocative.

  And totally wrong.

  It was bestowed with the skill of an artist who’d spent countless hours of practice perfecting his technique, but it lacked the elusive spice of maturity. It was a mild spring shower over the English countryside instead of a wild and perilous storm at sea, and it left her curiously, but completely, unmoved.

  Lucy’s eyes popped open in shock as an acerbic, and all too familiar, voice rang out.

  “I had thought to introduce you to my brother someday, Lucy, but I can see the two of you have already met.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  LUCY’S ASTOUNDED GAZE TRAVELED BETWEEN the two men.

  Gerard was leaning against the aft rail, his casual stance belied by the dangerous tension coiled in his folded arms. The other man loomed over her, his unrepentant grin slashing a devilish dimple in his left cheek.

  Horrified anew, she pounded his shoulder with her fist. “Get off me, you lecher! How dare you take such liberties?”

  “Don’t be so hasty, Lucy,” Gerard chided. “You did appear to be enjoying yourself.”

  “But that’s because I thought—” Lucy bit her traitorous tongue. What she’d thought was even more damning than kissing a stranger. She wasn’t about to gratify Gerard’s infuriating smugness by confessing that she’d been dreaming about kissing him.

  His brother gracefully disengaged himself from her supine form. She sat up and tucked her knees beneath her, trying vainly to rearrange her disheveled hair.

  “I’m fully prepared to shoulder the blame, brother,” he offered gallantly. “I never could resist a pretty girl in the moonlight.”

  Gerard’s eyes narrowed. “You never could resist any girl in any light. Do I have to remind you that this particular beauty can now identify you to the authorities as Captain Doom’s temporary replacement? Why do you think I locked the door of the dungeon when I left?”

  “You know as well as I that they haven’t invented a lock I couldn’t pick. If they had, you’d still be rotting away in Santo Domingo.”

  “And some jealous husband would have shot you dead by now,” Gerard retorted.

  Their verbal sparring suggested a contest of long standing. Lucy’s gaze bounced between the two men, still trying to absorb the shock of her discovery.

  Now that they were both on their feet, the differences between them became far more evident. Gerard’s strength was of the compact variety while his taller brother reminded her of a lanky, loose-limbed colt. His hair was a shade lighter than Gerard’s and his eyes more green than hazel. From the absence of crinkles around them, she judged him to be nearly a decade younger than his brother.

  “Does he have a name?” she interjected when they both paused for breath.

  Gerard turned his excoriating sarcasm on her. “You might have thought to ask that before you swooned so blissfully in his arms.”

  Before she could retort, her hand was snatched up and pressed to a pair of eager lips. “Kevin …” He hesitated, shooting his brother a panicked glance.

  “Doom?” Lucy offered dryly.

  “Claremont,” Gerard barked.

  “Kevin Claremont, my love, at your undying service.”

  Lucy might have been flattered had she not suspected he greeted every female with the same fervent ardor. Behind him, she could see Gerard mouthing her reply with uncanny accuracy. “Lucinda Snow. My friends call me Lucy, but you may call me …” Seized by inspiration, she bestowed a dazzling smile on the younger Mr. Claremont before crooning, “Lucy.”

  Gerard glared at her over Kevin’s shoulder, his gaze sharp enough to cut diamonds.

  Kevin’s lush lips tightened to a pout. “Damned unsporting of you to sneak this beauty aboard after you were so cruel as to kick off my actress friend in Dover that time.”

  “She wasn’t an actress. She was a prostitute,” Gerard shot back. “You didn’t honestly expect me to believe she was your cabin boy, did you?”

  Lucy climbed to her feet, peering curiously at the sandy hair caught in a queue at Kevin’s nape. “It’s very odd, sir, but I feel as if I know you.”

  Gerard snorted. “As well you should. You clipped his absurd feats of derring-do from the papers the entire time I was stuck at Ionia. I’m damned lucky I had a ship to come back to.”

  “Cap’n Doom!” Lucy exclaimed. “You’re the one from the Howells’ masquerade. The one with the atrocious costume.”

  Kevin clapped a hand over his heart. “You wound me, fair lady. I thought I was quite dashing.”

