Never Trust a Pirate (Scandal at the House of Russell 2)

This was going to be a great deal more difficult than she’d expected, starting out, but then, she had no choice. She’d committed herself to this path and she would see it through. If the captain made unwelcome advances she would scream her head off. But she’d seen his fiancée—her own complete opposite. Gwendolyn Haviland was skinny, flat as a board, Maddy added uncharitably, with watery blue eyes and pale skin and colorless hair…

She stopped herself, astonished at her own cattiness. Gwendolyn Haviland was a beauty. She was slender rather than thin, with porcelain skin, pale blue eyes, and the blond hair that her sister Sophie assured her was so much more à la mode. She was like some exquisite doll, and she made Maddy feel like an overblown peony, with her dark hair and dark blue eyes and admittedly voluptuous figure. Clearly she wasn’t the captain’s type—that kiss had been just what he’d said it had been—a salutary lesson. She just wasn’t used to lessons feeling so disturbingly… good.

“Greaves!” Mrs. Crozier’s carping voice came from the kitchen, and she couldn’t dawdle any longer. She’d find some way to coexist with the captain, perhaps pretend it hadn’t even happened. Pushing herself out of the seat with her one good hand, she returned to the kitchen and her two taskmasters.

Wilf was busy shoveling food into his mouth, and he didn’t even bother to look at her. She’d been a fool to expect him to thank her for taking the blame for his own ineptitude, but of course he ignored her completely, as he’d ignored her before. Which suited her fine—she didn’t want his rheumy old eyes on her.

“You’d best go up to bed, girl,” Mrs. Crozier said, and Maddy ground her teeth. Answering to the name of “Greaves” had been bad enough—the convenient “girl” was impossibly demeaning. “The captain will probably want to see you, and I don’t think you’ll be wanting to

face him tonight. He’d probably fire you on the spot. I’ll tell him I’ve sent you to bed.”

She was ready to put off seeing him for as long as she possibly could. “That won’t be a problem?”

Mrs. Crozier shrugged her thin shoulders. “You’ll simply have to prove yourself, same as anyone. If you do your job and keep out of his way the captain won’t have anything to say to you. But if you’re lazy or nosy you’ll be blistered with words, you will. I hear tell they don’t use the lash on his boats—all he has to do is use his tongue.”

It was a sudden, disturbing image. He’d used his tongue with her, in an entirely different manner from what Mrs. Crozier was describing, and it had demoralized her completely. She sincerely doubted he kissed his erring crewmembers, though there were stories about long trips…

No, not the man who’d put his mouth on hers. And she wasn’t even supposed to know that men did such things, but she’d always had a great curiosity and one of her father’s retired captains had explained things to her. She still couldn’t quite fathom what men did together, and she certainly couldn’t imagine the captain, but then, she was hopelessly naïve in some matters and preferred it that way.

“There you go again,” Mrs. Crozier snapped. “That faraway look in your eyes fair gives me the chills, it does. Like you’re seeing ghosts or something.”

Well, that was at least one form of defense against the old biddy, Maddy thought. “Beg pardon, Mrs. Crozier,” she said meekly. “I was just thinking of something.”

“Don’t you go be thinking about the captain! He doesn’t have any interest in a pert housemaid, not when he’s got a beauty like Miss Haviland, so you can put it right out of your mind. If you were a doxy he’d pay the price easily enough, I imagine, but he doesn’t soil his own nest, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m a good girl, I am,” she said immediately, putting just the trace of a whine in it. “I left London because my employer was trying to take advantage of me. If I’m not going to lift my skirts for a lord I’m for certain not about to lift them for a sea captain.”

Mrs. Crozier was not impressed. “I’m thinking your lord didn’t look like Captain Morgan. For all that he’s part gypsy the women fall all over him, and I expect you will too. Just don’t make a pest of yourself.”

“Yes, Mrs. Crozier.” She’d make a pest of herself, all right, just not in the way Mrs. Crozier imagined. Things had suddenly become a great deal more difficult. An elderly sea captain, no matter how larcenous, seemed a lot easier to deal with than someone like the man who…

No, she couldn’t think about it, not tonight. Tonight she had to find her way up three flights of stairs to her attic, lugging water to wash in and sheets for the bed, and she had to pray there were no bats to greet her.

