His Wicked Kiss

by Gaelen Foley

  “Aye!” a few started until Connor slammed the man who had spoken out of turn against the mainmast.

  His hand was locked around the would-be pirate’s throat; and squinting, Victor could make out several inches of air between the man’s dangling toes and the planks of the deck as Connor held him aloft. The sailor’s legs kicked and he grabbed Connor’s wrist, to no avail, choking for air as he tried to free himself from the Australian’s viselike grip.

  “We are going to England,” Connor ordered slowly. “Are you men or animals? Money isn’t everything.” He dropped the man abruptly, his point made. The sailor knelt forward on the deck, gasping and rubbing his bruised throat. “Now,” Connor addressed the others, “if there are no further questions?”

  The men cringed, but Victor could only stare at his friend, appalled. This brute was a stranger.

  “Don’t look at me that way,” Connor whispered at him under his breath. “At least you’re alive.” He turned away once more and addressed the cowering crew in a loud bark: “Now that we’ve cleared away the filth, let’s set this ship on a proper course!”

  “Aye, sir!”

  They scrambled at once to take up their usual posts, as though relieved that at least someone had taken control. Perhaps brutality was all they understood: the law of the jungle.

  “Don’t worry, Victor,” Connor murmured, looking around at the obedience of his new servants in dark satisfaction. “We are going to rescue Eden now. We’ll find her soon and bring her home safely.”

  You’re not going anywhere near my daughter ever again, Victor thought, trembling a little as Connor pivoted and strolled away, his rifle resting over one broad shoulder.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  They decided to be married at sea as soon as The Winds of Fortune met up with the Valiant, captained by Jack’s uncle, Lord Arthur Knight. Since they were now only about a hundred miles off the coast of Ireland, it wouldn’t be long.

  In the meantime, Eden threw herself into preparing for her new role in life as the wife and consort of a powerful shipping magnate. There was much to learn and, in truth, more responsibility involved than she had expected. Jack wanted her to understand how his empire was set up, how each branch ran, who his most loyal men were in each division, where the profits came from and how they were invested, and above all, where she could find the secret accounts “in case anything ever happened” to him.

  She did not like the sound of that.

  Yesterday, he had outlined for her the main pretense he’d be using to explain his return to England after twenty years in exile. As far as the world was concerned, Jack would only be visiting London for the purpose of buying out a competitor who had been causing trouble for his agents in various far-flung territories.

  Today, it was on to reviewing the preparations needed for housing the hundreds of mercenaries that he’d soon be transporting back to South America. The vast storage spaces on the orlop and lower gun decks, now filled with timber, sugar, and all the other West Indies goods, would become, on the return trip, the living quarters of his rough-and-tumble recruits. The troops would need food, water, supplies, uniforms, boots, weapons, and other equipment ranging from canteens to bedrolls.

  Trailing him at a quick pace as he marched through one of the sprawling spaces to be converted into a mess hall for the soldiers, Eden made notes of things she was supposed to remember and hurried to keep up with the rest of the boss’s present entourage: Lieutenant Trahern, the now recovered Peter Stockwell, and the purser, who was in charge of all shipboard supplies.

  While the men discussed possible problems ranging from ventilation to discipline, Eden found herself musing on how easily she had slipped into the role of helper on account of all her years assisting Papa in his work. But no sooner had she thought of her sire than she suffered an acute pang of guilt.

  Papa had counted on her in his quest for knowledge, and now she had gone over to helping Jack instead. One could not live for one’s parents, of course—especially a parent who insisted on secluding himself in the jungle—but still, she couldn’t help feeling a bit like a traitor, abandoning him. What he would say to her the next time they met, she could hardly imagine—if he would speak to her at all!

  She prayed she had not lost his love, but she knew at the very least he would be furious. Not only had she run away without a by-your-leave, but the next time they met, Papa would find her married—to a decidedly controversial husband—having sought neither his blessing nor his permission. Most fathers would probably take it as a heartless slap in the face.

