Regency High Society Vol 2: Sparhawk's Lady / The Earl's Intended Wife / Lord Calthorpe's Promise / The Society Catch

“Has Stanhope hurt you, lass?” He was breathing hard, his face shiny with sweat, and she wondered what he’d had to do to reach her. She had no experience with men as purely physical as this one, but she’d guess that Captain Sparhawk could leave a whole trail of bodies behind him. “Has he used you ill?”

“Oh no, not like that!” She was glad that in the gray moonlight through the window he couldn’t see how she blushed. He might not have meant ‘like that’ at all; it was only her thoughts that ran that way. “That is, I am well enough.”

He rubbed his sleeve across his forehead, his gaze sweeping around the tiny room. “Damnation, didn’t he even give you a candlestick?”

She shook her head. “George probably believed I’d try to burn his house down.”

“Then let’s shove off before that damned footman I had to cosh wakes. Come on, lass, hurry!”

“Have you lost your wits?” She stared at him indignantly. “I can’t possibly go with you! Can you imagine what George would think?”

“I can’t, and I don’t care.”

“Well, perhaps you just should. Do you think George has forgotten that you were the highwayman who robbed him the other night? He’s already filed a complaint against you, and I shouldn’t wonder if they’re printing broadsides with your description even now. Of course this footman you so elegantly—what was the word?—coshed will say it was the same man who came here and kidnapped me, and you’ll find yourself at the hangman’s tree so fast you’ll wonder how it happened.”

Now it was his turn to stare at her. “That’s the greatest pack of claptrap I’ve ever heard! You were the one who forced me into that nonsense about being a highwayman, and it was Stanhope, not me, who kidnapped You in the first place! No court in the world could make any of that stick!”

“Not in the world, no,” she admitted, “but here in Hampshire George has enough friends that he probably could bring it to pass. I really wouldn’t want you hung on my account.”

“And neither, ma’am, would I.” He held his hand out to her, more a command than an invitation. “So let’s clear off while we can.”

Still she hesitated. True, she’d sought the man’s help for Frederick’s sake, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to be indebted to him for her own, as well. “I’ve made great progress with that Mrs. Warren, you know. I think she’d be willing to let me escape some morning if I paid her enough. George isn’t the only one who can bribe servants.”

Jeremiah swore. “Will you come, or do I have to carry you?”

“That won’t be necessary.” She lifted her chin and swept past him, the coverlet dragging behind her like a train.

“Damnation, I forgot you hadn’t any clothes!”

She let the coverlet slip a bit, and grinned over her bare shoulder. “George has them somewhere, and I don’t think he’d return them now if we asked.”

“We’ll deal with it later,” he said. “Now hurry!”

She skipped along ahead of him, her bare feet silent on the stairs. With her hair loose and tousled around her shoulders, she looked like what she was, a woman roused from her bed, and in spite of everything else, Jeremiah couldn’t forget it as he followed close behind.

Close enough that he could smell her fragrance, close enough that he could see the soft curves of her body through the coverlet—God help him, was she naked beneath it?—close enough to remind him all too well of how sweet she’d been to kiss.…

Blast, did she mean to be so teasing, or was it just another of her unending games? She’d made it clear enough that she loved her husband, and Jeremiah would respect that, not wishing to poach on another man’s well-staked territory. He never had before. But still Caro seemed determined to play the coquette with him, even now, when he should have been concentrating on getting her safely from this house. Any other woman would have been terrified, clinging to him from sheer gratitude, but she was treating the whole business like a lark. Telling him he’d be dancing on a rope’s end for kidnapping her! His sister was right: the sooner he disentangled himself from Lady Byfield’s affairs, the better.

And then at the bottom of the steps to the street, she turned up and smiled at him, a smile so breathtakingly art less in the moonlight that he nearly forgot all his intentions and kissed her. “You did it, Captain Sparhawk, didn’t you? Rescued me from the dragon’s lair like some poor fair damsel?”

“Not quite. The dragon could still wake and eat you up.” He grabbed her by her elbow and hustled her across the street to the little park. She seemed shorter somehow, and then he remembered her bare feet. “Oh, hell, you can’t walk, can you?”

“Of course I can walk. I’m a countess, not a ninny. I’ve told you before I rather like doing without shoes.” She looked around the trees, her curiosity as frank as a child’s. “How far is your carriage?”

