by Anne Stuart
“I really don’t give a bloody damn how it happened,” her employer said irritably.
“Captain!” the old man huffed. “There are ladies present. Moderate your language.”
There was no apology. “How it happened doesn’t matter,” the captain continued after a weighted moment. “Just get it cleaned up and see to the girl. She’s cut herself on the broken glass.”
So he’d noticed that, had he? What else had he noticed?
But Wilf, the idiot, didn’t get the message. “She’s unbearably clumsy, Captain. We’ll see she’s bandaged before she leaves.”
“She’s not going anywhere. This house is a disaster, and you and your wife have been complaining that you need help for months. This is her first day and she’s allowed a few mistakes.”
Defending her again, she thought dazedly. But did he even get that good a look at her? He didn’t strike her as a knight errant by nature. His smile was too wicked.
By that time she’d backed out of the room, setting the heavy tray on the counter in the pantry, and she was trembling slightly as the door swung shut behind her, hiding her from view.
“Well, I for one do not tolerate shoddy service,” an older woman’s voice broke in. The pirate’s future mother-in-law. “And I would hope my daughter would follow my standards in all things.”
“Not in all things, I hope,” the captain said lazily, and Maddy wondered if she were the only one who caught his subtle, sexual hint in that statement.
There was a laugh from the far end of the table, and Maddy knew she wasn’t alone.
“Of course I shall, Mama,” came a meek voice. Poor girl. She was bullied by her parents, for doubtless that blustery old man was just as controlling, and she was about to marry an indiscreet lecher who kissed strange girls on the street. Though he also rescued them from rape, she had to admit fairly. So despite his thoroughly bad behavior in claiming her mouth she ought to put that out of her mind and concentrate on the fact that his act had been essentially noble.
Of course, putting that kiss from her mind was far from an easy task. When she thought about it, a strange tightness caught beneath her breasts, and heat bloomed where it shouldn’t. Would her husband kiss her like that? She could teach him to.
Except maybe she wouldn’t be wanting to kiss her husband like that, depending on whom she landed. She was going to be practical and hardheaded, and the unfortunate fact was that titles and large incomes tended to come with elderly, pockmarked, overfed men like Lord Eastham with too much hair on their faces and not enough on their heads. The captain’s smooth-shaven face was another sign of his disdain for society. How would it feel to kiss someone like that when they had a moustache, and perhaps side-whiskers? Tarkington had had a luxuriant mustache, but he’d never kissed her like that, even when they…
Maybe she should stop thinking about kisses, but at least it kept her mind off her sore feet and aching muscles.
“Pssst.”
It took Maddy a moment to realize Mrs. Crozier was signaling her. With a sigh she hoisted the tray once more and carried it down into the kitchen.
“Set it on the table, you stupid girl,” the woman snapped. “At least you had the sense to keep your mouth shut. And stop bleeding all over my clean kitchen. There are supplies in the cupboard where you found your aprons. Clean yourself up.”
Easier said than done, and by the time she’d managed to wash the blood away and wrap a crude bandage around her hand the bleeding seemed to have stopped. She’d allowed herself a moment to sit while she tried to bandage herself, and it would have been so easy simply to close her eyes and sleep, just for a few seconds.
Life had suddenly become a great deal more complicated. Instead of an elderly sea captain full of bluster she found herself in the household of a… a gypsy king. With those long, black curls and a golden hoop, he was a far cry from anything she’d ever dealt with. He was more like something from her childhood dreams, when she’d wanted nothing more than to run off and live in a gypsy caravan, traveling the country.
She’d even done so for three days. She’d been ten years old. Her father had disciplined her for shoving Sophie in the pond at Somerset, which was ridiculous because Sophie had always been a great swimmer, and in affront Maddy had decided to run away. She’d gotten as far as the neighboring Gorton Woods, only to run across an encampment of Travelers.
She’d been dirty, wet, hungry, and miserable, and the grandmother, who seemed to be in charge of the group rather than the old man, took her in, bathed her and fed her and tucked her up inside her own vardo. And Maddy had immediately decided right then that she would marry a gypsy and live in one of those wonderful caravans and travel the world.
