by Lauren Smith
“Aim for the decks!” a midshipman added.
“Belay that! Aim for the sails! We have to slow her down!”
She was terrified she and Cedric would be hauled back down into the hull of the ship by someone, but they were far more worried about the approaching sloop. When she focused on the ships in the distance she saw two flags. The Union Jack flapped against the wind of both vessels. The larger and closer vessel also carried the flag of the Royal Navy at the rear. The ship just behind it was closing the gap, and she saw more clearly that ship’s flag.
Cedric curled an arm around Anne’s waist, keeping her close as they moved. “Do you recognize any of the flags?”
“There’s a British flag and a navy flag on the first. The second has a dark blue flag with a white flower on it.” It was hard to make out the shape in the distance with all the wind.
Cedric laughed. “Good God, he found us!” And then he whooped loudly and kissed Anne on the lips.
“Who found us?” She had no idea what he was talking about.
“Ash! That’s his company flag. Must be one of his ships! He’s brought the bloody navy with him, the sly dog!”
Before Anne could say anything she saw Jonathan run up on deck, shouting, “Jump! We don’t have time!”
Jonathan sprinted across the deck, leaping over a pair of sailors bent over a cannon they were preparing to load.
“Fire in the powder room!” he bellowed.
That single cry and the ominous coiling of black smoke from below the deck sent sailors scattering like rats.
“What about a longboat?” Anne asked.
“No time!” Cedric glanced around, cursed under his breath. He thought he could make out some shadows, but even if it was more than just wishful thinking it wasn’t enough to navigate by. “Is there a part of the deck without a railing?”
Anne glanced around. “Yes.”
“Do we have a clear shot to run to it?”
“Yes. It’s about fifteen feet.” She swallowed hard. “We’re really going to jump?” It looked like another twenty feet to the ocean.
Cedric cupped her face with his free hand. “Yes. Jump away from the ship as far as you can. Kick for the surface once you’re in the water and get as far away as you can. Don’t let go of my hand…if we become separated, I may not be able to find the surface.” The desperate look on his face tore at her already battered heart.
“I won’t let go,” she vowed.
“Then run!” He propelled her forward and she guided him as they dashed across the deck. Jonathan met them halfway and shouted as he leapt over the railing and into the air.
Anne screamed, unable to contain the panic as her stomach jumped into her throat as she and Cedric fell. The dark water rose up to meet them, and in a hard smack she struck the surface, then sank below. Icy water swallowed her up. The shock of the cold water nearly made her scream. Her grip on Cedric’s hand was tenuous, but she kicked away her petticoats weighing her down.
A heavy vibration rocked the world around her. Looking up through the water, blurred streaks of red and orange consumed the skies above. She kicked herself upward until she at last surfaced. White smoke cloaked the area just above the water, and fiery hunks of the ship’s hull splashed around her. Cedric broke through the surface with a painful gasp a moment later. She reached out for him and grabbed his hand.
“Cedric!”
“Anne! What—” Cedric’s cry was silenced by a mighty crash.
Burning wood singed her as part of the ship’s wreckage fell on her husband. She cried out, and then her hand, the one tightly locked with Cedric’s, started to drop as Cedric’s head slipped beneath the waves. The weight of his body sinking was too much for her to hold on to.
“Cedric! No!”
She dove under the water, her eyes stinging as she searched for him. The water was thick with debris. She swam until her lungs burned and forced her back to the surface.
A piece of wood large enough to hold on to floated within her reach. Kicking and paddling over to it, she grabbed it and rested a few moments before diving back down to look for Cedric again.
I won’t let go…I can’t let go…
But he wasn’t there. She couldn’t see him. When she broke the surface a third time, her body had become stiff with cold and she didn’t have enough strength to go back. The body of a sailor floated past, and when it touched Anne, she flinched. She could barely see anything through the white cloud from the powder explosion.
