Teresa Medeiros (30 page)

Lucy gave an unladylike snort. “My father is a wealthy man. He wasn’t born so, but the King rewarded him handsomely for his years of loyal service.”

“I don’t dispute that. What I do dispute is his rather careless method of disposing of his wealth.”

“That’s ridiculous. The Admiral is a most frugal man. We’ve always lived comfortably, but never beyond our rather modest means.”

Gerard laughed, a hearty rumble that mocked her stilted defense. “Your father is a bloated wastrel who’s spent every night since long before you were born at the gambling hells in Pall Mall and St. James. When White’s and Brook’s tired of his unreliable credit, he fled to the less reputable establishments in Covent Garden. By the time of his accident, he’d not only managed to piddle away his annual income at the gaming tables, but his pension and the roof over your pretty little head as well.”

Lucy drew in an unsteady breath, thankful her hands were linked to hide their sudden tremor. Her world was shifting around her again and she feared one more lurch might destroy her fragile balance for good.

She met Gerard’s gaze squarely. “You once accused me of concocting elaborate fictions to justify my actions. I must now accuse you of the same. My father would no more resort to reckless wagering than he would to drunkenness or slothfulness or—or …”

“Or piracy?” Gerard provided. “Not even with creditors banging down his door? Not even when facing bankruptcy and scandal?” His slanted smile took
on a bitter twist. “We all know how your father loathes scandal, don’t we?”

Lucy forced herself to ignore his well-placed jab. She had been taught to respect logic above all else, but she was beginning to despise Gerard’s grasp of it.

She began to pace again, charting a wide course around his unavoidable presence. “If what you’re saying is true, how could you be so bold as to just stroll into our lives?” She paused as a disturbing possibility occurred to her. “Is Gerard Claremont even your name?” she asked softly, already dreading his answer.

“It is now. Richard Montjoy, the man Lucien Snow gulled, died in that fortress by the sea. Gerard Claremont survived.”

Lucy inexplicably felt as if she’d been robbed of something precious. “What if someone in London had recognized you? My father? His alleged henchman? One of Lord Howell’s guests?”

“Your father was already lamed when he hatched his plot. I have reason to believe he never saw me, except from a distance. My appearance has also changed drastically since my brief tenure of fame. I sported a beard for one thing.”

Lucy lowered her gaze, remembering his beard only too well, the teasing prickle of it against her cheek when the man calling himself Captain Doom had taunted her with his carnality.

“My hair was long then,” he continued, “worn in a Hessian tail, and much lighter than it is now.” His cocked eyebrow belied the gravity of his words. “After all, I hadn’t spent five years out of the sun, chained to a stone wall in a French fortress, watching my youth and vitality waste away.”

Lucy was shaken. His crew’s grim fate must have, in some ways, been more tolerable than his own. This
time she was wise enough to bite back her pity. He’d made it clear he had no use for it.

Besides, she thought, studying him from beneath her lashes, there was nothing wasted about this man. He exuded raw power. It was a tribute to his consummate skill as an actor that he’d kept it leashed long enough to appear the most exemplary of servants while in her father’s employ.

She was forced to scramble for the threads of her unraveling argument. “What did you hope to find in the Admiral’s library? Do you think he would have been foolish enough to retain evidence that could convict him of plotting such a ruthless scheme?”

“Not foolish. Arrogant, perhaps, but never foolish. When the truth comes to light, as I can promise you it soon will, that letter of marque will be the only thing standing between your pompous papa and the gallows. As long as he has it in his possession, he can be convicted of swindling and fraud, but not piracy.”

“That doesn’t explain why he would hire someone to protect me.”

“Did he? Or was he protecting himself? When he read in the newspapers of my untimely resurrection, he wisely chose not to travel by sea. But it obviously never occurred to him that Doom might abduct you. Perhaps he feared the man would try to make contact with you again. Would tell you the truth just as I’m doing now. The authorities might not believe a convicted pirate, but what if the Admiral’s own daughter denounced him?”

Against her will, Lucy remembered the Admiral’s grueling interrogation after her rescue by the
Argonaut
, his suspicious, sidelong glances. The words tore from her raw throat, as if saying them with enough fervor could somehow make them true. “That’s utter
nonsense. He hired you because he cares for me. I’m all he has. He needs me.”

“You’re bloody well right he needs you. So he can savor his role as martyred cuckold. So he can punish you, every hour of every day, for your mother’s indiscretions. She had the sheer audacity to die on him, but she left you in her place to pay for her sins. Quite the doting papa, isn’t he?”

At Gerard’s brutal words, the fierce pain of his betrayal struck her anew. She swayed on her feet. He reached for her.

She recoiled from him, infused with strength by the desperate need to avoid his touch. She couldn’t afford to forget that his tenderness, his consideration for her well-being, were nothing more than the tools of a coldly calculated ruse. His eyes darkened at her withdrawal, but he didn’t press.

She had to escape him. She knew better than anyone that there was nowhere to flee on a ship, but blind panic sent her striding toward the cabin’s door. “This is an outrage. I won’t stand for it. I demand to be released at the nearest port or I swear I shall—”

Gerard stepped neatly into her path, blocking any hope of flight. Lucy’s breath caught in her nostrils, deceived by the comforting scent of him—tobacco, the spice of bayberry, now mated with the wild and salty tang of the sea.

Tension tingled between them like lightning before a summer storm, but he didn’t lay a hand on her. There was no need to. The unspoken threat crackled in the air. As Lucy’s gaze shifted to his unyielding features, she was forced to acknowledge that this man, who had once vowed to hold her life as dear as his own, was now her mortal enemy.

“If you’ve any thoughts of escape,
Miss Snow
”—he lingered over her name as if to deliberately destroy any
intimacy they’d once shared—“you’d best think twice. My men are a dangerous lot. Utterly ruthless. Trust me. You don’t want to fall into their hands.”

