The sort that had seen firsthand a man’s feet nailed to planking and other unique freebooter tortures. The sort that had once been as merciless, and now spent his days trying to atone for those sins. He would never again allow a pirate ship to sail free.
“Anyway”-she shrugged-“it was such fun seeing the mighty Cavalier go down, I couldn’t resist.”
Red washed across Jin’s vision. He tried to blink it away. His gut hurt. Damn and blast, he wanted a cutlass and pistol more than life at this moment. Or perhaps just a bottle of rum.
She smirked.
Two bottles. They said she was a fine sailor for a woman, but no one said she was mad.
“What will you do with my crew?” His voice sounded uneven now. Damn and blast.
A single brow arched high again. “What do you think I’ll do with them? Trade them for profit?”
Jin’s spine stiffened. “You would not. You couldn’t sell more than half, if you did.” The half with brown skin.
“Of course I won’t, you heathen.” Her tone did not alter from the satin.
“What then?”
A gust of breeze blew the misty rain sideways. The ship leaned and the woman widened her stance. She pursed her lips.
“I’ll put you off tonight when we come into port. They’ll take you into the jail there and the constable will decide what to do with you.”
“Constable?” Mattie grunted.
“What, big fellow? Afraid of the law? Do you want to stay aboard?” She cast him a crooked grin. “I could use a brute like you around here. You’re welcome to remain if you wish, and leave Lord Pharaoh here to rot behind bars with the others.”
Mattie’s cheeks went beet red. Jin’s fist ached to slam right into his helmsman’s meaty jaw. Mattie was a fool about women.
But he took a measured breath instead. With that speech she had given away all he needed. She had given away proof of her origins.
In his twenty-nine years Jin had sailed from Madagascar to Barbados. He had drunk with men from Canton to Mexico City, and he had heard nearly every language on earth. No single utterance had ever sounded so sweet to him as Violet la Vile’s West Country long A. The woman was Devonshire born and bred or Jin wasn’t a sailor. It did not matter that he had lost the Cavalier. He had found his quarry.
His crew believed she was yet another bounty to be collected, a quarry assigned to him through his work for the government. She was not, rather his own private mission. With Viola Carlyle’s return to England, his debt to the man who had saved his life would be repaid at last.
“Thank you, mum.” Mattie ducked a jerky bow against his bonds. “I’ll be staying with me mates.”
“Suit yourself.” She eyed Jin. “I suppose you expect me to have you untied, pirate.”
“I do. Quickly.”
“Not a pirate no more, miss,” Mattie grunted. “Not for two years now.”
Her eyes glinted. “It gives me pleasure to call him one.” She lifted a brow. “He doesn’t like it, obviously. He is as arrogant as they say.” She sauntered toward him, halting inches away. She tilted her head back, her hat brim hovering just above his nose as she scanned his face slowly with her squinting eyes. Unusual color. So dark blue they could be called violet. Thus her false name, no doubt.
Up close her skin shone warm from sun even under the canopy of rainclouds, nothing like an English lady’s delicate pallor. Her mouth was fuller than he had first thought, lips chapped at the bow, a small, flat mole on one side riding the curve of her lower lip. Freckles dusted her pug nose.
Not pug. Delicate. Almost ladylike.
He gave her stare for stare.
She wrinkled the almost ladylike appendage.
“Arrogant.” She sighed on a rough whorl of air. “And still disappointing. I’ll admit I expected more of the legend.”
“I can give you more, if you wish.” And he would. As soon as he got free of these bonds he would give Viola Carlyle exactly what she should have had fifteen years ago.
He would give her family back again.
Viola chuckled. “Oh can you?”
“I can do you damage even with my hands tied behind my back.” His voice was gravelly, ice blue eyes intense.
In all the stories Viola had heard of the infamous pirate-turned-British privateer, no one ever mentioned those eyes. But sailors were a pack of fool men and never noticed details like that. Every member of her crew could tell her the exact direction the wind blew across Nantucket Sound in December, or the difference between a rolling hitch and a double sheet bend. But she wagered none of them could state the color of her hair if she stood hatless before them, and she’d captained them for almost two years and known them fifteen. Most sailors weren’t observant in that fashion.
