Never Trust a Pirate (9 page)

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

L
UCA 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 not 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.

He charged in, only to be brought up short, frozen.

She was sitting up in bed, her long, silky dark hair loose around her shoulders, though one side was partly braided, as if she’d been disturbed in the act. She was wearing a soft white nightdress of some sort, too thin for the chill in the attics, her eyes were wide in fear, and she’d stuck a small fist in her mouth to silence the noise she’d been making.

He had a knife drawn, and he whirled around, looking for a possible assailant. There was no one there but the two of them, and as she stared up at him she looked, if possible, even more frightened.

“What the bloody hell is going on?” he roared, his heart beginning to fall back to normal.

She opened her mouth to say something, but only a tiny whimper came out. She cleared her throat, stammering something he couldn’t understand.

He shoved the knife back into the narrow sheath, glowering down at her. “What?”

“B-b-bats,” she stammered.

“Oh, sweet Neptune’s briny pants,” he swore. “Is that all? I thought you were being murdered.”

Belatedly she seemed to realize her compromising position. She leapt out of her narrow, sagging little bed and quickly took the threadbare cover off it, wrapping it around her. A shame, too, as the moonlight coming in the window had outlined her silhouette quite nicely, and spending time with Gwendolyn always made him randy as a goat.

“Beg pardon, sir,” she said, and her voice had changed subtly, sounding a little more like the rough North and less cultured than her original tones. Granted, one stammered word wasn’t enough to be sure, but she’d done the same thing that afternoon when the sailors had been pestering her. Moved between Mayfair and Lancastershire with suspicious ease. “I’m mortal feared of bats.”

No, it wasn’t quite right. He could see her eyes, and while he had no doubt she was honestly frightened, he could see a tiny hint of calculation in their depths, as if she wanted to be certain to say the right thing.
Too late for that, my girl,
he thought grimly.

“I’m afraid, Miss…”

“Greaves, sir,” she said, going for a little more North-country in her voice. “M-M-Mary Greaves.”

And his name was William Kidd. Then again, his name certainly wasn’t Thomas Morgan, though he’d taken the last name in honor of one of England’s most famous pirates. But what reason would the girl have for giving the wrong name?

“Is your stammer permanent, or simply as a result of flying rodents?” He saw her inadvertent shiver, and knew that at least her fear of bats was very real.

“I’m that sorry, Captain. I didn’t mean to disturb you. They surprised me, is all. The moon came out from behind a cloud and one flew across the room…”