So they were back to that, were they? Lucy thought. Well, he wasn’t the only one who could read a cue. She tilted her head back, daring a mutinous glare. “You’ll forgive me, sir, if I find it difficult to trust you. Tell me, Mr. Clare—
Captain
,” she amended, each syllable laced with contempt, “was your time at Ionia worthwhile? Did you find the prize you were seeking in my father’s library?”

His gaze raked her, but Lucy found it impossible to decipher the peculiar blend of emotions in his expression. Amusement? Desperation? Regret?

His gaze returned to her face. “Oh, I found a hell of a prize. I just haven’t decided what to do with it yet.”

As he swung open the door to depart, Lucy didn’t know whether to be alarmed at being abandoned to her fears or relieved to escape his company. She could not resist a parting shot.

“Captain?”

“Yes?” he replied with scorching patience.

“You can blame my father for your villainy if it soothes your battered scruples, but you should never forget that every man is master of his own fate.”

He shut the door in her face, his gentle rejection underscored by the rattle of a key and the thud of a wooden bolt being slammed into place.

Lucy sank against the door, betrayed by her quivering knees. Perhaps the only skill she’d inherited from her father was her ability to bluff, for as long as Gerard Claremont was captain of this vessel, he was also master of her fate.

Gerard clenched the forward rail and braced his legs against the swell of the waves, savoring the sensation
of once again being master of all he surveyed. After weeks of meekly taking orders from a man he loathed, it was a heady feeling, intoxicating and almost as potent as the temptation to abuse that mastery.

Undaunted by the winter chill and the ponderous gloom of gray seas meeting pewter-tinted skies, he sucked a breath deep into his lungs, hoping it might purge him of the remorse marring his reunion with the only mistress he had ever loved. She baptized him in her invigorating spray and pressed her salty kiss against his lips. His years of captivity, spent buried in stone, yet taunted by the nearby chant of the sea, had only sharpened his craving for her open arms.

Every man is master of his own fate
.

Gerard’s knuckles whitened with anger at the echo of Lucy’s grave rebuke. The prim and pampered Miss Snow had a lot of bloody nerve denouncing him. She’d never had her fate snatched from her hands and given into the hands of others. Cruel hands. Merciless hands. Hands that quenched the light and left him chained in filth and darkness for months on end.

When Lucy had strode toward the cabin door to so gallantly defy him, he had thought to put his hands on her, but hadn’t trusted himself to do so. Hadn’t trusted himself to test the boundaries of the dangerous shift of power that had occurred in their relationship. He had feared his hunger for her and his thirst for revenge might somehow meld, creating a violent maelstrom that could destroy them both. He knew instinctively that if he ever crossed that line, there’d be no turning back.

Unbeknownst to her, she’d already saved her father’s life once. Until he’d learned of her existence, Gerard had fully intended to wring his revenge from Lucien Snow’s treacherous throat. It was her gentle prodding of his slumbering scruples at their first meeting
that had tempered his desire for vengeance with a craving for justice and birthed his mad scheme to infiltrate his enemy’s camp.

He wondered if some residual insanity had prompted him to bring her aboard the
Retribution
. His physical scars were fading, but the deeper mental scars of his imprisonment remained, carved when madness had gnawed like rats in the dark at the frayed edges of his reason.

It would have been far simpler to leave her unconscious on the floor of the Admiral’s library, no more aware of his true identity than she had ever been. She might have harbored her own suspicions about her bodyguard’s abrupt departure, but they would have been just that—suspicions with no proof to uphold them.

But when she had whispered his alias and slumped in his arms, her soft, boneless weight becoming his own, he’d been seized by a fierce surge of possessiveness, a primitive masculine response more suited to a cave dweller than a ship’s captain. He simply could not bear to relinquish her to his enemy.

So he had carried her off to his waiting ship, adding kidnapping to his growing list of transgressions. He knew the Admiral couldn’t afford to keep silent this time. Soon the London press
and
the Royal Navy would know the name he’d been born with, his description, and possibly some distorted version of his history. A version in which Lucien Snow would doubtless emerge as the most valiant of heroes.

His smoldering eyes searched the mist-shrouded horizon, but not even the tempestuous charms of the distant billows could soothe his raw temper. Too soon, that horizon would be studded with a fleet of Royal Navy ships, their rows of cannons trained on the
Retribution
.

He’d risked his ship, his crew, and his life, all for nothing more than the opportunity to make Lucinda Snow despise him.

He didn’t turn around when Apollo padded out of the shadows beneath the fo’c’sle like the ghost of his conscience. “The first time I brought her aboard, I did not know she was a woman. Can you say the same, my friend?”

His quartermaster’s melodious voice was underscored by the rhythm of the islands and lightly accented with the French of his former masters. Gerard knew he was worried. You didn’t spend five years chained next to a man without learning his moods, even a man as private as Apollo.

Gerard shot him a dark look. “I might have had more time to consider the consequences of my actions had my crew not threatened to sail without me.”

The natural serenity of Apollo’s features was disturbed by a faint wince. “Not by choice, Captain. We’d thought to lie low in the shallows for another week, but after that unfortunate incident with the earl’s wife, we thought it best to sail before the duel. That’s why I sent Kevin to the fancy house to inform you of our need for haste.”

“Damn his lascivious hide! I ought to call him out myself.” Gerard gave his cheek an irate rub, abrading his palm on the fresh stubble of what he hoped would soon be a thriving beard. One of the things he had detested most about Ionia was having to shave twice a day. “He hasn’t a repentant bone in his body. I should never have left him in command.” He stabbed a menacing finger at Apollo’s freshly oiled chest. “If you’d have only agreed to do it …”