Kitabı oku: «Regency High Society Vol 2: Sparhawk's Lady / The Earl's Intended Wife / Lord Calthorpe's Promise / The Society Catch»

Regency HIGH-SOCIETY AFFAIRS

Sparhawk’s Lady Miranda Jarrett

The Earl’s Intended Wife Louise Allen

Lord Calthorpe’s Promise’ Sylvia Andrew

The Society Catch Louise Allen

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Sparhawk’s Lady

Miranda Jarrett

About the Author

MIRANDA JARRETT considers herself sublimely fortunate to have a career that combines history and happy endings – even if it’s one that’s also made her family far-too-regular patrons of the local pizzeria. Miranda is the author of over thirty historical romances, and her books are enjoyed by readers the world over. She has won numerous awards for her writing, including two Golden Leaf Awards and two Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Awards, and has three times been a Romance Writers of America RITA® Award finalist for best short historical romance. Miranda is a graduate of Brown University, with a degree in art history. She loves to hear from readers at PO Box 1102, Paoli, PA 19301-1145, USA, or at MJarrett21@aol.com.

For the unholy Trinity – Teri, Raine, and Theresa

You make me laugh, you make me cry, you give

me the joy of your friendship (and don’t forget

the kitten handouts!)

Prologue

Portsmouth, England May 1787

With growing panic, Caroline Harris stared at her reflection in the mirror as her mother’s maid tied the sash at her waist. Soon it would be time to leave the ladies’ retiring room and join the gentlemen in the salon, and then it would be too late.

Why, why was there never enough money?

“I can’t do this, Mama,” she whispered hoarsely. “I know you say we’ve no choice, but I can’t. I can’t.”

“You can, and you will,” snapped her mother with the angry irritation that Caroline had come to know too well these past two weeks. “You’re all I have left to me, girl, and I won’t die a pauper.”

Caroline nodded, not trusting her voice to speak. If she cried, she would be cuffed. She’d learned that lesson quickly enough. Tears would make her eyes red and puffy, and then no gentleman would want her.

But what gentleman would want her anyway, dressed like this? Her flowered silk gown had been remade from an old one of her mother’s, cut down so far that her nearly all of her high, small breasts showed above the neckline, the darker rose of her nipples peeking shamelessly through the gauzy neckerchief. Her stays were laced so tightly she could scarcely breathe, and her feet were squeezed painfully into pointed, high-heeled shoes meant to give her a dainty, swaying walk.

Her hair, usually as straight and fine as corn silk, had been crimped and set with sugar water into high, stiff, fashionable curls she’d been forbidden to touch. The jewels that glittered against her pale skin were paste as false as the rest of her, and when she looked at the masklike way they’d painted her face—black kohl around her eyes and rouged circles on her cheeks—she wanted to weep all over again. She looked like a cheap wax doll that no one would ever value, let alone love or cherish.

And not even her mother had remembered that today was her fourteenth birthday.…

Miriam Harris clutched possessively at her daughter’s arm as she, too, stared at the reflection, the resemblance between them obvious in the high cheekbones and the wide-set blue eyes. But that was all; the consumption that would soon claim Caroline’s mother had left her face tight and gaunt beneath the dyed black hair, her body bent and wasted, and the life she’d led, a Cypriot always dependent on the favors of gentlemen, had long ago destroyed the innocent charm that lit her daughter’s face.

“You’re too weedy by half, Caroline,” she declared with a broken gasp, and coughed into the lace-trimmed handkerchief she was never without. Swiftly she wadded it into her reticule, but not before Caroline had seen the bright red blood on the white linen. “Look at you, half a head taller than me! I shouldn’t have wasted my money for all those years to see you raised in the country if this is how you turned out.”

With a sharp pang of homesickness, Caroline thought of the thatch-roofed house in Hampshire where she’d lived until last month, of ruddy-faced Mrs. Thompson who’d treated her like one of her own children, of sunlight and fresh milk and apples and fields to run through and kittens in the barn to play with. She remembered, too, the careful dreams she’d nursed of her parents: her father a handsome officer in a fashionable regiment tragically killed defending his king and country before he could wed her mother, the kind, beautiful lady in London who sent money each month for her care and would, as soon as her circumstances permitted, come herself to fetch Caroline away.

A lovely dream it was, a fantasy Caroline had played over each night before she fell asleep, and years and miles away from the reality of the ravaged, dying woman clinging to her arm. True enough, Miriam had finally come for her daughter, but not for the genteel family life that Caroline had always imagined. No, nothing like that, not in the mean lodgings that were her mother’s home now, with nearly everything of value stripped away and sold for food and medicine, and once again Caroline felt the tears smarting behind her eyes.

“No weeping now, daughter,” warned her mother, lowering her voice so the other women around them, most dressed in the same expensive, revealing fashions, wouldn’t overhear. “Sir Harry will look to you to ease his troubles, not to be burdened with your own.”

Caroline shook her head with a final, desperate show of defiance. “We don’t have to live like this, Mama. I could sew, or seek a position with a milliner. There must be other ways than this!”

“What, and squander the one true gift that God gave us both?” Her mother’s laugh was short and bitter. “Your face is your fortune, girl, and with it you’ll earn more in a week than any squalid little seamstress in a garret could in twenty years.”

“But Mama—”

“Don’t gainsay me, you foolish girl!” hissed her mother, her thin fingers tightening on Caroline’s arm as she led her from the room. “You’re all I have, and this is all I know. I mean to see you launched while it’s still in my power. If you please Sir Harry Wrightsman tonight, he’ll treat you finer than you can ever imagine, far better than you deserve.”

At the arched doorway Caroline shrank back. To her, the room before them was unbelievably grand, with gilded walls and mirrors and hundreds of candles. The beautiful women and the men who clustered around them terrified her, their gestures too free, their conversation and laughter too loud, nearly drowning out the musicians in the alcove. No matter what her mother said, she knew she didn’t belong here.

“Oh, Mama,” she whispered, her face pale beneath the rouge. “I beg you, please, can’t we go, please, please?”

“Hush, don’t shame me!” said her mother sharply, tugging Caroline along. Already smiling for the benefit of the others, she looked past her daughter to scan the crowd of people. “It’s too late for begging. The thing is done. You must prosper on your beauty and youth alone, Caroline, and you’d best pray that’s enough for Sir Harry.”

With her own eyes downcast, Caroline sensed the stares of the others, felt their curiosity closing in on her like a heavy cloak. If her mother’s fingers had not dug so deeply into her arm she would have turned and fled. But there’d be no escape now. Though she was young, she wasn’t a fool. The moment she’d come into this room, her innocence and her good name were irrevocably gone. As her mother said, the thing was done, and Caroline’s fear settled into an icy dread. This night would be the worst of her life, and she prayed for the strength to survive it.

Beside her, Miriam called greetings to her friends in a voice far sweeter than any she’d ever used with her daughter, a voice laced with gaiety and the promise of love.

Oh, Mama, if only you’d shown that love to me…

“So this is your prize chit, eh?” said the man eagerly, and Caroline’s heart froze. “By God, Miriam, but she’s a pretty piece, even finer than you claimed! Come now, missy, don’t be shy. Let’s have a proper look at you.”

Roughly he seized her chin to turn her face up toward his and forced Caroline to meet his gaze. He was old, far older than she’d expected, his face florid and lined, his eyes nearly buried in the fleshiness of his cheeks, and when he smiled, his remaining teeth stained yellow from tobacco, the stench from his breath nearly made her faint. Powder from his old-fashioned wig sifted down onto his sloping, velvet-covered shoulders, and though his clothing was costly, no tailor in London could disguise the corpulence that swelled his waistcoat. This was the man she’d been sold to; this was the man whose bed she was to share, the man to whom she must willingly give her body.

Dear Lord help her, she couldn’t do it, not with him. She couldn’t do it. With a little sob she jerked free and backed away, her hand over her mouth.

Sir Harry was displeased, and so was her mother. “Maidenly fears, my lord, that’s all,” said Miriam quickly as she put her hands around her daughter’s shoulders, a show of maternal concern that also kept Caroline from retreating further. “I told you she’s only a fortnight from the country.”

“Only a fortnight, eh?” The greedy lust in his eyes sickened Caroline. “Then you swear she’s still a virgin?”

“Never touched by any man, my lord,” said her mother, fighting back a cough. “Not even kissed.”

“Then come with me, little maid,” he said with a satisfied leer, “and I’ll teach you all you need to know.” His arm snaked around Caroline’s waist and pulled her close. Twisting frantically against his arm, she caught one final look of her mother, standing alone with the blood-soaked handkerchief pressed over her mouth, the tall plume in her hair nodding gently over her carefully expressionless face.

Oh, Mama…

The music continued, the conversations around them never paused, as Sir Harry pulled Caroline, stumbling across the floor toward the doors that opened to the garden. Dear Lord, the garden: he meant to be alone with her already. He wouldn’t even wait until they’d returned to his house. She balked, catching the heel of her shoe in her skirts, and with a little cry pitched forward.

Swearing, he jerked her back to her feet. “Come along, you little hussy. Spirit in a woman’s one thing, but outright defiance is quite another. Unless that’s your game, eh? You play the wicked lass, and I’ll correct you?”

Shaking her head, Caroline stared at him with desperate bewilderment. “No, sir, forgive me, I never meant to play any games on you!”

His small eyes narrowed as he suddenly twisted her wrist so sharply that she yelped with pain. “On me or under me, we’ll try them all in time, won’t we, my little cat?”

“Release the lady, Wrightsman,” said a mild voice behind them, and, her heart still pounding with fear, Caroline turned to see her defender. He didn’t look like a hero—thin and ungainly as a crane in a plain brown silk coat, his gray-streaked hair cropped short in monastic severity—but in Caroline’s eyes he was already worthy of a white horse. “I don’t believe she wishes to keep your company any longer.”

“What she wishes doesn’t matter, Byfield,” growled Sir Harry. “She’s Merry Miriam’s daughter, and I’ve bought her services from Miriam herself.”

The gray-haired man frowned. “Her own mother sold her to you?”

“Aye, and drove a harder bargain than any moneylender,” said Sir Harry sourly. “I’ll have you know I’ve paid a king’s ransom for this little whore’s maidenhead.”

“If she still has a maidenhead, then she’s hardly a whore,” reasoned Byfield. “For that matter, to my eye she looks too young for any sort of venal activity. Since when have your preferences turned to children, Wrightsman?”

Sir Harry snorted. “Since Christmas week in Bath with that infernal actress. Left me with the French pox, damn her eyes! Even an old puritan like you must know the only real cure comes from lying with a virgin, and that means the girl’s bound to be young. How else can a man be certain the chit’s what she claims?”

Incredulous, Byfield stared down his nose at the other man. “You would knowingly ruin the poor girl that way? Pox her in the empty hope of curing yourself?”

“She’ll be paid well enough for her trouble, you can be sure.”

“I don’t care what you gave that sorry excuse for a mother, Wrightsman. I won’t stand by and let you do this. Come round to my banker in the morning and you shall have double what you paid.”

“Damn your interference, Byfield, it’s the girl I want, not the money!”

“Triple it, then, and find yourself a new physician instead. Who can put a price on an innocent’s soul?” His smile grave, the sixth Earl of Byfield held out his hand to Caroline. “Here, child. You’re coming home with me, and I swear no one shall ever touch you against your will again.”

And at last Caroline wept.

Chapter One

April 1803

He would not be afraid.

Jeremiah took a deep breath and rested his hand over the open top of the lantern’s globe, sealing the candle and its flame within beneath his palm. As the air was exhausted, the flame slowly began to flicker and dim, and the shadows in the bedchamber grew darker, deeper, closing in on Jeremiah as the small light faded. He could feel his heart pounding in his breast, his blood racing, every muscle tensing to run and escape the blind, irrational panic that was swallowing him as completely as the night itself. The little flame twisted one final time and guttered out, leaving only the smoking spark on the wick and the endless, silent, eternal blackness.

With a choking sound deep in his throat, Jeremiah lifted his hand, his eyes desperately intent on the tiny glowing spark. His breath tight in his chest, he willed it back to life, struggling to concentrate on this last dot of light as the only way to fight the blind terror that would smother his life if he let it.

Come back. Damnation, come back! Don’t die and leave me alone in the night!

God, why had he let it go so far?

Slowly, as if it heard him, the spark glowed brighter, stronger, until at last it became a flame again, dancing double in the curved globe. Still Jeremiah stared at it, unable to look away. For now the shadows were gone, the demons vanquished. But how long would they stay away, how long before he found any lasting peace? With a groan of despair he dropped back onto the bed, his arms thrown across the pillows beneath his head.

What the devil had happened to him? It hadn’t always been this way. He was a Yankee, a Rhode Islander by birth, nobody’s fool, a deep-water captain raised on the Narragansett. The first time he’d fought for his life he’d been only eleven, beside his privateering father in the War for Independence, and through two more wars he’d never turned his back on a fight, whether with swords or pistols or his own bare fists.

He’d battle hurricanes at sea or thieves and rogues on land. Who or what made little difference to him, as long as he won. His temper was notorious, his courage undoubted. He stood over six feet tall with shoulders to match, and years of hard living had made his body equally hard, scarred, lean and muscular.

No one who knew him would ever call him a coward. No one would dare. But he himself knew the truth.

He, Captain Jeremiah Sparhawk, was afraid of the dark.

He stared up at the pleated damask canopy overhead, still struggling with the terror. He was safe here, safe in his sister Desire’s great house on the hill outside of Portsmouth. She was a fine lady now, his sister, married to an English nobleman, Rear Admiral Lord John Herendon. If Jeremiah listened he could just make out the sound of their guests in the music room below, the laughter and merriment that he’d wanted no part of this evening, or any other since he’d been brought here four months ago. Yet Desire had welcomed him when he’d needed a haven, sat by his bedside when the pain and fever had threatened his sanity, and not once had she questioned him when he’d begged to leave the lantern lit at night.

That other night there’d been no moon, no stars, nothing to mark where the midnight sky met the sea. The hot wind that carried the Chanticleer eastward across the Mediterranean had strangely died at sunset, and with the ship becalmed, the men on watch had grown drowsy, lulled to complacency by the warm air and the gentle slapping of the water against the hull.

But he was their captain. If they erred, the fault and the blame was his alone. He should have sensed the danger before it was too late, before the devil was there on his chest with the cold, curved blade pressed tight into his throat.…

He woke with a ragged cry, soaked with his own sweat, and instinctively lunged for the pistol he kept beneath his pillow. Clutching the gun in both hands, he rolled over onto his back, ready to challenge the demon that dared follow him here into the light.

“Forgive me if I startled you, Captain Sparhawk,” said the woman standing beside the bed, “but you can lay that pistol down. At least you won’t need it on my account.”

Still not sure if he was dreaming, Jeremiah stared at her with the gun gripped tightly in his hands.

“Please,” she said gently. “I promise I’m no threat.”

She didn’t look like any nightmare he recognized. Far from it. She was so beautiful it almost hurt him to look at her, dressed all in white, from the egret’s plumes in her blond hair to the toes of her white satin slippers. If no devil, then an angel?

But heaven’s angels were neither male nor female, and the way the white silk of her gown spilled over the full curves of this one’s body left little doubt that she was decidedly female, decidedly of this earth. Her mouth was full and very red, her eyes very blue, widely set and tipped up at the corners. She watched him evenly, not at all embarrassed that he wore trousers and nothing else, waiting for him without any sign of fear.

Fear. Dear God, had she been here long enough to hear him cry out against the dark like a terrified child?

He uncocked the pistol and lowered it slowly, that gentleness in her voice making him wary. He didn’t want sympathy or pity, especially not from a woman he didn’t know. “How did you get in here?”

“The customary way.” Now that he’d put the gun down, she stepped closer to him, the diamonds on her bracelets glittering in the light of the single candle. “Through the door.”

He cursed himself mentally for forgetting to lock it. Was he getting so old that he’d already turned careless? “Then you can damned well leave the same way you came. Clear off, and leave me alone.”

She shook her head solemnly, the white feather in her hair brushing against the curtains of the bed. She was near enough now that he could smell her scent, jasmine and musk, and in spite of his wish to be left alone, he felt his gaze drawn inexorably to the soft, full curves of her breasts above the white satin. It didn’t make any sense. Why was she here, so beautifully available? He hadn’t had a woman since they’d brought him back to England, and his body was reminding him, a bit too obviously, that he’d recuperated long enough.

“Ma’am.” Consciously he forced his eyes back up to hers. Beautiful or not, he didn’t need the kind of entanglement she’d bring, not now when his life was in such a shambles. “Look here. Where I come from, ma’am, a lady doesn’t visit a man’s bedchamber unless she’s blessed sure of her invitation. If she comes prowling around on her own, then she’s generally something less than a lady. Now will you take yourself back downstairs with the others, or am I going to have to haul you down myself, for all the world to remark?”

Suddenly imperious, she lifted her chin a fraction higher, and he saw now that she was older than he’d first thought, no young girl dabbling at flirtation. “You shouldn’t address me so familiarly. I am the Countess of Byfield.”

