Brazen Temptress (5 page)

Maureen gazed about the room, taking it in as she had so many other establishments, locating the exits and entrances, gauging and weighing the patrons as friends or enemies.

But she stopped herself when she started to calculate the most defensible position in the place — this wasn't, after all, a dockside tavern in some rough Carib port town.

She doubted the fashionable of London considered an evening's entertainment incomplete if it didn't end with a good knife fight.

Not that she wasn't carrying hers, just in case ...

Maureen smiled to herself. She was sure Lady Mary would go into a fit of vapors if she knew Maureen had stolen her prized dagger out of the Captain's sea chest. When she'd spied one of the Lord Admiral's lackeys delivering her personal effects to the Captain a few days after her arrival at the Johnston house, it had been only a matter of timing and picking the poor lock on the chest to retrieve her weapon, as well as the coins she kept sewn in the hem of her coat.

She'd felt somewhat better about her situation after that. With her knife and a few bob, at least she wasn't as helpless as the blushing creatures daintily mincing around Almack's.

Besides, concealed as the dagger was beneath her skirts, she decided what Lady Mary couldn't see was probably acceptable.

Beyond the dancing there seemed to be a refreshments table, in which no one appeared all that interested. Rooms beyond held gambling, Maureen knew, from Lady Mary's descriptions, but those areas were off limits to decent young ladies.

If she knew de Ryes he wouldn't be prowling the dance floor with these vapid misses but rather playing some high-stakes game with someone's life and welfare hanging in the balance.

So it was time to find him before he had the chance to ruin any more lives.

Her gaze swept the room again, passing over the elegantly dressed men, and she wondered if after all these years she would recognize him.

Of that she had no doubt. His face, his features, his every nuance were burned into her memory. For years she'd retraced every moment from their first meeting to their last, not wanting to forget even the smallest detail.

Even now, as her thoughts wandered to that day so long ago, the day he'd first set foot on her father's ship and claimed to be a friend, she wondered why she hadn't seen through to his evil intent.

No, how could she forget him? The man who'd murdered her father.

West Indies
1805

Maureen had been watching the ship following them for nearly seven hours. Her father had tried to call her down from the rigging, but she'd refused time and time again.

And he knew better than to argue with her when she set her mind to something.

She gazed out over the waves separating them from their shadowy counterpart. How could she explain it? The ship matching their movements held an eerie fascination she couldn't account for. Not to her father, not to herself.

She knew her father's lack of patience was behind his orders to the crew to slow their pace enough for the other vessel to catch up with them. He never liked a cat-and-mouse pursuit. He chose when and where he was going to be confronted, and he'd decided to do it before sundown.

And so it was in the last hour that she'd spied the other vessel's name.

The
Destiny.

The words sent shivers down her spine, chilling her sun-kissed skin.

As if the name called to her across the waves, whispered to her that this encounter was about to change all their lives,
their
destiny.

A premonition, she knew, was nothing more than her Irish half getting the better of her. If she'd been full Irish, like her father, she might have understood the odd sensations rippling down her spine as the
Destiny
let down two longboats, each filled with half a dozen sailors, who then bent their backs to the task of rowing toward the
Forgotten Lady.

She shook off her forebodings with the good sense inherited from her mother's proper English bloodlines and brought her spyglass up to her eye so she could watch the longboats' approach.

"They've no weapons, father," she called down. "At least none that I can see. Nor is there any smoke or activity around their cannons. If they mean to fight, it isn't right away."

Her father nodded. As the captain of the
Forgotten,
he had a duty first to his ship and his crew. Caution when sailing these days was the first and foremost rule of the sea. With England and France back at war, the Dutch and Spanish had flocked to the seas to take advantage of the hostilities by sending out their own privateers, while the brash and cocky Americans picked at the leftovers. All this left a ship with no country, like the
Forgotten,
with few friends.

