Claimed by the Rogue (8 page)

“W-what…name shall I g-give?”

Robert thought for a moment. “Tell her Sir Robin awaits.” He hadn’t invoked the childhood pet name since leaving England. Saying it aloud felt both foreign and bittersweet.
 

“Very good, sir.” With his free arm, he reached behind and fumbled for the knob.
 

Forcing his way within would have been child’s play, but Robert held back, allowing the door to be closed in his face. From within a bolt struck home. The belated nod to caution had him shaking his head. Shifting from foot to foot, he waited. The minutes ticked by. A church bell tolled a single chime. From nearby a night watchman called, “One o’clock and all is well,” the voice rusty and slightly slurred. While well lit, the tony neighborhood was still shockingly vulnerable. Knowing firsthand the dangers of dropping one’s guard, Robert cursed beneath his breath. To prove his point, he considered leaving his post and trying the tradesman’s entrance. He’d wager half his personal cargo that it had been left unlocked. Before he could confirm for certain, the door reopened.
 

“Her ladyship will receive you.” Shaking but mildly, the butler stepped back to make room for Robert to enter.

Robert stepped inside the hushed house. Lamps had been lit. Grateful for their reassuring glow, he followed the fellow through the foyer and into a well-appointed side parlor. Brocaded floor-length draperies were drawn against the night. A settee and several chairs were arranged in an amiable semi-circle. Set on the far side of the room, a chess table with a painted-on board showed a match in mid-play. A pianoforte held pride of place in the room’s center, a branch of lit candles atop. Aware of the butler retreating, Robert stepped up to the instrument and lifted the case. Eastern music utilized a variety of string, percussion and wind instruments, but nothing with a keyboard. He hadn’t set eyes on a piano in his six years away. Then Montrose had been in the throes of renovation, the present room a shambles of plaster dust and scaffolding, the furniture buried beneath Holland covers—another reminder of how much, everything, had altered in his absence.

Rustling from the hallway had him whipping about. “Chelsea!”

His sister stood in the doorway, a hand cupping her mouth. Mussed copper curls tumbled about her shoulders. Ruddy color rushed her cheeks. A silk dressing gown, obviously donned in haste, clung to the swell at her midriff. The thickening answered his earlier question of why she hadn’t been at the betrothal ball.

He was to be an uncle again!
 

Her hand fell away from her face. “Bloody hell, it
is
you,” she said, eyes shimmering.

Montrose materialized beside her, tucking in his shirttail. Sighting Robert, his aristocratic jaw dropped. “Good God, Bellamy, can it really be you?” he demanded, wrapping a protective arm about his wife.

“It is I.” Robert walked toward them. Training his gaze on Chelsea, he asked, “Can a prodigal brother hope for a hug?”

Smile wobbly, she stretched out her arms. “Oh, Robert, I’d hoped and prayed and yet…” She swayed, her eyes rolling back.

Anthony caught her before she folded to the floor.

Looking on, Robert allowed there was no help for it. For the second time in as many hours, he’d felled a woman he loved.

Lying abed in one of the guest chambers, Robert wasn’t surprised to hear a soft tap outside his door. “Psst, are you awake?”
 

Bolting upright, he made a grab for his shirt which he’d shucked off upon retiring but as always kept within arm’s reach. He hauled it over his head and quickly did up the buttons. “No, I’m fast asleep. Out like a light. Of course I’m awake. Don’t be a goose. Come in.”

The door opened and Chelsea, taper in hand, padded inside. Pulling the door closed behind her, she admitted, “I couldn’t sleep. My brain is abuzz with excitement and…questions.”

“I’ll answer them all,” he lied, moving over to make room on the mattress. “Provided you promise not to go fainting on me again.”
 

She set her candle on the lamp table and lowered herself onto the bed. “It’s the babe. Most days I’m a woozy watering pot. Anthony has been a saint to put up with me.”

