Gentle Rogue (32 page)

“Clinton couldn’t care less that he’s the infamous Hawke,” Drew said. “He just wants him never to darken our door again. He’s still smarting that he couldn’t get the better of him.”

“Neither could you two, but I haven’t heard you calling for the rope.”

Boyd chuckled. “You’ve got to be kidding, Georgie. Weren’t you watching the man? We were so outclassed, it was a joke even trying to take him on. There’s no shame in losing to someone that skilled with his fists.”

Drew just smiled. “Boyd’s right. There’s a lot to admire in the man, if he weren’t so—so—”

“Antagonizing? Insulting? Disparaging in his every remark?” Georgina almost laughed. “I hate to be the one to tell you, but that happens to be the way he is
all
the time, even to his close friends.”

“But that would drive me crazy,” Boyd exclaimed. “Didn’t it you?”

Georgina shrugged. “Once you get used to it, it’s kind of amusing. But as habits go, it’s a dangerous one, since he simply doesn’t care if he rubs someone the wrong way…like tonight. But regardless of his habits, or his past crimes, or anything else, I don’t think he’s been dealt with fairly by us.”

“Fair enough,” Boyd insisted, “considering what he did to you.”

“Let’s not bring me into this. You don’t hang a man for seducing a woman, or you’d both be in trouble yourselves, wouldn’t you?” Boyd had the grace to blush, but Drew just grinned maddeningly. “I’ll put it another way,” Georgina continued, giving Drew a disgusted look. “I don’t care if he was a pirate, I don’t want him to hang. And his crew should never have been brought into it, either. He was right about that.”

“Maybe so, but I don’t see what you can do about it,” Boyd replied. “What you’ve said isn’t going to make the least bit of difference to Warren.”

“He’s right,” Drew added. “You might as well go to bed and hope for the best.”

“I can’t do that,” she said simply and slumped back in her chair.

She was starting to feel that insidious panic again that had brought her in here to try desperate measures. She forced it back. Panic didn’t help. She had to think. And then it came to her as she watched her two youngest brothers head toward the liquor cabinet, likely what had brought them both here. She wasn’t surprised they needed a little help sleeping tonight, as bruised as they both were. She tried not to think of how much worse James had been injured.

She began by stating the facts. “James is your brother-in-law now. You all saw to that. Will you two help?”

“You want us to wrestle the key away from Warren?” Drew grinned. “I’m all for that.”

Boyd, in the process of taking a sip of brandy, choked. “Don’t even think about it!”

“That’s not what I had in mind,” Georgina clarified. “There’s no reason for either of you to get in Warren’s bad graces, no reason for him to know that any of us did anything, for that matter.”

“I suppose we could break that old lock on the cellar door easy enough,” Drew allowed.

“No, that won’t do, either,” Georgina said. “James won’t leave without his crew or his ship, but he’s in no condition to free either one. He may
think
he is, but—”

“So you want us to help him with that, too?”

“That’s just it. As angry as he is just now, I honestly don’t think he’d accept your help. He’d try to do it all himself and end up caught again. But if we free his ship and crew first, then it will be an easy matter for them to break James out and help him back to his ship. Then they’ll be gone by morning, and Warren will have to assume that his men missed one or two of them, who were able to help the rest escape.”

“And what about the guard Warren has left on the
Maiden Anne
who will tell him exactly who came aboard?”

“Those men can’t tell him if they don’t recognize anyone,” Georgina said confidently. “I’ll explain on our way there. Just give me a few minutes to change my clothes.”

As she came around the desk, though, Drew grabbed her arm to ask softly, “Will you go with him?”

There was no hesitation or emotion in her reply, “No, he doesn’t want me.”

“Seems I heard something different.”

She stiffened at the reminder that they’d all heard James say she’d make a fine mistress. “Then let me rephrase that. He doesn’t want a wife.”

“Well, there’s no arguing with that. And neither Clinton nor Warren would let you go, anyway. They might have married you to him, but I can tell you true, it wasn’t with the intention of letting you live with him.”

