Enthralled

by Lora Leigh

  And it was a risk worth taking. Shouting, the men ran for the lanterns, flinging them over the starboard side, away from the hole. Only a tiny leak right now. Thom had only pierced the balloon’s skin; his blade was still buried in the envelope, blocking the leak, and despite the pressure the metal fabric wouldn’t rip easily.

  As soon as the lanterns were gone, Thom jerked the blade upward, slicing open a two-foot tear. He dropped to the deck with a heavy thud, the steel blade at his arm glinting.

  The mercenaries ran. They sprinted to the companionway, shouting the fire alert as they disappeared down the ladder.

  Georgiana hauled herself over the rail, stumbling into the coils of rope and crates near the bow. Moonlight spilled faintly over the port side of the deck, lighting her way as she hurried toward Thom. He caught her hand, and they raced to the stern, where the boats hung on pulleys.

  Out of breath, she stopped at the tie, frantically unfastening the ropes. And Thom . . . didn’t have a left hand.

  For the space of a second, she stared. He wasn’t holding a blade that had been stashed inside his arm, as she’d thought. His arm was a blade. And as she watched, he pushed back a small lever at his elbow, and his forearm unfolded as if being turned inside out. Gears clicked. The blade retracted and his fingers snapped into place, one by one.

  Mouth open in shock, she met his eyes. “Thom!”

  His grin flashed again. “I asked Ivy for it—in case I was ever eaten by a megalodon, I could cut myself out.”

  Shaking with sudden laughter, she quickly finished unwinding the tie. Thom hauled on the line and lowered the boat to the deck, then grabbed it by the mooring rope tied to the bow.

  “To the tether, Georgie. I don’t trust that they won’t cut the pulley line if we go down this way.”

  Dragging the boat after him, Thom quickly started down the moonlit port side, toward the center of the ship. Georgiana followed close behind. But they weren’t going to be there alone. Ahead of them, footsteps pounded up the ladder. Mercenaries spilled out of the companionway, shadowy shapes peering through the dark toward them.

  “I ripped the balloon open portside,” Thom called over the scrape of the boat against the deck. “If you shoot, we’re all dead.”

  More mercenaries came up as he spoke. Winch’s voice sounded through the dark. “Put your guns away, you fools! Go pull down the other lifeboat. Billy, Leigh—go find Southampton. He’ll need help carrying up that gold.”

  “I’m here, Mrs. Winch.”

  Thom abruptly stopped and faced the center of the ship. Georgiana scrambled past the boat to his side. He pushed her back against the rail, behind him.

  Southampton emerged from the shadows at the center of the deck, wearing a jacket over his nightshirt and a sword in his hand.

  A sword. Fear roiled in Georgiana’s stomach. Southampton couldn’t shoot, but he could stab—and he held the weapon with the ease of someone long familiar with it.

  He stopped, just over the length of his blade away from her husband. A thin smile curled his lips. “Well done, Big Thom.”

  To her astonishment, instead of forming his own blade again, Thom pulled on his gloves. His voice was flat and hard. “If you have a brain at all, you’ll get into that lifeboat with your crew, and then you’ll leave us be. We won’t put any claim on your gold. We won’t say I was the one that brought it up. Those coins don’t matter to me.”

  “You believe I’ll take that risk? Only three people know how many coins you found. I’ve already silenced your salvage dealer. Now you and your wife must be silenced.”

  “And your mercenaries?” Georgiana said.

  “Ah, yes. Well, they will be paid enough to keep silent.”

  “Or maybe you’ll have them killed, too,” she said. In the shadows, the mercenaries had quieted. “Or perhaps they’ll blackmail you for more money. Or steal the gold and be done with it.”

  She hoped Mrs. Winch would at least consider it.

  “There will be no blackmail or stealing, Mrs. Thomas.” Southampton looked away from her and regarded Thom with amusement. “And my crew and I will be the only ones to survive this. You’re a fool for thinking this will save you. We’re forty leagues from the nearest shore. The two of you alone will have little chance of reaching it alive.”

  Forty leagues? Oh, dear God. They would have to row a hundred and twenty miles.

