Swept Away By a Kiss (45 page)

“Force you to wed me.” He pulled her hips against his.

“There need be no force about it, my lord.” Her body shivered in his hands as her mouth opened beneath his. He slipped his tongue between her eager lips. She pressed into him, twining her fingers in his hair.

When he drew away, her eyes were bright with desire, but a hint of challenge flickered in their sea-blue depths.

“Why did you leave me?”

He took her defiant chin gently between his fingers. “To protect you.”

“From what, more pirates?”

“From me. From the horrors of the life I lead.”

Her brows rose. “You thought I would prefer the horrors of
haute société
?”

“I will always protect you, even from myself. Valerie, I—”

“I do not need protection from you, Steven. I love you.” Her voice was firm. “I loved you when I knew I should not, and I love you even more now that I know what you are. Who you are.”

He stilled. He did not deserve this woman. He certainly did not deserve to have had so many chances to claim her. But this time he would seize her and hold on to her forever.

“My brother sends his greetings, by the way,” she added with an unusually hesitant smile, “along with the message that if you ruin me and leave me he will hunt you down and put a bullet through your heart.”

“I am relieved to learn he is so conscientious.” He kept his tone sober, despite the pounding in his chest. He needed her so powerfully he could not conceal it. But he needn’t any longer.

Valerie’s eyes glimmered. “You have been very foolish, believing you could make decisions for me. Didn’t they teach you any better in seminary?”

“My education has lacked a great many things, I fear.” He kissed the corner of her luscious mouth.

“And yet you are so successful at what you do. How is that?” she gasped in surprise as his hands moved beneath her cloak, curving around her bottom and dragging her to him.

“Luck. Fate,” he murmured, his voice taut. “Valerie—”

“You don’t believe in Fate,” she whispered.

“I most certainly do now.” He took her mouth hard, instantly demanding, urging her to open to him. His arms wrapped around her waist, holding her tight. Hungry for his touch, for everything, Valerie sank into him.

He pulled back, his lion eyes afire.

“I love you, Valerie. You know I do,” he said roughly, his gaze sweeping her face, raw and thoroughly unmasked. “More than my life. I did try to stop loving you. I had always succeeded before at everything I attempted. But—” He broke off, searching her eyes. “With you, for the first time in my life, I am home.” He kissed her long and deep, with a warmth that stole Valerie’s breath.

“Say it again,” she whispered against his mouth, twisting her hand in his shirt to hold him close.

“I love you,” he replied promptly, raining sweet kisses upon her cheeks and the corners of her mouth, so delicious her limbs went weak. He paused and whispered into her ear, his voice a tender caress, “I love you.”

She clutched his shoulders. “And you want me to be with you.”

“I want you in every way you can imagine. And several you cannot, I suspect, but we will soon remedy that.”

Desire flooded her. Valerie laughed aloud, joy and sweet anticipation crowding her senses.

Steven drew back, smiling. “What is it?” he said, his lips tracing the line of her cheek, sending tingles of delight skittering through her awakened body. She pressed closer to him.

“I have been thinking.” She tried to sound serious, but her lips twitched up at the edges. “I will accept my role as your counterpart if you choose once more to play the dashing ship captain or English lord.” She paused. “But if you adopt clerical robes again, Steven, honestly, I think I would quickly come to find convent life a dull bore.”

His laughter resonated through her. Valerie’s insides melted, his happiness as seductive as his touch.

“I daresay,” he murmured, setting his mouth just beneath her ear. She sighed and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Rather than a nun’s habit, jewels and silken veils would better suit your beauty.” He brushed her lips. “I have a bit of work to do in the East, you see.” He kissed her again, this time slowly, lingering and deep, sealing their union with a promise of even more to come.

Finally he released her mouth and cocked a roguish smile. “How would you like to visit India, my love?”

Author’s Note

A
mid scandalous accusations, in 1773 when the powerful Society of Jesus was disbanded, the order did not fade away as its enemies hoped. Jesuits continued to work undercover for the day when they were finally reestablished with all honor in 1814. This made Steven’s ruse possible; in 1810, no official Jesuit authority existed to chastise him for his masquerade. As a group, the Jesuits had an appreciation for and acceptance of native cultures unequaled in the colonial world.

While violent persecution of Roman Catholics in England came to an end in the seventeenth century, Catholics still experienced repression of various sorts due to their allegiance to what frequently amounted to a papal monarchy. Catholic peers were prohibited from taking their seats in Parliament until 1829.

As for the Atlantic slave trade, as a result of slave insurrections in its Caribbean colonies and abolitionist fervor, the fledgling French Republic abolished slavery in 1794. By the end of the decade, however, those dependent upon the lucrative trade and plantation economy were lobbying for slavery’s reestablishment. Napoleon Bonaparte supported the anti-abolitionists, overturning emancipation in France and its colonies in 1802. Thousands of freed men, women, and children were reenslaved. The former slaves in the French colony of Saint Domingue, a plantation society whose inhabitants had briefly tasted freedom, violently revolted and in 1804 overthrew their French governors. Renaming itself the Republic of Haiti, this nation became the third free republic in the world (after the United States and France, the latter which had meanwhile succumbed to the emperor). The Haitian flag still bears the motto
L’Union Fait la Force
, “Union Makes Our Strength.”

At the forefront of the abolitionist drive, England outlawed the importation of slaves from Africa in 1807 and finally abolished slavery altogether in 1833. France followed suit in 1848. Within all the colonial European nations, however, many like Clifford Hannsley used their positions of power to continue the trade illegally.