Every part of her body hurt. She clung to that bit of wood, her cheek pressed to the roughened surface, blinking back tears. It was no use. She wept in silent grief.
The only two men she’d ever loved, she’d lost. Her father and now her husband. Too stunned to move, she allowed the sea to swallow her heart within its depths. Wherever Cedric was now, so went her heart and soul.
A longboat cut through the smoke, and the distant shouts hailed her. The navy sloop loomed out of the smoke, and only a short distance away, Ashton’s vessel drifted closer. Men shouted at each other from the decks, pointing in her direction and preparing a longboat.
Anne couldn’t breathe, let alone answer them. Her mind had shut down, unable to process what she was seeing. Faces, marked with blackened streaks of soot, peered down at her when the longboat drifted up.
“She’s alive!” someone shouted.
Hands reached down, pried her viselike grip off the driftwood, and she was hauled into the boat.
“Anne, look at me,” a gentle but stern voice commanded. She opened her eyes and saw a golden-haired man sighing with visible relief. Charles. The name came slowly through the pain. Another face, one just as wet as hers, Jonathan, leaned in by Charles.
“Where’s Cedric?”
Lips trembling, she looked back to the wreckage. Her throat felt as if she was swallowing glass shards. Every protective barrier she’d ever built had been obliterated in the wake of that explosion. She could no longer contain her pain, the rage at her loss. The only man who’d loved her for the woman she was, was gone.
Everything was gone now. She’d been rendered blind, not in her eyes, but her heart. She’d lost Cedric forever. Charles slipped his coat off and wrapped it around her shoulders, but she barely noticed.
“He’s gone,” she whispered.
The boat went silent. As one their gazes drifted toward the sea, which had claimed the life of the man they’d come to save. The memory of an old poem her father used to recite came unbidden to her.
“And the ocean claimed her lover,
The waves folding him in an endless blue embrace,
Mourn not this king of seas, this prince of tides…”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Pain…excruciating darkness… stars…blue…
Cedric’s head throbbed as he fought to get away from whatever was dragging him deeper and deeper into the sea’s vast depths. His strength was rapidly fading and his lungs would explode unless he could get to the surface. His shirt tore and the binding that had trapped him to the wreckage was gone. He fought as though nothing in his life had mattered until now.
All he could see was Anne’s face, and his desire to live. His desire to see her looking up at him with love and endless wonder. New strength flooded his limbs. The water stung his eyes, burned them like hot pokers, but he kept swimming toward that brightening point of light that he knew had to be the surface.
When his head burst above the water, he sucked in a loud, agonizing breath. A shocking white glared into his eyes, and he blinked, raised one hand as he treaded water, and looked about…looked…as gray shapes appeared in the fog.
“What in God’s name?” Pieces of wood bumped into his shoulders as he breathed in the thick smoke. That was what made things gray. Not his blindness, but gunpowder smoke and burning wreckage.
He could see! Not well,
but by God he could see! He started to laugh, but choked as he breathed in the smoke.
He saw several longboats drifting through the ship’s wreckage. The one closest to him had several people in it, all of them facing away, their backs to him. A woman was in the middle, and her soaked dark hair hung to her waist.
Anne! She was alive. Not yet strong enough to call out, he started to swim toward the boat before it left him behind. As he drew closer he recognized Godric, Ashton, Charles, Lucien, even Jonathan on board. Just beyond them two ships, the HMS Ranger and Ashton’s merchant vessel Black Lily, were drifting around the wreckage of the Maiden Fair. The entire League and Anne were on that boat, all staring silently at something he could not see.
Dread filled him. What had happened? It had to be something horrible, something he couldn’t bear, if it had struck his friends and wife speechless. When he reached the longboat, he swam around to the side. He clung to the edge of the boat and searched the floating wreckage, trying to spot whatever had devastated his friends.
Anne’s face was strewn with tears, and Charles had a comforting arm around her shoulders. Cedric forced his gaze back to the sinking ship.
