A Wedding by Dawn

by Alison Delaine

  Somehow he managed to keep hold of India.

  “He’s going to kill her!” she screamed. Rage burned bright red on her cheeks beneath a stream of tears. She was close to breaking completely—it was there in her eyes. Vulnerability. Helplessness. Terror.

  “He won’t kill her. Jaxbury himself has spared her life—surely you see that. He cannot do more, not and maintain control of the ship. You know that as well as I do.”

  There was another horrifying scream.

  “I can’t stand it!” India let go of him and covered her ears. “I can’t!”

  Nick wanted to plug his ears, too. There was a roar—a cheer from the men, and he wanted to be sick. And suddenly India wasn’t fighting anymore, she was cowering like a child with her hands over her ears trying to block out the awful sounds.

  The need to protect her churned up from a place very deep—a place he’d never been quite able to control. A woman in distress wrenched him like nothing else. He braced her head in his hands the way one might do when scolding a child, making sure his palms covered hers over her ears.

  It wasn’t enough. He needed something more—some kind of noise to block out the awful sounds.

  “It’s past time you surrender,” he shouted. Perhaps it would be enough. “All this bloody nonsense, stealing ships and sailing around the world—you’re bloody lucky anyone is willing to marry you at all. You’re damned near spinsterhood as it stands—”

  Another scream.

  “—and everyone knows a girl’s marriageability decreases exponentially with every month that passes, never mind all this nonsense about giving away one’s virtue—but of course you’re too naive to know what that entails.”

  She just blinked at him, so he kept shouting, louder—hopefully—than the sickening clamor from above.

  “I ought to let you go—straight back to your father, who can find some other fool willing to marry you! Would you prefer that? Some fat, old lecher with a taste for deviance—” Good God, what was he saying? “—who will want to do things to you most whores wouldn’t do? Someone who truly is ancient, and then you’ll find out about the degradation of a man’s body, and don’t I wish I could see your face when you get a first look at that—”

  India’s blue eyes fixed on him in horrified desperation as she clung to his shouted nonsense.

  “—but of course I shan’t, because we shall be wed the moment we set foot in France—”

  The men shouted even louder on deck. Tears welled up in her eyes. Ah, God—he needed some other way to distract her, so he did the only thing he could think of that was sure to infuriate her beyond reason.

  He kissed her.

  A full-on plunder of a kiss that was guaranteed to enrage. He dug his fingers into her hair, keeping his hands over her ears, and invaded her so completely she would have nothing left to wonder about kisses when it was through.

  No working up to anything, no taking anything slowly.

  Just him consuming her—ah, Christ, she tasted better than he’d imagined—and forcing her to engage with him and regretting it when she did, because her lips were as soft and sensuous as they looked...and too late he realized he couldn’t do this and forget about it later, and he had no idea what the bloody hell to do next if this didn’t get her fighting again.

  Which it wasn’t, because she wasn’t struggling or kicking or trying to bite him. She was leaning into him. Letting him devour her.

  Another tortured scream shrieked through the deck above.

  And he couldn’t do this anymore, because he was ravishing her innocent tongue, and her untutored response was killing him, and his body had no conscience. It didn’t give a damn about torture and lashings. It was responding to her, and nothing could be more wrong.

  He tore his mouth away, breathing harder than he should have been. In her stunned blue eyes he saw confusion, outrage, despair and—God damn it—desire.

  He aimed straight for the outrage. “The moment we set foot in France,” he said harshly, “you shall be mine. And then you will discover the true meaning of—”

  “I don’t care.” Instead of running for the door she grabbed his shirt and tried to shake him. “She doesn’t deserve this—you must do something! You must! All she ever wanted was to be a physician, to attend that devil-blasted school—”

  “What? What school?”

  “The surgical school. At Malta. All she’s ever wanted was to be a physician, but then Katherine returned to England because of your stupid bill of attainder—” now she was fighting him “—and Millie went home, and her brother nearly killed her because she’d sailed with Katherine, and you’ve got to do something to—”

  Another scream. What if Jaxbury was so angry he did kill her?

  “—stop him! I’ll do anything—I’ll marry you the moment we reach France. I won’t protest, I won’t fight you, if you will go above and stop the lashing!”

  It was a desperate promise she would never keep. But Jaxbury was taking this too far, and the sounds coming from above were more than he could take—never mind that if anything happened to Miss Germain, life with India would be a special level of hell all its own.

  But those desperate blue eyes were staring at him as if he were her only hope in the world—God, but he was a fool—and it didn’t matter anymore that she wasn’t as vulnerable as she looked. “Stay here,” he finally told her. “Do not move.”

  He opened the door, but just as he stepped into the passageway there was a commotion in the stairwell. They were coming down. Jaxbury had Miss Germain by the arm. Men crowded at the top, and Jaxbury barked at them to return to their posts or they’d get the same.

  Miss Germain’s shirt was still on, but she clutched her waistcoat to her bosom. Her knuckles were white in the black fabric, and her face was strained and ghostly. Jaxbury barely spared Nick a glance as he brushed by and ordered Miss Germain into the cabin where India waited. The back of Miss Germain’s shirt was cut to ribbons and seeped with blood.

