I Kissed an Earl: Pennyroyal Green Series (4 page)

“Is bringing pirates to justice a habit of the earl?”

“Achieving the impossible is a habit of the earl. It’s how he became an earl,” Lavay said shortly. “And what drew the attention of the King to him for this particular mission.”

“I heard he did something heroic to earn his title.”

“You heard correctly.”

Mr. Lavay said nothing more. But he seemed privately amused about something. “But why, Lord Lavay, would a pirate attend balls by night and then creep out to sink ships?”

He managed a shrug again. “Power? Money? Notoriety? Vengeance? Who can say? Needless to say, he would never sink a ship if he knew you were aboard.”

They smiled at each other, pleased with the progress of their flirtation; they understood each other almost too easily. His gray eyes smoldered with a comfortable heat, familiar but refined with a frisson of the exotic as he was French. His eyes and hands and very presence didn’t…take her captive.

Unlike the earl’s.

Oh! And there he was! The earl’s expression fixedly polite, watching with sleepy fascination as Lady Peregrine’s mouth moved and moved, as though she were a talking dog. A novelty. Doubtless not really listening.

She almost pitied him.

“We shall find Le Chat, however,” Lavay told her. It was a deliciously certain, arrogant statement, calculated to return her attention to him.

“How can you be so certain?”

He hesitated. And then he smiled. The smile was a beautiful thing, polished and shapely and easy, probably the same smile his ancestors had smiled through centuries. But it was cold. In a way that reminded Violet of her father, who, by dint of birth and influence, knew there was nothing he couldn’t have, achieve, hide, if necessary.

“I have never known Captain Flint to pursue a goal in vain. The Earl of Ardmay wants Le Chat alive or dead for many reasons. And what he wants he is very certain to get.”

Did she detect a hint of irony in his words? Or did French-accented English simply consign one forever to sounding ironic?

For many reasons.

She felt that same prickle at the back of her neck, some hybrid of unease and thrill. She wanted to peel back the layers of meaning shrouding the phrase, unwrap it like a gift, like the cure for her boredom.

And perhaps this was why the Gypsy girl had shouted “Lavay” to her. She found him appealing; she could not feel herself falling in love, however. Love seemed to come with extremes of behavior and loss of dignity, and in her family, disaster or grave compromises. Still, she’d never before encountered men quite like these. And yet they would be gone tomorrow.

“Could Le Chat be in London this very minute?”

“Ah, you’ve naught to fear, Miss Redmond. The Olivia isn’t docked here alongside our ship.”

Forever after she understood what it meant when someone said “time stopped.”

Because it did. Or at least stuttered.

His words seemed to echo peculiarly in her brain. And at first she thought she’d misheard him. But then a cascade of facts and impressions came into speedy focus, as though she were falling toward them from a great height.

That’s when shock blurred her vision. She stumbled; Lavay’s arm stiffened, balancing her, the awkward half step she’d taken never interrupted the smooth flow of the waltz.

“Miss Redmond?” He was genuinely concerned. “Please forgive me. Perhaps we ought to speak of gentler things. One forgets, you know, when one is forever in the company of men, what a woman may prefer to discuss.”

The poor man. He thought her constitution delicate.

She looked up at him. She couldn’t feel her extremities. They’d gone numb. She rallied. “Your conversation has been the pleasure of my evening. I merely trod clumsily in my new slippers. But I fear I missed the name of Le Chat’s ship? It sounded intriguing.”

A sick, thrilling portent flooded her as she awaited confirmation. The Gypsy girl shouting

“Lavay!” echoed in her mind, and her ears rang from the beating of her heart, and considered the odd directions life could take, and what she ought to do next even before he spoke.

“Naturally, as it’s the sort of thing that might interest a woman, for it is the name of a woman. It’s The Olivia, Miss Redmond. Perhaps it’s the name of the woman who did break his heart. Assuming he ever had one to break.”

Already quivering with purpose, she exchanged bows and pleasantries with handsome Lord Lavay, who again expressed regret his stay should be so brief. And then Violet ran.

Or nearly ran. She freed her ankles by tucking her dress up with her fingers, weaving between dancers and clots of giddy gossipers. A smile pasted to her face. Her slippers nearly skidding over marble.

Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. Lyon couldn’t be that stupid, could he?

Or that…interesting?