“Well, hell.” He scowled at her, unable and unwilling to recall his sister’s careful coaching on English titles and forms of address. “I’m Captain Sparhawk of Providence, and by my lights that’s considerably more impressive. At least I earned my title.”

“So did I.” She smiled with an open charm he hadn’t expected, her lips curving upward like her tip-tilted eyes. “Forgive me. I forgot that you’re an American, and that a countess would be an anathema to you. Perhaps we’ll do better if you simply call me Caro.”

“I’m not going to call you anything.” He grunted, wishing she didn’t use hundred-guinea words like anathema. “I’m tired, and I want to go to sleep. I’ll just say goodnight and then you go on back down to my sister and the rest of your friends.”

“But they’re not my friends.” Impulsively she sat on the edge of his bed and leaned toward his hand, her blue eyes searching his face. “I don’t go out much, you see, and I’ve never met your sister. It’s you that’s drawn me here, Captain Sparhawk, you alone, and now that I’ve found you I’ve no intention of leaving quite yet.”

“I’ve drawn you here?” he repeated softly, staring at her parted lips so near to his own. Her gloved hand brushed against his hand, just enough to make the hair on his arm tingle with anticipation. “A craggy old Yankee shipmaster with white in his hair?”

She smiled again with the same openness. “You’re not so very old, Captain, and I’m not so very young. Together, I think, we could find some common ground to share.”

Her fragrance was like a drug to his senses, filling them so completely he could almost taste her already. He knew she expected him to kiss her. When he’d been younger, it had happened to him all the time. Barmaids or countesses, women generally made their wishes felt the same way. It would be so easy to draw her into his arms and beneath the sheets, to lose himself in the soft, willing pleasure she was offering.

So easy, and so wrong. Just because he’d been careless enough to let her into his room through that unlocked door didn’t mean she deserved a place in his life, however fleeting, or even one in his bed.

Purposefully he shifted away from her, focusing instead on sliding the pistol back beneath his pillow. “It’s late, ma’am. Good night.”

He heard her sigh, and felt the mattress lighten as she rose to her feet. “Jack warned me you’d be like this,” she said sadly. “But I thought at least you’d be willing—”

“Willing for what?” demanded Jeremiah. With humiliating clarity the answer came to him. His brother-in-law was so hopelessly besotted with Desire that he believed love alone could cure every other man’s ills, as well. How many times before this had Jack urged him to find a ladylove of his own? “So help me, if Herendon put you up to this—”

She turned sharply. “Whatever are you saying?”

“You know damned well what I’m saying! What did Jack tell you of poor old ailing Jeremiah? Did he tell you I was so lonely that I’d welcome the attentions of a woman, any woman, who showed a breath of interest in me?”

By the light of the single candle her eyes flashed bright as her diamonds. “What he told me was that you were proud and hot tempered, but oh my, I never dreamed he meant this!”

“But you came anyway, didn’t you?” Shoving himself from the bed to stand, Jeremiah saw how her eyes widened at his size as he loomed over her, how she stared at the jagged new scar that sliced across his torso. “Was I that much of a curiosity, a foreigner, an American, that I seemed worth the effort of seduction?”

“Seduction!” She tipped back her head and her laughter rippled merrily from her lips. “You think I came here to seduce you?”

He was in no mood for teasing, and he never liked being laughed at, especially not by a woman this pretty. “Aye, what other reason could there be for you creeping in here while I slept, every bit as bold as any barkeep’s daughter?”

“You left me no choice.” With her head cocked, she looked at him shrewdly. “You never leave this house. How else was I to find you?”

“You found me well enough in my bed, didn’t you?”

“You really do believe I came to seduce you,” she said incredulously, lifting her gaze to meet his. “Lord, I wouldn’t know how to begin.”

“Like this.” He rocked her back off her feet and into the crook of his arm before she could protest. He swallowed her startled little cry into his mouth, his lips moving deftly over hers. He would show her that he wasn’t some laughable American savage. He’d prove to her that he didn’t need her pity, or her curiosity, or whatever other contemptuous impulse had brought her here tonight. She tasted every bit as sweet as he’d hoped she’d be, soft and warm in his embrace, and with a low groan he slid his hands along the satin, down her back to settle on the curve between her waist and hip.

Yet for a woman brazen enough to chase him to his bed, she seemed oddly uncertain. She lay stiffly in his arms, her hands curled defensively against his chest, and though her lips had parted for his, she waited for him to lead her. Were English gentlemen so self-centered that they left their women as unschooled as this one so obviously was?

With a new gentleness he deepened the kiss, exploring the most sensitive corners of her mouth until she began to answer him, tentatively at first and then with growing ardor. Her hands crept up his chest and around his neck to draw him closer, and, charmed by the ingenuity of her response, he felt his anger melting away, replaced by an intense bolt of desire. Lord, it had been too long! Countess or not, perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to take what she offered. He lifted her against him and she moaned deep in her throat, and he knew then she wanted him as much as he did her.

And then she jerked free and slapped him as hard as she could.

He stared at her, his cheek stinging where she’d struck him. “What the devil was that for?”

“You—we shouldn’t have kissed like that,” she said breathlessly. Her face was flushed, her lips still wet from their kiss, her hair disheveled and her plume cocked to one side. “It wasn’t right.”

“It seemed right as rain to me.” Strange how he wasn’t really angry with her. Disappointed, yes, but not angry.

“No, you don’t understand.” She lowered her gaze, her clasped hands twisting together. “You don’t understand at all.”

“You’ve called it well enough there.” He sat heavily on the edge of the bed, still rubbing his face. She’d caught him on the jaw with the edge of one of her bracelets, and he knew he’d have a bruise in the morning. “You’re not making much sense, sweetheart.”

“I don’t, not when I’m distraught.” She fidgeted with the clasp on one bracelet as she struggled to regain control of her emotions. “Frederick says it’s one of my greatest failings, and he has worked quite hard to rid me of it.”

Though Jeremiah waited for her to explain who Frederick was, she didn’t. Her husband, most likely. If she was a countess, then somewhere there had to be a count—no, an earl. But whoever Frederick was, Jeremiah would be damned before he’d ask.

“Don’t tell me,” he said instead. “You have a list of failings as long as my arm.”

“No, Captain, I don’t, no matter how much you wish to believe the contrary.” She closed her eyes briefly and sighed. “Good night, then, and forgive me for disturbing you.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that, yes.” She gave her shoulders an odd little shrug, almost a shudder. “I’ve caused us both enough trouble tonight, haven’t I?”

He caught her arm as she turned toward the door. Beneath the silk, her skin was warm and he felt the quickening of her heartbeat at his touch. “You can’t go now.”

She looked pointedly at his hand before she raised her gaze to meet his. “Why not? You’ve been telling me to leave ever since you woke.”

“Use your ears, ma’am, and you’ll know. All’s quiet below. It must be well past midnight.”

“Then I can let myself out. I’m hardly helpless, you know. My coachman will be waiting with the carriage where I left him, at the bottom of the hill.”

“Well, you’re not going alone.” He released her arm, reaching for his shirt and tugging it over his head. Helpless or not, she wasn’t going to traipse off into the darkness by herself as long as he had anything to say about it.

“I assure you such sudden chivalry isn’t necessary,” she said indignantly. “I’m quite capable.”

“Oh, aye, I’m sure you are.” He shrugged on his coat, not bothering with a waistcoat or hat, and smoothed back his hair. “And don’t mistake it for chivalry. If you’re found in the shrubbery tomorrow with your throat slit and your diamonds gone, I don’t want to be the last one who saw you alive.”

She made a disgruntled, undignified sound in the back of her throat that made him smile. He liked her better this way, when she wasn’t so busy being a great lady. Given the chance, perhaps in the moonlight beside her coach, he’d kiss her again.

No, he wasn’t being chivalrous at all.

He took the lantern from the table beside the bed. “Along with you then, ma’am.”

“If you can’t bring yourself to call me ‘Caro,’ then you must use Lady Byfield,” she said irritably as she followed him. “‘Ma’am’ is common.”

“Common or not, it’s what we call ladies in my country,” he said drily. “I fought a war with your people over such things.”

She didn’t answer, or maybe she was ignoring him, but he didn’t care so long as she was quiet and didn’t wake the rest of the house. He’d no wish to explain any of this to his sister, or worse, to his brother-in-law. Oh, he meant to have a few words with Jack in the morning, all right, but not with the subject of their discussion present the way she was now.

The long hallway to the front stairs was dark, and the single candle lit their way only a few shadowy feet before them. Fiercely Jeremiah lifted the lantern higher, determined to control the wariness that could turn so easily into fear. He’d walked this hall a hundred times, no, a thousand, in daylight without coming to harm. What difference, then, could there be in the dark?

He felt the woman beside him tentatively take his arm, and he patted her hand self-consciously to reassure her. If it had been a long time since he’d lain with a woman, it had been longer still since one had turned to him for comfort. He smiled wryly to himself, wondering what she’d do if she’d learned the truth about the sorry champion she’d chosen.

But once outside, she scurried away from him, skipping down the stone steps with her white gown fluttering out behind her in the moonlight. He followed more slowly, for the wound still pained him if he moved too fast, and he’d no wish to begin wincing and gasping like an old man before her.

The moon was almost full, the sweeping lawns around the house lit nearly as bright as by day, and Jeremiah relaxed. No demons here; here his only company was this sprite of a countess. The gravel of the drive crunched beneath their feet and with an exasperated mutter she stepped onto the grass instead.

“You’ll ruin your slippers,” warned Jeremiah as he joined her. “The dew’s already fallen.”

“I don’t care. It won’t be the first time, and I doubt it will be the last.” She paused, waiting for him to catch up. “I refuse to stay off the grass simply because ladies’ slippers are so insubstantial. It vexes Frederick, of course, but I lived in the country as a child, and if I could I’d go without shoes and stockings and garters altogether.”

“Then shuck them off now. Where’s the harm?” The night was warm for April, and Jeremiah liked the idea of her vexing this infernal Frederick.

She grinned at him. “I could, couldn’t I?”

“Of course you can,” he said easily. “I won’t tell.”

“Then I shall do it.” Modestly she turned away from him as she lifted her skirt, but as she bent to untie her garters, the white silk gown draped over her round, upturned bottom in a charming, if unintentional, invitation that Jeremiah found far more provocative than any mere show of her ankles ever could be. When he’d been younger, women had bundled themselves away in layers of petticoats and buckram, but the scanty fashions now were worse—or better—than if they’d come out walking naked. And this woman before him would tempt a saint to sin.

Purposefully he looked up at the stars overhead and away from her. “I was raised in the country, too, and we didn’t wear shoes from May till September, excepting when Granmam made us dress for church on Sundays.”

“On a farm?” she asked eagerly. She was upright again, safe for him to look at as they once again began walking down the hill toward the gates and the road. In the swinging circle of the lantern’s light her bare toes peeked out from beneath the hem of her gown. She held her slippers in one hand and her stockings in the other, the fine-gauge silk of the stockings still keeping the shape of her calves as they drifted out from her hand. “I’ve always liked farms.”

“It was a plantation, really, though all that means is a bigger farm that the owner doesn’t work himself.”

“A plantation? That sounds very grand.”

“For Rhode Island, it was,” he agreed, remembering the last real home he’d had before he’d gone to sea. “My grandfather made a king’s ransom from privateering, and he must have spent half of it on that house alone. But I expect it would pale beside what a countess would call home, even in the country.”

“Indeed,” she said softly. “A proper countess most likely would.”

“You’d know better than I.” There was no mistaking the wistfulness in her voice, and he didn’t understand it. He brushed the back of his fingers lightly across her arm, just enough to make her look back at him. “Exactly why did you wish to see me, Caro? You must have come with some reason in mind.”

She frowned as she realized he’d finally used her given name, and rubbed the place on her arm that he’d touched.

“It doesn’t matter now,” she said swiftly, her words tumbling over one another. “I thought that we might help each other, but now I see how foolish an idea that was. I hadn’t expected—oh, but I’ll never see you again, so none of it matters anyway, does it? Look, there’s my coach, just beyond the gate. There’s no reason for you to come any farther.”

“Don’t, lass.” He reached for her, but she scurried across the grass beyond his reach. “Damnation, I said I’d see you to your carriage!”

“And I say it’s not necessary. Good night, Captain Sparhawk, and goodbye.”

She turned and ran, holding her skirts up above her bare feet. He called her name, but she didn’t look back, and he let her go. She was right: most likely they would never see each other again. She was an English countess and he was an American shipmaster, and in another week, a fortnight at the most, he meant to be gone, back to Rhode Island to pick up the shattered pieces of his life as best he could.

He watched her disappear through the door beside the gate, and he smiled to himself as he thought of her bare pink toes. He hoped she didn’t catch hell from Frederick when she got home. The man should take better care of his wife.

But still Jeremiah wished she’d stayed a little longer.

Chapter Two

Caro’s feet skidded on the slippery grass, and the oath was already halfway from her lips before she swallowed it back. She hadn’t sworn like that in years; swearing had been one of the first bad habits that Frederick had convinced her to abandon. Ladies didn’t swear, and she was a lady, a countess, wife to a peer of the realm.

But ladies didn’t let strange men kiss them, either, and for the first time the magnitude of what she’d done swept over her. She’d crept into the bedchamber of a man she didn’t know, a foreigner, with a question that she’d finally been too fainthearted to ask, and instead she’d smiled and laughed and behaved as commonly as the barkeep’s daughter he’d accused her of being.

It didn’t matter that she’d gone there with the best intentions in the world. The truth remained that Frederick deserved better from her. He’d cherished her and loved her and educated her far beyond her station, and then, finally, had raised her up to his own by giving her his name and his title. There could be nothing finer for her than to be the wife of a man so endlessly kind and generous, and in return she loved him more than she’d ever loved anyone else. Because he’d told her so, she’d always believed that that love alone would be enough to redeem her.

And dear Lord, it wasn’t, not now that she’d finally been tested. It wasn’t even close.

The carriage loomed before her in the shadows, the Byfield crest barely visible on the side. The horses had been loosened to graze, but there was no sign of her coachman or the footman, either.

“Ralston?” she called uneasily. She touched one of her bracelets, recalling what Captain Sparhawk had said. She didn’t believe that the grounds of an admiral’s house would harbor footpads and cutthroats, but here on the Portsmouth Road she wasn’t as sure. “Ralston, where are you?”

“And where have you been, my dear aunt?” drawled the young man who stepped from behind the coach. “I don’t want to tell you how long I’ve been waiting.”

“What a pity you’ve waited in vain, George,” said Caro sharply, inching around him to reach the coach’s door. “I’ve no more to say to you here than I do anywhere else. If you insist on your rude and impertinent questions, then I must refer you to Lord Byfield’s solicitor.”

“A solicitor, Auntie?” said the young man as he lounged back against the coach and stretched his legs before him to block her way. He wore a tall-brimmed hat cocked forward that hid his eyes, but for Caro his insolent smile was more than enough. “That’s deuced uncharitable, even for you.”

“Then perhaps I should call on Mr. Perkins myself, and arrange for charges to be brought against you,” she answered, her irritation growing. “Surely there must be laws against your kind of vile harassment.”

“So unkind, Auntie, so cruel!” He clucked his tongue in mock dismay. “And what of the laws against adultery, eh? Laws to protect husbands from a set of cuckold’s horns from their slatternly wives?”

She gasped. “How dare you defame Frederick and me that way!”

“Dare I? Dare you, more’s the point.” His smile widened as he crossed his hands over his chest, the moonlight reflecting off the twin rows of polished buttons on his coat. “Oh, I’ll vow you’ve been most discreet. These past months there’s never been a hint of scandal about you. Until tonight, of course. Your slippers in your hand, your legs bare, your headpiece askew—what gossip I’ll have to whisper over cards at Lady Carstairs’s tomorrow night, eh? I didn’t think you’d be enough to tempt gallant Admiral Lord Jack, but then his wife’s breeding again, and to my own joy, you’ve never shown much inclination that way.”

With an incoherent shriek, Caro dropped her slippers and flew at George’s smirking face, determined to hurt him as much as he’d hurt her. It was bad enough for him to believe she was Jack Herendon’s mistress, but to be taunted about her childlessness cut her to her heart.

But George’s reflexes were unclouded by anger, and he deftly caught her wrists before her fingers reached his eyes. In the next instant he twisted and shoved her back against the side of the carriage, pinning her hands over her head and trapping her with his body.

“A widow’s portion’s not such a bad thing, Caro,” he said, breathing hard as she struggled against him. “Once you’re the dowager Lady Byfield the world will expect you to take lovers. Say the word, and it’s done. So simple for you to have your freedom, and be rid of the old bastard for good.”

“You’re the bastard, George, not Frederick!” Furiously she fought against him. “Ralston!”

“Save your breath, Caro. I sent them off with a bottle of rum so we could talk in private.”

She glared at him. “You’ve no right to do that! They’re my men, not yours!”

“But for how long, eh?” He pressed closer, near enough that she could smell the same rum on his breath. “Dowager or not, Auntie, you’re not so old I couldn’t oblige you myself, and keep it all in the family. It’s time you had a taste of a man young enough to remember what a woman desires most.”