  “Subtlety has never been my little brother’s strong suit. Equipping my ship with a fully functional torture chamber was his idea too.”

  Before Lucy could object, Kevin linked an arm through hers and drew her close to his side. “Hospitality has never been my elder brother’s strong suit. I hear he’s been woefully neglecting you.” He cast his brother a reproachful look. “Sometimes it’s difficult for those who are rapidly leaving behind the pleasures of youth to remember how easily bored we are.”

  Gerard opened his mouth, then snapped it shut. He clenched his teeth in an acidic smile. “If you’ll excuse me, I tire easily in my dotage. I believe I’ll leave you children to your”—his gaze dropped briefly to Lucy’s lips, which still felt moist and swollen from his brother’s uninvited kiss—“pleasures.” His shoulders set at a painfully rigid angle, he melted into the shadows.

  Lucy wiggled in Kevin’s grasp, intent on going after him. “Let me go. I—”

  “Don’t,” Kevin whispered sharply. “He never took me seriously until I stopped trotting at his heels. The crew gives him enough adoration. He needs something entirely different from you and me.”

  Lucy ceased her squirming, startled by the wry note in her captor’s voice. As she met his sparkling green eyes, she had the distinct impression that she’d just found a long-lost friend she’d never known was missing.

  The foretop lookout was no longer a safe refuge for Gerard. Watching Lucy cavort about the ship alone had been a vicarious torment. Watching her cavort about the ship with his brother filled him with a nameless agony. To see their fair heads together. To hear their carefree laughter ringing on the wind as if they shared a joke incomprehensible to the rest of the world.

  He’d never been so conscious of his thirty-one years or so keenly regretted the time that had been lost to him. Not lost, he reminded himself bitterly. Stolen.

  During that time, the plump, awkward, worshipful little brother he’d left behind had shed his baby fat and honed his skills as a reprobate. Using the money Gerard had so painstakingly stashed away for his education, he drank, gambled, and cajoled his way into the company of some of the richest and most notorious rakes in London. With his uncanny knack for numbers and his flawless memory for cards, Kevin had fleeced the more reckless of them of their fortunes, just waiting for the night when destiny would place him across the table from some drunken braggart who might know the fate of his older brother.

&nb
sp; After three years of living in such debauchery, destiny had delivered Lucien Snow into his hands. It hadn’t taken the sharp-eared Kevin long to make the connection between his missing brother and the man’s boasts about swindling “Captain Doom” out of a veritable king’s ransom.

  Gerard knew Kevin had been tempted to call Snow out on the spot, but he feared the Admiral had the power to have Gerard moved to another prison or killed if he scented a rescue attempt. So he’d simply excused himself, gathered his winnings, and sailed off to Santo Domingo to find his brother.

  Gerard had little memory of those first dark days after the rescue. He remembered Kevin’s gentle but relentless hands pouring water down his throat, his brother’s voice, familiar, but much deeper than it should have been, coaxing him to open his mouth so a spoonful of broth could be dribbled inside. Kevin had forced the wasted wreck of a man that he’d become to survive until Gerard’s consuming desire for revenge gave him a reason to live.

  Which made it doubly difficult to go strolling on the quarterdeck late one evening to find Lucy holding court with his brother as her crown prince.

  All lanterns were to be extinguished after eight, but a misty orb of a moon bathed the deck in a silvery glow. Lucy sat in a circle of men, flanked by Kevin and Tarn, their laughter and teasing underscored by the sporadic clatter of dice.

  Gerard approached with the fleet grace for which he was notorious, pausing in the shadows just outside their circle of merriment. It had been bad enough to feel excluded from Lucy’s life in London, but on his own ship, the sensation was almost unbearable. It quickened his temper to the point of danger. Made him want to grab her by those ridiculous braids, drag her back to his cabin, and remind her in the most potent way possible just who was master of this ship.

  “Here, Lucy,” Tarn called out, passing her a battered mug, “p’raps a bit of rumfustian will change yer luck.”

  Lucy took an obedient sip. Her grimace elicited a burst of laughter from Digby and Fidget. “Good heavens, Tarn. What’s in this stuff? Hemlock?”