Pity she wasn’t most sailors. Jinan Seton was a fine specimen of masculinity.
She grinned. “I’d like to see you try.” Taunting a man bound to a mast with ropes wasn’t gracious. But it was fun, especially when the man was too handsome for his own scoundrel good.
“Would you like that?” The ice glittered.
“Talk bluster-cock all you want, pirate.” Viola ignored her abruptly dry throat, gesturing to the ropes strapped about him. “My boys know how to tie a fine knot.”
“I have no doubt they do.” His voice was deep. Relaxed. Far too confident. “Are you daring me?”
“Surrounded by sixty of my men, with yours all tied up just like you?” She waggled her brows. “Why not?”
His teeth snapped. Her nose exploded in pain.
She wrenched free and leaped back, slapping a hand to her face.
The hulk roared with laughter. “Guessing you haven’t heard all the stories about Cap’n Jin after all. Aye, miss?”
She glared, dropped her hand, and pushed her face up to Seton’s again. Whiskers shadowed his jaw, nearly black, all of him wet just like everything aboard her ship. It had been raining for three days, the downpour thick as fog, and she hadn’t meant to sneak up on the Cavalier at all. It had just been good luck.
Seton’s eyes looked hard as crystal.
Or perhaps not such good luck.
She gritted her teeth. “Don’t you dare do anything like that again.” She poked her finger into his soaked waistcoat. Muscle beneath. Hard muscle. But that was typical enough for a sailor. “Or I’ll have you strapped to the hull in less than an instant.”
“You dared, in point of fact. Faulty judgment.” The cool blue glimmered now. He was enjoying himself. His gaze, so close, slipped to her throbbing nose, then returned to her eyes. His voice rumbled like a summer storm, low and mildly threatening. “I could have taken off the tip.”
“Done it before,” the hulk grunted cheerfully. “Earlobes too. A bloke’s finger one time.”
Viola couldn’t drag her attention from the icy eyes. “I retract the Pharaoh sobriquet. You are an animal.”
“And you are standing far too close for your own good.” With his dark hair plastered to the bridge of his nose and high cheekbones, his eyes looked preternatural and uncannily knowing. A long nose and a strong jaw lent him an aristocratic air. And he spoke with the accents of an educated man, but with a foreign timbre. He was not fully English. In ports from Boston to Havana, they called him the Pharaoh for good reason.
A gleam of white showed at the crease of his mouth. Teeth. Deceptively sharp teeth. She should move away from them.
She did not-not only because she had never backed down from an opponent in front of her crew. She was, quite frankly, rapt. His lips were perfect, the most decadent dusky shade curving in wonderfully sensuous dips and rises. Flawless masculinity. Viola tried to conjure Aidan’s lips in her memory. She couldn’t. It’d been months since she last saw him, true, but she was in love with Aidan Castle. Ten years in love. She should surely remember his mouth.
Seton’s perfect lips curved into a slow smile. His breath tickled her face, mingling with the rain. Her gaze crept up. He leaned slightly forward and murmured as intimate
ly as though they were lovers sharing a bed, “I will do it again if you do not move away.”
“I suspect you will.” Her insides shivered, the betrayal of a grown woman too long in command of a bunch of scabrous salties. But her father had always told her she was hot-blooded. “But then I would have to kill you, and neither of us want that, do we?”
“Move away, or we will find out.”
“Don’t tempt me. The dirk at my hip likes the taste of pirate blood.”
“Not a pirate no more, miss,” the hulk mumbled.
“It seems to me, madam”-Seton bent his head, tilting it so that those perfect lips hovered a mere sliver of damp air above hers-“that you are ignoring an important message here.”
He smelled of salt, rain, and wind. And something else. Musky and male, but not filthy, sweaty male sailor. Rather, male man. A scent that ran right through her like a little flame.
Viola willfully shut off her nostrils.
“Perhaps I’m hard of hearing. Or perhaps I just sank your ship and you are my prisoner.”
A brow lifted. “Kill me then, if you wish.”