  And the wedding…

  She closed her eyes and cringed, sickened to think that she would be married without her papa being there at her wedding. How she wished they could have postponed the ceremony until he found them!—but she knew this was not realistic.

  When she had mentioned it halfheartedly to Jack, he had been adamant that they marry without delay. He understood, he said, that Papa’s absence would break her heart; but he had far more practical concerns directly impacting her best interest.

  He explained that, having given him her innocence, Eden was now vulnerable to ruin until she had secured the legal protection of his name. As much as filial respect prompted her to seek her father’s blessing before the marriage was a fait accompli, she knew Jack was right.

  It might be months before Papa caught up to them. Meanwhile, the two of them had already become lovers, and a child could be conceived at any time. A baby born too soon after the wedding rather than the full nine months would be deemed by the world a product of impropriety, born in sin.

  After suffering Society’s harsh treatment all his life on account of his own scandalous birth, Jack refused to allow any child of his to come into the world under the slightest taint of dishonor. In his view, it was not just her that he had to protect, but their firstborn, too.

  Eden couldn’t argue with that, nor did she really wish to. She wanted to be married to Jack—she did not want to wait. She just wished Papa could have been there, too; but it seemed that this was the price she was going to have to pay for having given in to passion. Still, even at so high a cost, she did not regret her choice.

  At least not yet.

  Indeed, there was much to be nervous about if she were to let herself. Though she managed to thrust aside her fear of her father’s reaction, there remained a deep insecurity about what the future might hold. She had given herself to the terror of the West Indies in passionate abandon and had agreed to marry him without any guarantees that she would get the kind of normal, settled life that she had stowed away on his ship to pursue in the first place.

  Would they be nomads, living aboard this vessel, rootless, moving from port to port? Or would she be like a navy wife, left at home on the shore, raising her children alone while their father was on the other side of the world?

  Thinking about it too much started panic boiling in her veins, so she shoved all her fears aside with a will. For now, she was going on faith. What else could she do? He had no answers for her yet. With the destiny of a nation counting on him, Jack’s dangerous mission had to take precedence.

  Once he had fulfilled his promise to the leaders of the revolution and got back safely, then the two of them could decide how and where they were going to live and raise their family.

  Provided, of course, that he survived the mission.

  Jarring herself out of the desperation that threatened, she realized Jack and Mr. Trahern were now arguing about the best solution to get more air down into the orlop deck.

  “Damn it, stop questioning me and just do as I told you!” Jack barked at him.

  His loyal lieutenant muttered an angry affirmative and stormed off as the captain dismissed the rest.

  Eden remained, gazing at him. She leaned against the bulkhead in the dim, narrow passageway and shook her head at him after a moment. “Why are you so hard on Trahern?” she asked after the others had gone.

  “Why shouldn’t I be? I pa
y him enough.”

  “Jack,” she chided in response to his blunt answer.

  “Come, I want to check on a few more items.”

  “I don’t see why you can’t treat him a little more kindly,” she remarked as she followed him down the passage. “Mr. Brody would be well advised to do the same. The old man is as hard on the poor lieutenant as you are.”

  “The only reason we’re hard on him is because we want him to succeed in life,” Jack said in a reasonable tone, opening a door for her into one of the storage areas. “Trahern’s good—very good—but he came from nothing, and that means he’s got to be twice as good as someone of higher birth if he’s going to make men heed him.”

  “Well, that’s not fair, if you ask me.”

  “No, it’s not,” he agreed. “But it’s the way things are. For the lad to be his best, I have to hold him to high standards.”

  “What standards?”

  “Why, the same ones I set for myself. In all honesty, I’m doing him a favor. If he didn’t have the potential, I wouldn’t bother. Mark this down, would you? These planks need replacing. Remind me to tell the carpenters.”

  She made a note of it, and then followed him back out into the tight, lamplit corridor. “Jack?”

  “Hm?” He still sounded distracted, pausing to inspect some oakum caulking between the planks.

  “There’s something I’ve been wondering about.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Lady Maura.”