  Jaxbury ordered a cabin boy to bring ointments and bandages from the infirmary and to tell the ship’s carpenter to come and repair the lock.

  Nick didn’t need to ask if that was necessary. The expected shrieking and pounding from inside the cabin never came, and the silence was worse than India’s worst fit.

  “Breeze is starting to come up,” Jaxbury told him. He looked about ten years older than when they set sail, and there was no trace of his usual humor. “Putting you and India out at Marseille, Warre—one of the men will row you to shore.”

  “What of Miss Germain?”

  Jaxbury’s lips thinned. “She’s none of your concern.”

  The hell she wasn’t. The past half hour had made it clear she was his concern—at least, if he ever hoped to keep India in check. As dangerous as the two of them were together, trying to manage India if she were separated from Miss Germain would be next to impossible.

  But there might be a way to work this to his advantage, and if the situation was as he suspected, he was not above profiting from it.

  * * *

  MILLIE STUMBLED INTO the cabin, and India’s voice failed. It was too awful. There was no way Millie could lie in the hammock, so India snatched a pillow and blanket and started to spread them on the floor.

  “Just let me sit in the chair,” Millie whispered.

  India positioned it for her and helped Millie lower herself to the edge of its seat. This was not the time to cry—it would only make Millie feel worse—but sobs she couldn’t control shook her chest. “Forgive me.” She backed away, fisting her hand against her mouth trying to gain her composure, but the sight of Millie torn to shreds and the memory of her awful screams was too much. “I couldn’t stop him.... There was nothing I could do.” And then, “I will kill him.” Rage exploded through her, and she rushed for the locked door. “I will kill William with my own hands!” The rough boards bit her skin as she pounded with her fists. “Do you hear me, William? I’ll kill you!”

  “Indi
a, stop.”

  Millie’s hoarse voice cut her to the quick. India’s hands stilled against the wood, and she stood there, breathing hard with her hands pressed helplessly against the boards. She didn’t want to stop. But there was nothing more to be done.

  She let her forehead fall against the door, felt the grain press into her skin. “What can I do?”

  “There is nothing left to do.”

  There had to be. There had to. Finally India turned away from the door.

  “Oh, Millie—your back.” India couldn’t stand it. She looked away. “I wanted to die, listening to you.”

  “He told me to scream,” Millie said quietly. “Before he started. He told me to scream as if my limbs were being torn from my body, and he would stop at five.”

  “To satisfy the men,” India realized.

  Millie nodded. Tears of anger leaked from her eyes, and her quiet voice broke. “I didn’t want to scream. I never did when Gavin hit me—not once.” Her face burned with anger and shame. “I would rather have had twenty and kept quiet. But I knew—” Now she began to cry. “I knew I could well die...from twenty.”

  And William had known, too.

  As dreadful as this was, it could have been so very much worse. And William would have had the right. They were pirates. On any other ship, their bodies would be swinging from the yards.

  India sank onto the bed, leaned forward and buried her face in her hands.

  It was too much—she couldn’t take this anymore. She couldn’t have the kind of life everyone else had, and she couldn’t be left alone to have the only kind of life she wanted, and Nicholas Warre had no right to destroy what she’d worked so hard trying to accomplish—not that it would ever have worked, or that she and Millie would not have failed completely even with a new crew.

  But she had nothing else. Nothing.

  Millie sniffled. “Did he punish you terribly?”

  “No.” She took a deep, steadying breath. “No, he did not.” And she could scarcely think of what he had done.

  What it felt like to have his arms around her. To lean on him. To have him pull her close and—oh, God—kiss her. Deep inside there’d been a feeling that she wasn’t alone, and that somehow he could make the horror go away and everything would be all right.

  She’d felt...protected.

  “I suppose he decided the situation was punishment enough,” she said, picking at a fingernail while a new feeling curled inside her, sneaking into secret places she’d always made certain nobody could find.

  “Your eye will be black by morning,” Millie said.

  Already it was swelling shut, and India’s face throbbed and burned where he’d hit her. “He could hardly marry me and collect Father’s money if I was killed by a mutinous mob,” she said. He had only been defending his hope of the money he would receive by marrying her—he wasn’t defending her for her own sake.

  Except that he hadn’t needed to cover her ears and try to keep her from hearing the horror of Millie’s punishment.

  But he had.

  And now there was no going back and un-feeling what it was like to have someone defend her, no matter the reasons.

  Millie let out a long breath and closed her eyes. “Perhaps you ought to negotiate with him.”

  “Negotiate? He’ll accept nothing less from me than marriage, Millie.” The moment we set foot in France, you shall be mine. That was what he’d said.

  And she’d told him she didn’t care.

  It wasn’t true.

  She’d told him she would do anything. Even marry him.

  He couldn’t possibly have believed her.

  “If you agree to stop fighting him—” Millie sighed “—he might agree to give you some of that money and allow you to live independently.”