“I may.”
“You will not.” He sounded certain.
“How can you know that?”
His voice dipped to a whisper, his gaze slipping to her mouth so close. “You have never killed a soul. You will not begin with me.”
She didn’t respond. How could she? The blackguard was right.
Slowly, he drew his head back. Viola allowed herself a sip of fresh air. His face remained perfectly passive. Her right foot slipped back several inches. Then her left. If he smiled, she would stick him with her dirk and damn him and her vow never to be the kind of sailor her father had been.
As though he knew exactly what she was thinking, his eyes seemed to light again. A wicked glimmer.
She narrowed hers. “You really don’t believe you’ll be behind bars tonight, do you?”
He did not respond.
“Master Jin’s not one for telling fibs, miss,” the hulk offered gruffly, “but I don’t think he wants to be insultin’ you in front of all your men like, you sees.”
“What’s your name, sailor?”
“Matthew, miss.”
“Matthew, keep your lip buttoned or I will button it for you.”
Seton’s perfect mouth slanted into a half smile. Viola’s breathing halted.
She snapped her gaze away and shouted toward the helm. “Becoua, make our course for port.”
“Yes’m, Cap’n!”
“Mr. Crazy,” she called across deck to her lieutenant, “we’ll take everything off these sailors for prize before we give them over to the constable.”
Her lieutenant scuttled up like a crab, all bones and white whiskers beneath leathery skin. “Everything, Cap’n?”
Viola smiled, breathing deep again, and crossed her arms. “Everything.” She tilted her gaze back toward the Pharaoh. “And, Crazy, start with Mr. Seton.”
She realized her mistake immediately. After a long cruise, her crewmen valued good clothing more than firearms and coin, and the sailors from the Cavalier were better clad than most. But she should have let Seton be. He’d been the master of his own ship for years, after all, her equal on the sea. It was common courtesy to treat other captains respectfully.
More to the point, his perfection continued below the mouth.
She could not look away. He held her gaze as a pair of deckhands loosened the ropes and stripped him first of coat, neck cloth, and waistcoat, then shirt and trousers. Through the disrobing, his stare challenged. But after a point, she gave up looking at his face.
Sweet Saint Bridget, he was more god than man.
From broad shoulders glimmering with rain, his chest tapered lean and well muscled to a line of dark hair dipping beneath linen drawers slung low on his hipbones. After years on her father’s ship, Viola had seen plenty of men undressed. Sailors were either wiry from life on the sea or bulky from the work. Jinan Seton was neither. His height rendered his corded arms, chest, and tight belly perfectly aesthetically pleasing.
Her breaths shortened. It had clearly been far too long since she’d seen Aidan.
“Enjoying the view, Captain?” His lips barely moved but his voice was remarkably strong and hard.
Arrogant son of a humpback whale. Well justified, though.
“Enjoying the weather, Seton?” He had to be cold as a Nova Scotian iceberg. His crew too. She’d better get them to shore before they froze to death.
He grinned. “Overly warm for spring, wouldn’t you say?”
Yes. But not on the outside of her skin. Beside him, Matthew shivered, but the Pharaoh remained perfectly still. She should move closer to see if his smooth skin was covered with gooseflesh too. The ship dipped against a swell; he steadied his stance and his muscles flexed-chest, arms, neck, calves. She nearly choked on the shock of heat that went through her.
His grin widened.
Ever so nonchalantly she strolled toward the companionway, putting her back to him, and descended below deck.
In her cabin she unlocked the medicine chest and pulled out powdered root, salve, and a few other bottles, and dropped them into her wide coat pockets along with a pair of shears and a thick roll of linen bandaging. She would be busy until sunset seeing to nicks and gouges, but she hadn’t seen any serious wounds among her men or the sailors from the Cavalier. She added a needle and thread and headed back up top.
She set to tending wounds as she found them, accustomed to the occupation. From the time she was ten and she’d first crossed the ocean in her father’s smuggling brig, he let her take care of this part of his captain’s responsibilities. He had claimed it would make the men appreciate her so they would not mind her aboard.