Caro stared at him, too stunned by what he was suggesting to answer.

He smiled, taking her silence as acquiescence, and leaned his mouth closer to her lips. “Simply say the word, my dear, and please us both. You’ll find I’m generous with both my gold and my company.”

“You’re despicable.” She practically spat out the words, forcing him to draw back. “Let me go at once!”

“Not yet, Caro, not before—”

“You heard the lady,” said Jeremiah, his voice unmistakable to Caro. “Let her go. And do it now.”

George twisted around, searching the shadows for the man who’d spoken. “What the devil—”

Jeremiah stepped forward. In the moonlight he looked to Caro like some wild forest giant, his size accentuated by the shadows around him, his face sharply planed and his thick black hair loose to his shoulders. He stood with his legs widespread and his whole body so tensed and ready to fight that the primed pistol in his hand seemed almost superfluous. In her small, sheltered world she’d never known a man like this one, and she flushed at the memory of how she’d let him kiss her, how much she’d enjoyed it before the shame had stopped her. And oh, what sorrowful mischief George would make for her if he ever learned what she’d done!

“Look here now,” blustered George. “This is a private matter between Caro and me, and it don’t concern you, whoever you are.”

“I told you to let the lady go,” said Jeremiah again, his voice rumbling deep. “I’m not a patient man, and I’m accustomed to having my way.”

“Mind him, George,” whispered Caro loud enough for Jeremiah to hear. “He has a gun, and I’ve no wish to be shot to death by some highwayman on account of your stubbornness. Lord knows we’re probably already surrounded by his confederates in the trees.”

A highwayman? thought Jeremiah, frowning. Confederates in the trees? What the devil was she up to now?

“A highwayman!” George’s voice squeaked upward as he let Caro go, his eyes still turned toward Jeremiah. “Damn it all, Caro, you would be wearing those diamond cuffs, too! They must be worth a thousand guineas if they’re worth a penny.”

“They’re worth ten times that if they’ll save my life.” She turned bravely toward Jeremiah as she slid the bracelets from her wrists. “Here, sir, they’re yours, and my earrings, too, if you wish them. I know you’d take them by force anyway, but I pray because I’ve been so accommodating you’ll spare me and my—my companion.”

“Hear, hear,” echoed George faintly, staring at the pistol.

Jeremiah’s frown deepened. Here he’d thought he’d saved her from some ruffian’s attack, yet instead the man had some sort of claim to her, enough that she’d protect him like this. Not that he was worth it, in Jeremiah’s estimation: a fancy-dressed little Englishman so cowardly he’d let a woman defend him. But what was all this nonsense about highwaymen and bracelets?

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he began, “but I don’t—”

“Oh, please, sir, please!” she begged, clutching her hands piteously before her. “Don’t be so hasty in your judgment!”

Jeremiah shook his head in bewilderment. Whatever he’d blundered into belonged on a London stage, not here on the high road to Portsmouth. He glanced toward a rustling in the bushes and saw two wide-eyed men in livery cowering in the shadows, and curtly he waved at them to join the others. No matter what the woman intended, she hadn’t really left him any choice but to go along with her game, at least for now.

George sniffed derisively at the two servants. “Is this how you display your loyalty to Lady Byfield, leaving her alone to be accosted like this?”

“But sir,” protested Ralston, “that be what you wanted o’ us!”

“None of your bickering, you silly fools,” snapped Caro, her glance darting from George to Ralston and back again as exasperation temporarily overcame her show of terror, “else I’ll leave you all as hostages.”

George sniffed again. “You shouldn’t bargain with ruffians like this, Caro. It ain’t decent.”

“I’ll do what I must.” With her jewelry cupped in her hands, she walked slowly to Jeremiah, her bare feet silent on the grass.

“Here you are,” she said softly, her eyes so beseeching Jeremiah knew now he wouldn’t give her away before the others. “I pray it’s enough to ensure our safety.”

He scooped the jewelry from her hand and stuffed it into his pocket with what he hoped was a proper highwayman’s nonchalance. He’d been a great many things in his life, but this was the first time he’d been a thief, and he wasn’t quite certain how it was done. “The gentleman has a purse, doesn’t he?” he asked gruffly. “And that cut-stone ring there, on his little finger.”

George opened his mouth to argue but Caro glared at him, her open hand outstretched. “Give it up, George, and consider it cheaply done. If you hadn’t followed me here and interfered, none of this would have happened.”

Glumly he handed his purse and ring to Caro, who brought them back to Jeremiah. “I fear that’s everything, sir,” she said sadly. “Oh, please, please, say it’s sufficient to let us go!”

Though her words were meant to sway the hardest heart, there was still an impish gleam in her upturned eyes, meant for Jeremiah alone. She’d protected this man George, true, but she’d also enjoyed taking his purse. Jeremiah was glad, for the man was both a fool and a bully.

“If there’s anything else you want,” she continued when he didn’t answer, “anything else that could sway your decision, so that we might be on our way.”

Jeremiah looked down at her, struggling to appear as if he were weighing her plea instead of wondering if she’d intended a double meaning to her words. What else did he want? He wanted to send the three men on their way, and keep her here with him so she could explain. And kiss her again. Oh, aye, he wanted that very much, even if the reasons against it seemed even stronger after this silly masquerade. Her upswept hair had slipped further to one side, the egret’s feather now bent at a jaunty angle over one eye as she looked up at him through her lashes. She was a charming, bewildering creature, no mistake, but with a start he realized she’d made him forget his own miseries, however briefly, for the first time since he’d been brought to England.

Her diamonds sat heavily in his pocket, a lump against his thigh. At least now he had a decent reason to see her again, if only long enough to return her jewelry, and knowing that made it easier to let her go.

Over her head he motioned to the coachman. “You heard the countess. She’s ready to clear for home. And you, Master Georgie, you leave the lady alone, or you’ll answer to me.”

Even in the moonlight, Jeremiah could have sworn the other man paled. “See here now,” he said weakly. “You can’t threaten me like that. I’ll see you hung, see if I don’t.”

“If you catch me first,” said Jeremiah, and though he smiled, not even George could miss the threat in his voice. “But if I hear you’ve mistreated this lady again, I’ll hunt you down. And God help your cowardly hide, when I find you you’ll wish I hadn’t.”

He bowed his head briefly to Caro, still watching the other man. “Good night, ma’am. Sleep well.”

She grinned swiftly at Jeremiah from beneath the feather, more than enough thanks to please him, before she turned and ran to her coach. He didn’t wait to see her leave, not knowing whether or not the coachman might carry a gun beneath his box, but as he retreated back up toward the gate he could hear her adamantly refusing George a place in the carriage, with Ralston agreeing.

He uncocked his pistol and slipped it into his coat pocket on top of the diamonds as he retrieved the lantern from the lawn where he’d left it earlier. He still didn’t know why she’d come to his bedchamber to see him, let alone why she’d let him rob her. He thought of her neat pink toes beneath the dew-marked white silk, and the way she grinned at him like a fellow conspirator. Behind him he heard her voice raised again, this time over the noise of her carriage, as she called George a name more usually found in the vocabularies of seamen.

No, Caroline, Lady Byfield, wasn’t like anyone’s idea of a countess.

And for the first time since he’d lost the Chanticleer, Jeremiah laughed out loud.

“Go on, lad, it’s yours if you like raspberries.” Jeremiah held the jam cake out in the palm of his hand, coaxing his nephew, Johnny, to take it. “Myself, I’d choose the apple, but your mama does them both blessed well.”

The little boy stared seriously at the cake, his lips pursed with a four-year-old’s intensity and his hands clasped behind his waist in imitation of his father, the admiral. But that was the sum of his father that showed, for with his green eyes and dark hair, Johnny was all Sparhawk. If he’d ever stayed in one place long enough to father a son himself, thought Jeremiah with a little pang of regret, his boy would look like this one.

“Take it, lad. I swear it’s not poisoned.” Still the boy hesitated, looking back over his shoulder to his nursemaid for reassurance. Not that Jeremiah blamed him. He hadn’t much experience as an uncle, and this was the first time, quite by accident, that he’d been alone with the boy without Desire to ease the awkwardness. “Be bold now, Johnny. If you see a prize you want, why, you must seize it and make it your own.”

Johnny frowned, considering, and grabbed the cake and stuffed it into his mouth in one messy bite. Then he smiled at his uncle, displaying teeth so covered with crumbs and bits of raspberry jam that Jeremiah, appalled, found it very hard to smile back.

“Oh, Johnny, you know you’re not supposed to bother your uncle!” cried Desire as she hurried into the breakfast room as quickly as she could with her second child, Charlotte, clutching onto her skirts.

“No bother, Des, I swear,” said Jeremiah with more relief than he’d intended. “I thought he still seemed hungry, that’s all.”

“He’s always hungry for sweets.” She plucked a napkin from the table and bent down to scrub at the boy’s face while he squirmed and Charlotte gloated. “But that doesn’t mean the little rogue has to come begging to you.”

“He didn’t beg. I offered.”

“Truly, Jere?” She was slow to straighten, one hand on her back to balance the weight of the third child she carried within her, due in June. But still a beauty, thought Jeremiah proudly, the kind of tall, comely American woman that put all the little whey-faced English ladies to shame. “I’ve told him you’ve been ill, but children don’t always understand.”

“Stop fussing, Des. I’m as well now as I’ll ever be, and the boy did no harm.” He slipped his hand around his sister’s shoulder and guided her to her chair at the head of the table as the nursemaid herded the two children from the room. “You’re doing well enough by him, that’s clear. One look at him and you know he’s a sight more Sparhawk than Herendon.”

“Don’t forget whose roof you’re under,” Desire scolded, reaching out to smack his hand with her teaspoon. “No matter if it’s true, Jack will have your head if he hears you say it.”

“Hear you say what?” asked her husband as he came to stand behind her chair. His blond hair glinting in the morning sun, Admiral Lord John Herendon was the model of an English gentleman and officer, tall and handsome in the white and navy uniform he seemed born to wear. Desire smiled as she turned her face up toward him, her cheeks coloring with pleasure, and he rested his hand gently on the swell of her belly as he bent to kiss her.

The warm intimacy of the gesture made Jeremiah look down at his plate. If any two people in this world loved each other, it was Desire and Jack, and despite Jeremiah’s own misgivings about his sister’s choice of a husband, he had to admit that the marriage had brought her happiness and contentment.

He raised his gaze long enough to see them still wrapped in one another, his sister’s eyes blissfully closed. Though married for nearly five years, they behaved as shamelessly as newlyweds, perhaps because so much of that time they’d spent apart. For the first year, Desire had sailed with Jack on his flagship while the British Admiralty had benignly looked the other way, and Johnny had been born at sea in the admiral’s cabin and Charlotte begotten there. But then the war with France had worsened, and Desire had been forced to make a safer home alone on land for their children until the Treaty of Amiens last spring had brought Jack back to Portsmouth and the Channel Fleet.

Self-consciously buttering toast he had no real interest in eating, Jeremiah considered the dangers of loving as completely as Jack and Desire did, of placing all hope for joy and happiness in a single other person. He’d never known that kind of love himself, or particularly wanted it. Why should he? For him life seemed too uncertain for such unconditional devotion, and he’d been hurt enough by all he’d lost too soon—his mother, his father, his brother, friends and comrades—to willingly risk more.

Besides, he’d be thirty-seven his next birthday, far past the age for sentimental follies. He enjoyed women well enough—he thought again, pleasantly, of Lady Byfield— but he’d never found one worth giving up his freedom for, or would any of them, he thought wryly, consider him much of a bargain as a husband.

He looked up from the toast to his sister and brother-in-law in time to see them exchange one final kiss before Jack went to his own chair at the opposite end of the table, one more moment of such wordless tenderness that Jeremiah again looked hastily away with the same unfamiliar pang of regret he’d felt with little Johnny. What must it be like to love, and be loved, that much?

“You’re looking well this morning, Jeremiah,” declared Jack heartily, unaware of Jeremiah’s thoughts. “Though Desire was ready to give you up, I knew it would take more than that single sword swipe to finish a man like you.”

“I never gave him up!” said Desire indignantly. “I knew he wouldn’t die. Jere’s too ornery, even if that ‘single sword swipe’ was a gash as long as your arm, and then there was the infection on top of that, and floating in the sea for days on end.”

“It wasn’t quite that bad, Des,” said Jeremiah uncomfortably, wishing they’d find something else to bicker over. He was feeling better this morning, well enough that for the first time he’d dressed in the new clothes his sister had ordered for him when his own were lost. A fop’s rags, he grumbled as he’d looked in the mirror, but still he’d admitted to himself that the dark green coat looked handsome enough, and he’d taken extra care with how he’d tied his neckcloth and brushed his hair. The world seemed a more promising place this morning, and he didn’t want to be reminded about how close he’d come to dying. “Though I suppose I should be grateful for your confidence in my orneriness.”

“Orneriness be damned,” said Jack as he cut into the ham and poached eggs that the servant had placed before him. “If Jeremiah’s looking well this morning, I’m more willing to credit it to his own constitution and a good night’s sleep.”

“I wasn’t much for sleep last night. No time.” Jeremiah pulled Caro’s bracelets and earrings from his coat pocket where he’d left it for safekeeping and shoved them across the polished mahogany toward Jack.

Desire gasped, and Jack frowned and lay down his knife and fork.

“I had a visitor,” continued Jeremiah. “A lady who first found her way to my bedchamber and then tricked me into cozening some old sweetheart of hers into believing I was a highwayman. Gave me her jewels to prove it, too, as well as the man’s purse.”

Jack groaned. “Caro Moncrief.”

“Caro Moncrief?” repeated Desire incredulously. “In my house? In my brother’s bedchamber?”

“Aye, in my bedchamber.” Jeremiah was enjoying the sight of his usually unruffled brother-in-law squirming a bit, though for Desire’s sake he hoped the woman wasn’t yet another of the admiral’s former sweethearts. “Now, Jack, maybe you can explain how she came to be there. She said she’d told you all about it, which is a sight more than she ever bothered telling me.”

Jack sighed as he toyed with the fork on the plate before him. “She didn’t tell me everything. Caro never does.”

“Oh, honestly, Jack, if you’re not going to tell my brother about her, then I will,” said Desire. “The Countess of Byfield is even more lowborn than we poor Americans are, Jere. Her mother was an expensive woman of the town who actually sold her daughter to Byfield when she was scarcely more than a child. You can imagine the talk when the old earl married her.”

“Is he that much older?” Jeremiah remembered the stiff, startled way Caro had responded when he’d first kissed her. No wonder, with that kind of experience.

“Oh, Byfield’s vastly older!” said Desire with relish. “You’d take him to be her father at the very least, maybe even her grandfather. They almost never go out in society, but when they do it’s clear enough that they’re both, well, a bit peculiar. Goodness only knows what they do together in private. He makes her dress all in white, sometimes in classical dress all the way down to sandals on her bare feet and leaves in her hair, and he encourages her to do and say whatever she pleases as if she were some child brought down from the schoolroom to act clever for company. And then, of course, there is the dragon-of-a-dowager countess.”

“Desire, love,” said Jack mildly. “You’re gossiping.”

Desire rolled her eyes with mock dismay. “I’m not gossiping, Jack, I’m merely warning my brother before he becomes too enchanted with the creature.”

“To protect my virtue from a fallen woman?” asked Jeremiah with amusement.

“No, you great idiot, to keep you out of the courts! She’s never given the earl any children, so the heir is his nephew, and when the poor old man was lost at sea two years ago—”

“You mean she’s a widow?” That surprised Jeremiah; from the way Caro had spoken of her husband he’d assumed the man was snoring safely in his bed at home.

Desire shrugged. “Well, that’s what the world assumes. But Lady Byfield refuses to believe it and have her husband declared dead, and you can imagine what the nephew says about her to anyone who’ll listen. He’ll seize on any chance he gets to discredit her—what he’d make of her meeting a lover in our woods!—and I’d rather you didn’t get yourself tangled in the middle of it.”

“And I think your warning comes too late, sister mine,” said Jeremiah smugly as he swept the jewelry from the table and into his hand. A widow, and a baseborn one at that. His spirits rose a little higher. Maybe Caro Byfield tumbling into his path was a sign that at last his luck was changing. Lord knows it couldn’t get much worse, but she’d be a first-rate way to improve it. “Her being a widow changes everything, doesn’t it? You know I’ve always had a special fondness for consoling widows.”

Desire’s brow puckered with concern. “Oh, Jere, please don’t! This isn’t some whalerman’s merry lady that you can dally with for a week and then leave behind.”

“Two weeks, Des, two weeks.” His smile widened as he rose from the table. “Then I swear I’ll put the whole Atlantic Ocean between me and the pretty little countess. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

“Jeremiah, wait.” Jack’s expression was troubled as he, too, rose to his feet, the heavy damask napkin in his fist. “She didn’t ask you, did she?”

“To come to call? Nay, she didn’t, not in so many words, but I’d think her tossing her diamonds at me was invitation enough.”

“Not that, Jeremiah. She means to ask you about Hamil Al-Ameer.”

