One Night of Passion (22 page)

He didn’t bother to look up at her, his gaze locked on the child between them. “I can’t do that. I won’t.”

Georgie’s insides quaked. He wasn’t supposed to care about his child. Lord Danvers probably had dozens of bastards that he held no more regard for than he did his wards.

Hopefully even less.

So she tried lying. “She isn’t yours.”

His gaze hardened. “Oh, she’s mine,”

There was no hesitation in his voice, just as she had imagined Colin would have said it Her Colin, not her faithless guardian.

“What is her name?” he asked.

“Chloe.” It was a begrudging response, but it was all she was going to give him. Besides, this meeting wasn’t going at all as she’d planned. She’d spent the last few hours pacing about his cabin trying to determine what he’d say . . . and just how she’d reply. Certainly, she hadn’t expected him to be bothered. She’d half predicted that he’d come bursting into his cabin and give her the choices of being set adrift; marooned on a small, barren island; or sold to the nearest passing ship headed to the East.

No, he was acting as if he cared. As if they had a second chance at . . .

Georgie dismissed that notion altogether. Like a cat with its nine lives, she’d probably used most every second chance she was due in the previous year—inheriting a modest fortune from Mrs. Taft, escaping London, taking on the weeds of a widow, and finally finding the freedom she’d always longed for.

She wouldn’t risk all that by believing in the myth he now dangled before her, not for anything. Certainly not on the word of an unpredictable man.

“Chloe—?” he persisted.

Georgie balked again. What was it with this man and his insatiable need for surnames? “Just Chloe.”

His hand reached out and tenderly lifted the edge of the blanket so he could see her face, and Georgie thought for a moment he was going to reach down and take her up in his arms. But to her relief, his hand finally went back to his side.

“Is she safe there on the bed?” he asked.

She would be safer far away from you,
her anger and frustration wanted to cry out, but she knew that wasn’t true. Any fool could see the concern in his gaze, the tenderness in his touch as he tucked the blanket back around the sleeping babe.

“Safe enough,” Georgie said. “As long as she stays in the middle and the seas don’t get rough.” She paused and glanced again at her daughter. “A cradle would be better, for she likes to be rocked,”

Colin glanced up and a kindred light burned in his eyes.

She could almost hear him say,
Thank you for telling me
that.

If she hadn’t felt it before, suddenly the connection they’d found the night of Cyprian’s Ball flickered to life, tugging her closer to him, tearing at her resolve to have nothing to do with Colin, Lord Danvers.

But suddenly he was Colin once again. Her Colin.

Georgie backed away from him. From the invitation to trust him, to believe in him.

She couldn’t. She wouldn’t. He’d been right when he’d come in and introduced himself. They didn’t know each other. They were strangers. And until she knew what the measure of Lord Danvers may be, either the ogre guardian of her imagination or the Colin of her heart, she had to stand firm against the temptation he represented, the passion he made her recall.

“My daughter needs a name,” he was saying. “And Danvers is hers by right.”

“I think not,” she shot back, a tad more hotly than was probably prudent.

His eyes widened. “And what is wrong with my name?”

Everything,
she wanted to say.

Instead she told him, “I just prefer not to confuse the matter right now.”

“Such as using the name
Bridwick?”
he asked.

When she didn’t answer, he returned to the chair where he had left his dry breeches hanging over the back rungs. There was a deliberate teasing nonchalance about the way he’d asked his question.

Georgie wasn’t fooled for a minute by his feigned indifference. He was keenly interested. From the way his sharp, telling gaze stole glances at her, to the taut line of his shoulders giving him the look of a cat about to strike.

And she had no doubt, given the opportunity, he would pounce upon any offering she let slip like an unopened gift, unwrapping all her secrets.

Well, Captain Danvers,
she thought.
Not if I have
anything to say about it.

“And what happened to Mr. Bridwick?” he had the audacity to ask.

“You know as well as I, there is no Mr. Bridwick.”