Of course, she had been so young. And the grandmother had returned her to her father three days later, a brave act since she could have been accused of kidnapping. But her father had always been a fair man, and he knew his rebellious middle daughter well, so he’d simply thanked the grandmother, gave her a gift of wine and foodstuffs, and told her they would always be welcome to camp on his land.
But it wasn’t his land anymore. She hadn’t seen them for years, but she hoped they wouldn’t return to be faced with the new viscount.
Now here she was in the household of someone who looked like her adolescent dream of romance, with that honey gold skin and flashing eyes. And he’d kissed her! So much for her plan to slip through the household unnoticed. Most people never even gave housemaids a second glance, and despite Mrs. Crozier’s complaints Maddy had made herself as plain as possible. An elderly sea captain might not notice her, but the man who’d accosted her this afternoon certainly would.
She should have paid more attention when her father spoke of him. She’d known he was a far cry from the other men who commanded Eustace Russell’s ships, with his mysterious background, a stint at piracy in the Far East, and a gift for getting a cargo where it needed to be faster and safer than anyone else. Sailors fought to be on his ships. Her father had trusted him implicitly as one of the most valued of his employees, or so she thought, until they’d found that scribbled note after he died. Never trust a pirate, he’d written. Why couldn’t he have said more?
This was going to be a great deal more difficult than she’d expected, starting out, but then, she had no choice. She’d committed herself to this path and she would see it through. If the captain made unwelcome advances she would scream her head off. But she’d seen his fiancée—her own complete opposite. Gwendolyn Haviland was skinny, flat as a board, Maddy added uncharitably, with watery blue eyes and pale skin and colorless hair…
She stopped herself, astonished at her own cattiness. Gwendolyn Haviland was a beauty. She was slender rather than thin, with porcelain skin, pale blue eyes, and the blond hair that her sister Sophie assured her was so much more à la mode. She was like some exquisite doll, and she made Maddy feel like an overblown peony, with her dark hair and dark blue eyes and admittedly voluptuous figure. Clearly she wasn’t the captain’s type—that kiss had been just what he’d said it had been—a salutary lesson. She just wasn’t used to lessons feeling so disturbingly… good.
“Greaves!” Mrs. Crozier’s carping voice came from the kitchen, and she couldn’t dawdle any longer. She’d find some way to coexist with the captain, perhaps pretend it hadn’t even happened. Pushing herself out of the seat with her one good hand, she returned to the kitchen and her two taskmasters.
Wilf was busy shoveling food into his mouth, and he didn’t even bother to look at her. She’d been a fool to expect him to thank her for taking the blame for his own ineptitude, but of course he ignored her completely, as he’d ignored her before. Which suited her fine—she didn’t want his rheumy old eyes on her.
“You’d best go up to bed, girl,” Mrs. Crozier said, and Maddy ground her teeth. Answering to the name of “Greaves” had been bad enough—the convenient “girl” was impossibly demeaning. “The captain will probably want to see you, and I don’t think you’ll be wanting to
face him tonight. He’d probably fire you on the spot. I’ll tell him I’ve sent you to bed.”
She was ready to put off seeing him for as long as she possibly could. “That won’t be a problem?”
Mrs. Crozier shrugged her thin shoulders. “You’ll simply have to prove yourself, same as anyone. If you do your job and keep out of his way the captain won’t have anything to say to you. But if you’re lazy or nosy you’ll be blistered with words, you will. I hear tell they don’t use the lash on his boats—all he has to do is use his tongue.”
It was a sudden, disturbing image. He’d used his tongue with her, in an entirely different manner from what Mrs. Crozier was describing, and it had demoralized her completely. She sincerely doubted he kissed his erring crewmembers, though there were stories about long trips…
No, not the man who’d put his mouth on hers. And she wasn’t even supposed to know that men did such things, but she’d always had a great curiosity and one of her father’s retired captains had explained things to her. She still couldn’t quite fathom what men did together, and she certainly couldn’t imagine the captain, but then, she was hopelessly naïve in some matters and preferred it that way.
