An Improper Proposal (22 page)

“See ’ere,” Clarence said, obviously not liking the sound of this a bit. “We’re not takin’ on no new crew. We’ve got enough swabbies as it is …”

“I’m no swabbie,” Payton said scathingly. “My last position was cabin boy for Admiral Kraft!”

“Admiral Kraft?” She sensed that the pirates had exchanged glances over the top of her head. Admiral Kraft was one of the navy’s most dedicated eradicators of what he called the pirate scourge. Payton had met him once at a dinner party. She didn’t think he’d much mind her bandying his name about so loosely, for all he’d complained to her father some weeks after the party, about how Payton had spent the better part of the evening discussing the family arts with the admiral’s soon-to-be-wed eldest daughter, who’d then insisted upon practicing some of these arts with her new husband.

“You served under Admiral Kraft?” Tito twisted her head around so that he could look into her face. “If you’re lyin’, boy—”

“I’m not lying.” Payton met his watery-eyed gaze steadily, though his breath was enough to make her want to vomit. She happened to get a good look at his teeth, and saw why it was his breath stank so. He had very few teeth left, and those that remained were black with rot. “I looked after him right ably. and his daughter, too.” Her gaze slid toward Jonesy, who was still slumped upon the deck, both hands over his nose. Blood streamed down his face, and had stained his shirtfront, which hadn’t been clean before, a deep, dark brown. “Maybe I can make up for what I did to your boy Jones, there, by taking on his duties. I don’t imagine he’s going to be good for much for the next few days—”

A series of explosions sounded behind them. Instinctively, Payton ducked as bullets went whizzing past their heads. A swift glance behind her showed that her brothers had given up trying to untangle the
Virago
‘s cannons from the mainsail that had collapsed over them, and had decided instead to fire on anything that moved.

She thought about shouting to them to watch where they were bloody well shooting … but before she had a chance even to inhale, the air was pierced by a blast from a conch shell, long and urgent. It appeared to be coming from the
Rebecca
. All around her, Payton saw heads lift and faces turn toward the only able-bodied ship remaining in the area. It was evident from the activity on board that the sails, which had been dropped during the battle, were being hauled back up, and the anchor lifted. Departure was imminent, thanks to a sudden volley of bullets from the
Virago
. Men who’d been filling their arms and pockets with bounty from the
Constant
began retreating, and right quick.

Payton’s would-be assassin was no exception. Without another word, Tito dropped her and sank his hook back into the pig he’d been lugging behind him. Payton, in a very good position to view this, swallowed hard when she saw the heavy hook sink, all the wayto its handle, into the marbled slab of meat.

That could, she thought, have been me. She would never again be able to look at pork the same way.

“’Ere we go,” Tito said with a grunt, as he began dragging the meat toward the full-rigger. “Jonesy, get up.”

Clarence had already reached down to lift the sack of food Jonesy had dropped, shouldering it easily along with the heavy bag he already carried. “Up, boy. It’s only your nose.”

“Aye, but it bleedin’ ’urts,” Jonesy complained, staggering to his feet.

Payton glanced over her shoulder, just as her brothers let loose another round of bullets. This time, the
Rebecca
answered back with some firepower of her own. Payton, caught in a shower of bullets, jumped to her feet. She hadn’t much time, she knew. She had to decide, right then and there, which it was going to be:

Back to safety with her brothers.

Or onto the
Rebecca
, with all its dangers … and Drake. She turned, and started hurrying after the men who, moments before, had been ready to kill her. “Hey!” she shouted. “Wait for me!”

It wasn’t hard for him to keep track of time.

There was light in the room in which he was held, light that spilled down from cracks through the ceiling above him. The ship’s deck, he knew, was what was above him. In particularly bad weather, waves crashed across the deck, and he was showered in saltwater. When it rained, all he had to do was cup his hands, and he could catch a few mouthfuls of fresh water.