It was the least she deserved after such an exhausting day.

She wasn’t counting on it.

CHAPTER SIX

LUCA WAS NOT A happy man. With Vincent Haviland’s rheumy eyes on him, he had danced attendance on Gwendolyn and was rewarded with the beautiful smile that lit her blue eyes, her slight, restraining touch on his arm, a mild flirtation that hardly suited their engaged status. Mrs. Haviland was looking at him as if he’d crawled out of a sewer, and he would have given almost anything to lean over and inform her that’s exactly where he’d come from.

Ah, but he had a role to play, a brand-new reputation, hard-won and relatively honest. His thieving, pirating days were behind him, as well as his whoring and brawling. He’d decided to marry a very beautiful, very proper young lady, and he needed to ignore his rebellious second thoughts. From now on, when at home, he was going to be the perfect model of a captain and a budding industrialist. He knew Gwendolyn—she would revel in her role as leader of Devonport society. She’d assured him she had no aspirations toward London, and he believed her. In London she’d be nothing, the daughter of a country solicitor. Dukes’ nieces were thick on the ground already, and her tenuous claim to aristocracy would be ignored for the greater scandal of whom she’d married. Here in Devonport, where shipping lines were more important than bloodlines, she could queen it over everyone, because there was simply no one better than he was at running a ship, be she powered by sails or steam.

He understood the ocean and the vessels that plied it. While his heart would always love the beauty of the clipper ships, his practical side responded to the power and speed of steam and steel. Fools had tried to race him, and they always lost. Other fools had tried to lure his best men from him—they lost as well. Now, with a burgeoning fleet of two ships, soon to be three, he was unstoppable.

So why was he suddenly troubled by the young woman who’d entered his household this very day?

He seldom noticed maids—this house and living on land was a tedious and always temporary necessity, and he paid little attention to the disreputable state the house was in until Gwendolyn gently brought his attention to it. It had to be sheer coincidence that he’d run into the girl earlier, trying to fight off three drunken sailors, the silly cow.

Except she was no cow. She was a rare beauty, with a fire inside that was carefully banked but still glowing, a fire that made Gwendolyn seem pale and lifeless in comparison. He’d been a fool to kiss her, but he’d taken the excuse, simply because he wanted to be bad, be outrageous, do something that would horrify his fiancée had she ever found out. Kissing a beautiful woman in the rough neighborhoods of Devonport had been as good a way as any to vent his frustration, and if the girl had been willing he would have pulled her deeper into the alleyway and taken her up against a wall like a sailor just home from the sea. There’d been something about her, about her soft, unskilled mouth, her flashing eyes, her brave fury, that had called to him, and it wouldn’t have taken him long to show her just how to use that mouth.

He’d thought better of it, of course, and it had only taken the second kiss to realize she wasn’t someone you fucked in an alley on a bright spring day. At least he’d thought he’d scared her off from wandering around the docks alone. So why had he gone back to kiss her one more time?

He couldn’t get her face out of his mind. When he first looked over and saw her kneeling on the floor he thought he was imagining things, so caught up in her memory that he was dreaming she’d appeared.

But damned if it wasn’t her after all, and one sharp glance was even more unsettling. He knew the girl, and not just from the encounter in the alleyway. He couldn’t remember where he’d seen her before today, but he most certainly had. And what the hell was she doing in his household, picking up after that sotted Crozier’s mistakes?

It wasn’t as if she was fair game. Even if he weren’t engaged, he wouldn’t touch a woman in his employ. That was what the toffs did—seduce and discard people like him without a second thought. Though who was he fooling—maids were a step up from where he’d come from. He’d seen them on the streets, following their mistresses when he was a cutpurse, seen them in the houses when he was a climbing boy. Superior they were, clean and starched and prim, looking at him like the dirt he was. No, he’d dealt with the upper crust in the last few years while in Russell’s employ, and he hadn’t been impressed. The only one he’d liked and trusted had been Russell himself, and that had proven to be a mistake. He was hardly going to start aping their bad behavior. Russell. Why was he suddenly thinking of Eustace Russell so much? That part of his life was over.