“There you go again,” Mrs. Crozier snapped. “That faraway look in your eyes fair gives me the chills, it does. Like you’re seeing ghosts or something.”
Well, that was at least one form of defense against the old biddy, Maddy thought. “Beg pardon, Mrs. Crozier,” she said meekly. “I was just thinking of something.”
“Don’t you go be thinking about the captain! He doesn’t have any interest in a pert housemaid, not when he’s got a beauty like Miss Haviland, so you can put it right out of your mind. If you were a doxy he’d pay the price easily enough, I imagine, but he doesn’t soil his own nest, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m a good girl, I am,” she said immediately, putting just the trace of a whine in it. “I left London because my employer was trying to take advantage of me. If I’m not going to lift my skirts for a lord I’m for certain not about to lift them for a sea captain.”
Mrs. Crozier was not impressed. “I’m thinking your lord didn’t look like Captain Morgan. For all that he’s part gypsy the women fall all over him, and I expect you will too. Just don’t make a pest of yourself.”
“Yes, Mrs. Crozier.” She’d make a pest of herself, all right, just not in the way Mrs. Crozier imagined. Things had suddenly become a great deal more difficult. An elderly sea captain, no matter how larcenous, seemed a lot easier to deal with than someone like the man who…
No, she couldn’t think about it, not tonight. Tonight she had to find her way up three flights of stairs to her attic, lugging water to wash in and sheets for the bed, and she had to pray there were no bats to greet her.
It was the least she deserved after such an exhausting day.
She wasn’t counting on it.
CHAPTER SIX
LUCA WAS NOT A happy man. With Vincent Haviland’s rheumy eyes on him, he had danced attendance on Gwendolyn and was rewarded with the beautiful smile that lit her blue eyes, her slight, restraining touch on his arm, a mild flirtation that hardly suited their engaged status. Mrs. Haviland was looking at him as if he’d crawled out of a sewer, and he would have given almost anything to lean over and inform her that’s exactly where he’d come from.
Ah, but he had a role to play, a brand-new reputation, hard-won and relatively honest. His thieving, pirating days were behind him, as well as his whoring and brawling. He’d decided to marry a very beautiful, very proper young lady, and he needed to ignore his rebellious second thoughts. From now on, when at home, he was going to be the perfect model of a captain and a budding industrialist. He knew Gwendolyn—she would revel in her role as leader of Devonport society. She’d assured him she had no aspirations toward London, and he believed her. In London she’d be nothing, the daughter of a country solicitor. Dukes’ nieces were thick on the ground already, and her tenuous claim to aristocracy would be ignored for the greater scandal of whom she’d married. Here in Devonport, where shipping lines were more important than bloodlines, she could queen it over everyone, because there was simply no one better than he was at running a ship, be she powered by sails or steam.
He understood the ocean and the vessels that plied it. While his heart would always love the beauty of the clipper ships, his practical side responded to the power and speed of steam and steel. Fools had tried to race him, and they always lost. Other fools had tried to lure his best men from him—they lost as well. Now, with a burgeoning fleet of two ships, soon to be three, he was unstoppable.
So why was he suddenly troubled by the young woman who’d entered his household this very day?
He seldom noticed maids—this house and living on land was a tedious and always temporary necessity, and he paid little attention to the disreputable state the house was in until Gwendolyn gently brought his attention to it. It had to be sheer coincidence that he’d run into the girl earlier, trying to fight off three drunken sailors, the silly cow.
Except she was no cow. She was a rare beauty, with a fire inside that was carefully banked but still glowing, a fire that made Gwendolyn seem pale and lifeless in comparison. He’d been a fool to kiss her, but he’d taken the excuse, simply because he wanted to be bad, be outrageous, do something that would horrify his fiancée had she ever found out. Kissing a beautiful woman in the rough neighborhoods of Devonport had been as good a way as any to vent his frustration, and if the girl had been willing he would have pulled her deeper into the alleyway and taken her up against a wall like a sailor just home from the sea. There’d been something about her, about her soft, unskilled mouth, her flashing eyes, her brave fury, that had called to him, and it wouldn’t have taken him long to show her just how to use that mouth.