It was a sign of shoddy workmanship that light and water seeped through the cracks between the planks of the ship’s deck. That’s how Drake had known, from the moment he’d wakened on this hard, straw-strewn floor he’d gotten to know so well, that he was on a Tyler ship. Sir Marcus was notorious for hounding his shipmakers to finish his craft on time, not necessarily caring what sacrifices might have been made in order to meet some arbitrary deadline.

So he knew, from the light that shifted into his cell, how many days had passed since his ship, the
Constant
, had been attacked by another on the open seas. By counting the number of times his cell door had been opened, and meals delivered, he even had a rough idea of how many hours. He even, judging from the slowly warming air, had a general idea of where they were headed: south.

What he did not know was anything beyond that. The man who guarded his door would tell him nothing. The giant who brought him his meals told him even less.

But Drake had a pretty good idea what had happened. He had been captured, most likely by the pirate Lucien La Fond, who had never been particularly fond of him. While this was irritating, it was not particularly distressing. The Frenchman obviously wanted something—why else had he let his prisoner live this long? And Drake had a pretty good idea of what that something was. So all he had to do, really, was sit back and wait.

His main concern was, of course, for his men. They had fought bravely to protect the
Constant
against the flood of pirates that boarded her. Drake suspected a number of them had given their lives defending her. For that, he blamed himself. He had suspected something of the sort might occur, even before they’d ever set sail. He ought, he knew, to have never allowed Miss Whitby aboard. Doing so had been foolhardy, like agreeing to convey a cargo of cobras. Not that it would have made any difference. They still would have come after him. But they wouldn’t have had the information they did now, information that had been dutifully supplied by their informant.

Oh, well. There was nothing he could do about that. He would be forever sorry for the lives lost in this debacle, a debacle that, he suspected, was all of his own making. When he got out of it—and he knew that, one way or another, he would; he always did—he’d try to make it up to the wives and families of those men, any way he could. It was the least he could do, for men who had so unhesitatingly thrown themselves in harm’s way.

That map. That dammed map. If only he’d never drawn the wretched thing.

It had all started out as a lark. One night the summer before, he and Hudson and Raleigh Dixon had been visiting a favorite brothel in New Providence—certainly nothing to be proud of, but they had been a long time at sea, and men had certain needs, after all. Anyway, they’d finished, and were making their way back downstairs, when Drake happened to notice a familiar figure escorting a young lady into one of the bedrooms. It was none other than the notorious pirate captain Lucien La Fond, whom they’d suspected of having been behind a number of raids on Dixon ships sailing in the area.

Though Drake had always considered the Frenchman a grotesque monstrosity of a man, it was clear Monsieur La Fond felt otherwise about himself, since he exercised even more meticulous care over his wardrobe and personal grooming than Raleigh Dixon. Now, Drake might have been a little drunk, it was true. And the idea, to a more sober man, might have seemed a bit childish. But it occurred to him that it might be rather amusing to wait until the Frenchman was otherwise occupied, and then relieve him of his highly colorful habiliments. Hudson and Raleigh were then to set a very smoky but easily contained fire. Then they would reconvene a safe distance away to watch just what the Frenchman donned in his haste to leave what he would think was a burning building.

This ludicrous plan had succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations when, quietly entering the room into which Monsieur La Fond had disappeared, Drake found the pirate—having made rather rapid use of the woman dozing beside him—in a dead sleep. So when the cry of fire rose up through the house, the infamous pirate Lucien La Fond came dashing through the doors of the villa donned in a woman’s diaphanous nightdress, with one half of his black mustache—of which he was so inordinately proud—cut off.

Hearing raucous laughter, and seeing no signs of flame, Captain La Fond turned to spy his archenemy, Connor Drake, holding up his velvet coat and breeches in one hand, and a long curl of black hair between the index finger and thumb of another.

“
A tout a l’heure, Lucien
,” Drake called, and then he and the Dixon brothers turned and ran for all they were worth.

A childish prank, to be sure, but word of it spread through town like wildfire. It got to be so bad, in fact, that the pirate captain could not enter an eatery without inspiring snickers and guffaws. Finally, he returned to his ship and set sail, ostensibly for the gentler climes of Key West, but really, it was rumored, to one of the other islands,—to wait for his mustache to even out.