  He paused, went very still, and then sent an uneasy glance at her over his shoulder. “You know about her?”

  “Papa told me she was Aunt Cecily’s friend…and that you wanted to marry her, but her parents wouldn’t allow it.”

  He turned to her slowly, the rugged planes and angles of his face gone tense.

  “Is this true?” she asked.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Yes, but if you nearly married her and now you’re going to marry me, at least I’d like to know a little bit about the woman. She must have meant a lot to you.”

  For a moment, he seemed torn about whether or not to answer. Behind him, some distance down the cramped corridor, a shaft of sunlight pierced the gloom, arrowing in through one of the square hatches.

  “What did she look like?” Eden prompted, smiling at him.

  “Brunette. Dark eyes.” He shrugged. “I had formed a certain attachment to her, but her parents had their sights set on my elder brother.”

  “Ah, Robert. The duke? Papa said that Lady Maura was the daughter of a marquess.”

  He nodded warily. “Marquess of Griffith. His estate borders the Hawkscliffe lands in the North Country, so they wanted to forge an alliance between our two clans. If I had been genuine issue of the ancient Hawkscliffe blood, perhaps they might have considered the suit of a mere second son. Unfortunately, the fact of my bastardy was an open secret, so any attachment between Maura and me was, shall we say, discouraged.”

  She furrowed her brow, studying him. “How could it have been an open secret? I mean, how did anybody find out?”

  “Oh, dear,” he said in a low voice, dropping his gaze as he rested his hands on his waist. “I suppose I’m going to have to tell you all the family secrets.”

  She arched her eyebrow in question.

  He let out a huge sigh and leaned against the bulkhead. “Where to begin…?”

  Eden leaned across from him in the narrow passageway, intrigued. Around them, the ship creaked rhythmically in the belowdecks gloom.

  Jack stared at her for a long moment. “My mother’s name was Georgiana Knight, the Duchess of Hawkscliffe. As a young wife and mother of one son—Robert, named for his father—she discovered that her husband had a mistress hidden away in a quaint little love nest just outside London, and she was…incensed. Well, Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and so Georgiana set out to teach her duke a lesson he would never forget.”

  Eden listened, wide-eyed.

  “She decided to cuckold him, quite publicly. She deliberately opted for a man below her station. If she had chosen another peer of the realm, a duel would have been necessary to preserve honor. I don’t know how much you know about dueling, but men don’t duel against those who are their obvious social inferiors. Mother didn’t want her duke to be killed, obviously. She wanted my brother Robert to have his father alive as he grew up. Another problem she faced was finding a man with the courage to bed the wife of a man as powerful as the Duke of Hawkscliffe. She was beautiful, but her husband was a bosom friend of the King. Well, she found her perfect specimen in the boxing champion, Sam O’Shay. The Killarney Crusher,” he said wryly. “My dear old dad.”

  Eden’s lips formed an “oh” but no sound came out.

  “I was not supposed to happen,” he explained. “I was…an accident. A terrible accident. A living, breathing, squalling mistake, nine pounds, four ounces.”

  “Goodness.”

  “Hawkscliffe acknowledged me as his own to try to save face. The gossips knew the truth. The amusing part, you see, is that I was not Mother’s final mistake.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Rather than teaching her husband a lesson, her adultery simply destroyed the marriage. Their polite coexistence turned to hatred, and hatred eventually turned to apathy. At that point, Mother reunited with the man she ought to have married in the first place, Lord Carnarthen. By this time, there was no danger of a duel because Hawkscliffe no longer cared a whit what she did or with whom, as long as she was reasonably discreet. At least this time she chose a man that no one could be ashamed of. Lord Carnarthen fathered the twins, Damien and Lucien.”

  Eden’s jaw dropped. “Oh, my!”

  “Personally, I think she wanted to have a child with him, for love’s sake. She ended up with two at one go. He was ecstatic, I hear, when the twins were born, both strong and healthy. He never married, you know. He loved her that much. He let his title go extinct, dying without legitimate issue, rather than marry another woman. To protect his sons, Carnarthen persuaded Hawkscliffe to acknowledge the twins as he had acknowledged me. One big, happy family,” he said with a twinge of bitterness in his deep voice.