They must think I’m dead…
It was Jonathan, the one nearest to him, who slowly turned his head and saw Cedric clinging to the side of the boat.
“Cedric!” His startled shout made everyone jump.
Jonathan rushed over to where Cedric gripped the side of the longboat. Exhausted, Cedric latched onto the younger man’s arms and allowed himself to be hauled aboard.
No sooner had he righted himself did Anne launch herself at him, sobbing incoherently. They fell together in a wet mess.
Ashton wiped at his eyes and cleared his throat. “We thought we’d lost you.” There was a rough catch in his voice. Everyone looked too strained, too devastated.
The admission of how much he was loved, not just by Anne, but by his friends as well, struck his heart.
“Takes more than a burning cottage, horse thieves, piratical slavers and an exploding ship to kill me, eh?” he teased, trying to ease everyone’s pain.
Charles chuckled. “Right. Should have known better than to think that could take you down.”
Cedric looked down at Anne, who stared at him with that look he’d hoped to someday see. An endless wonder in her eyes, and love, so much love, that simply seeing it now gave him wings enough to fly.
“My heart,” he whispered, feeling suddenly shy, so damned shy of his own wife. It was as though he was looking at a familiar stranger. He’d grown so used to her touch, her taste, her scent. To see her, finally see her again after so long in the dark…
She raised a hand and stroked the backs of her fingers across his cheeks.
“Don’t cry,” she begged him. “Please don’t. If you do, I won’t be able to stop.”
“To hell with it.” He buried his face in her neck, curling his body around hers, clinging to her. His heart, his love, his other half. They were alive and safe.
“I can see you,” he kept saying as he wept. Never in all his life would anything be as beautiful as his beloved Anne and his dearest friends. The last five months had been an awful nightmare.
But I’ve finally woken up. He brushed his lips over Anne’s, tasting the sea and her tears.
He vowed from that moment on, she would never cry again except from joy.
* * * * *
Ashton stood on the deck of the Black Lily, his captain, Ellis Bristow, beside him.
“Close call, Lord Lennox. We almost didn’t reach the Ranger in time.” The captain, his hat tucked under one arm, watched the rolling waves, his sharp eyes missing nothing.
“I know.” Ashton held his breath a moment, trying to erase the thoughts of what might have been if they hadn’t gotten to the Maiden Fair when they did.
They’d learned at the port which direction the slaver’s ship had gone, and in the race to catch her, soon learned a navy ship was also in pursuit. The joy at having an ally, however, became terror when their man from the crows nest called down that the Ranger wasn’t ordering the Maiden to stand down, and instead was opening gun ports.
Captain Bristow desperately arranged for his own message to be raised, warning the navy ship that English hostages were on board their target.
The captain of the Ranger had heard them and ordered his crew to prepare for boarding instead, but moments later the Maiden went up in flames without a shot being fired.
Seeing the ship burn and the bodies floating among the flotsam had almost killed Ashton. He’d feared Cedric, Anne and Jonathan to be among the dead.
He glanced down from the top deck of the Lily to see Anne and Cedric heading to the cabins below. Cedric’s arm was curled around Anne’s shoulder, and she clung to him as though afraid to let him out of her sight. Cedric paused just beneath Ashton and glanced up, nodding at him in silent gratitude for the Lily’s arrival.
Miracles do happen. After everything that had been lost over the years, sometimes the world gave things back. Like Cedric’s sight.
Ashton wasn’t the sort to put his trust in faith, but he couldn’t deny their good fortune today. Still, he feared what tomorrow would bring.
When he’d spoken to the captain of the Ranger, he’d learned that he’d been given orders to sail Brighton to find and sink the Maiden Fair without giving quarter to prisoners. He’d been told it was a slaver ship, but it was supposed to be devoid of human cargo.
The orders had been given through the proper chain of command, yet Ashton had the distinct impression he was playing a vast game of chess. One with a board that spanned the country, and that somehow, even with this, Hugo Waverly was his opponent.