Hearing this, and having nothing better to do—they were waiting for a shipment to be made ready for the journey back to England—Drake set out after the pirate, determined to flush him from his hiding place. It was while he was searching for La Fond that Drake decided to begin mapping each area he searched, so as to have a record of where he’d already looked.

By the time he finally found the pirate in a cove just off Cat Island, he had recorded nearly two thousand islets, five hundred cays, and six hundred or so islands, along with all the reefs and shoals to avoid while traveling to each of them, something that had never been done by any man before him—and something he had done only out of abject boredom.

Then, to add insult to injury, Drake had fired off a single cannon ball at La Fond’s ship, just to let him know he’d been found out. He then sailed triumphantly back to Nassau.

It was enough, Drake supposed, to make any man a little angry. But really, this attacking of the
Constant—
killing innocent men—over it was a little much. If he’d known La Fond was such a bad sport, he’d never have started up with him in the first place.

Though he had thoroughly enjoyed holding up that bit of mustache.

Things had gone entirely too far, though. Now he was locked in the brig of a Tyler ship, and Lord only knew what had happened to the rest of his crew. He couldn’t remember much that had happened after they’d been boarded. Something had struck him forcefully on the head, and the next thing he knew, he’d wakened here. He dimly recalled cannon fire, which led him to believe his crew might have been rescued—but by whom, and to what avail, he had no idea.

The only thing, really, that he had to be grateful for was that, if La Fond had to pay him back for last summer’s practical joke, he couldn’t have chosen to do so at a more opportune time. Drake had been on his way to Nassau to marry a woman he didn’t love, and whom he was beginning to suspect might have motives even ulterior to the ones she admitted to in attaching herself to him. La Fond had put a convenient stop to that.

So things were not very bad. It would have been another matter entirely, this being held captive by Lucien La Fond, if the pirate had also gotten hold of people Drake actually cared about. Any of the Dixons, for instance. Even the youngest Dixon, who, he thought, in his bleaker moments, was undoubtedly well on her way by now to becoming the belle of London. At least if her sister-in-law had any say in the matter.

And that, Drake told himself firmly, was as it should be. It was a far better thing that Payton Dixon marry some earl or viscount, as Ross’s wife intended her to, who might be able to keep her under control and out of trouble, than that she continue to run around in the completely undisciplined manner to which her brothers had allowed her to grow so unfortunately accustomed. That kind of behaviour was only going to get her in trouble. He thoroughly hoped a husband was found for her, and quick.

Still, it was odd how, as much as he hoped when he returned to England—if be lived long enough to return to England, that is—Payton Dixon would be safely married, the idea made him feel like yanking the chains with which his wrists were shackled right out of the rings that held them belted to the wall. He wanted her married, after all. For her own good. For his own good. She needed a husband to keep her out of trouble. And he needed a good reason to stay away from her. Well, a reason beyond the fact that if he didn’t, her brothers would kill him.

Whenever he found himself entertaining the idea that he might have married Payton himself, had he not been idiot enough not to notice her until the day before his wedding to someone else, he generally leaned his head up against one of the walls he could reach and smacked his forehead against it a few times. Not so much out of regret, but out of the mere ludicrousness of the idea. Him, marry Payton Dixon? Was he losing his mind? She was just a child.

All right, maybe not a child, but still, she was the little sister of his best friends, the best friends he had ever had. As much as they tended alternately to ignore and browbeat her, they all adored her, and would never have allowed her to marry someone like Drake. They knew him too well, and much of what they knew of him wasn’t exactly good. He’d frequented brothels with them, after all. They’d shared some of the same women, and the ones they hadn’t shared, they’d described in graphic detail to one another. Was that the kind of man they would ever allow their sister to wed? A man who mightn’t feel the slightest compunction about describing to other men exactly what she’d been like in bed?

No. Without a doubt, no. Hypocritical, maybe, but perfectly understandable. This was their sister, after all.