Robert snorted. Before wedding Chelsea, Anthony had been renowned as one of London’s most notorious rakes, with good reason. Had love and marriage so utterly transformed him? For Chelsea’s sake, Robert hoped so.

“Reformed rakes truly do make the very best husbands,” she answered, as if reading his mind. Given how close they were, Robert deemed that to be entirely possible.
 

After a carriage accident had claimed the lives of both their parents, they’d only had each other. When a neighboring squire’s treachery had landed him in the custody of kidnappers, Chelsea had resolved to do whatever was required to raise his ransom, including highway robbery. Waylaying Montrose’s coach had shortened her criminal career considerably. Though betrothed to Phoebe, Anthony had taken one look at the flame-haired felon and fallen head over heels. When the same henchman who had Robert also kidnapped Phoebe, he’d soon found himself fallen similarly smitten. As in a Shakespearean comedy, their romantic entanglements had been sorted to the supreme happiness of all parties—or so it had seemed.
 

Chelsea’s face, more radiant than any candle, proclaimed her to be a well-satisfied wife. “Married life must agree with you,” he conceded. “You’re more beautiful than ever.”

She let out a laugh. “At the moment I only know I feel large as a house. You, on the other hand, look as though you’ve lost a stone.” Shifting to face him, she poked a finger in the vicinity of his belly.

He fell back against the headboard. Two years’ enslavement in the granite quarry had chiseled away anything of him that was soft or surplus, firming his will to survive along with his body. “Mind you don’t let Caleb hear you say that. He takes great pride in having fattened me up.” It was thanks to Caleb’s regimen of strengthening herbs that Robert could no longer count his ribs or feel the knobs of his vertebrae when he lay abed.
 

“Who is Caleb?”

He hesitated. How to explain the complexity of their relationship in terms his very English sister might understand?
 

“Caleb is my manservant, though our relationship is more complex than that. We are bound in ways no European master and servant would ever be. I saved his life and now he insists that it belongs to me. For what it’s worth, I consider him a friend, almost a brother.”

She reached out and gave his hand a squeeze. “I shall look forward to meeting him. For the moment, you’ll forgive me if I can’t seem to think much beyond my next meal. Come below with me, and we’ll raid the pantry as we used to when we were children. You can regale me with your adventures,” she added as though speaking of his travels and travails were some sort of inducement.

Quite the opposite, Robert had hoped to postpone the inevitable questioning at least until the morrow. “Anthony won’t have my head for keeping you up?”

Already on her feet, she laughed. “Not if I tell him it was all my idea, which happens to be the truth. At this stage, I only sleep in snatches. The poor man can only profit from a few hours’ freedom from my tossing and turning.”

Whereas most couples of their class slept separately, an adjoining dressing closet serving as a discrete portal for conjugal calls, Chelsea and Montrose must still share a bed. Once Robert had taken it for granted that he and Phoebe would enjoy a similarly passionate, unconventional union. Now he was no longer so certain.

Tucking in his shirttail, he followed her over to the door. “Very well, lead the way.”

Like the truant children they once had been, they tiptoed through the corridor. A servant’s passageway and a steep set of plain back stairs brought them to the basement, a spare, tidy space of flagstone flooring and plain plaster walls. Few ladies of rank would condescend to come in to this humble area of the house, but Chelsea had always abided by her own rules, not those of society. She navigated the low-ceilinged labyrinth with the foot surety born of familiarity, steering them through scullery, laundry, china pantry, larder and lastly into the kitchen.
 

“Sit.” Crossing to the meat safe, she motioned him to the planked pine table bracketed by backless benches, but Robert stayed standing.
 

“You’ll pardon me if I don’t fancy being waited upon by my pregnant sister.”

Ignoring her fussing, he found the flint box and set to work resurrecting the banked fire. The parlor and other rooms relied upon coal for heat, but Chelsea’s kitchen followed the English culinary tradition of cooking over wood. Though he hadn’t much occasion for fire-making in the Orient, he’d hardly forgotten how. He’d soon raised a cheerful blaze and set the kettle on the hob to heat.