He’d thought better of it, of course, and it had only taken the second kiss to realize she wasn’t someone you fucked in an alley on a bright spring day. At least he’d thought he’d scared her off from wandering around the docks alone. So why had he gone back to kiss her one more time?
He couldn’t get her face out of his mind. When he first looked over and saw her kneeling on the floor he thought he was imagining things, so caught up in her memory that he was dreaming she’d appeared.
But damned if it wasn’t her after all, and one sharp glance was even more unsettling. He knew the girl, and not just from the encounter in the alleyway. He couldn’t remember where he’d seen her before today, but he most certainly had. And what the hell was she doing in his household, picking up after that sotted Crozier’s mistakes?
It wasn’t as if she was fair game. Even if he weren’t engaged, he wouldn’t touch a woman in his employ. That was what the toffs did—seduce and discard people like him without a second thought. Though who was he fooling—maids were a step up from where he’d come from. He’d seen them on the streets, following their mistresses when he was a cutpurse, seen them in the houses when he was a climbing boy. Superior they were, clean and starched and prim, looking at him like the dirt he was. No, he’d dealt with the upper crust in the last few years while in Russell’s employ, and he hadn’t been impressed. The only one he’d liked and trusted had been Russell himself, and that had proven to be a mistake. He was hardly going to start aping their bad behavior. Russell. Why was he suddenly thinking of Eustace Russell so much? That part of his life was over.
Of course, if he hired the new maid for bed sport rather than cleaning his house, that would be a different matter, but it was already too late. And that wretched old woman who’d served as his housekeeper since he’d bought this place would keep her at a distance as well. Prunella Crozier tended to drive off maids and cooks with surprising speed, leaving him living in a state of chaos—the only mitigating factor being her acceptable cooking skills. The house didn’t matter—as long as the ships he commanded were spotless and the food on his table edible, he didn’t care.
He would have to apologize to the girl, he supposed, but n
ot until he remembered where he’d seen her before. His solicitor’s junior partner had recommended her, so perhaps he might have seen her in Fulton’s house. But she’d supposedly worked for his mother, and he’d certainly never been welcome in Mrs. Fulton’s august presence, so he couldn’t have seen her there. There were too many unacceptable things about him: his gypsy blood, his refusal to conform to society’s demands, his past. The impressive amount of money he’d amassed over the years, both from legitimate and questionable sources, would only take him so far.
No, he wouldn’t deal with the girl tonight—the day had been too long, and tomorrow would be soon enough.
It seemed as if his guests lingered forever. Billy wouldn’t abandon him to the Havilands, and old Haviland didn’t seem in any hurry to leave his fine cognac. By the time he’d gotten rid of them he was bone weary, and he sat staring at the fire, knowing he should go to bed, but he was still feeling restless. It was the damned girl beneath his roof that was making him edgy, and he knew it.
Wilf Crozier couldn’t be trusted to properly damp a fire, so Luca kicked the blaze down and set the grate in front of the coals. Fortunately warm weather was coming, and maybe his delectable new maid would be better at laying fires. Though he could think of other things she might be good at laying.
He shook his head, both to toss off the effects of the whiskey and to negate the temporarily lustful thought. Not for him.
He started up the stairs, turning down the gaslight as he went, moving through the shadowy hallways, silent as the thief he’d once been. He’d just reached his room when a bloodcurdling scream tore through the quiet house.
He could come to full attention no matter what state he was in, and he immediately knew where the scream had come from and who had made such a hideous sound. He slammed open the hidden door to the attics and bounded up the stairs in the darkness. There was only a faint glow at the top to guide him, but he had eyes like a cat, and he could see when there was no light at all but the faint pinprick of the stars above an ink-black sea. The screaming had stopped, and he wondered if someone had cut the idiot girl’s throat when he heard the panicked whimpers coming from the room on the left.