And she couldn’t argue with that, nor did she want to live with James. She’d meant it earlier when she said she didn’t love him. She didn’t anymore, she really didn’t, and if she kept saying it often enough, it was going to be absolutely true.

Chapter Thirty-six

F
orty minutes later, the three youngest Andersons found the small bay where the
Maiden Anne
was still anchored. Warren’s crew had captured her with the pretense of an official boarding by the harbor master, and there’d been little Conrad Sharpe could do since he didn’t know whether Bridgeport had jurisdiction over this area of the coast or not. Fortunately, no one had been hurt. The deceit had worked perfectly in getting enough of Warren’s crew transferred over from the
Nereus
to the
Maiden Anne
for them to then take control of the unsuspecting ship. And since Warren hadn’t given his men orders to bring either the ship or crew into Bridgeport, his men had simply locked the
Maiden Anne
’s crew in their own hold and left a small contingent of men to guard them and the ship. The
Nereus
hadn’t even remained behind, but had returned to Bridgeport with most of her crew.

With the whole thing having been accomplished from ship to ship, Georgina was hoping there would be a skiff somewhere along the shore that James had used to land, and they could use to get out to the ship. But after ten minutes of searching, it appeared that James had merely been dropped off.

“I hope you know I hadn’t figured on a midnight swim being part of this crazy scheme. It’s the middle
of October, if you hadn’t noticed. We’re going to freeze our…you-know-whats…George.”

Georgina flinched at the new name both her brothers had been ribbing her with since she surprised them by coming downstairs dressed in her old boy’s togs, which James had so thoughtfully returned to her. Drew had gone one further to really embarrass her in remarking, “I really don’t like you in those breeches, now that your Englishman has pointed out what parts of you can be so easily admired in them.”

“I don’t know what you’re complaining about, Boyd,” she said testily now. “Imagine how much more difficult this would have been had they brought her into the harbor where we’d have the watch on every nearby ship to contend with, not just Warren’s men.”

“Had they done that, little sister, you’d never have gotten me to agree to this business in the first place.”

“Well, you did agree,” she said testily. “So get your shoes off and let’s get it over with. These men do need
some
sort of head start, just in case Warren gets
really
ridiculous and decides to go after them.”

“Warren might be feeling justified where your captain is concerned,” Drew pointed out, “but he’s not suicidal. Those aren’t toy cannon poking out of those gunports on yonder ship, sweetheart. And the Hawke says he’s retired?”

“Old habits die hard, I imagine,” she said in James’s defense, which was becoming a habit she ought to break. “Besides, he was sailing in the West Indies, where pirates do still roam.”

That piece of logic brought chuckles from both
brothers, with Drew remarking, “That’s rich, an ex-pirate worried about attack from his old buddies.”

With memories reminding her how true that statement was, Georgina only said, “If you two don’t show a leg, you can stay with the horses. I’ll go on without you.”

“Clinton was right, by God,” Drew told Boyd as he hopped on one foot to get the boot off his other. “Bossy, that’s what she’s become, plain and…Now hold on, Georgie, you aren’t going up that anchor cable first!”

But she was already in the water, and they both had to scramble to catch up with her. As they were strong swimmers, it didn’t take long, and soon the three of them were gliding smoothly across the bay. Ten minutes later, they neared the ship and swam around to the anchor cable, which they would now have to use to climb aboard.

The original plan had included the use of James’s skiff, to just brazenly approach the ship in it and claim they’d found another of the
Maiden Anne
’s crewmen in town and had brought him out for safekeeping with the others. Georgina would have done the talking and stayed in front, since she was the least likely of the three of them to be recognized. Drew would have kept behind them, and Boyd was to be the “prisoner” in the middle. Then as soon as she got close enough to one of the guards, she was to duck and let Boyd bash him. Very simple. But since they weren’t likely to swim out to the ship with a prisoner in tow, those plans had to be abandoned, at least until the deck was secured. And neither Drew nor Boyd was about to let Georgina participate in that, which left her twiddling
her thumbs in the water while they both disappeared over the side of the ship.