  But she wouldn’t let the dread overwhelm her. They still had a better chance in a small boat than they did on this ship.

  Thom obviously thought so, too. “Little chance is better than none.”

  “I prefer all or nothing. Now you’d do well to say good-bye to your lovely wife while you still can.”

  “And you’d best get in your boat and go while you can,” Thom said, and she’d never heard his voice so hard and cold. “I was raised under the boot of men like you, who use people and toss them away. When that tower came down, I tore apart men like you. We called them the Horde, but they were the same. And if you don’t back away, I’ll tear you apart, too.”

  “They put you down with a tower.” Southampton took a step, his blade rising. “I’ll do it with a sword.”

  He lunged, jabbing the blade toward Thom’s heart—and stayed, as if his blade had embedded in flesh. Screaming, Georgiana flew forward. But it wasn’t what she’d thought. Southampton hadn’t impaled Thom’s chest.

  Thom had caught the blade in his fist.

  He stood, staring at Southampton as his fist slid farther down the sword toward the hilt—the glove preventing any spark from steel scraping against steel.

  Jaw clenched so hard that his face seemed to shake, Southampton tried to pull back on his sword, then tried to shove it forward.

  With a twist of his wrist, Thom snapped the blade and tossed it over the side. Stepping forward, he swung his right fist. A terrible wet crack split the air. Southampton flew back into the shadows at the center of the deck—but by the shape of his head, Georgiana could see that half of it was gone.

  Stripping off his bloody glove, Thom threw it to the deck and looked into the dark. “Any of you want a go?”

  “I don’t think we do,” Mrs. Winch answered quickly. “We’ll consider Southampton’s gold your ransom.”

  “Fair enough.” Thom looked to Georgiana. “Now you hang on to me again.”

  They’d done it. Heart pounding with sudden relief, she leapt up onto his back, winding her arms around his shoulders. He reached the airship tether—five hundred feet below, still connected to Oriana—and grabbed on with his gloved left hand. With his right hand, he hauled the boat over the side by its mooring line.

  “Ready?”

  She buried her face in his neck. “Yes.”

  He went over, sliding down the cable toward the water. The tether bowed slightly under their weight—the airship was sinking, the cable taking on slack. With their feet just above the sea, Thom lowered the boat to the surface, then carefully slid the rest of the way down.

  Standing in the boat, he hugged her fiercely. Georgiana clung to him, refusing to think of the forty leagues. They’d made it this far.

  A splash suddenly sounded nearby, followed by a dismayed shout from Mrs. Winch. Thom stiffened against her.

  “Those damned fools.” Letting her go, Thom dragged up the oars stowed lengthwise beneath the wooden thwarts and moved to the bow. “Sit, Georgie.”

  Georgiana quickly took a seat on the center thwart, searching for another pair of oars on the bottom boards. “What happened?”

  “They threw the body over.” He fitted the oars into the rowlocks. “Now hang on.”

  “But let me—”

  Thom surged backward with a mighty pull. The boat shot forward, almost tumbling Georgiana off her bench. A wild laugh broke from her.

  “Oh, Thom! Perhaps forty leagues is not much at all!”

  He grinned and pulled again, and they sped across the swells. Georgiana faced forward as long as she could, watching him, until the wind and salt s
pray blinded her. She turned to look behind them.

  Lit by the moon, the airship had just settled onto the surface of the water, the balloon sinking in on itself. The mercenaries had begun filling the other boat—across the distance, she made out their dark silhouettes, the items being tossed from the airship to the mercenaries waiting below. Supplies or gold.

  She looked around again as Thom suddenly stopped rowing. The expression on his face warned her to silence. Quietly, he tucked the oars inside the boat and moved to her thwart.

  “Shh.” He gathered her to his chest, his voice a whisper in her ear. “No noise against the bottom of the boat. Stay absolutely quiet, no matter what.”

  She nodded against his wet coat, not daring to breathe. They waited, rising and falling with the roll of the sea. Minutes passed.

  The boat suddenly jolted, rocking deeper into a swell. Moonlight glinted on a blade of steel racing past the stern—a razor-edged dorsal fin taller than Thom would have been standing. Sharp terror jumped through Georgiana’s skin, spearing her heart.