He nodded at her concession. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“And where exactly is that?”

“Where you stop this charade and quit pretending that we are polite strangers. It starts by you telling me the truth. All of it. Beginning with your name and ending with what the hell you were doing on that beach tonight.”

“I think it was obvious what I was doing out there.”

He cocked a brow.

She brushed her hands over her skirt and then crossed them over her chest. “Trying to escape a bad situation, nothing more.”

His hands went to the waistband of his wet breeches. He smiled at her as he started to open them. “Madame, you seem to have a penchant for bad situations.”

“I have since I met you,” she muttered under her breath, as she whirled around to avoid seeing . . . well, seeing temptation.

Outside, the waves reflected the pink starting to grace the sky It was nearly dawn. “You never did say why you’ve changed course again. We’re sailing south by southwest, aren’t we?”

She didn’t even dare glance over her shoulder this time.

“Why do you ask?” Again that contrived indifference marked his question.

“Because I would like to know where you’re taking us.” She heard him deposit his wet breeches on the floor, the sound of the cloth once again rubbing against his skin, and then the rustle of twill as he tugged on the dry pair.

Satisfied he was decently clad, she ventured a glance over her shoulder.

He was just finishing buttoning the last tab. “I’m not sure yet. Back to London, most likely.”

“
London?”
Georgie shook her head. “That will never do.”

“I think I’m the judge of that,” he said. “I’m still the captain of this ship.”

“Why, it will take months to reach London,” Georgie argued, trying to think of a hundred reasons why he had to let them go and ignoring the most compelling one: that she wanted out of his company as quickly as possible. “Besides, you haven’t the room for us. I see no reason why you can’t just set us ashore at the nearest port—such as Naples. It will hardly inconvenience you, and then you can be on your way to wherever you decide you are going.”

“Georgie, have you forgotten that there is a war going on around you?”

No, she hadn’t, but the one going on inside her heart was far more dangerous.

He continued, “Haven’t you a care for yourself? For your sister or Chloe? Volturno is just the beginning now that France is under Bonaparte’s control. London is the safest place for the three of you. And I mean to see you there whether you like it or not.”

Georgie bristled. So this was how it was going to be. He was no different from that infernal interfering vicar in Penzance. No different from Uncle Phineas and his blustering manners.

Well, she’d had a taste of freedom and she wasn’t about to fall under the domineering control of yet another intolerable man. “You can’t take us where you please. You have no right.”

“I may not have the right,” he said, his voice holding a dangerous edge, “but someone should. Dammit, woman, you need someone to see you safe. What you need is a guardian.”

Chapter 9

A
guardian, indeed! The very word was the bane of Georgie’s existence.

Oh, she wanted to scream in frustration that this man, of all men, would lecture her on the need for someone to safeguard her welfare.

“I don’t need a guardian,” she said.
I don’t need any
man. Especially not you.
“And what I truly don’t care for is being kidnapped by some . . . some pirate.”

Colin’s brows rose. “A pirate? You think I’m a pirate?”

“What else am I supposed to think when I find you lurking about the Italian coastline picking up stray Englishmen.”

Did he really think her so dull-witted that she’d believe his appearance was mere happenstance?

“Tell me, Captain Danvers, how was it that you so conveniently arrived in Volturno tonight?”

His mouth set in a hard line and Georgie knew she was on to something.

Good.
She was turning the tide on him. He didn’t want to discuss his reasons for being in Volturno any more than she wanted to hand him a calling card.

“I say, it really was coincidental that you were on that beach exactly when Mr. Pymm needed rescuing,” she said, pacing around the table, her fingers trailing over his open logbook. She hoped to catch an entry as to their coordinates and course, but before she could spy anything in his scrawling script, he reached over and slammed the volume shut.

She plucked her fingers back just in time, and glanced up at him. The challenge in his gaze reminded her of the dangerous gleam that had lit his eyes when he’d returned to save her from her trio of tormentors in London.

When he’d declared that she was his.