She waited, but none too patiently, as the minutes passed and she had no way of knowing what was happening above. The lack of any noise was heartening, but what might she really hear with the water lapping in her ears, and her ears covered by the woolen cap which completed her disguise? And with nothing to distract her, it wasn’t long before her position in the water began to work on her imagination.

Were there sharks in the area? Hadn’t one of her neighbors caught a shark just last year when he’d gone fishing up the coast? In the shadow of the ship, she couldn’t see anything on the surface of the water, much less anything swimming around under her.

Once the question arose, it was less than a minute before Georgina was out of that water and climbing the anchor cable. Not to go all the way up, though. She’d been told to wait with an added “or else,” and had no intention of getting Boyd and Drew angry with her after they’d been so obliging to help her. But intentions didn’t take into account that her hands weren’t made for dangling from a thick cable. In fact, she only just barely made it to the top rail before her hold gave out. And considering that she would have gone splashing back into what she was now absolutely positive was shark-infested water, she was pretty relieved to pull herself over the side—until she saw the dozen men standing there ready to greet her.

Chapter Thirty-seven

S
tanding in the puddle of water pooling at her feet, shivering in the frigid night wind whipping across the deck, Georgina heard the dry, disparaging voice say, “Well, if it isn’t old George. Come to pay us a visit, have you?”

“Connie?” Georgina said on a gasp as the tall redhead stepped toward her to drop a heavy coat around her shoulders. “But…what are you doing free?”

“So you know what’s happened here?”

“Of course I…but I don’t understand. Did you escape on your own?”

“As soon as the hatch opened. These countrymen of yours aren’t too smart, are they, squirt? It was no trouble a’tall changing places with them.”

“Oh, God, you didn’t hurt them, did you?”

He frowned at that. “No more than was necessary to dump them where they’d dumped us. Why?”

“They were letting you out! Didn’t you give them a chance to explain?”

“Not bloody likely,” he replied emphatically. “Am I to assume then that they were friends of yours?”

“Just my brothers, that’s all.”

He chuckled at her disgruntled tone. “Well, no harm done. Henry, go fetch us the two lads, and be nice to them this time.” And then, “Now, George,
perhaps you’d be so good as to tell us where James is?”

“Ah, that’s kind of a long story, and since time happens to be a problem, you might want to let me explain on our way back to shore.”

It was her sudden unease rather than her words that Connie reacted to. “He
is
all right, isn’t he?”

“Certainly…just a little bruised…and in need of your assistance in getting out of a locked cellar.”

“Locked in, eh?” Connie started laughing, to Georgina’s chagrin.

“It’s not funny, Mr. Sharpe. They mean to see he stands trial for piracy,” she told him bluntly, which took care of his amusement quite quickly.

“Bloody hell, I warned him!”

“Well, maybe you should have sat on him instead, because it’s every bit of it his own fault, him and his grand confessions.”

She prodded the first mate into hurrying then, but didn’t get away with not explaining the rest of it on the way. Her brothers were left temporarily behind, much to their loud irritation, so Connie could make use of their horses to bring several of his own men along. Georgina got the honor of riding double with the first mate, but as she’d feared, so he could get every last detail out of her, which he did, interrupting only occasionally with “He didn’t!” or “The devil he did!” and finally with an angry “You were doing fine up to that point, George, but you’ll never get me to believe James Malory has got himself leg-shackled,” to which she replied, “You don’t have to believe me. I’m only the other half who got shackled.”

And since she didn’t even try to convince him beyond that, by the time they reached her home, he was still unconvinced. Much she cared. By that time she was annoyed enough that she wouldn’t even have showed them the way to the cellar if she didn’t think they’d wake one of the servants stumbling around in the dark to find it on their own.

But she really wished she hadn’t waited around for the door to be pried open. With the one candle she’d garnered from the kitchen, James had no difficulty in seeing who his rescuers were, aside from her, since she stood well back of the door. But she didn’t think he’d have said anything different had he known she was there.

“You shouldn’t have bothered, old man. I bloody well deserve to hang for what I allowed to happen here.”