But Captain Hawthorne and his crew liked it that way. Loyalty unto themselves. It was a lesson Captain Hawthorne and his men had learned from experience, and they'd weaned Maureen on that notion from the time she'd started toddling around the deck — a lesson that made her all that much more wary at these strangers' approach.

She tipped her glass toward the back of the first longboat, looking for the man in charge of this expedition. But it was the sailor at the last oar who caught and held her attention.

Her destiny.

The words haunted her again, as if her Irish blood refused to give up its banshee refrain.

The ocean swelled, lifting the longboat up and then down, hiding it for a moment from her view. The instant the sea rose again, her eye was trained on the man at the last oar.

"Oh, my," she whispered.
He's incredible.

It was the only word she could think of to describe him. Considering she was inured to the company of men, the sight of one — even one with his shirt open — should hardly hold any surprises for her.

But this man gripped her attention like no one else ever had.

His muscles moved with the oar and the sea as if they were a mere extension of the powerful forces pulling the waves this way and that.

His hair, tied back in a queue, glinted coppery lights under the hot Caribbean sun. The shirt on his back strained at his shoulders and arms. The white fabric, bleached from the sun, appeared stark against the dark tan of his forearms.

Out of nowhere she wondered how many women those arms had held and how it would feel to be caught in their grasp.

Immediately aghast at such a daring notion, she dragged her attention away from his limbs, but still she found herself mesmerized by the raw determination in his grasp of the oar, the set of his jaw.

There was something about this man that wasn't quite as it seemed to be.

More Irish nonsense, she thought.

Despite her disgust with herself, she looked again at the approaching man. This was no ordinary seaman. No wharf rat or prison refugee.

All of a sudden, as if he sensed her watching him, he looked directly at her and flashed a grin. A brilliant, knowing smile that nearly toppled her from her perch high above the deck.

She yanked the glass away from her eye and clung to the ropes like a dizzy London miss at her first party.

"Damnation, Reenie," her father bellowed from the decks below. "Have you got too much sun? What do you see, girl?"

"I don't see anything," she shouted down, annoyed at her uncharacteristic loss of concentration. What was the matter with her, gawking at a sailor like some cheap doxy?

Ignoring the man who'd held her gaze, she made a quick assessment of the other longboat and its inhabitants. Satisfied nothing was amiss there, she looked back at the
Destiny,
searching for any signs of a trap, signs of an impending battle, anything that would give her a clue as to what these strangers wanted.

But aboard the
Destiny,
like on her longboats, it appeared to be business as usual.

Who were they? They, like the
Forgotten,
flew no flag, so she studied them for any clues.

Glancing over the other ship's decks and then at the sailors, she decided they were too tidy for Spanish and their clothes in too good shape to be Brits. They also looked well fed and well provisioned, which could only mean they'd left a friendly port recently. Their ship, a frigate, had similar lines to the
Forgotten,
as if it had come from the same Baltimore shipyard where her father had purchased his vessel, not two years earlier.

"I think they're Americans," she called down to her father. She took another glance.

Below, her father paced the deck. "Get down, then," he called to her. "I may need you."

What he wanted was her to be out of the rigging, out of the easy pickings of any sharpshooters. At least down on the decks she could hold her own against any scoundrel.

Ignoring the tugging desire to take one last glance at the sailor in the first longboat, she stowed her spyglass in her belt, and with the skill born of years at sea, she clambered down the lines and dropped to the deck next to her father.

The longboats were just drawing alongside the
Forgotten.

Captain Hawthorne was quietly issuing orders to his men. Armaments had been stowed about the deck for just this sort of emergency, and the men, moving about as if nothing was unusual, started to pull back the ropes and canvas concealing the muskets and cutlasses.

"What do you think they want?" she asked.

Her father scratched his beard and looked out at the other ship. "I don't know, but I suppose we'll soon find out."

The first longboat bumped into the side of the
Forgotten.