  A megalodon.

  Thom’s arms tightened around her. She watched in horror as the monstrous armored shark sped straight toward the airship, the fin slicing through the path of moonlight.

  And from the south, another fin. Oh, dear God.

  Faint across the distance, shouts rose from the other boat. Water splashed as they began a desperate rowing. Two men jumped out, tried to swim back to the sinking airship, as if seeking safety.

  There would be no safety there, either. A frenzy was starting. The giant sharks would batter the airship’s hull until they’d torn everything apart.

  Nearing the mercenaries’ lifeboat, the fin disappeared beneath the surface.

  “Don’t look, Georgie,” Thom breathed into her ear.

  But she couldn’t look away. The other boat abruptly lifted up out of the water, as if on a huge wave.

  And in one bite was gone. Soon the thrashing swimmers in the water were gone, too.

  For a long moment, there were no more shouts, no sounds but Georgiana’s ragged breath. The bow of the airship suddenly tipped up, wood splintering. Another fin raced toward it. Georgiana clenched her teeth against a scream of warning. On the deck, a familiar silhouette—Mrs. Winch, standing with her feet apart. A gun barrel gleamed in her hand, pointed at the shark coming toward her.

  A bullet wouldn’t do anything to a megalodon. Shooting a weapon beneath a leaking balloon would.

  The fin went under. The airship tipped sharply to port—and Mrs. Winch fired her pistol.

  The airship exploded in a bright ball of light. Muffling her cry, Georgiana turned her face against Thom’s throat. Heat rushed past her skin.

  Then there was just cold again.

  And despite Thom’s strength and how quickly he could row, with monsters swimming all around them, forty leagues seemed very, very far away.

  * * *

  The burning remains of the airship were nothing but smoking pieces of flotsam when Georgiana finally succumbed to sleep, held securely in Thom’s arms.

  Only a few minutes seemed to pass before his low “Wake up, Georgie” pulled her back up, but when she blinked her eyes open, the eastern sky had paled, and pink traced the clouds.

  The low thrum of an airship jolted her fully awake.

  Still cradled in Thom’s lap, she sat up. Her gaze searched the air, her heart lifting when she saw the skyrunner coming from the southeast, her lines sleek and beautiful.

  Thom pulled her back against his chest and pressed a kiss to her hair. “They must have seen the explosion,” he said softly.

  And the remains of the airship burning like a beacon through the night. The etiquette of the seas demanded that any passing vessel offer help and rescue. Now the smoke led them here.

  “Have the megalodons gone?” she whispered.

  “I haven’t seen a fin in more than an hour. That doesn’t mean we’d be all right to start rowing.”

  Georgiana didn’t want to risk it, either. She watched the airship’s approach, silently urging the engines faster. Slowly, Thom’s muscles tensed around her.

  “Thom? Is it a shark?”

  He made a slight choking sound that might have been a laugh. “In a manner of speaking. That skyrunner is Lady Corsair’s.”

  The notorious mercenary. “I thought you were friendly with her?”

  “I am. She’ll probably still charge us a ransom before she lets us go.”

  Georgiana supposed it was the principle of the thing. She didn’t mind paying for a rescue, though. It seemed more practical than remaining here.

  “All right,” she said, and felt Thom’s smile against her hair.

  “You’re not afraid?”

  “After watching that megalodon swim by our boat, I’ve become just as impervious to the threat of madmen and mercenaries as you are.”

  He laughed quietly against her, and a few minutes later, when the airship hovered overhead and a rope ladder unrolled down to their boat, he urged her up the rungs ahead of him.

  Above, a man with a wide grin and the loudest orange waistcoat Georgiana had ever seen leaned over the rail, watching them climb.

  “Big Thom! We heard rumors that you’d gotten yourself kidnapped! But now I see that you’ve just been on a pleasure cruise with your wife.”

  Thom’s gruff reply came from just beneath her. “It seemed like good weather for one—”

  From the sea below, a rush of water and cracking wood. Gasping, Georgiana looked down just as enormous jaws crushed their boat to splinters. After a second, nothing remained but small floating pieces.