His no longer,
she reminded herself.
Never his.

To Colin, the woman before him was a tangle of contradictions, running afoul of everything he’d held in his memories from the night of the Cyprian’s Ball.

How could he have forgotten her temper? Her fiery defiance? Or her inquisitive nature?

It was just that inquisitive side of her that made him wary. While he didn’t record anything in his log that could be considered damning, he didn’t like the way she was prying.

Asking questions about their course . . . their destination . . . his role in Pymm’s rescue.

They were, he knew, innocuous questions on their own, but Pymm’s needling suspicions found one toe-hold after another in his heart as she persisted in her attempts to uncover his secrets.

He found himself wondering if perhaps Pymm had the right of it.
Could Georgie be a spy?

Ridiculous, he told himself, endeavoring to ignore what Pymm would call irrefutable evidence and stick to what his heart was telling him.

Yet he couldn’t ignore the fact that he’d held no doubts as to Lady Diana’s affections for him until she’d all too happily tossed his ring back at him.

Now as he watched Georgie, he wondered if she too had given him the pretense of love that night. If he couldn’t trust his own heart, how could he believe this woman who had stolen it with such audacious impunity?

If only he could dismiss that night from his mind as an aberration, a lapse in judgment his memories faulty from the passing of time. Yet the long days and months hadn’t diminished his need for her . . . and they had only made him realize the beauty and rarity of what they had shared the night of the Cyprian’s Ball.

So how could that passionate interlude, the undeniable connection they shared, have been a deception?

He knew exactly what Pymm would say about such a theory, and the man’s poisonous conjectures pierced yet another needle of doubt in his resolve to believe in Georgie’s innocence.

“Just why were you on that beach tonight?” she persisted.

He glanced over at her. “I would think you would be satisfied enough that I was there and not be overly concerned with the reasons. I did, after all, save you from certain jeopardy . . . once again.”

“Yes, thank you,” she muttered. “For all my unforeseen rescues.”

He smiled. “You needn’t thank me for the time in London.”

“Why is that?”

“Because you thanked me quite sufficiently that night,” he said. “Three times, as I recall.”

Her mouth opened in a wide, indignant O.

Colin ignored her outrage, turning his back to her and pacing a few steps around his table. It was a risk to leave himself vulnerable to this woman, but he wanted to evoke a response from her.

An angry Georgie meant that his impassioned Cyprian, his mischievous lover, still existed beneath her cautious indifference, her aloof reserve.

“As for my being in Volturno, it truly was coincidence,” he continued saying. “I think the better question is what are
you
doing so far from London? Don’t you realize the risks of dragging your sister and child into the middle of a war?”

He glanced over his shoulder and spied the dangerous, challenging light in her eyes.

The fire blazing in those dark, stormy depths sent his blood racing with memories.

Her urging him to take her. The heated frenzy that
had overtaken them both. Her clamorous response.

It hadn’t been an act. She hadn’t been there just to spy on him or to learn of his mission.

He would prove it if he had to shake the truth out of her.

“What are you doing here, Georgie?” he asked, moving closer to her. “Tell me, tell me now. Who are you? What do you want of me?”

Without waiting for an answer, he reached out and took her into his arms.

He gave no heed to her squirming protest, to her threats of darkening his other eye, to any of her blustering and posturing.

Colin wasn’t listening, for the only thing he wanted was to discover the truth.

What the hell had happened to his Georgie?

For a moment she stilled, and he glanced down into her wary gaze.

It held a warning beacon as bright as the lights off Portsmouth, but her eyes also burned with something else . . .

Desire.

That part he recognized, and it was as achingly familiar as the sight of England’s verdant shores after a long voyage.

So he answered her siren song by closing his mouth over hers.

Again she struggled to protest, her fists hammering at his shoulders, her booted foot stomping about as it tried to connect with his bare toes. But as his tongue swept over her lips, enticed her to open her barred doors, her protests wavered and her defenses faltered.