Jeremiah stopped, frozen with his hands gripping the back of his chair. She meant to ask him about Hamil. Hamil Al-Ameer: the man who’d robbed him of his ship, his crew, his friends. The heathen bastard who’d destroyed his peace, made him a shaking coward, kicked him bleeding from his own deck to die in the black waters of the night.

Blindly he stared past Jack and his sister, struggling to find something, anything, to make himself forget. Outside the window, Johnny and Charlotte were playing with a small, fat dog with pointed ears that jumped into the air for the ball they tossed. Desperately Jeremiah tried to focus on them: the two laughing children dressed in white, the green lawn still glittering with dew, the fat little dog jumping and twisting again and again for the red ball, innocence and sunshine and laughter.

But not for him. God help him, never again for him.

Chapter Three

Blackstone House, home to the last six earls of Byfield, was much as Jeremiah expected. Larger than his sister’s house, surrounded by far more land, Blackstone House was an elegant jumble of architectural fashions, from the oldest, sprawling wing of Elizabethan brick to the front facade of pale green limestone, a model of Palladian order, and arches with Doric pilasters that rose the full three stories high to the roof.

But nary a black stone in sight, thought Jeremiah wryly as he walked his horse down the long gravel drive. He didn’t like these ancient, overgrown English houses, reeking of endless capital and family histories so much older than his own country. As Desire explained it, Lord Byfield was only a middling sort of nobleman, yet his home was more grand than any to be found in New England, and Jeremiah thought of what a fool he’d been to babble on to Caro about his grandfather’s plantation house on Aquidneck Island. Crescent Hill would fit into the stables of Blackstone House and not be missed, but at least Caro Byfield would never have to know that. No, once he returned her jewelry, she wouldn’t learn another word about him.

As he climbed from his horse, a groom came running to take the reins, and slowly Jeremiah began up the long flight of steps to the door. He took his time, telling himself he wouldn’t wish to be winded before the countess, but reluctance slowed his steps far more than any exertion. If the diamonds hadn’t been so valuable, he could have sent them back with a messenger and been done with it, and with her.

His jaw tightened as he remembered what Jack had told him. Why would any lady want to speak of Hamil? Damn her, he wouldn’t talk of what he’d been through for her cheap amusement! Jack and Desire had pieced together the barest details from what the men who’d rescued him had said and from his own delirious ravings, but he’d refused to tell them anything more. Even if he could, what was the use of it? Better to forget. It was done, finished, and all the yammering in the world wouldn’t bring back the men who’d been slaughtered. Men who would still be alive if he hadn’t been so—

“Good day, sir.” The eight-paneled door swung open and a butler nearly as tall as Jeremiah himself gravely met his eye. “Your name, sir?”

“Captain Sparhawk, but it doesn’t signify since I’m not staying.” Still on the step, he held out the small flannel bag—Desire’s contribution—that held Caro’s jewelry. “Give this to your mistress, and be quick about it. Go on, man, take it, don’t keep her waiting!”

“Why Captain Sparhawk, how splendid to see you again so soon!” Caro poked her head around the butler’s arm, crowding him in the doorway. “Do show him in, Weldon. He’s quite an agreeable man, for all he’s glowering fit to burst at present.”

Stiffly Weldon stepped aside, bowing his powdered head as slightly as he could.

But Jeremiah chose not to enter. “Thank you, ma’am, but no,” he said as he handed her the little bag. “I’ve only come to return your property, and that done, I’ll wish you good day.”

“Oh, fah, don’t be so pompous!” Impulsively Caro seized him by the sleeve and tugged. “Why else did you dress yourself so handsomely if you didn’t mean to call on me?”

“I cannot, ma’am.” Jeremiah tried to disentangle his arm while she laughed and clung to him and Weldon’s disapproval grew more and more apparent. The devil take the woman for making him feel like such a fool! “My sister expects me to return shortly.”

“I’ll vow a man like you has never answered to a woman in his life, let alone his sister,” said Caro, her tone shrewd as she released his arm. She smiled gleefully. “But then I should remember that myself, shouldn’t I?”

“Aye, ma’am, perhaps you should.” Jeremiah tried to look stern. Here in the morning sun he could see she wore no paint nor powder on her face, and little gold freckles that matched her lashes were scattered beguilingly across the bridge of her nose. Her cropped hair was simply dressed with a white ribbon across the brow, and only a narrow band of white work decorated the hem of her muslin dress.

She drew herself straight, folding her hands neatly before her as she carefully composed her expression. To Jeremiah’s surprise, she succeeded, for though nothing else had changed she suddenly looked every inch an imperious, aristocratic countess. Frederick, wherever he was, would be proud.

“If you would be so kind as to favor me with your company, Captain,” she said, her smile now no more than the merest genteel curve, “I would be quite honored. For a moment, that is all I beg of you. Only long enough so that I might thank you properly for your—your services last night.”

The butler sniffed, and inwardly Jeremiah groaned, guessing too well what services the man was imagining. At least if they went indoors they’d be free from Weldon. “Very well, then. But mind, not long.”

Jeremiah followed her down a long hall with a marble floor like a checkerboard. Lining the hallway on either side were life-size statues raised up on half-column pedestals. Some of the statues were men, some women, and all were mostly naked, and worldly though he considered himself, Jeremiah’s pace slowed as he passed beneath the line of sightless marble eyes. He’d been in his twenties before he’d seen a statue like these, in an expensive Jamaican fancy house, and he and his mates had marveled over the ancient goddess’s marble breasts and bottom for days afterward. What must it be like, especially for a lady, to live with such things every day?

As if she read his thoughts, Caro turned to face him, running her fingers lightly along the knee of young man with a kind of shawl draped over one shoulder and not a stitch more.

“He looks rather bashful, don’t you think? Almost shy,” she said. “Not very good for a warrior, which is what Frederick says he’s supposed to be. I never remember his true name, something ancient and foreign, so I call him Bartholomew instead. Bart’s one of my favorites.”

Jeremiah made a noncommittal sound between a grunt and a cough. “He doesn’t look like any Bart I’ve ever known.”

“Ah well, he’ll always be Bart to me.” She patted the statue’s muscular thigh with a fond familiarity that unsettled Jeremiah. She glanced up at him archly. “But then, of course, you’d prefer the ladies. Gentlemen do.”

She laughed merrily as she walked away from him. At the end of the hallway was a tall arched window, and the sunlight filtered through the sheer muslin of her gown, silhouetting the curves of her body as plainly as the statues that flanked her. Jeremiah swallowed, unable to draw his eyes away though he knew he must. For her to be ignorant of how much the sunlight revealed was bad enough, but what if she knew the effect, what if she’d planned it to entice him?

“Ma’am.” He looked down, away from her and away from the statues, and was surprised to see his hands clenched in tight fists at his sides. “Ma’am, I told you before I didn’t have much time.”

“Then it’s just as well we’re here,” she said as she reached the end of the hallway and threw open the double doors to the right. “This is the Yellow Room. My sitting room. Not even Frederick can enter without knocking. He calls it my—oh, what was it?—my ‘sanctuary.”

He would have known this place was hers even if she’d said nothing. Unlike the chilly formality of the rest of the house, this room was warm with color and cheerfully cluttered. The paneled walls were white with gilded trim, each centered with a painting of overblown roses spilling from baskets. More flowers formed the design of the soft wool carpet underfoot, and real ones—daffodils, hyacinths, Dutch tulips that filled the air with their scent—in Chinese porcelain vases clustered along the mantelpiece and table-tops among figurines of commedia dell’arte characters and sly-faced cats. The hangings and upholstery were all of yellow silk damask, and piled in the chairs and sofa were plump down-filled cushions with gold tassels.

Caro dropped into one of these, propped her feet up on a gilded stool as she carelessly tossed the bag with her bracelets and earrings onto the table beside her. She waved her hand airily for him to sit in the chair opposite hers. As if, thought Jeremiah, they were the oldest of friends; as if he hadn’t come here intending never to see her again.

“I really must thank you for saving me last night, Captain Sparhawk. Not that George would have done me any genuine harm, but your arrival was quite fortuitous. And, oh my, to see how he squirmed before you as a highwayman!” She clapped her hands with the fingers spread so only the palms touched. “I trust you won’t return his purse and ring to him, too. He’d only squander it on gaming, and besides, if he learned to do without then he might stop badgering me for more.”

Still standing, Jeremiah frowned, not liking the sound of a man who badgered a woman for money. “I dropped them both in the poor box at the seamen’s chapel in Portsmouth.”

“How perfect! Most likely it’s the first time he’s ever given a farthing to anyone other than his tailor.” She tugged on one of the ringlets held back by the ribbon, twisting the hair around her finger, and though she smiled, it seemed to Jeremiah that some of her merriment had slipped away. “You were very good to come to my rescue, especially since you’d just sent me on my way for trespassing. You were quite right, of course. I’d no business being there in your room that way without any reason, good or bad.”

He didn’t answer at first, and beneath the weight of his silence her cheeks slowly flushed. “You had a reason,” he said, wishing she’d told him the truth. “At least that’s what Jack told me.”

“I thought he might.” She pulled a daffodil from the vase beside her, pretending to study it to avoid meeting Jeremiah’s gaze. “He’s been so good to me through this, you know, always telling me whatever he could from the admiralty, but even he can’t perform miracles.”

She looked at him wistfully, her eyes bright with tears. “I thought you might be like that, too, for no other reason than that I wished it so. More likely you judge me as great a fool as the rest of the world, but I won’t believe that Frederick’s truly gone. I can’t believe it. That’s why I couldn’t let you kiss me, you see. You’re a very nice man, and a handsome one, too, but I love Frederick, and he’s my husband. If I’d kissed you, that would be as much as admitting that he wasn’t coming back. And God help me, I can’t do that.”

Jeremiah watched her unconsciously tear apart the flower in her hands, her thoughts turned inward to the husband she’d lost. Once again he was faced by the power of love, a locked room that he’d never enter. Widow or not, Caro was one woman who wouldn’t need the kind of consolation he could offer.

With a sigh he headed toward the door, pausing by her chair to lay his hand briefly on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Caro,” he said gently. “Sorry for everything.”

She bowed her head, staring down at the torn yellow petals scattered across her lap, and he walked past her to the door.

“Your friend David Kerr is still alive,” she said softly, so softly he almost didn’t hear her as his hand turned the latch.

But he’d heard enough to disbelieve it. “What did you say?”

“I said that David Kerr is still alive.”

“How the hell would you know about Davy?” In two steps he was back before her chair. Roughly he seized her by the shoulders, his fingers crumpling the fragile muslin as he dragged her unwillingly to her feet. “David Kerr is dead, along with all the others. I saw their bodies with my own eyes, their blood black on the deck at my feet. Can you do better than that, Countess? Can you? Because by God, if you’re trifling with me—”

“I wouldn’t trifle with you. Not about this or anything else. Believe what I say. Your friend Mr. Kerr is alive, and I know where he is.”

Jeremiah’s fingers tightened into her shoulders as he clung to her as desperately as he was clinging to this last, insane hope she was offering him. “Then tell me where. Tell me now.”

Caro lifted her chin defiantly, trying to hide her fear. It wasn’t him that she was afraid of, despite his size and strength and the anger and pain she saw in his eyes. No: what she feared was that she’d once again lose the courage to say what she must, or worse yet, to speak but choose the wrong words. This American was her last hope of saving Frederick’s life. There wouldn’t be another.

She swallowed hard, searching for the right plea, the perfect bargain, that would make him help her. And dear Lord, all she’d done so far was make him so angry he probably wouldn’t hear a word she said.

“I’m waiting, ma’am,” he said, and she heard in his voice the same velvety threat he’d used last night with George. “And I don’t like waiting for anyone.”

“You won’t force it from me,” she whispered hoarsely. She was too aware of how close he stood to her, of the warmth of his hands as they covered her shoulders, of how his mouth had felt on hers last night. Jack Herendon had told her of his brother-in-law’s temper, but why hadn’t he warned her of the raw power of his physical presence, the animal power that made her pulse quicken and her limbs turn to butter when he touched her? “If that’s your intention, it won’t work.”

Instantly he released her, swearing to himself in frustration. “I’m sorry, all right? I didn’t mean to hurt you. Now tell me.”

She shook her head and backed away, rubbing one shoulder where he’d held her before she self-consciously began to smooth the crease from her sleeve instead. “I won’t tell you a word about your friend until you tell me everything you can about Hamil Al-Ameer.”

There, she’d done it, and there’d be no taking back the words now. She’d expected him to rail more at her before he answered, even call her names, the way Jack had warned her. But she wasn’t prepared for what she saw now.

“Hamil,” he said, his voice as hollow as his eyes. He seemed to age before her, his broad shoulders bowing down beneath the weight of his grief and pain. “What would a fine lady like you want to know about a thieving bastard like him?”

She remembered how he’d been last night when he’d jerked awake from the nightmare, the wild, haunted look that had followed the anguished cry of pain and terror. What could have happened to reduce a man like Jeremiah Sparhawk to that?

“Pray forgive me, Captain,” she began, “for I didn’t mean to upset—”

He drew himself up sharply. “No pity, ma’am. I’d rather be scorned than pitied.”

“I don’t intend to do either. I wouldn’t ask you of this man Hamil if my reasons weren’t most urgent.”

“Then you’ll understand if I prefer to keep my past to myself,” he said wearily. He wasn’t angry anymore, just tired. “David Kerr is dead, and so is every other man who served with me on the Chanticleer. I don’t know what Herendon told you, but I won’t dishonor the memories of Davy and the rest by speaking their names in the same breath as that heathen bastard Hamil.”

“You would rather retain your stubborn sense of honor and propriety than hear in return what I have to say of Mr. Kerr?”

He sighed. “Honor or no, ma’am, I’m not in the habit of making bargains with ladies. Good day, Lady Byfield.”

“No, wait, I beg you!” she cried, rushing after him. “This isn’t a bargain that I ask of you, only an exchange of information, a way we might help each other!”

Though her desperation was unmistakable, he refused to be swayed. “If you’re like every other woman on this earth, you’d merely tell me what you believed I wished to hear, whether it was true or not.”

“No!” Frantically she rushed back to the little table beside her chair, yanking the drawer in it out so forcefully that the vase of yellow flowers toppled over. She pawed through the papers until she found the one she sought, then held it up to read, her fingers trembling and her voice shaking.

‘’ ‘Kerr, David, mariner, first mate, surviving of the brig Chanticleer, of the city of Providence of Rhode Island in the United American States. Of medium height, not above five and one-half feet, in age thirty-seven years, fair complected with brown hair, both ears pierced for the wearing of rings. Marked by a crooked left arm, broke long ago and ill-set, a star-shaped powder burn on the upper right back shoulder—”

“Let me see that!” Jeremiah lunged to tear the paper from her hands but she darted clear.

“You didn’t believe me, did you?” she said breathlessly, dancing just beyond his reach. “You wouldn’t trust me because I’m only a silly, ignorant woman, because I couldn’t possibly feel the same loyalty as a man for those I love!”

His green eyes were as wild as a madman’s as he shoved a chair aside to try to reach her. “What the devil is it, anyway? God help you if you lie!”

“The messengers of the Pasha of Tripoli do not lie, Captain Sparhawk, not when there is ransom to be earned from prisoners!” she cried, bunching her skirts in her fist as she ran from him. “From Naples this comes, from King Ferdinand’s own secretary, but I won’t read another word unless—”

She hadn’t heard the knock at the door, and turned with a hiss when Weldon entered the room himself. She froze beneath the butler’s scrutiny, as did Jeremiah, both panting and flushed amid the overturned furniture. The only other sound was the slow drip of water from the upset vase onto the carpet.

Weldon’s expression remained unperturbed. “My lady needs assistance?”

Caro pressed her palm to her forehead. “No, Weldon, I do not, nor do I appreciate your entering this room unannounced!”

“My apologies, my lady, but I did knock. I did not realize you were engaged.” He looked pointedly at Jeremiah. “But Mr. Stanhope has arrived, and demands a word with you at once.”

“Damn Mr. Stanhope! Tell him I’ve no wish to see him, that I’m not at home, or better yet, tell him to go—to go straight to Hades!”

Weldon nodded. “Very well, my lady.”

“Oh, Weldon, stop being so provokingly literal! Of course I’ll come and speak with him, but only as far as the door. I won’t have the wretched man in my house, acting like it’s already his.”

“Nay, ma’am, you’ll do no such thing,” ordered Jeremiah. “I won’t have you running off like a frightened chicken until we’ve settled this between us!”

“I’m not running, Captain, you can be sure of that, not until you reconsider your own position.” Her face still flushed, she glared at him, folded into quarters the paper she’d read from and shoved it down the front of her gown. “You wait here. I shall return directly.”

As the door shut behind her and the butler, Jeremiah struggled to control his frustration, and failed. Over went another chair, followed by the needlepoint-covered footstool he heaved across the room. Damn the woman! Either she did have news, real news, of Davy, or else she was the most convincing liar he’d ever met. He thought of how she’d toyed with him, teasing him along with stolen kisses and contrived robberies and statues of naked women, when here she’d been keeping a secret he’d kill to have. Davy alive, Davy a prisoner. Sweet Jesus, could it really be true?