Most never had, growing accustomed to her quick enough. She made certain of it. The one consolation to losing her family in England, after all, had been the adventure of life at sea. In those days Viola had done everything she could to convince her father to keep her aboard rather than leave her on land with his widowed sister and her three squalling infants. He had rewarded her all spring and summer, each fall setting her ashore to remain in his little house in Boston the rest of the year, to learn her lessons and wait impatiently for his return in April.
Later, when she’d grown up a little, she realized he kept her with him on the ship because she reminded him of her mother. His only love. After she met Aidan Castle, she had finally understood her father’s singular devotion.
The rain let up just as Viola tied off the final bandage and sent the sailor back to work. Her crewmen industriously scrubbed and hammered, tying and splicing and patching. All in all, her ship hadn’t come out too badly. Given her opponent, Viola was astounded they’d come out of the fight at all.
She forced herself to look aft. Still strapped to the mizzen, Seton stood with his eyes closed, his head resting back against the mast. But she wasn’t fooled. A sailor like him wouldn’t sleep while prisoner aboard another’s vessel. He was probably calculating his escape.
He opened his eyes and looked straight at her. This time he didn’t grin.
Viola knew that over the past decade the swift and clever Cavalier had spent most of her time harrying British yachts, and during the struggle with Napoleon she had bested a handful of French men-o’-war. Here and there she had taken American merchant ships selling weapons and supplies to the French colonies, but never a U.S. naval ship. Not many months ago, however, rumor had it the Cavalier sank a Spanish pirate sloop round about Havana. Shortly after, she turned over another buccaneer-a Mexican schooner-to an American naval captain off Trinidad. Good work. Decent work.
Still, with the vessel’s colorful past and the Pharaoh’s reputation, if Viola turned its crew in to the port authorities in Boston, Seton and his men might very well hang.
She glanced over her shoulder at her quartermaster making fast a halyard to the mainmast.
“Crazy, how dishonest would a pirate have to be to keep his
identity secret so he wouldn’t be hung?”
“Not dishonest at all, Cap’n.” The old man’s eyes were knowing. Since she was ten, Crazy had taught her half of what she knew about sailing and life. “Wise, I’d say,” he added, casting a quick look at the Cavalier’s master.
“Can our boys keep it quiet, do you think?” She hushed her voice. “Or will they want to brag? It’s not any ship they’ve sunk, after all. They’ve every right to be proud.”
He scoffed. “These boys’d do anything for you.” He said it without sentimentality. Sailors didn’t get teary, no matter how much affection they held for one another. Viola had learned that early on. She had learned to hold her tears like a man.
“Then make it so.” She paused. “But don’t tell Seton or his crew.”
Crazy nodded his white head and went off to see to her orders. Viola’s shoulders relaxed. When they came into port in an hour or so, she would tell a tall tale to the constable of a stranded ship that fired on her accidentally. Of how she had taken the crew aboard and tied them up in case they intended trouble. Of how, still and all, she was convinced they weren’t any harm. Hell, they couldn’t even keep their own vessel afloat. How much of a threat could they be?
The Cavalier’s papers had gone down with her. Without proof of identity her crew would be held overnight. But with Viola’s story they wouldn’t be held any longer than that unless Seton opened up his arrogant mouth and proclaimed his identity and the identity of his ship.
Viola wouldn’t be at fault in his hanging. She would allow the Pharaoh to take care of that all by himself.
Chapter 3
The port constable, an old friend, bought her story hook, line, and sinker. Or pretended he did. The sack of gold she’d taken off a Spanish brigantine two months earlier and slipped into his pocket probably didn’t hurt matters any.
She saw the crew of the Cavalier off her vessel and into the harbor jail, and wiped her hands of them.
“You done the right thing, Miss Violet.” Crazy walked with her along the lantern-lit quay toward the street bustling with sailors, dockworkers, merchants, and the bawdy women who gave them all pleasure. Laughter and raucous amusement tumbled from pub doors, and mist still hung in the night air. “Had myself a chat with some of them boys from the Cavalier. They weren’t none of them a bad lot.”
How to Be a Proper Lady Page 2