  “Oh, yes—and renege on that agreement the moment he’s got the money in hand.” She could still taste him. The skin beneath her lower lip still burned a little from the scrape of his unshaven jaw, and her lips felt a little bruised. “We’ll escape as soon as we arrive in Marseille,” she told Millie. “We’ll find a way to quickly return to Malta before William can ready the Possession to sail. We could yet steal it from under his nose—or at the very least, sneak aboard long enough to retrieve your money.”

  “We won’t,” Millie said raggedly. “Because once we reach Marseille, Lord Taggart will take you away, and we’ll likely never see each other again.”

  * * *

  MILLIE LAY ON her stomach in the cabin William had moved her to, with her back on fire. She tried to muster some kind of resolve, but all that was left inside her was an empty chasm.

  The ship rocked and lolled in a newfound breeze, steadily making its way toward France.

  In a day or two she would find herself alone in Marseille—left behind when Lord Taggart took India away. She would be forced to sell her body to disease-ridden sailors, earning no more than a few pence each time. The prospect curled around her lungs, making it difficult to breathe against the musty pillow.

  A tear slid down the side of her nose and dropped into the ticking. An unholy thought crept like a finger of black fog into her thoughts:

  Poison.

  It would be quick. Easy.

  And a terrible, horrible sin. But did that really matter now?

  The scrape of the bar being lifted snapped her attention to the door. Quickly she swiped at the tear, cursing when the motion pulled at her wounds, cursing again when the door opened and Lord Taggart came in.

  “Leave me,” she said. “I do not want you here.”

  “I have a proposal,” he said flatly, and shut the door behind him.

  “Nothing you have to say could possibly interest me.” Never mind everything that had transpired since Malta... If it weren’t for Lord Taggart and his bloody bill of attainder, Katherine never would have left the Mediterranean to sail for England. They would all still be aboard the Possession, and soon Millie would have had everything in place to attend the School of Surgery.

  “That remains to be seen.” He spoke in that even, unperturbed tone that was his hallmark—as if nothing could disturb him, not even the sight of her wounds. “When we arrive in Marseille, I plan to hire a carriage and return to England traveling north through France. I have every expectation that Lady India will attempt to escape me.” He paused, watching her. “I am prepared to take you with us, if you will assist me during the journey.”

  “To hell with you.”

  “In exchange, I will offer you a hundred pounds and a letter of introduction identifying you as a personal acquaintance under any name you like. I would claim to be your patron.”

  Now Millicent stared at him.

  Go to the devil. Those were the words she should say. Instead, she thought she might vomit.

  “You refuse? Very well.” He started to turn.

  “Wait.” Her voice betrayed far too much.

  He turned back. Crossed his arms. Stood staring at her with those cold eyes—India was right about that—while her mind spun in mad circles.

  “What do you mean by assistance?”

  “I have every expectation that my journey through France will be marked by one escapade after the next wherein Lady India attempts to run off. I would expect you to foil those attempts and encourage her in a more lucrative direction.”

  Lucrative for him, at least.

  She was supposed to say, How dare you imagine I would betray India? I’ve never heard anything so offensive. “India hardly listens to me as it is,” she said instead.

  “I’m aware this is a calculated risk. You may well decide to help her escape.”

  But he did not believe she would, because he knew how very desperate she was, and he was not above taking advantage of it.

  But she should be. For India’s sake, she should be.

  She felt a little sicker. “Once you collect your money, you could go back on your word.”

  “True. But it will be in my interest to have you a continent away from my wife.”


  Unless Millie found a way to bring India with her. “And what if India manages to escape anyhow?”

  “I feel confident India will not go anywhere without you. And forgive me, but you are in no condition to be traipsing about the French countryside.” His gaze flicked to her back, hardened briefly, and his nostrils flared ever so slightly. If she didn’t know better, she would think he disapproved of William’s punishment.

  I shall take her below and punish her as she deserves. But he had not punished India at all. Was he waiting until France?

  “I will pay your room and board during the journey, of course,” he added.

  He thought the school meant more than India’s friendship.

  It didn’t. It didn’t. But... Dear God. It wasn’t as if India would somehow escape this marriage. He would have his way in the end anyhow, and when he did, she would be left alone and penniless.

  “If I help you...” Her lips suddenly felt paper dry, and she moistened them. “Will you promise never to lock her away?”

  “Lock her away?” His brows dived.

  “In her rooms. She cannot be locked away—she hates it more than anything.”

  “I shan’t allow her to run wild and make a fool of me,” he said flatly.

  “I must have your promise.”

  She heard her own voice, bargaining with him, but it didn’t sound real.

  But with what he offered...she could disguise herself in men’s clothes, attend the school and achieve a level of independence that would be impossible as a woman.

  She thought of India and what her life might be like married to Nicholas Warre. Of the alternatives, of India flinging her virtue away to a sailor in a tavern, of hiring aboard a ship, where she would be discovered as female the first time one of the sailors got a yen for buggery with a cabin boy.

  Or India could marry Nicholas Warre, endure his fists from time to time, look the other way while he diddled with the help. There were worse fates. At least she’d have money, a home.

  Still... “Married or not, you should know I’ll not stand by while you press your advantage in the adjacent room.”

  His cautious expression dived instantly into anger. “I’m not going to press my advantage against Lady India.”