Sometime later they sat across from one another, crumbs all that remained of their impromptu feast of Stilton cheese, crusty country bread and thinly sliced roast beef. Robert hadn’t thought he was hungry, but once the cold collation was set out, he’d tucked in as though starved. After the years away, the simple English fare was ambrosia.

Hands laced about her earthenware mug, Chelsea sighed. “When one of the children is ill, I often come down here late at night and fix myself a cup of tea.”
 

Dusting his hands atop his trousers, he asked, “Daphne and Tony are well, I trust?”

His twin nephew and niece must be coming on seven. When he’d left, they’d been babes in arms. And now there was a third child on the way. Once again he was reminded of how very much he’d missed.

A beaming smile answered his tentative query. “They remind me of you and I when we were children. Daphne would rather play with frogs than dolls. Tony allows her to bully him dreadfully though she’s the eldest by mere minutes.”

“I’ll have a look in at the nursery in the morning, if I may.”

“You’ll see them at breakfast. Other than a nursery luncheon, the children take their meals with us. I like to keep my family close,” she added with a wink. “But mind me prosing on like a fat, happy housewife when it’s you I want to hear all about. How have you been keeping yourself all these years?
Where
have you been keeping yourself?”

He hadn’t expected his reprieve to go on indefinitely; still he tensed, anticipating all the questions to come. “Calcutta, Bombay, Ceylon, parts of Arabia, oh, and one voyage to Canton.” Once he’d been greedy to see the great wide world, but now his dearest wish was to find contentment in one small corner of it—England, with Phoebe.

Predictably her eyebrows shot to her hairline. “That’s…a great deal of exploring. However did you manage it?”
 

Breaking into a smile, he admitted, “I’m a captain in the Honourable East India Company.”

She slanted him a smile. “So that explains the sun bronzing and the earring and that frightful-looking cutlass I saw you wearing earlier.”
 

“It does in part.” Laboring in the granite quarry had toughened his hide in more ways than one. By the time he’d found himself free, he was berry brown and inured to burning. “My ship, The Swan, is harbored at Blackwall,” he said, and despite how abysmally things had gone with Phoebe, he felt his chest swell. “She’s a grand lady, gilded and festooned, for all that she likely has but one more voyage left in her.”

An East Indiamen typically was good for four, no more than five, voyages. The Swan was built of English oak, not the Bombay teakwood that afforded a longer lifespan but also prohibited berthing in a London dock. Unloading the cargo and overseeing its transport to the Company’s warehouses in Cutler Street would occupy him for the following few days, and then afterward the vessel would require a thorough overhauling before making the return voyage to India. Whether she did so with or without Robert at the helm depended wholly upon Phoebe.

“Dare I hope that means you’ll be staying on?”

His gaze wavered away. “That rather relies upon Phoebe.”
 

Her smile faded. “You’ve seen her, then?”

He nodded. “I have. I came to you directly from her betrothal ball. It seems I chose a damnably inconvenient time to come back from the dead,” he added, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice.

She set down her cup with a sigh. “Don’t judge her overly harshly. She mourned you for…a very long time.”

“Six years, the same span for which I stood steadfast. She, quite clearly, cannot lay claim to a like constancy.”

She cut him a look. “She draped herself in black crepe and bombazine for a full year as though she were your widow in truth. There were times when we feared she might take her own life.”

Suicide, surely not! He snapped upright in his seat. “Good God, she didn’t try—”

“We watched her closely.”

His gaze dropped to the ivory bracelet banding his left wrist. Turning it about, he found himself confiding, “While I was…away, the resolve to find my way home to her was all that sustained me. More so than fouled water or maggoty meat, it was what kept me alive.”

She reached across the table and took hold of his hand. “Have you told her that?”

“Our privacy was…limited.” Thinking of Bouchart holding out in the hallway, he picked up his knife and stabbed it into what remained of the wedge of cheese. “Tell me more of this Frenchman. Can it be she loves him?”