“Ash.” Lucien climbed the stairs to the deck and nodded at Captain Bristow. Bristow offered them some privacy and left to speak to one of his lieutenants.
“How’s Cedric?” Ashton asked.
“Good. Better than good. He’s seeing again and can’t seem to stop smiling at his wife. Silly fool.”
Ashton heard the note of love in those last two words. Last Christmas had been a dark hour for both Cedric and Lucien. But they’d weathered the storm and come out stronger.
“Horatia would have killed me if our baby had lost its uncle.”
It would have devastated them all to lose Cedric.
“And Jonathan? How is the lad?”
They glanced at the lower deck where Jonathan was braced with his back against one of the masts, his sandy-colored hair blowing in the wind. He’d risked much to get to Cedric and save him, far more than Ashton had asked of him. And that had truly made him one of the League of Rogues now.
“He’s a bit distant. I sense he’s feeling lost, even after so many months of adjusting to his new position. He needs someone to ground him, keep him in high spirits. Give him a wife to chase and tame, and he’ll settle down and be happy. I think it’s time Cedric brought Audrey home.”
Ashton laughed, easing the tension he felt. “I never thought you’d be the one to suggest a wife was good for a man.”
Lucien turned his knowing gaze toward Ashton. “A good wife is good for every man. You ought to remember that the next time you let a Scottish lass get the better of you in a theater alcove.”
Ashton blanched, causing Lucien to chuckle.
“You’re not the only one with eyes and ears, Ash. The staff at the opera house see more than anyone realizes. Might I suggest you find some other way to deal with Lady Melbourne, before she brings your business endeavors down around your ears.” With nothing more than a smug grin, Lucien left Ashton at the railing, pale as a white flag of surrender.
He was right, though. Ashton had to deal with Lady Melbourne before she did exactly that. Ruin his business interests.
* * * * *
Cedric lounged back on the settee in his drawing room, arms folded behin
d his head as a white and brown puppy dragged one of his boots across the carpet. Little Forrest growled and snarled, his dagger-like puppy teeth making little scrapes in the leather. Cedric didn’t care. Life was perfect, puppy teeth marks and all.
It had been two weeks since he’d been rescued from the waters off Brighton, and his sight had fully returned. Headaches had pained him the first few days, but once the swelling from the blow to his head had subsided, so did the pain.
The door to the study opened as Anne and Audrey flew in like a pair of doves. Anne looked ravishing in her rose-red gown trimmed with embroidered wildflowers on the van-dyked sleeves and hem. Her full hips accented her tiny waist, especially when she placed her hands on them now to glower.
“Cedric, you mustn’t let him chew on your boots. You’re spoiling him.” She lunged for Forrest. The King Charles spaniel froze, as he always did when Anne got frustrated with his mischievous antics. After she snapped up the boot, the spell was broken and the dog ran in a wild scamper for her ankles, nipping playfully. Before he could damage her skirt, he tripped over his own paws and rolled onto his back, his pink tongue sticking out.
Audrey giggled. “Bit of a rogue himself, isn’t he?” Cedric couldn’t help but beam at her. She’d come home from Europe early, only two weeks after their escape from Al Zahrani’s ship. It was as though she’d known he needed her, because she and Lady Rochester had arrived before anyone from the League had contacted them.
“Forrest is a scamp, kitten, not a rogue,” Cedric clarified as he rose from the couch.
Despite Audrey’s presence in the room, his wife walked up to him and curled her arms about his neck, kissing him fully on the mouth.
“How are you?” Anne asked.
He returned the kiss for a long moment before he replied.
“Like a better version of myself,” he said, then smiled. “A much better version.”
Anne pursed her lips. “As long as you remain wicked in one or two areas, I shan’t complain.” Her laugh made his body hum with desire. It was so good to see her smile. She had no idea how much he’d missed it.