"Ahoy, sir," a deep rich voice called out. "May we come aboard?"

Captain Hawthorne lumbered over to the railing. He pushed back the wool cap covering his gray and balding head. A large man, he crossed his arms over his barrel chest and spat just over the heads of the men in the longboat. "And why should I grant you that?" he asked. "You've slithered after us for the last seven hours, with nary a sign that tells me if yer friend or foe. I'll be more willing to let ye aboard if ye can bother to tell me who ye are and what ye want with me ship."

Maureen moved to her father's side and looked down at the longboat next to them. To her shock it was the sailor at the last oar conducting the negotiations.

In the time since she'd climbed down from her lookout post, he'd donned a tricorn hat and a black jacket, and now he stood in the bow, one hand clasped to a rope hanging from the side of the
Forgotten.

This close, the unmistakable green of his eyes glowed with a strange intensity, like the sight of spring-fed meadows and trees after a long journey on the winter's gray seas. The shadowy cut of his jaw, bearing a day or two's worth of dark stubble, only accented the strong lines of his mouth and chin.

Your destiny,
the wind and waves seemed to hush and whisper to her.

She drew back from the railing, as much in shock as from an unfamiliar feeling of breathlessness.

"My name is Captain de Ryes, and I have a business proposition for you."

Captain de Ryes.
His name rolled silently over her tongue as she tried it out.

Her father made a rude noise in the back of his throat. "I've heard of ye, but I have no time for yer kind of trouble."

"I have no mind to make trouble for you or my ship," de Ryes said smoothly, his deep and slightly accented voice teasing Maureen's ears with a hint of something that made her want to blush.

Blush?
What the devil was the matter with her?

De Ryes continued his negotiations. "What I want is to expand my business opportunities. And I know you can help me."

Maureen glanced at her father, then over the rail at de Ryes. He looked too young to be the trouble her father obviously thought him to be. Why, he couldn't be more than three and twenty, just a few years older than herself.

"And just how could I be helping ye do that?"

"I want to join the Alliance. And I want you to sponsor me."

The statement stilled everyone aboard the
Forgotten.

While it was common knowledge among the men aboard that the
Forgotten
sailed under the loosely held fraternity of the Alliance, few spoke of the connection. Known membership in the brotherhood — considered by most governments nothing more than a group of ruthless pirates — could leave a ship open for attack. That is why the captains who belonged kept the names of their members a closely held secret from the world outside their less than legal realm.

While being publicly labeled a pirate would mean death to any captain and crew, for ships like the
Forgotten,
which sailed without the protection of a flag and navy, the Alliance was the better of two evils.

The captains knew they could count on a fellow member to sail with them in protective convoy. They had trade agreements with less than honest customs agents and merchants, who ignored their lack of tax stamps and duty forms. When a fellow ship was in danger, a member of the Alliance offered immediate aid, no matter the peril. And if one captain obtained information about a particularly rich prize or convoy, he could count on his brethren to sail with him and share the profits without stealing him blind under the cover of night.

Yes, some of the members were less than honest, perhaps even as ruthless as the pirates of old whom they had inherited the Alliance from, but membership was granted to few and open only to those they trusted.

And now this handsome stranger wanted to join.

Maureen let out the breath she'd been holding. The man certainly had iron in his anchor to sail up and ask to be let in the Alliance just like that. With hardly an introduction.

"Did you hear me, sir?" he called out again. "I've a mind to join the Alliance."

Captain Hawthorne laughed. Loud and hard. "The Alliance, you say. And what would I know about them thieves?"

It was de Ryes's turn to laugh. "Because your hold is full of silks, provisions, and ammunitions taken from a Portuguese ship bound for Lisbon. The
Forgotten Lady,
the
Avenger,
and the
Scarlet Mistress
were seen dividing up her goods not five days ago." The man scratched his chin. "Or perhaps you didn't know that Captain Jacobsen and Captain Smyth were members when you offered to help them?"