Where the devil was Jonathan? If he wasn’t dancing again—and a quick scan of the room told her he wasn’t—he would be near the punch bowl, or close to the garden windows so he could sneak out for a cigar or a tryst or to hop over the fence to go on to his club without Father knowing, and—

She nearly crashed to a halt when she saw the back of him. So unmistakably a Redmond, long and lean, finally grown out of coltishness. He was indeed proximate to the punch bowl and the garden doors, but he was also strategically tucked behind a pillar, and one hand was outstretched and propped against the wall. He was obscuring someone or something. She knew what it was when she heard the giggle.

She peered over his shoulder to get a look at the woman he was shielding: a delicate blonde in unimaginative white muslin: big-eyed, petite-nosed, a little overbite that gave her a not unappealing rabbity appearance peeled back in a smile. Lady Wareham? Wartsomething?

Violet had been introduced earlier and had forgotten her name instantly. Where had her brother learned to do that? To strike that indolent pose, to pour…silent, burning attention…upon a woman and to say things to cause her to picturesquely blush? Violet wasn’t a blusher; growing up in a household of frank brothers rather inured one to that sort of thing. But her brother looked unnervingly like a…grown man. Which he of course he supposedly was.

It was just that she so seldom saw him behave like one.

“Jonathan,” she said. Sotto voce. About two feet away from his ear. He didn’t turn.

“Jonathan!” she barked.

Her brother jumped and spun to face her, glowering. And in that instant he looked so remarkably like Lyon that Violet was intensely aware of the passage of time and the urgency of her mission. She saw instantly what the earl must have seen when he saw Jonathan, and wondered how she hadn’t yet seen it.

“Viiiolet,” her brother drawled warningly, by way of greeting. He cast a quick sidelong look at the blonde, and then a speaking one back at Violet. All of which was sibling for: Go away.

“Oh, please do excuse me for interrupting,” Violet gushed insincerely. “But Jonathan—were you aware the gentleman accompanying the Earl of Ardmay is named Lavay?”

Her brother’s frown shifted into irritated confusion. “Well…yes. I was introduced to him. Pleasant, if a tad oily, his manners so very, very exquisite you know. One gets the sense that he thinks he’s better than you, but it’s naught he does or says in particular, really. Not certain you can yet entirely trust anyone of French—”

“Do shut up, Jon. His name is Lavay. Don’t you recall what happened when we visited the Gypsies?”

“I say, hardly cause to raise your voice, sister dear.” The tone was condescending and came with an inclusive smile for Lady Wartle…Lady Wartham! That was it!

The beast. Jonathan was showing off. He really, really ought to know better by now.

“You do take telling a number of times, Jon. Don’t you remember? The Gypsy girl shouted

‘Lavay’” to me? The one who said you would have ten children?”

He went instantly rigid, alarmed as if she’d hexed him.

“That Gypsy girl is touched in the head, Violet,” he said on a fervent hush. “That’s pure lunacy, and you know it.”

“You probably will have ten children.”

“Bite. Your. Tongue.”

“You might even have all ten of them with Lady Wartham here,” Violet pressed wickedly. Young Lady Wartham’s eyes widened to saucers and began to sparkle with dreams. Her brother was incensed. “Never! Never, I tell you! I’m nowhere near ready to be leg shackled and she’s just a dallia…” He squeezed his eyes closed as he realized he’d neatly tumbled into his sister’s trap. “Damn you, Violet,” he croaked. Violet shook her head to and fro, pityingly.

Jonathan opened his eyes in time to see Lady Wartham’s dropped-open mouth clap tightly shut and her eyes narrow in an admirably poisonous way. She whipped around in an indignant blur of taffeta and clicked off without a word for either of the Redmonds. Jonathan rounded on his sister. “See what you’ve done, you wretch!”

“Oh, stop. You just said yourself she was a dalliance. If you can tell me her first name now I shall profess abject chagrin and I will owe you a great favor of your choice.”

He glared at her. Lips tightly clamped.

She smiled slowly at him.

As always, Jonathan struggled to maintain a snit and his mouth unsuccessfully fought a smile.

“But one needs the practice with dallying, you see,” he explained. “Or how will my reputation ever become the match of Argosy’s?”

“Practice? For when you find the woman with whom you’ll have ten children?”

“Enough!” he howled.