  Astonished, she met Thom’s eyes, swallowed hard. “Well,” she said. “You missed the opportunity to test out your knife.”

  And his laugh followed Georgiana the rest of the way up.

  * * *

  Within an hour, Georgiana was walking down a passageway toward another stateroom. In another three hours, she would be home, and quite aware that she and Thom would be returning in much the same way they’d left: on an airship, down a cargo platform. Perhaps even returned to the same spot, with her steamcoach still where Thom had abandoned it.

  But Georgiana could not bear to return in exactly the same way they’d left.

  When they’d left, she and Thom had been on their way to the magistrate’s to separate. When they’d left, Georgiana had still been keeping the promise to herself that she would never ask him to stay again.

  Now she would beg, if necessary. When they’d left, theirs had been a wreck of a marriage. But in the past few days they’d salvaged something incredible from it, a treasure worth more than any gold—and she couldn’t let him go.

  But it would not be her choice. If Thom didn’t see himself as she did, if he still believed himself a failure, he might want to leave. The very thought of it started a desperate ache in her chest. What would she do without him now?

  She didn’t know. But it would not be the same as before. She’d survived the past four years.

  Georgiana didn’t know if she could survive his leaving again.

  Eyes blurred, throat knotted, she barely saw the cabin as they entered it. As soon as the door closed, she turned to him.

  Before she could get a word out, he kissed her—and yes, this needed to come before anything else. Not a task, but a sheer necessity. She melted against him, his warmth easing the ache in her chest and the pain in her throat. Rough stubble scratched her chin and his coat was damp and her fingers were cold, and this was the most wonderful kiss that there’d ever been.

  Until it ended, but then he swept her up and carried her to the bed, and that was even more wonderful.

  He set her down on the mattress and stepped back to unbuckle his coat. Voice hoarse, as if something within him was hurting, too, he said, “I need to have you again before we reach home, Georgie.”

  “You already have me, Thom. Always.” Gathering every bit of her courage, she rose up on her knees. “Always. When we reach home, I wan
t you to stay. No papers, no separation. I want to call you my husband for the rest of my life.”

  His fingers stilled on his coat buckle. As if not daring to believe, his gaze desperately searched her face. “Tell me again.”

  “I love you, Thom, and I want you to stay,” she said, and fierce joy replaced the pain. Oh, she would tell him again and again. “I loved you before, but I love you so much more now. Before, I’d have let you leave because the hurt was too much. It isn’t now. And I couldn’t let you go now, even if I was torn apart. If you went, I’d be trailing along behind you—or tying a chain around you to drag you back. So I want you to stay.”

  With a sharp hitch of his breath, he clutched her against his chest. Tightly he held her, his hands slipping up her back to tangle in her hair. Gently, he tilted her face up, and the aching love in his eyes was a mirror of her own. “You know I wouldn’t have ever gone. But I don’t know that I’ll be any better a husband than I was.”

  “Will you be with me?”

  “Every single night.”

  “Will you love me?”

  “Always, Georgie.”

  “Then that’s all I need.” She tugged him down to the bed. When he sank down on the edge, she straddled his thighs. His coat still needed unbuckling. Her fingers started in on the task. “If it’s money that worries you, you ought to know it’s not a concern. My business is yours, too—at least the profits from it are, since I invested your earnings to start it. And it’s done well. I’ve got a fleet of ten ships, and I’ll soon be acquiring more. Maybe airships, too. It’s not a chest of gold, but we won’t want for anything.”

  He struggled with that, but finally nodded. “Considering that gold is likely in a shark’s belly, I’ll trade it.”

  “It’s a good trade. Your share of the profits is a hefty one.” She took a deep breath. “If you want a new ship for your salvaging work, you’ve earned more than enough to buy another one. A new submersible, too.”

  “I don’t want to salvage.”

  “You’re very good at it.”

  “I was good at hauling fish, too.”

  He was good at a lot of things. But that wasn’t the question she needed to ask—the question she’d never bothered to ask before. “What will make you happy, Thom?”