With an oath he jerked the drawer from the table where she’d taken the first paper and dumped the contents onto the sofa. Receipts from dressmakers, half-finished letters dated months ago, a sheet of music to a love ballad. He scanned them all and found nothing more from Naples.

Double damn the woman! Jeremiah sank heavily into an armchair, his head in his hands. He’d known David Kerr since they’d been boys, one of only a handful of men he’d call friend. They’d sailed together, sought whores together, fought together. He’d stood up with Davy when his friend had wed Sarah Wright, and he was godfather to their oldest boy. Of course he intended to call on all the widows and orphans left by his crew as soon as he returned to Providence, a grim, heartbreaking responsibility for a captain, but telling Sarah would have been the hardest of all. And now, perhaps, he wouldn’t have to do it. But what did Caro Moncrief expect from him in return, and what did it have to do with Hamil?

The ormolu clock on the mantel chimed three times. Jeremiah sighed impatiently. The countess had been gone nearly an hour, far longer than she’d indicated. He rose and walked to the window, pushing back the heavy curtains with two fingers as he looked toward the driveway.

Before a hired carriage parked at the base of the steps stood Caro and a man. Though Jeremiah was too far away to hear them, it was obvious they were arguing, Caro waving her hands in short, angry motions to emphasize her words. Abruptly the man turned to speak to the driver on the box, and Jeremiah recognized him as George from the night before, the man he’d guessed was the countess’ lover. So much, thought Jeremiah cynically, for all her careful pledges of devotion to her husband.

As Jeremiah watched, Caro twitched her skirts away from George and, with her head high and the last word, began up the stairs. But before she’d taken three steps, George had thrown his arm around her neck, and pressed a handkerchief over her mouth. She fought against him, tearing at his hands as he dragged her down the steps to the carriage, until her struggles became weaker and by the time George lifted her into the carriage she was limp and still in his arms.

Though he knew he’d be too late, Jeremiah raced from the room and down the hall, reaching the front door in time to see the carriage disappear behind the first stand of beeches on the way to the road.

“Lady Byfield regrets that she will no longer be able to continue your interview,” said Weldon behind him. “She has been unexpectedly called away.”

Jeremiah swung round to face the butler. “Damn your impudence! Where are your eyes? She wasn’t called away, she was kidnapped! That man drugged her and hauled her off without so much as a by-your-leave!”

“Mr. Stanhope is his lordship’s nephew and heir,” said Weldon with infuriating calm. “I do not believe he would wish her ladyship any harm.”

“That bastard’s the old earl’s heir?” How neatly the pieces now fell together! No wonder George Stanhope wanted her money, and no wonder, too, that she didn’t want to give it to him. Besides, he was relieved she had better taste in men than to choose such a sorry specimen, and mentally he apologized for doubting her loyalty to her husband.

“Yes, sir. That is, he is not a bastard, but the son of my lord’s sister Lady Stanhope.” Weldon let a gleam of smug contempt flicker briefly in his eyes, and Jeremiah remembered how the illegitimate daughter of a prostitute had become a countess. Trust a servant—an English servant—never to forget the scandalous details. “Mr. Stanhope is a fine gentleman. It will be an honor to serve him in time.”

“No time soon, if I have anything to say about it.” Jeremiah stared out into the direction the carriage had gone, already making plans. They wouldn’t get far before he found them, for though Stanhope was impulsive, he wasn’t particularly clever. He’d find them and rescue her, for Davy’s sake, as well as her own.

“And Weldon.”

“Yes, sir?”

“As the lady said, Weldon, you go to Hades, too.”

Chapter Four

Jeremiah found Desire in her garden, sitting alone with a book turned open on her knee, in the shadow of a tall boxwood hedge. It was late in the day, too close to dusk for reading any longer, and she had pulled her cashmere shawl over her shoulders and around her arms against the chill. Preoccupied with his own thoughts, he failed to notice how she was here alone at this hour and not inside with Jack or the children, or speaking with the servants concerning supper, and in his eagerness he began speaking as soon as he’d spotted her.

“That woman, Des, that woman’s told me the most amazing thing! She swears that Davy Kerr is still alive, and I’m almost halfway to believing her.”

Desire looked at him sharply. “Whatever are you talking about, Jere? You’re making no sense at all. What woman?” “Caro Moncrief. Lady Byfield. You know, that pretty little countess who tossed me her diamonds.” He sat on the bench beside his sister, resting his hands on his thighs as he stretched his legs out across the grass. “Though I haven’t learned how just yet, she’s come by some sort of paper to the King of Naples that lists prisoners in Tripoli up for ransom, and Davy’s name’s on the list.”

“And you believed her?” asked Desire with dismay. “Oh, Jere, I thought you’d promised not to go near her again!”

“I never promised you anything of the kind, and a good thing, too.” Her lack of excitement disappointed him. Of anyone here in England, he’d expected Desire to be the one who’d understand. “Just as she was explaining it all to me, that same whining little bastard from last night—George Stanhope’s his name—appears on her doorstep, quarrels with her, and when she doesn’t say what he wants, he slaps some sort of smelling spirits over her face and hauls her off in his carriage, just like that! And the worst of it, Des, is that her own people, her butler, who saw the whole thing, are pretending none of it happened.”

“So of course you’ve appointed yourself her savior?”

“I can’t let him get away with kidnapping her, not when she knows about Davy!”

“Or says she does.” She took his hand in hers. “Listen to me, Jeremiah. You can’t let yourself get tangled in Lady Byfield’s affairs. She could have trumped up this whole business about David simply to draw you into her quarrel with George Stanhope. The whole county follows it like a sparring match. It’s been going on for years, all the way back to Frederick’s mother.”

“But Des—”

“No, you listen to me! Most likely Caro learned enough of your past from Jack to appeal to you, and because she can be quite—quite charming, you believe her. Even Jack’s willing to forgive her all manner of impositions, and he’s known her for years.”

“That’s Jack’s folly, not mine. I’m no greenhorn, Desire.” Indignantly he pulled his hand away, folding his arms across his chest. “The woman knew too much about Davy to be cozening me.”

She sighed with exasperation. “Listen to me, you great fool! Even if you manage to separate her from Stanhope, and if she has proof enough that David lives, what then? Go to Tripoli to rescue him, too? Or have you forgotten that America’s at war with the Turks, and that if you’re captured again, this time they’ll make sure they kill you?”

“Oh, aye, and what do I say to Davy’s wife? I’m sorry, Sarah, but I couldn’t go after him from fear of soiling my trouser hems?”

“And what do you say to me, Jeremiah?” demanded Desire. “We’re all that’s left of our family, you and I, and I don’t want you risking your neck because some pretty little chit winks and simpers your way. When I think of how close to death you were when they brought you here—”

Suddenly her voice broke, more emotion than he’d expected spilling over into her words. “I can’t lose you, too, Jere. I can’t. I want you to forget Caro Moncrief and all her foolishness, and I want you to sail for home the way you’ve planned, so I can picture you there in our old house, safe at last.”

She closed her eyes and pressed one hand over her mouth to try to stop the sob that broke through anyway. With her other hand she cradled her belly, striving to calm the child within her, who’d sensed her agitation and grown restless.

“Oh, sweetheart, forgive me,” said Jeremiah, remorse sweeping over him. Awkwardly he slipped his arms around Desire’s shaking shoulders and she buried her face against his chest. She wept from the heart and he let her, patting her back to comfort her as best he could. She was right, they were the last of their family, and he alone understood the depth of the sorrows they’d shared together: the early deaths of both their mother and father, and then, again too soon, that of their younger brother.

The candles and lamps had been lit within the house before she finally grew quiet, and he held her still a little longer to be sure.

“We’d best be off now, Desire,” he said gently. “Jack will be sending out the guard if we don’t go in soon.”

“He’s gone, Jere.” She pushed herself away from him with a final fragmented sob, and took the handkerchief he offered. “He left this afternoon, while you were out.”

“What do you mean he’s gone?”

“What other meaning can there be?” She sniffed loudly, fumbling with the handkerchief as she struggled for her composure. “His orders came for him to rejoin his ship, and by now I expect they’ve cleared Portsmouth to chase after Frenchmen again. He says the Peace of Amiens is nearly done, that this horrid General Bonaparte will break it any day now. Jack’s known for days, but he said he didn’t want to spoil our time together by telling me before he had to.”

Her voice wavered precariously. “He said…he said…oh damn, Jere, I don’t want to cry anymore!”

“Hush now, sweetheart,” he said gently, wishing for something, anything to say to ease her pain, “it will be all right.”

“No, it won’t,” she said bitterly, “not as long as men insist on making war, killing each other for their precious honor, or their king, or some forsaken scrap of land like this wretched Malta. God in heaven, Jere, I don’t even know where Malta is, and for its sake I may lose my husband!”

“Do you know exactly where he’s bound, how long he’ll be gone?”

She stared down at the handkerchief, rolling it tighter and tighter into a soggy ball in her hand. “You know he can’t tell me any of that, Jere. He can’t tell me anything beyond that he’s leaving. Jack’s like that with his orders: the word of the admiralty lords is his almighty God.”

“Then perhaps it’s time he bowed down to something a bit more exalted than his blasted navy.” Although Jeremiah had come to grudgingly respect his brother-in-law as a man, he could never accept Jack for what he represented, the pomp and authority of King George’s Royal Navy, the same navy that had killed Jeremiah and Desire’s father when they’d been little more than children. “How he can abandon you like this, so close to your time—”

“No, Jere, I won’t hear it from you again!” Awkward though she was, Desire rose swiftly to stand before her brother, her hands where her waist used to be. “Jack loves me, Jere. I’ve never once doubted him since we wed, and I never will. He’s a loyal, honorable man, loyal to me and our children and to his country, and I would no more question his right to do what he believes he must than I’d ask you to, oh, quit the sea and become a tinker instead.”

Jeremiah scowled, unable to follow her reasoning. She could preach all she wanted about loyalty, but the fact remained that her husband had left her when she needed him, and as her older brother, the one who’d always protected her, he hated to see her hurt like this. “I’m trying to be serious, and all you can do is make jests about tinkers!”

“And here I thought I was being serious, too.” She rested her hand with the sapphire wedding ring on his arm. “What I’m trying to say, Jeremiah, is that as difficult as it may be, I love Jack enough to let him go. Can’t you understand that?”

“No, sister mine, I cannot. After all the trouble the man went through to win you, he should damned well want to keep by your side!”

“You’ll never change, will you?” she said sorrowfully. She swallowed hard, her fingers tightening on his sleeve. “But maybe you’ll understand this. As much as I wish I could keep you here, I want you to sail for home now, tomorrow, before the French try to blockade the channel again.”

“Desire—”

“Hush, hear me out! If you’re healed enough to chase after Caro Moncrief, you’re more than well enough to travel. You’ve no real reason to stay here. I’ve had Jack book passage for you on an English ship bound for Jamaica, and from there you’ll have no problem finding a sugar sloop for the voyage up the coast to Rhode Island.”

“I can’t do it, Desire,” he said softly. “I’d be a coward if I did.”

“At least you’d be a live coward!”

“Since when has that been an issue for our family, eh?” He touched her cheek with the back of his hand, her face pale and anxious in the twilight. “If you’d taken the safest course, you’d still be a spinster knitting stockings in our grandmother’s parlor on Benefit Street. We Sparhawks don’t always do the wisest thing, but we’re never cowards.”

“Oh, Jeremiah.” She sighed with resignation and leaned against his shoulder. “I thought at least I could try to convince you.”

“You might as well try to coax the moon from the sky. Likely you’re right about Lady Byfield. Likely she doesn’t know any more about David Kerr than she’s already told me. But if she does, and if there’s even a breath of a chance that I can save Davy or any of the others…”

“Of course you must.” She sighed again, and with her handkerchief in her fist, she struck his arm. “It’s the very devil being a Sparhawk, isn’t it? Think if our greatgrandfather had been a tinker instead!”

“Us Sparhawks tinkers?” Jeremiah snorted. “We’d all have died out from boredom long ago.”

“Well, we’re never bored now.” She searched his face, her eyes still too bright. “You will be careful, won’t you? If there’s another war with France, then the whole continent will be turned upside down.”

“Ah, but Des, I’m an American, and none of it will bother me.” With his own handkerchief he wiped away the last of her tears. “If this Napoleon’s fool enough to go after England again, then he’ll get the whipping he deserves and right soon, too. You’ll see, this war, if there is one, will be done in no time, and your Jack will be home in time to see this baby christened.”

“Dear God, I pray you’re right.” Her smile was shaky, but at least, thought Jeremiah, it was a smile. “But Jere, please, please, tell me you’re doing this for Davy’s sake alone and not for that silly Byfield woman.”

Jeremiah saw the concern in his sister’s face, and thought of Caro Moncrief. Yes, Lady Byfield was silly. She was beautiful, too, and charmingly unpredictable, and she’d made him laugh for the first time in months. She was also married, and no matter what the rest of the county gossiped about her, she was clearly in love with her husband. But all that mattered to Jeremiah was that she needed him, and for that he wouldn’t abandon her.

Yet the deeper truth was something he couldn’t admit to Desire. She’d always looked up to him as her big brother, counting on him to be strong. How could he tell her how uncertain he’d become inside? How could he admit that because Caro needed him, he needed her, too?

“Oh, aye, of course I’m doing this for Davy,” he said softly, wishing he didn’t have to lie to Desire. “Come, sister mine, let’s go in the house.”

Slowly, painfully, Caro struggled to force her eyes open. There was a sticky sweet taste in her mouth and her head ached so badly she felt sick to her stomach. What had she eaten for supper? If only she could reach the chamber pot beneath her bed and not retch all over the carpet!

The shadowy figure of a man leaned over her. “Come now, Auntie, don’t play the sleepyhead with me. The servants said you were stirring and I haven’t all day to wait on your pleasure.”

“George?” Her voice was scarcely more than an ineffectual croak as she tried to focus on his face. “Leave my bedchamber before I have you tossed out!”

“How charming, Caro. Your eyes aren’t even open and already you’re giving orders as if you were born to it. Pity you weren’t, isn’t it?”

Her head still spinning, she weakly pushed herself up against the pillows. “You’ve no right to be here, especially to insult me. Where’s Weldon? Why did he let you in?”

George laughed, enjoying her confusion. “Weldon didn’t let me in. Rather he let you out.”

To Caro’s dismay, she realized he was right. Now she remembered how she’d argued with George on the steps of Blackstone House, how he’d grabbed her when she’d turned to leave him, and the same sickly sweet smell of the cloth he’d pressed over her face as he’d pulled her into the carriage.

“You’re my guest now, Caro,” he continued, “and I mean to be a most excellent host to you during your stay here.”

Caro’s dismay deepened as she looked around her. The slanting, water-stained ceiling overhead didn’t belong to any room she recognized, and the single casement beneath the eaves framed no more than a sliver of sky through the narrow, dirty pane. Watching from beside the window, the grim-faced woman with her arms crossed over her breasts bore no resemblance to her own laughing, lighthearted lady’s maid. The linens Caro lay upon were patched and dank, the bedstead hard and narrow, a servant’s bed without curtains or bolster, and beneath the coarse coverlet, she wore not her cambric night rail but only her shift. With an indignant gasp, she clutched the coverlet over her breasts and glared at George, seated beside the bed on the room’s only chair.

“I’d hardly describe myself as your guest, George,” she said tartly, striving for as much dignity as she could muster under the circumstances. “As despicable as you are, I didn’t think you’d lower yourself to kidnapping.”

He cocked his head, striving to look contrite. “Kidnapping seems a bit harsh. Think of it instead as an opportunity for you to reconsider certain of your…misconceptions.”

“Don’t try and put a pretty face on it, George,” she snapped. “It’s kidnapping, nothing less, and I’m certain the magistrates will agree with me. And my only ‘misconception’ was to trust you as much as I did.”

In her mind she was already framing the words she’d use to swear out a writ against him. Even with Frederick’s title to protect her, she’d have to be careful: to a magistrate, George would seem more a model English gentleman than a villain. He was a small man, the same height as Caro herself, and because his features were fine boned, almost too pretty, he favored expensive boots and coats cut to make him look like some bluff country squire. In a group of men George Stanhope was always the one who laughed the loudest, and among ladies he was known as a witty, agreeable partner, free with compliments and trinkets.

Yet from the first time George had bowed over her hand, Caro had not been fooled. She, too, was a sparrow made bright in false plumage, and she was quick to recognize the wish for the same in George. But where she would have loved a penniless Frederick for his kindness alone, all of George’s fawning attention had been dependent on her husband’s wealth and generosity. It was his expectations of Frederick’s death that paid George’s tailor and bought the gewgaws for his mistresses, and those same expectations that had made him bring her here.

He smiled now, still trying to charm her into compliance. “I didn’t ask for your trust, Auntie, only your common sense where poor old Frederick is concerned.”

“Frederick will have your head when he learns of this, and then you’ll find there’s nothing poor about him.” She tugged the coverlet higher. “Now that you’ve had your little amusement, would you please bring me my clothing so I might dress and go home?”