She put a conciliatory hand on his arm. “Jonathan, listen to me. This is important, I swear to you. The French gentleman accompanying the earl—his name is Lavay. Lord Lavay. She—that Gypsy girl, Martha Heron—shouted ‘Lavay’ to me! Don’t you recall? It was all very puzzling at the time. And Lavay is the mate of the Earl of Ardmay’s ship. And she said I’d go on a long journey over water!”

He groaned. “Is that all? Oh, for God’s sake, Violet, if that were true every time a Gypsy said it the entire country would be bobbing on boats in the Thames right now.”

Losing interest, he intercepted the gaze of Lady Peregrine and began to produce what he believed was a sensual smile.

“Not her,” Violet said. “She’s awful. A terrible gossip. Stop practicing and listen to me.”

Jonathan turned back to her irritably. “Listen, you’re not usually so featherbrained. Why give this ‘Lavay’ nonsense any credence at all? Doubtless it’s not the rarest of French surnames. There’s something not quite right with that Gypsy girl, and you know it.”

“I think you simply hope there’s something not quite right with her,” she said shrewdly. He glared at her.

She mouthed Ten children.

She remained fixed in his glare.

She breathed in deeply, suddenly nervous. “It’s not just that. When I was introduced to the Earl of Ardmay he saw you, and went…well, very like a pointer spotting a rabbit. I swear to you, Jon, he made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. Quite chilling. He said you looked exactly like a trader who is also believed to be a South Seas privateer—a pirate—who goes by the name Le Chat.”

“Me?” Jonathan’s eyes went wide with shock, and then misty with the very notion. “Fanciful name, Le Chat. But I ain’t a pirate, Vi.”

“I know you aren’t, Jon. And it means ‘the cat.’”

“I know what it means,” he said irritably. “I had a French tutor, too. “

His roving gaze intercepted the gaze of another woman, Millicent Hart.

“Not her, either. She has all the wits of a blown dandelion. And a lion is a big cat, Jonathan. Don’t you see? The earl thought you looked exactly like this person named Le Chat. And a lion is a big cat.”

Jonathan frowned, irritated now. “It’s a damned silly name. Pirates do that, don’t they? Adopt silly, dangerous-sounding—”

“His ship has a silly name, too, Jonathan. Apparently it’s called The Olivia.”

The effect of sudden comprehension on Jonathan was rewarding and extreme. She could have sworn his blood stopped moving beneath his skin, so taut, so pale, so still he went. The mention of Everseas, and the disaster one particular female Eversea had wreaked upon their family, had that effect on the man.

Their eyes locked. His were darker and more inscrutable than she’d ever seen them, and she wondered again what kind of man her brother would make. Solid and formidable like Miles?

An enigmatic emblem of power, like their father? Silently Violet willed him to believe what she believed. Lyon is out there. Lyon might very well be a trader known as Hardesty and a pirate named Le Chat sailing a ship called The Olivia. They needed to find him. To convince him to return home.

To save him from the Earl of Ardmay and certain justice at the end of a rope. But surely it was all a mistake? Surely, if it was indeed Lyon, all wasn’t quite what it seemed?

And then, spell broken, Jonathan scowled and shook his head violently.

“So your theory is that Lyon restyled himself as a pirate named Le Chat in the wake of his broken heart at the hands of that bloody Eversea woman and named his ship The Olivia to commemorate his misery or to take revenge upon her? It’s—well, it’s really the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Think about it.”

“I grant you it seems unlikely. But The Olivia, Jon! It’s—”

He held up a hand. “No. No, Vi, it’s just…patently absurd. I mean—does this pirate board ships, rape and pillage, things of that sort?” Now he was struggling to keep his face straight.

“Why don’t you ask the Earl of Ardmay? Until our king got hold of him he was known as Captain Flint and his mandate is to capture Le Chat for a bounty. He might tell you more than he’d tell a woman. He might speak more of raping and pillaging to a fellow member of his species. Then again, you apparently look exactly like Le Chat.”

The earl was easy to locate even in the crush, like a glacier in a sea. He was politely speaking to an older gentleman, Monsieur Lavay at his side, a coolly elegant foil to the earl’s quiet smolder.

“I spoke to the earl,” Jonathan said curtly. “Father introduced me to him and to Lord Lavay. He did ask whether I’d ever considered going to sea, said there was a fellow named Rathskill, a cook’s mate whom he needed to replace. Incompetent and cheeky. I pity the sod. But I didn’t care for the way he looked at me, Vi. Apparently the king decided to give the title to someone more given to heroics.”