In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Natchez (pronounced “Nah’chee”) people in Louisiana welcomed escaped slaves and other refugees into their communities. The relationship between Natchez people and French colonists ultimately proved tragic, though, resulting in the decimation of the tribe in the 1730s, including the forced enslavement of Natchez of noble status and relocation to the island of San Domingue, where they were put to work in the cane fields. Natchez who escaped this fate found homes with other native tribes. The Natchez language no longer exists in spoken form, and only sketchily in written renderings. The words Steven speaks represent my humble attempts at reconstruction, assisted by Charles D. Van Tuyl’s wonderful lexicon and Jim Barnett of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

My heartfelt thanks go to Father L. F. M. Radrigues of the Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu in Rome, Dr. Leslie Marx and Alex Beguinet of Duke University Fencing, Dr. Christine Daniels, Mari Freeman, Nancy Gideon, Dr. Anne Brophy, Noah Redstone Brophy, Mary Brophy Marcus, Dr. Diane Leipzig, Georgann T. Brophy, and wonderful Kimberly Whalen for falling in love with this book.

And now a sneak peek at
KATHARINE ASHE’s
next thrilling novel,
coming in 2011

Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose minds he learned, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life.

—Homer,
Odyssey

G
or blimey, Cap’n Redstone. Cut off his head already.”

With his long, leather-clad legs braced upon the pitch-sealed deck, Alexander “Redstone” Savege stared down at the cowering form, his broad-brimmed hat casting a shadow over the figure. The whelp’s skinny arms encircled his head, his pallor grayish from a dredge in frigid coastal waters. He wasn’t more than fourteen if he were a day. Far too young to be living such a wretched life.

Alex rubbed his callused palm across his face, sucking in briny air laced with the scent of oncoming rain, his gray eyes shadowed. He gripped the hilt of his cutlass, a thick, inelegant weapon, long as his arm and meant for only one purpose, the same as the ten iron guns and pair of agile pivots jutting from the
Cavalier
’s sleek sides, all at rest now but easily primed for battle.

Violence, the hell’s ransom of a pirate. Once mother’s milk to Alex, now a curse.

He cast a glance at his helmsman, a hulking, chestnut-skinned beast sporting a missing earlobe and a leering smile. Big Mattie was always eager to see blood spilled. The faces of the five dozen sailors clustered around showed the same gleeful anticipation.

Alex withheld a sigh. He’d brought this on himself. The lot of them knew, after all, the swift ease with which their master’s blade could fly.

“Nip his knob right off, Cap’n,” cackled a sexagenarian with cheeks of uncured leather. “Or slice his nose and ears.”

“Stick ’im in the ribs, just like you did to that Frenchie wi’ the twenty-gun barque we sunk in ’13,” an ebony sailor chimed in.

Alex repressed a grimace, his hand tightening around the sword handle. He fixed the grommet with a hard glare.

“Are you ready to die for your crime, Billy?” he grumbled in his deepest, scratchiest voice, the sort that never saw the inside of a St. James’s gentlemen’s club or a beautiful lady’s Mayfair bedchamber. The sort that his mother, sister, and most of his acquaintances would be shocked to know he could affect.

The Seventh Earl of Savege never cussed, rarely swore, and only in the direst circumstances raised his voice above an urbane murmur. Handy with his fives, expert with saber, épeé, and pistol alike, he never employed any of them, to the eternal vexation of not a few cuckolded husbands. He preferred perfumed boudoirs to malodorous boxing cages, and the elegant peace and quiet of a fine gaming establishment to the dust and discomfort of a carriage race.

But each time Alex stepped aboard the
Cavalier
, he left the Earl of Savege behind.

“Blast and damn, Bill, are you trying to fob off a whisker?” He glowered. Several of his crew members echoed his discontent with mumbles.

“I didn’t cackle, Cap’n. I swears it,” the youth mewled. “You can’t kill me for not telling them nothing, can you?”

Alex took a long breath, steadying the blood pounding through his veins fueled by a dangerous cocktail of anger, frustration, and pure cerebral fatigue.

“I can kill you for soiling my ears with that sound,” he grunted. “What’s that coming from your throat, a plea or a girl’s whimper?” He tapped his sword tip to the boy’s bony rear and nudged. “Stand up and let me hear if you can speak like a man instead.”

The lad climbed to his feet.

“On my mother’s grave, Cap’n, I didn’t tell any of them smugglers about our covey. I didn’t.”

“Your mother is still alive, Billy, and happy you’ve nothing to do with her any longer, I’ll merit.” Alex sheathed his sword.

The whelp’s eyes went wide. “Then you ain’t going to kill me after all?”

“Not today, but you’ll scrub the decks for a fortnight,” Alex growled. “And caulk that crack on the gun deck at the bowsprit. Caulk the whole damn deck, for that matter. The rest of you get back to work.”

Nothing stirred atop but the fluttering banner, gold rapier upon black undulating in the fresh breeze.

“Now!” Alex bellowed.

Billy jumped, and the crew scattered like grapeshot. Alex moved toward the stair to below deck. Big Mattie lingered.

“You ain’t gonna even strap him to the capstan for a day, Cap’n?” he prodded. “But he gave up our covey to those curs at the tavern in the village. Got to make an example of him. What do you want, for the rest of these lilies”—he gestured around the ship—“to go spouting their mouths off?”