“I told you, Caro, you’re my guest, and I won’t part with your company just yet. But such a wifely, if belated, show of modesty!” Insolently his gaze flicked over her bare shoulders. “These last hours while you’ve been unconscious I’ve had time enough to acquaint myself with your most intimate charms.”

“But that woman…’’ She glanced at the grim serving woman across the room. Wherever her clothing had gone, she’d assumed that the woman had undressed her, not George.

George shrugged. “Oh, Mrs. Warren is paid well enough to watch—whether it’s you, me, or both of us.” He leaned closer over her, and she forced herself not to draw back. “Your husband is a far more fortunate man than I’d suspected.”

“You didn’t,” she said slowly. “Not even you would dare do that.”

He shrugged again, his very carelessness suggesting a one-sided intimacy.

Fighting against her own uncertainty, she refused to believe all that smirk suggested. Could she really have been that vulnerable? Surely she would know if he’d—he’d used her the way he implied. Unconscious or not, her body couldn’t have been so insensitive, so unknowing, that she’d feel no different now. She closed her eyes, unable to meet the implication in his, and instead she saw another man’s hands reaching for her, grabbing her, his gnarled fingers digging into her trembling, terrified flesh.…

George trailed his forefinger along her cheek, the nail grating just enough across her skin to jerk her back to the present. She was a woman now, not a child. She knew how to fight back. Furiously she struck his hand away from her face.

“Don’t you ever touch me again, George!” Anger and hatred made her voice icy cold. “Can you understand that? Never!”

George’s lips pressed together into a tight, narrow line, as all vestiges of his customary charm vanished. “Save your protests for when they’re justified, Caro. I haven’t laid a finger on your dubious virtue. You are, after all, merely a bit of garnish beside a much richer meal, and as delicious as you likely are, you’re not worth risking the whole.”

“You are vile!” She nearly spat the words.

“No, Auntie, I’m simply weary of waiting.” He pushed the chair back from the bed and walked over to the window, the morning sun making a bright halo of his golden hair. “Your room here has a most excellent prospect of the harbor. You’ll also note that you’re four stories above the ground. The door will be locked—to protect you from harm, of course—and Mrs. Warren will see to your meals and other needs. I’ll keep your gown and slippers myself, so they won’t become soiled.”

“You can’t keep me here, locked away as your prisoner!” cried Caro, fighting her panic. She must not show any weakness before George. “Weldon must have seen what you did to me. He’ll send for the authorities, and they’ll—”

Smiling to himself, George tapped lightly on the window. “Weldon’s no fool, Caro. He knows how his bread will soon be buttered. He saw nothing unusual in your departure, and he’ll tell the other servants that you’ve gone.”

“You bribed my servants!” Unable to lie still any longer, she flung the coverlet around her shoulders and slid unsteadily from the bed. “First you kidnap me, and then you poison my people against me with your own worthless promises! This time I will go to Mr. Perkins and swear against you! When he realizes I’ve disappeared—”

“But he won’t, you see. Perkins believes you have gone to visit a friend to the north.”

“Not Perkins, too!” she cried. “God in heaven, George, when I tell this to Frederick—”

“But you won’t, Caro, because Frederick is dead.” He turned away from the window and headed toward the door, nodding curtly at Mrs. Warren to follow. “The sooner you accept his death and agree to begin the proper proceedings, the sooner you can leave.”

“No, George, I won’t do it! Frederick’s not dead. I would know it in my heart if he were! Somewhere he lives, somewhere he’s waiting for me, I know, and nothing you can say or do will change that!” She lunged for George’s arm to stop him before he locked her away, but her feet tangled in the trailing coverlet and she stumbled forward, her knees and arms hitting hard on the bare floorboards. “Wait, George, damn you, wait!”

“How charming,” said George, pausing with the door half shut. “The curse of an illegitimate child prostitute, seducer of a man old enough to be her father. You let Mrs. Warren know when you’ve come to your senses, Caro, and then we’ll speak again.”

She looked up as the key turned in the lock, and with a muffled cry of despair she sank back down to the floor, burying her face in the coverlet.

She tried to think of Frederick, to remember how his smile lit his blue eyes with pleasure when she played the pianoforte for him, no matter how many wrong notes she struck, to recall the faint fragrance of his tobacco on his coat and the contented sigh he made when he sat in the bargello armchair at the end of the day. She tried to imagine what he’d say to her now, if she could once again kneel on the floor beside him with her head resting on his knees, how gently he would stroke the back of her head and tell her not to fuss and worry, that life was too dear to waste it on ill feelings.

Why, then, was such hatred and greed destroying everything that Frederick had valued most? Why, why had he left her when she needed him so?

With a little sob of loneliness she curled deeper into herself, striving for the elusive comfort that her husband’s memory might bring. And then, strangely, the memory shifted. It wasn’t Frederick’s voice she heard in her head, but a deeper one, rumbling thick with an American accent.

“I’ll set it all to rights, sweetheart,” Jeremiah Sparhawk was saying as he held her against the hard muscles of his chest. His large hands along her body were warm and sure, a caress that fired her blood and made her heart race. “I won’t let that thieving bastard hurt you.”

She gasped and sat bolt upright. What had come over her? It must have been whatever drug George had used to rob her of her senses, returning again to steal her wits. Only once had she let the man kiss her, and here she was daydreaming of him like some moonstruck serving girl! She certainly had no business looking to Captain Sparhawk to rescue her, any more than she had the right to turn to him for comfort. He’d been furious when she’d left him at Blackstone House. What must his temper have been when she didn’t return as she’d promised?

She sighed deeply, rubbing her fingertips across her forehead. The American had been her last hope for finding Frederick, and even then Jack had told her she’d only have two weeks to convince Captain Sparhawk before he sailed for home. Now most likely he wouldn’t even speak to her, let alone risk his life to help find her husband.

Slowly she pushed herself up from the floor, drawing the coverlet around her shoulders like a shawl as she went to the window. From the houses across the street, she realized George had brought her to the attic of his own lodgings. She was surprised that he’d be so obvious, but then why should he bother to take her to a more secretive spot? No one would suspect him because no one was looking for her.

She stared down at the paving stones in the courtyard four stories below and groaned with frustration. She’d never be able to help Frederick as long as she was locked away up here. Somehow, she must find a way to escape.

Somehow she must, and soon.

Chapter Five

“Oh, aye, sir, that be Mr. Stanhope’s house,” said the scullery maid, swinging the market basket before her as she smiled winningly up at Jeremiah. “Or leastways it be where he lives for now. Grand prospects, sir, that be what Mr. Stanhope has, on account o’ him bein’ heir to a great title. The Earl o’ Byfield, that’s what he’ll be.”

“Too grand he’ll be for the likes of us, eh, lass?” said Jeremiah as he returned the girl’s smile. He’d waited all morning for someone to come from the house, and finally luck had sent him this guileless little red-haired girl, fresh from the country. “But tell me: does he have a lady staying with him now?”

“Eh, sir, when don’t Mr. Stanhope have a lady there, that be the more proper question!” The girl giggled and glanced nervously over her shoulder, hoping that neither the cook nor the butler would catch her talking to the stranger. Of course she’d been warned against dawdling with men on the street, but this one wasn’t some randy, pigtailed jack-tar from the fleet. No, this one was a gentleman, and handsome, too, with his green eyes and shoulders as wide as a house. Where could be the harm? “As Mrs. Warren’s always sayin’, sir, Mr. Stanhope likes his ladies, an’ the ladies like him.”

“Then you’d best look after yourself, sweetheart, once he finds what a little beauty he’s harboring under his own roof.” The girl blushed and giggled more just the way Jeremiah knew she would, the same way women always did. Or almost always: it certainly hadn’t been as easy with Lady Byfield. “But I’ve a reason for asking about this particular lady. I’m asking for a friend whose sister’s run off with a gentleman, and I’m afraid it may be your Mr. Stanhope.”

“Oh, lud!” The girl’s eyes widened, delighted as she was to be party to a possible scandal. “Now Mrs. Warren did say there was a new lady come yesterday, an’ grumblin’ she was because Mr. Stanhope ordered her t’ take the trays up t’ her special herself. Mrs. Warren don’t gossip overmuch, an’ course she wouldn’t tell me the lady’s name, but she did say this one be prettier than most, with silver hair an’ blue eyes turned up like a fairy’s, even if she do be vexin’ the master with her chatterin’.”

The girl leaned closer, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Mrs. Warren says the master had t’ take away her clothes t’ keep her quiet an’ lock her up in the room under the eaves! Can you fancy that, sir? Takin’ away a lady’s clothes on account o’ her speakin’ out!”

Indeed, he could fancy it, and a good deal more graphically than this little country girl would ever guess. Of course the woman was Caro. With upturned blue eyes and too much chatter, it couldn’t be anyone else.

For a moment doubt flickered through his conscience. Desire had said the battles between Lady Byfield and George Stanhope were well-known. What if they really were lovers? He’d judged it so himself at first, and he’d seen stranger relationships between men and women, particularly when one of them was married to another. What if he went blundering in to save a lady who didn’t want saving?

Then he remembered how she’d wept with such genuine emotion when she’d spoken of her husband, and how roughly George Stanhope had treated her beside her carriage. No, that hadn’t been lovers’ play. Jeremiah’s frown deepened when he thought of what the man would do to her when he had her under his own roof.

“How the devil can he expect to get away with that?” he demanded, as much to himself as to the girl. “This is supposed to be a civilized country, isn’t it? A man can’t haul off and make some woman his prize just because he wants her!”

The girl looked at him pityingly, the ruffles on her cap fluttering in the breeze. “I didn’t think you was an Englishman, sir, on account of how you talk. Do you be Irish, then?”

“Nay, lass, American, and where I come from a lady’s safe from rascals like your Mr. Stanhope.”

“American! La, no wonder you don’t understand our ways!” She spoke firmly, almost lecturing him, as if he were some half-wit savage—the opinion most English held of Americans.

“In England we all know our place,” she explained. “Them that’s our betters can do things different than me or you. Because Mr. Stanhope’s bound to be an earl, he can do what he pleases with his new sweetheart, an’ none will judge him the worse for it. There be no law against what they do with themselves, leastways for gentry like him. Can you fancy a constable knockin’ on his door wit’ a warrant for hidin’ a lady’s gown? That constable’d be lookin’ for work for certain if’n he tried that!”

She giggled again, her red-knuckled fingers over her mouth, and Jeremiah forced himself to smile in return. As foolish as the little creature was, what she said was all too true, and it echoed Desire’s warnings, too. No matter how convinced he was that Lady Byfield was being held against her will, he’d never be able to find an English judge to agree with him against George Stanhope. If he wanted to free her, he’d have to do it himself.

“Don’t judge me bold for askin’, sir,” the girl was saying, swaying her hips suggestively beneath her apron as she looked up at him from under her stubby lashes, “but do all American men be so tall an’ comely?”

“Nay, lass, not at all,” he answered, his face impassive. “In Rhode Island I’m rated a poor fifth-rate runtling, not worth the trouble to feed or keep. Why else do you think I’ve been sent here?”

The girl gasped, speechless at the possibilities. Jeremiah chucked her beneath the chin and patted her cheek. “Good day to you now, darling. The lady I’m seeking is dark haired, not fair, but I still thank you for your help.”

He lifted his hat and turned away, but she moved quickly, blocking his path with her basket.

“Sir, oh sir!” she said, smiling as coquettishly as she could. “My name’s Betsy White, sir, an’ tonight’s my turn t’ step out t’ visit my sister. She lives in Tower Street, does my sister, the last house near the pump, an’ she don’t mind if I have friends.”

“Miss Betsy, then.” This time he was able to dodge the girl and her basket. “Your sister in Tower Street, this very night. You can be sure I won’t forget it, lass.”

He wouldn’t, either. He didn’t want anyone in Stanhope’s house who might recognize him tonight when he came back for Lady Byfield.

With another war imminent, many of the ships in the channel fleet had returned to Portsmouth for a final victualing and refitting before once again settling into the necessary tedium of blockading the French coast. Ships in port meant sailors in town, and the streets of the town were crowded with crews celebrating one last, boisterous shore leave.

Jeremiah was thankful for the sailors’ excesses. Although the citizens of Portsmouth were generally tolerant of rollicking strangers, tonight decent folk would prefer their own company and keep to their houses. Even on this quiet street, no one would notice another man who kept to the shadows, albeit one who glanced repeatedly at the bright three-quarter moon for solace against the darkness around him.

He waited in the park across the street from Stanhope’s house, watching until the last curtains were drawn and the lights put out for the night. To his surprise, Stanhope left in a carriage with several companions, all laughing and dressed for evening amusements. Though he knew he should be relieved that Stanhope had left Caro, Jeremiah was more disappointed. He’d anticipated thrashing Stanhope in his own house. Touching the pistols in his belt for reassurance, he crossed the street and rapped on the front door with his knuckles.

A sleepy-eyed footman finally opened the door a crack, his nightcap askew as he peered at Jeremiah. “Shove off before you wake your betters, Jack,” he ordered, seeing the rough, anonymous sailor’s clothing Jeremiah had chosen, “else I’ll call the watch on you. We’ve no use for your sort in this neighborhood.”

But as he began to shut the door, Jeremiah braced his shoulder against the heavy oak and thrust the barrel of one of the pistols through the opening and against the footman’s ribs. The man made a garbled, gasping sound as he stared at the pistol, his hands fluttering off the doorjamb as he backed away. “Spare me, sir, oh sir, please don’t kill me, not even the master’s plate’s worth my life!”

“Nay, I’d wager it don’t even come close,” growled Jeremiah as he forced his way into the house and shoved the door shut. A night-light hung overhead, the light from the floating wick tinted pale blue by the lantern’s glass, the footman’s round face beneath it ghastly pale. “Look at how you’re all aquiver, you yellow-bellied little coward!”

“Please, sir, I beg your mercy! The master don’t keep no hard money in the house, but I swear on my mother’s honor that the pitchers there on that table are sterling, and—”

“Don’t want ‘em,” said Jeremiah. “Where’s the lady Stanhope brought here yesterday?”

The man’s mouth turned down. “At the top of the last stairs, in Addy’s old room. The door’s locked, but the key’s hanging on the peg opposite for Mrs. Warren.”

“The devil take you if you play me false!”

“I swear it’s true! But the master’s orders—”

“Do you think I give a damn about that bastard’s orders?” Jeremiah jerked his head toward the adjoining room. “In there with you, and be quick about it.”

“Oh, no, sir, I won’t let you kill me like that!” Clutching his nightcap, the man turned to run, and with a muttered oath, Jeremiah tapped him on the back of his head with the butt of his pistol. The footman slumped to the floor, his eyes still wide but now unseeing.

Swiftly Jeremiah dragged him into the drawing room and bound him to a straight-back chair with the line he’d brought in his pocket, tying a rag around the man’s mouth as a gag before he turned the chair to the wall, far away from any windows or door. He was sure he could count on at least a quarter hour before the footman was missed, maybe more, plenty of time to find Caro.

But back in the hall he stared up the long, dark—too dark—stairway, the old fears returning, pressing down on him like a weight he couldn’t lift. He’d counted on the footman bringing some sort of candlestick to the door, not realizing the man would rely on the night-light alone. His heart pounding and his palm damp around the pistol’s butt, he tried to swallow back his growing dread. He could turn around and walk away alone in the bright moonlight, or he could climb up into the darkness to search for Caro. He could sail for Jamaica tomorrow, the way his sister hoped, and never look back.

A coward’s comfort, or his friends and a woman who needed his help.

Another chance to fail, or another chance to prove himself.

No choice at all for a Sparhawk.

He swore beneath his breath as he headed up the stairs, trying to keep his footsteps quiet. Footsteps, hell. He’d wake the whole house with the pounding of his heart. One landing, then another, the light from the lantern below fainter with each turning. His fingers gripped the pistol more tightly. Three flights, the footman had said. He was almost there. He could just make out the single closed door ahead, a gray stripe of moonlight along the bottom.

Almost there, and still the demons hadn’t claimed him.

“Lady Byfield?”

Lying awake, curled on the narrow bed, Caro held her breath and listened, her ears straining to hear again what she feared she’d only imagined.

“Are you in there? Lady Byfield, ma’am?”

She flew off the bed and ran to the locked door. “Captain Sparhawk! Whatever are you doing here?”

“What the hell do you think I’m doing?”

She heard the key scrape in the lock and then he was there, a pistol in his hand and a wild expression in his eyes. Each time she saw him she was startled again by his size, how much larger and stronger he was than herself, and unconsciously she drew back. He was, she supposed, her savior, but she hadn’t counted on being saved quite this way, and she’d certainly no intention of throwing herself into his arms the way the heroines did in operas and plays.

“Has Stanhope hurt you, lass?” He was breathing hard, his face shiny with sweat, and she wondered what he’d had to do to reach her. She had no experience with men as purely physical as this one, but she’d guess that Captain Sparhawk could leave a whole trail of bodies behind him. “Has he used you ill?”

“Oh no, not like that!” She was glad that in the gray moonlight through the window he couldn’t see how she blushed. He might not have meant ‘like that’ at all; it was only her thoughts that ran that way. “That is, I am well enough.”