  He paused, brooding, his dark eyebrows knitted together, his arms folded across his chest. “At least Carnarthen’s high rank helped to ensure the twins’ acceptance. Unlike me, they also made an effort to please Hawkscliffe. At this point, we all still thought the duke was our father and for reasons unknown, simply disliked us. It was clear that he wanted nothing to do with us. Robert was everything to him. At least the twins had each other.”

  “You have another brother. Alec?”

  “Ah, yes. Mother and Lord Carnarthen got into a spat.”

  Eden winced.

  “The man let his line die out for her, but she couldn’t even be faithful to him, in the end. He had something to do with the Admiralty, I think, and was often away on different missions, sometimes up to a year at a time. She wanted him to quit, but he refused. Well, he sailed off again. I don’t know if she was sulking or genuinely lonely, but she decided to amuse herself with Sir Phillip Preston-Lawrence, a rising actor who caught her eye treading the boards at Drury Lane Theatre in the role of Hamlet. That’s how I got my baby brother, and wasn’t poor Carnarthen in for a shock when he got home.”

  “I think I need a drink,” Eden said.

  Jack flashed a lazy grin. “Rum for the lady pirate?”

  She just looked at him. “What about Jacinda?”

  “Would you believe she, too, belongs to the duke?”

  Eden absorbed this in fascination. “They…made up?”

  He nodded. “Hawkscliffe’s health began to deteriorate. Some affliction of the heart had weakened him. Well, he was sent down to Hawkscliffe Hall in the country to recuperate, and Georgiana rushed to his side like a true, devoted wife to take care of him. They finally achieved a true marriage—just in time for him to die. Jacinda was his parting gift to my mother: the only girl. So, she, like
Robert, is of the true blood, but after all of Mother’s escapades, you can imagine the expectations Society had about her.”

  “Hmm. So, all of this was the reason Lady Maura wasn’t allowed to marry you?”

  “Yes. Her parents would have embraced Robert, but the boxer’s whelp was out of the question.” He paused reflectively. “It isn’t an easy world for the illegitimate, you know. Even Shakespeare casts bastards as villains in a few of his plays.”

  She smiled gently. “If Lady Maura grew up on the neighboring estate, then you must have known each other since childhood.”

  He nodded. “Yes. Her elder brother, Ian, was constantly at our house. He and Robert have always been the best of friends. Those two were more like brothers than Hawk and I ever were. Still are, I understand. Political allies, too. Of course, they’ve both got their titles now. Robert is the Duke of Hawkscliffe and Ian’s the Marquess of Griffith. At one point, they considered finally uniting the clans by having Jacinda marry Ian, but it was not in the stars.”

  “I see,” Eden murmured, recalling Lady Jacinda’s doting rhapsodies in her letters about her beloved “Billy.” After a thoughtful silence, she forced out bravely: “Did you love her?”

  “I thought I did,” he said with a wan smile. “In hindsight, I was just grateful somebody noticed I was alive.”

  She gazed at him in tender sympathy. “Did she love you?”

  “Oh, of course not. I believed at the time that she did, but I soon learned that she merely enjoyed the attention and was more or less just practicing her coquetry on me before her coming-out. When her parents revealed their aspirations for her to marry a title, and ordered her to stop seeing me, I vowed they would not separate us—true love and all that—and began planning our elopement so that we could be together.”

  “Elopement?” Eden exclaimed.

  “Please bear in mind that I was seventeen and an idiot.” He took out a cheroot but did not light it. “We were too young for a legal marriage in England, but Scotland was only a few miles over the border.” He shrugged. “I got everything ready and went to collect her, but she refused to come. I can’t say I blame her now but I wanted to kill both of us when her protests revealed her true feelings about me. Elopement would have meant scandal, and she had no intention of being banished from the ton for my sake.”