He rubbed his sleeve across his forehead, his gaze sweeping around the tiny room. “Damnation, didn’t he even give you a candlestick?”

She shook her head. “George probably believed I’d try to burn his house down.”

“Then let’s shove off before that damned footman I had to cosh wakes. Come on, lass, hurry!”

“Have you lost your wits?” She stared at him indignantly. “I can’t possibly go with you! Can you imagine what George would think?”

“I can’t, and I don’t care.”

“Well, perhaps you just should. Do you think George has forgotten that you were the highwayman who robbed him the other night? He’s already filed a complaint against you, and I shouldn’t wonder if they’re printing broadsides with your description even now. Of course this footman you so elegantly—what was the word?—coshed will say it was the same man who came here and kidnapped me, and you’ll find yourself at the hangman’s tree so fast you’ll wonder how it happened.”

Now it was his turn to stare at her. “That’s the greatest pack of claptrap I’ve ever heard! You were the one who forced me into that nonsense about being a highwayman, and it was Stanhope, not me, who kidnapped You in the first place! No court in the world could make any of that stick!”

“Not in the world, no,” she admitted, “but here in Hampshire George has enough friends that he probably could bring it to pass. I really wouldn’t want you hung on my account.”

“And neither, ma’am, would I.” He held his hand out to her, more a command than an invitation. “So let’s clear off while we can.”

Still she hesitated. True, she’d sought the man’s help for Frederick’s sake, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to be indebted to him for her own, as well. “I’ve made great progress with that Mrs. Warren, you know. I think she’d be willing to let me escape some morning if I paid her enough. George isn’t the only one who can bribe servants.”

Jeremiah swore. “Will you come, or do I have to carry you?”

“That won’t be necessary.” She lifted her chin and swept past him, the coverlet dragging behind her like a train.

“Damnation, I forgot you hadn’t any clothes!”

She let the coverlet slip a bit, and grinned over her bare shoulder. “George has them somewhere, and I don’t think he’d return them now if we asked.”

“We’ll deal with it later,” he said. “Now hurry!”

She skipped along ahead of him, her bare feet silent on the stairs. With her hair loose and tousled around her shoulders, she looked like what she was, a woman roused from her bed, and in spite of everything else, Jeremiah couldn’t forget it as he followed close behind.

Close enough that he could smell her fragrance, close enough that he could see the soft curves of her body through the coverlet—God help him, was she naked beneath it?—close enough to remind him all too well of how sweet she’d been to kiss.…

Blast, did she mean to be so teasing, or was it just another of her unending games? She’d made it clear enough that she loved her husband, and Jeremiah would respect that, not wishing to poach on another man’s well-staked territory. He never had before. But still Caro seemed determined to play the coquette with him, even now, when he should have been concentrating on getting her safely from this house. Any other woman would have been terrified, clinging to him from sheer gratitude, but she was treating the whole business like a lark. Telling him he’d be dancing on a rope’s end for kidnapping her! His sister was right: the sooner he disentangled himself from Lady Byfield’s affairs, the better.

And then at the bottom of the steps to the street, she turned up and smiled at him, a smile so breathtakingly art less in the moonlight that he nearly forgot all his intentions and kissed her. “You did it, Captain Sparhawk, didn’t you? Rescued me from the dragon’s lair like some poor fair damsel?”

“Not quite. The dragon could still wake and eat you up.” He grabbed her by her elbow and hustled her across the street to the little park. She seemed shorter somehow, and then he remembered her bare feet. “Oh, hell, you can’t walk, can you?”

“Of course I can walk. I’m a countess, not a ninny. I’ve told you before I rather like doing without shoes.” She looked around the trees, her curiosity as frank as a child’s. “How far is your carriage?”

“There isn’t any damned carriage.” His frustration growing, he uncocked the pistol and shoved it back into his belt. “Hired carriages are easy to trace. I’d thought we’d walk down near the waterfront and hire a chaise there to take you to your friends.”

“Then I suppose we should begin walking, shouldn’t we?” She hiked the coverlet higher over her shoulders and began striding resolutely off in the wrong direction. He caught her by the arm and turned her around, and she laughed merrily at her own mistake.

“Hush now, lass,” he said uneasily. “Won’t do to call attention to ourselves.”

She clapped her hand over her mouth, then lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Forgive me, Captain. I forgot that strolling along Queen’s Court in my shift at midnight isn’t enough to get me—even me—noticed.”

“We’ll find you some clothes soon enough.” Damnation, why had she had to tell him that? She was as good as naked beside him, and he felt his own body responding with alarming interest. “Now tell me the names of your friends here in town I could take you to.”

Her head bowed, she didn’t answer at first. “There aren’t any.”

“All right then, in the countryside,” he said, exasperated by her pickiness. “I forget you fashionable gentry don’t believe in living in towns.”

“No, that’s not it.” Her voice was so soft that he had to strain to hear it. “I meant that I don’t have any friends. Before Frederick married me, none of his friends’ wives would receive me, and afterward Frederick decided we wouldn’t receive them. So you see we’ve always kept to ourselves at Blackstone House, and that’s always been enough. Until now, anyway.”

“Then there must be a someone else. An aunt or uncle, or some business acquaintance of your husband’s?”

“Only George on Frederick’s side.” She smiled bitterly. Once she would have turned to Mr. Perkins, but now she didn’t trust George not to have poisoned the lawyer against her, too, just as he had her own servants. She’d always suspected how little they’d respected her, no matter how much she’d tried to be fair and kind, and now she had the unhappy proof.

Her eyes were troubled, her manner uncharacteristically hesitant, as she glanced up toward Jeremiah. “Your sister Desire lives near Portsmouth. Could I possibly stay with her?”

Jeremiah sighed, unsure of how to answer without wounding her more, but that sigh was answer enough for Caro.

“No, of course not,” she said quickly with forced cheerfulness, now trying to spare him. “Whatever am I saying, inviting myself into her house like that?”

“It’s not what you’re thinking, Caro,” he said. “My sister’s not much for any guests these days, not with her husband just gone off with the fleet and her third child due within the month.”

Caro’s face softened. “Oh, a baby!” she murmured. “How fortunate your sister must be to have a family like that! I’ve always wanted—no, I shouldn’t go wishing for more, not after all the good things life’s given me. Of course your sister couldn’t take in a stray like me at such a time. Please wish her well when you see her again.”

But this time her attempts to be the grand, gracious Lady Byfield failed miserably. Her words might be brave, but the forlorn slump of her shoulders told a different story that didn’t escape Jeremiah.

Gently he slipped his arm over her shoulders. “I’m not about to cast you off alone, Caro. First we’ll find you something more suitable to wear and a decent place to stay, then we’ll consider the rest one step at a time.”

“The poor damsel is most grateful,” she said with more wistfulness than she’d intended. “And I do intend to pay you back.”

“Oh, hush,” he scoffed gruffly. “I’ll hear none of that. My coin spends every bit as well as yours, and since I’ve brought you this far, you’ll be my guest.”

She smiled, thinking how different Captain Sparhawk’s offer of hospitality was from George’s. He didn’t resemble any other gentleman she’d ever known, but she liked him. She liked him very much. “I didn’t mean to pay you with guineas, though your offer is most generous. You’ve done me a great favor, and so, if you’ll let me, I’ll do one for you. Your friend Mr. Kerr—”

“Later, Caro,” said Jeremiah sharply, drawing her closer beneath his arm. “We’ve company.”

They had come to a neighborhood that Caro didn’t recognize, one with narrow streets and ancient, dilapidated buildings whose upper stories jutted crazily over their heads. The paving stones beneath her bare feet had been replaced by hard-packed dirt, and the stench wafting from the street made her long for shoes of any sort. Two sailors were weaving toward them, navy men with long pigtails down their backs and round, flat-rimmed hats with embroidered ribbon bands, and unsteady as they were on their feet, there was no mistaking the eager hunger in their eyes as they stared at Caro.

A lifetime ago, but she’d never forgotten that look in a man’s eyes. Greed and lust, a predator’s cold need, marking her, using her, ruining her beyond redemption. All she had, all she was, to be sold to the man with the deepest pockets.

“Tumbled the chit right out o’ her hammock, sheets an’ all, did you, mate?” asked the first seaman, fumbling in the bag around his neck for another coin as he leered at Caro. “Saints, but she’s finer than any o’ the drabs we seen in the fancy houses on Water Street. How much’ll you take for a turn wit’ her?”

“Not a farthing,” said Jeremiah with a quiet authority that startled Caro.

“Ah, mate, we’s only askin’ to share yer good fortune!”

“The lady’s with me,” said Jeremiah, his voice rumbling deeper. “And she’s not for sale.”

The man raised his hands and backed away, intimidated by the threat in Jeremiah’s voice. “Meanin’ no offense, gov’ner. She’s yours, an’ there it ends. No offense.”

But his companion had had his courage bolstered by more rum, and he lurched toward Caro to snatch the coverlet away. “Come on, lovey, let’s have some sport.”

The knife was in Jeremiah’s hand in an instant, the long blade flashing in the moonlight. The second sailor yowled and stumbled back, clutching his arm where blood was already darkening the slashed sleeve of his jacket.

“I told you,” said Jeremiah as he guided Caro past them, “the lady’s with me.”

“You would have killed him, wouldn’t you?” whispered Caro. The ease and violence with which he’d defended her stunned her. Frederick would never have dreamed of doing such a thing, even if he’d been able. “Just like that, you would have killed him.”

Jeremiah made a disgusted sound deep in his chest as he wiped the knife’s blade clean. “If I’d had to, aye. But that bit of English foolishness wasn’t worth the killing.”

She tried to smile. “But this bit of English foolishness was worth defending that way?”

He glanced at her sharply, surprised by the quaver in her voice. She looked small and waifish, her mouth pinched and her eyes still wide from what she’d just witnessed. Belatedly he realized that while dockyard arguments and drawn knives were nothing new to him, she’d be accustomed to more tender circumstances. He longed to take her in his arms and reassure her, to hold her until the fear left her eyes, but the memory of that well-loved husband stood uneasily between them, and instead all he did was slip the knife back in the sheath at his waist and clear his throat.

“There’s nothing foolish about you, lass,” he said gruffly, “except, maybe, the way you’ve rigged yourself out. But we’ll remedy that directly.”

He pounded on the door of a shop with men and women’s second-hand clothing hanging from a rod in the window until a sleepy old woman answered the door.

“Can’t ye read the sign, ye great bluff baboon?” she said. “We’re closed.”

“Not now, are you?” Jeremiah raised a guinea in his fingers to glitter in the moonlight, and at once the woman opened the door. “The lady needs a gown, and whatever else she pleases.”

“Ain’t ye the Lord Generous,” grumbled the woman, eyeing Caro critically. “What’s become o’ yer own clothes, girl?”

“She lost ‘em throwing dice with a crimp,” answered Jeremiah dryly. “Look quick about it, ma’am, we haven’t all night.”

Chapter Six

Within an hour Caro was dressed decently, if not fashionably, in a linsey-woolsey gown with a checkered scarf tied around her throat and over her breasts and a chip bonnet with a limp pink rose on her head, and perched on a bench across a table from Jeremiah in a bustling tavern near the water. Before her sat a slice of onion pie topped with yellow cheese and a tankard of cider, and nothing in her life had ever tasted so good. Although she guessed the hour must be closer to dawn than midnight, the tavern was full of sailors, shipwrights, carters, colliers and their women, and Caro leaned closer to Jeremiah to hear him over the din of their laughter and shouted conversations and the fiddle player near the hearth.

“I said, Caro, that Stanhope will think you’ve vanished from the face of the earth.” He thumped his own tankard of ale down on the oak table for emphasis. “As far as he’s concerned, you have. Look at you! No one would ever believe you’re a countess now!”

She grinned, and took another bite of the pie. To see Jeremiah Sparhawk across from her now, his face relaxed and his green eyes warm as he teased her, made it easy for her to forget the pistols and the long, bloodied knife at his waist. He really wasn’t much better than the highwayman they’d pretended he was. Maybe no Americans were. His gift for self-preservation would make him perfect for the task she meant to set before him, and with his chivalrous inclinations on her behalf he’d be bound to agree. Now if only she could convince herself that her own feelings toward him were equally mercenary!

For the first time, she wished she knew more of men and the world. Before she’d met Captain Sparhawk, she’d been able to divide them neatly in two: there were the precious few like Frederick and Jack Herendon, who treated her with kindness and respect, and then there were all the others, who looked at her with a blatant mixture of contempt and lust. But no man she’d ever met treated her like this oversize American, teasing and bantering with her one moment and then willing to fight to the death for her honor the next, and to her confusion, she liked it. She liked him, more than she should, certainly more than was proper for her as Frederick’s wife.

Jeremiah covered her hand with his and the warmth of his touch raced through her. “You’re quiet, lass,” he asked with real concern. “Weariness, or is there something else that ails you?”

“Weariness.” How could she ever admit that he was what ailed her? “Nothing more, nothing less.”

Self-consciously she withdrew her hand, but as she sipped her cider, her eyes met his over the tankard’s battered rim. There was gray streaked through his black hair at the temples, and from the deep lines that fanned from his eyes when he smiled, she knew he’d seen much of life, not all of it good. But she also knew better than to ask. She had more than her own share of secrets to keep hidden.

“Then I’d best find us lodgings for what’s left of the night.” He kept his hand on the table after she’d pulled hers back, unspoken admission of her rebuke, and he studied it now as if surprised to find it there. “Though truth to tell, I like where I am just fine.”

In the crowded, noisy, smoky room his smile was for her alone, an invitation she had no right to accept. She must end this now, while she still could.

“I told you I would pay you back your kindness with the information you wished about your friend, and I will. But first I must tell you of Frederick.”

“You don’t have to,” said Jeremiah quickly, perhaps too quickly. But he didn’t want to hear again of the paragon that was Caro’s husband, or how much she loved him. No, he didn’t want to hear that again at all. “You’ve told me more than enough already, and I wouldn’t want you to speak of anything that might cause you pain.”

Selfish, conniving bastard! He couldn’t believe he’d actually said that, especially after the lovely, grateful smile she gave him that he didn’t deserve.

“No, Captain, I’ve scarcely told you anything.” With a sigh she pushed the pewter plate to one side and clasped her hands on the table before her. She looked very young in the old-fashioned bonnet, her face framed by the curving brim, and he’d meant it when he’d said no one would believe her a countess now. “Frederick’s mother, the dowager countess, still lives, though she is very old and not well. I’ve never been presented to her. Before I was Frederick’s wife there wasn’t any question of it, but when she learned we planned to wed, she left England for Naples so she wouldn’t have to acknowledge me. It was—is—very painful for Frederick, though of course I understand entirely.”

Yet the way Caro looked down at her hands, rubbing one thumb against the other, told Jeremiah that she didn’t understand at all, and that the elder Lady Byfield’s scorn wounded her every bit as much as it did Frederick. Pompous old bitch, thought Jeremiah angrily. His sister had told him how she herself had been snubbed in certain aristocratic circles simply for being an untitled American who’d had the audacity to marry the younger son of an English lord, and he imagined what those same overbred vultures would make of poor Caro.

“Two years ago this summer Frederick’s mother finally agreed to see him again,” she continued sadly, “and with great joy and eagerness he booked his passage to Naples. She specifically excluded me from her invitation, but Frederick held great hopes for their reconciliation. I wept for days and days after he sailed. We had never been apart, you know, not since my fourteenth birthday.”

Jeremiah nearly choked on his ale. He’d known she’d been young, but fourteen, for all love!

“I had one letter from him,” she said, unaware of his reaction, “brought by another ship that had met his, and then nothing more because—why is everyone running away?”

All around them men were shouting and abandoning their drink and their women to crowd out the back door, some not waiting their turn and climbing through the windows instead.

A laconic barmaid reached over to take Caro’s empty plate and swipe a rag across the tabletop. “It’s the pressgangs again, lamb,” she explained. “They’ve been at it so hot all this week that the few men left run like frightened coneys at the very hint o’ a lieutenant an’ his bullyboys.”

Slowly the woman straightened, hands on her hips and her full breasts jutting out above her bodice as she languidly surveyed Jeremiah. “Best tell your pretty sailor man here to turn tail with the others ‘less he wants to spend the next seven years servin’ against the French.”

Caro gasped and shoved her bench back from the table. “Oh, Captain, she’s right! There must be three score navy vessels in the harbor now—I saw them from the window at George’s house—and they’ll all be looking for men! Come, hurry, you don’t want them to take you!”

“Hush now, lass, they’ll not take me.” He caught her wrist and gently forced her back down to her seat. “I’m an American, mind?”

The barmaid sniffed. “Don’t be so sure, Yankee. There was two New Yorkers here the other night had their protections torn up right afore their eyes. The lieutenant called them bloody liars an’ read them into the king’s service anyways.”

Alarmed all over again, Caro tugged at Jeremiah’s hand. “Hurry, then, there’s little to be gained taking chances like this!”

“There’s no chance to it, Caro,” scoffed Jeremiah, touched and pleased by her concern. “I’m an American, and I’m a captain and owner of my own vessels. Six of ‘em, last I counted. They can’t touch me.”

Pointedly the barmaid studied how he was dressed and sniffed again, not believing his claim for a moment. “Please yerself, Cap’n,” she said with a dismissive shrug, “for here they be now.”

Abruptly the fiddler stopped playing in the middle of his tune, and every one of the people who remained—women, toothless old men and those missing limbs, sailors already serving with a ship and watermen protected by the crown—turned to stare in hostile silence at the six men standing in the doorway. At their head was a young navy lieutenant in a blue coat and two marines in red, and behind them stood three more seamen, clearly chosen for their size and fearsomeness.

The lieutenant scowled as he scanned the room. Empty seats with half-full tankards and tumblers before them were testimony enough that they’d arrived too late to find any useful men.

“An empty net tonight, eh, Lieutenant?” taunted one old man, his cackle echoed by the others. “The fish all slipped through yer net again?”

Angrily the officer searched the room for the man who’d mocked him. His gaze stopped when he spotted Caro and Jeremiah at their table near the far wall, and with a tight-lipped, predatory smile on his face he headed toward their table. One of the bad men, decided Caro uneasily, one of the ones who only wanted to hurt.

“You there, skulking behind the petticoats!” he said sharply. “What ship, eh?”

Her anxiety mounting, Caro watched as Jeremiah slowly rose to his feet, using his height to his advantage as he towered over the others. It seemed to her he was twice the size of the little lieutenant, and despite his rough, common clothing, there was more authority in him alone than in all three of the uniformed Englishmen combined.

The lieutenant knew it, too, and didn’t like it. “I asked you your ship, you insolent dog.”

“I’m not a dog, but a captain,” answered Jeremiah with a mildness that didn’t fool Caro. She thought of the pistols in his belt beneath his coat and the knife at his waist and who only knew what else, and prayed he wouldn’t be halfwitted enough to use any of them now.

“An American captain,” continued Jeremiah, “a shipmaster and an owner of nearly twenty years’ standing. I stood my own quarterdeck before you were breeched, you English puppy, and I’ll thank you to remember it before I report you to your betters for ill breeding.”

The others in the room hooted and laughed derisively. “Silence, all of you,” bellowed the lieutenant as his men raised their cudgels around him, “or I’ll have you all taken in for disrespect to an officer of the crown!”

The cudgels, not his threats, brought an uneasy silence, and the officer turned back to Jeremiah. “You claim to be an American captain. What ship? What port? Where, sir, are your papers?”

“I am Captain Jeremiah Sparhawk of Providence, in the State of Rhode Island in New England.” There was no mistaking the pride in his voice as he handed the lieutenant a document with a heavy red seal stamped into one corner. “Most recently of my own brig the Chanticleer.”

“The Chanticleer? I know of no ship by that name in port.”

“She was lost,” said Jeremiah softly, “last November.”

The lieutenant grunted as he took the document. “That’s convenient, isn’t it?”

Caro held her breath as the officer scanned the paper, his lips moving slightly as he read to himself. If what Jeremiah said was true, then the man must be satisfied and leave them alone.

But instead he tossed the paper scornfully onto the floor at his feet. “A Yankee forgery, and an amateurish one at that. Were I in Boston, I’ll wager I could buy another like it for half a crown. But I don’t even believe you are American. Sparhawk, that would be a Scottish name, wouldn’t it?”

Caro could see Jeremiah tense, how he consciously flexed his hands at his sides to keep them from making fists.

“In Cromwell’s time, it was English,” he said, his voice unnaturally calm, “but it’s American now, and has been since we tossed your kind off our shores twenty years ago.”

“He lies, sir,” spoke up one of the marines, his role obviously rehearsed. “The rascal’s from Greenock, sir. I knew his people there.”

The lieutenant smiled with triumph. “Then he shall do his duty in the maintop of the Narcissus, or be flogged for the lying, sneaking Scotsman he is. Seize him, before he makes off!”

But outnumbered though he was, the fury in Jeremiah’s green eyes kept the Englishmen at bay. “If you do not choose to believe me, then perhaps you’ll believe the word of Vice Admiral Lord John Herendon—your captain’s superior, aye? Herendon will vouch for me, for he is married to my sister.”

“A rogue like you married into Lord Jack’s family?” The lieutenant sneered, and now it was his men’s turn to laugh. “Next you’ll be telling me that this little strumpet is lady-in-waiting to the queen!”

The tension that had been building in Jeremiah suddenly exploded. He pulled Caro to his side and tipped the heavy oak table over with a clatter of pewter and breaking crockery, scattering the Englishmen on the far side of the makeshift barricade. With a grunt he lifted the bench and swung it like a club, knocking the first marine senseless to the floor. The second one had his rifle lifted clear from his hands, and while he stared openmouthed after it, Jeremiah struck his chest so hard that the man folded in two and fell gasping for breath on top of the other marine.

But then came the unmistakable snap of flintlocks being cocked. Jeremiah froze, staring at the lieutenant’s pistol aimed at his heart and two seamen’s rifles pointed at him, as well. Behind Jeremiah, Caro stared at the guns with her knuckles pressed to her mouth, sick with dread over what would, inevitably, come next. The hatred between the American and the Englishmen was palpable, and the only sound in the room came from the groaning marines on the floor.

“That will earn you an extra twenty lashes, you filthy liar,” said the lieutenant. “Now drop it.”

With an oath Jeremiah tossed the bench over the table and at once the English sailors were on him, shoving Caro aside as they roughly jerked Jeremiah’s arms behind his back to tie his wrists with tarred cords. They found and claimed his pistols and long knife, and a second blade hidden in the sleeve of his coat, and struck him with a cudgel when he tried again to protest. Blood trickled from his mouth and stained his shirtfront, and when they prodded him toward the door he stumbled, and they laughed again with a cruelty that tore at Caro’s heart.

She couldn’t let them do this to him. He deserved better from them, but even more from her. Three times this night alone Jeremiah Sparhawk had come unbidden to her defense, and though she didn’t have his experience or his strength, there had to be a way to save him now.

For Frederick’s sake, she told herself as she rushed after them. She was doing all of this for Frederick, not for Captain Sparhawk, and never for a moment for herself.

“Jeremiah, love!” she cried as she flung her arms around his neck. “They cannot take you like this, my darling husband!”

Confusion, then irritation, showed in Jeremiah’s eyes. “Hush, Caro, this is none of your affair. They won’t make any of this stick. I’ll be out and free tomorrow, and I don’t want you in the middle of it.”

“No, love, no!” she wailed, fervently kissing his cheek before she turned to the lieutenant, wringing her hands with despair that was only partially feigned. “Please, oh, please, kind, dear, just sir! We are newly wed, only this very night! Could you be so cruel as to rob a bride of her heart’s one true love on this day of all others?”

Behind her Jeremiah groaned. “For God’s sake, Caro—”

“No!” She clutched at the lieutenant’s sleeve, pleased that her histrionics had made him look so uncomfortable. The other men in the gang were hesitating, too, looking to him for reassurance, and around them the tavern’s patrons were muttering and grumbling among themselves. She had him, she thought triumphantly; he’d have to let Jeremiah go now.

But instead of agreeing, the officer shoved her away. “Where would his majesty look for his navy if every wife wished to bind her husband with her apron strings?” he said curtly as he motioned for the others to continue. “It’s your misfortune, not mine. My duty is to fill the company of the Narcissus, and I mean to do it no matter how many dubious brides weep at my feet.”

“No, wait!” She rushed back to Jeremiah, her arms flung across his chest to protect him. She wasn’t as certain as he that they’d set him free tomorrow. She’d heard too many stories from Frederick about the abuses of the navy’s pressgangs in Portsmouth, and it was all too easy for her to imagine Jeremiah shipped out on a British frigate, beyond her reach for years and years. They’d already mocked his nationality, his rank and his protection papers, and laughed at her new bride’s ploy, but there was one last, desperate gamble she still could try.

“You speak of your duty, and what his majesty expects,” she said breathlessly, “but not even the king himself would expect my husband to serve as a mariner after what he has suffered at the hands of the Turks!”

With Jeremiah’s hands pinioned behind his back, his coat was open over his shirtfront. Her hands trembling from her own audacity, Caro yanked his shirt clear of the waistband of his breeches and lifted the linen high over his bare chest. Gasps of horror filled the room as the light from the fire danced over the long, livid scar that sliced across Jeremiah’s body. It was worse than Caro remembered, far worse, but it was also testimony that no one would ever question.

“God’s shame on you if you take that poor lad!” called a woman near the back, and her cry was echoed over and over by the others. Caro let the shirt slip from her fingers, but left her hand resting lightly on Jeremiah’s chest. She could only guess what her dramatic gesture had cost him, and she prayed he’d understand.

The lieutenant stiffened with displeasure and defeat. He waved curtly to the others, who jerked the ties from Jeremiah’s wrists and tossed his guns and knives onto the table beside him. They pulled the two marines to their unsteady feet and, without another word among them, retreated out the door and into the street, followed by jeers and catcalls and a thrown heel of bread.

The tavern owner rushed over to Jeremiah. “God keep you, Cap’n, and whatever you wish tonight is my gift to you.” He winked broadly and cocked his thumb toward Caro. “‘Tis not every night a man outwits the press and gains a clever bride like this one, eh? Whatever you wish, Cap’n, but name your fancy and it’s yours.”

“Thank you, no.” His expression grim, Jeremiah stepped clear of Caro, leaving her to stand with her hand awkwardly in midair. She swallowed hard and tucked her hand beneath her other arm. He hadn’t understood what she’d done; he couldn’t make it any more apparent, not to her or anyone else in the room.

He shoved his shirttail back into his breeches and hooked the pistols back on his belt. “Though I appreciate your hospitality, sir, I must needs have a word with my wife in private.”

He grabbed Caro by the elbow and ushered her roughly out the door. She tried to pull free but he held her fast, half-dragging her across the courtyard and past a curious stable boy at the pump. To her surprise the sky was beginning to pale with dawn. Was it really only last evening that he’d come for her at George’s?

“You shouldn’t be angry with me,” she began, breathless at the pace he’d set. Her hat slipped from her head and though she grabbed for it he jerked her relentlessly onward, leaving the crumpled rose facedown in the dust. “If you’d only stop and consider—”

“Nay, ma’am, I shall not. Not here, not now. You’ve entertained the world enough tonight.”

He pulled her into the open door of the tavern’s small stable and back among the stalls. Beneath the single lantern the space was warm with the heat of the close-packed horses’ bodies, the air thick with their smell.

“At least these beasts won’t repeat what they hear or see, which is more than can be said of your last audience.” With a last little shake Jeremiah released Caro’s arm and she backed away, glaring at him as she rubbed her arm where he’d held it. “What the hell was all that about, anyway? Have you lost what few wits you possess?”

“I did what I judged best under the circumstances.” Around them the horses shifted and nickered uneasily, made restive by the unchecked emotions in the human voices. “And don’t you dare call me witless!”

“I’ll call you whatever I damned well please! Why did you decide I needed a wife?”

He took another step toward her, trapping her in the corner with his body. She could feel his anger like a force between them, a white-hot violence barely contained, and any other time she would have been terrified of him. But her own furious resentment blinded her, and she lifted her chin defensively.

“I thought being married would make the lieutenant pity us, and he’d let you go. I saw it once in a play, though of course the hero was a Scottish laird, and—”

“A play?” He stared at her, appalled that she would even admit such a thing. “All that ‘darling husband’ claptrap was from some damned play?”

“It worked, didn’t it?” she said stubbornly.

“Listen to me! They would have kept me at the press house for an hour or two at most, then let me go!”

“You trusted them too much! This is England, not America!”

“Oh, aye, my fine Lady Byfield, as if I’d forgotten! I don’t need you to tell me that. I don’t need you for anything!”

“Don’t you go making any of this my fault!” She felt tears smarting behind her eyes and she didn’t know why. “You’re not being fair. You were the one who forced your way into George’s house to rescue me. All I did was try to return the favor, and now you’re free.”

“I’ll never be free, you damned selfish bitch!” Tormented by a pain she couldn’t understand, he slammed his fist into the post beside her. “You claim fair play. You turned my private life into a penny curiosity. What of you, eh? What if I took you back in there before the others and told them all your shame, your sins? Would that be fair?”

“You wouldn’t dare.” She shook her head wildly. “You can’t!”

He tore the kerchief from her bodice, and with a frightened gasp she pressed her hands over her neckline, striving to cover herself with her spread fingers. Instead he caught her wrists and pinned them high over her head, mercilessly forcing her back against the rough planks of the stall. She was painfully aware of how she stood trapped between the rough stable wall and the equally unyielding barrier that was Jeremiah Sparhawk.

Yet her body sensed the difference between the two, her softness matching and melting against the lean, muscled planes of his, warm with the heat of his anger. It had been this way the one other time he’d held her in his arms, and she shivered with an anticipation she desperately wanted to suppress. Long, long ago her mother had told her of such feelings between men and women, and their inevitable result. No wonder Captain Sparhawk could taunt her about her sin and shame when her body betrayed her like this!

When he bent his head over hers, she knew he meant to kiss her, just as she knew too late how wrong she’d been to trust him. By trusting him she had made herself vulnerable. She squeezed her eyes shut, the last defense she had.

“I thought you were different,” she whispered rapidly, her voice barely containing her tears of fear and disappointment. “When I saw that scar and guessed what you had suffered, I thought you were the only man who could help me, the one who had fought Hamil Al-Almeer and survived. I believed you were strong and brave, but I was wrong, wasn’t I? I was wrong! You’re a coward, just like you fear. A coward!’

She felt him go still, his ragged breathing matching hers, the only sound between them. Though by infinitesimal degrees his grip on her wrists relaxed, she kept her eyes closed, both unsure of what he’d do next and unwilling to break the strange spell between them.

Gently his fingers caressed the narrow bones of her wrists, his thumbs sliding along the inside of her upstretched arms as he traced the pale blue veins that ran to her heart until, at last, he eased her arms down to her sides. Gently, so gently, he cradled her jaw in his hands, his breath warm on her forehead, and she felt the roughness of his beard on her skin as his lips feathered across the loose wisps of hair near her parting.

“A coward, you say,” he said so softly she nearly didn’t hear him. “Dear God, I never wanted to hurt you.”

Then his hands, his touch, were gone. Bereft, she opened her eyes and saw he’d retreated across the stable, his back against the slatted boards of a stall as he crouched down in the straw, his arms folded tightly over his bent knees and his chin resting on his arms. The light from the lantern hanging overhead was harsh, sparing him nothing. His jaw was bruised from press-gang’s beating, already swollen and mottled, and in his eyes was the same empty, haunted look Caro remembered from that first night.

The nightmare, she thought miserably. Something that she’d said or done had brought it back.

“I didn’t mean that about you being a coward,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You believed it when you spoke, and God knows it’s the truth.” He sighed and rubbed his fingers into his eyes. “So let me guess. Hamil has your precious Frederick prisoner, and you wish me to go fetch him home. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“Only to Naples, to his mother,” said Caro eagerly. “She is the one who has heard through the Neapolitan court—they maintain diplomatic relations with the Pasha of Tripoli for their trade, you see—that Frederick still lives, and that Hamil would consider a ransom for him and your friend Mr. Kerr, too. I thought that because you’d fought Hamil before you’d like the chance to meet him again. Not as a friend, of course, but as men do, you know—oh, dear, that’s not coming out at all how I intended!”

“You mean would I like another crack at killing him the way he nearly did me? A bit of bloodthirsty revenge amongst the savages, with a nice little errand delivering dear Frederick’s ransom on the side? Is that what ‘men do’?”

Caro winced. “That makes it sound vastly foolish, doesn’t it?”

“Men are vastly foolish, sweetheart, though I’ve never had reason to judge women much better.” He plucked a piece of straw from the floor and twirled it absently between his fingers. “So to make all this work, you must rely on the promise of a heathen pirate, the good will of an old woman who despises you, and the vengeful wrath of a coward you scarcely know?”

“I told you I don’t truly believe you’re a coward!”

“Ah, but Caro, I do.” He tossed the straw away and slowly stood. “You’ve chosen the wrong man to be your hero.”

She looked down, unable to meet his eyes. “It wasn’t a choice. There were no others. You were all I had.”

“Damnation.” He didn’t want to do it, and he’d be ten times a fool to agree. He didn’t trust the old countess in Naples or George Stanhope here in England, the Pasha of Tripoli or Hamil Al-Ameer; any of them could play Caro false in a minute. And God in Heaven, what he himself could do to her hopes without even trying, a pitiful battered Yankee who was afraid of the dark!

Yet there was Davy, and maybe others. To turn his back on them would be to admit far worse of himself than cowardice alone.

And then there was Caro herself, waiting for his decision there by the post like some poor felon in the dock. An exhausted, bedraggled countess in secondhand clothes who’d tried to do her best to save him just as he’d saved her. A beguiling, unpredictable creature who mixed world-weary airs with unstudied innocence. A luscious, desirable woman who melted in his arms and tempted him with lips redder, plumper, sweeter than summer berries on the vine.

A woman who expected him to risk his life for the husband she loved.

Damnation, indeed.