“There isn’t any damned carriage.” His frustration growing, he uncocked the pistol and shoved it back into his belt. “Hired carriages are easy to trace. I’d thought we’d walk down near the waterfront and hire a chaise there to take you to your friends.”

“Then I suppose we should begin walking, shouldn’t we?” She hiked the coverlet higher over her shoulders and began striding resolutely off in the wrong direction. He caught her by the arm and turned her around, and she laughed merrily at her own mistake.

“Hush now, lass,” he said uneasily. “Won’t do to call attention to ourselves.”

She clapped her hand over her mouth, then lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Forgive me, Captain. I forgot that strolling along Queen’s Court in my shift at midnight isn’t enough to get me—even me—noticed.”

“We’ll find you some clothes soon enough.” Damnation, why had she had to tell him that? She was as good as naked beside him, and he felt his own body responding with alarming interest. “Now tell me the names of your friends here in town I could take you to.”

Her head bowed, she didn’t answer at first. “There aren’t any.”

“All right then, in the countryside,” he said, exasperated by her pickiness. “I forget you fashionable gentry don’t believe in living in towns.”

“No, that’s not it.” Her voice was so soft that he had to strain to hear it. “I meant that I don’t have any friends. Before Frederick married me, none of his friends’ wives would receive me, and afterward Frederick decided we wouldn’t receive them. So you see we’ve always kept to ourselves at Blackstone House, and that’s always been enough. Until now, anyway.”

“Then there must be a someone else. An aunt or uncle, or some business acquaintance of your husband’s?”

“Only George on Frederick’s side.” She smiled bitterly. Once she would have turned to Mr. Perkins, but now she didn’t trust George not to have poisoned the lawyer against her, too, just as he had her own servants. She’d always suspected how little they’d respected her, no matter how much she’d tried to be fair and kind, and now she had the unhappy proof.

Her eyes were troubled, her manner uncharacteristically hesitant, as she glanced up toward Jeremiah. “Your sister Desire lives near Portsmouth. Could I possibly stay with her?”

Jeremiah sighed, unsure of how to answer without wounding her more, but that sigh was answer enough for Caro.

“No, of course not,” she said quickly with forced cheerfulness, now trying to spare him. “Whatever am I saying, inviting myself into her house like that?”

“It’s not what you’re thinking, Caro,” he said. “My sister’s not much for any guests these days, not with her husband just gone off with the fleet and her third child due within the month.”

Caro’s face softened. “Oh, a baby!” she murmured. “How fortunate your sister must be to have a family like that! I’ve always wanted—no, I shouldn’t go wishing for more, not after all the good things life’s given me. Of course your sister couldn’t take in a stray like me at such a time. Please wish her well when you see her again.”

But this time her attempts to be the grand, gracious Lady Byfield failed miserably. Her words might be brave, but the forlorn slump of her shoulders told a different story that didn’t escape Jeremiah.

Gently he slipped his arm over her shoulders. “I’m not about to cast you off alone, Caro. First we’ll find you something more suitable to wear and a decent place to stay, then we’ll consider the rest one step at a time.”

“The poor damsel is most grateful,” she said with more wistfulness than she’d intended. “And I do intend to pay you back.”

“Oh, hush,” he scoffed gruffly. “I’ll hear none of that. My coin spends every bit as well as yours, and since I’ve brought you this far, you’ll be my guest.”

She smiled, thinking how different Captain Sparhawk’s offer of hospitality was from George’s. He didn’t resemble any other gentleman she’d ever known, but she liked him. She liked him very much. “I didn’t mean to pay you with guineas, though your offer is most generous. You’ve done me a great favor, and so, if you’ll let me, I’ll do one for you. Your friend Mr. Kerr—”

“Later, Caro,” said Jeremiah sharply, drawing her closer beneath his arm. “We’ve company.”

They had come to a neighborhood that Caro didn’t recognize, one with narrow streets and ancient, dilapidated buildings whose upper stories jutted crazily over their heads. The paving stones beneath her bare feet had been replaced by hard-packed dirt, and the stench wafting from the street made her long for shoes of any sort. Two sailors were weaving toward them, navy men with long pigtails down their backs and round, flat-rimmed hats with embroidered ribbon bands, and unsteady as they were on their feet, there was no mistaking the eager hunger in their eyes as they stared at Caro.

A lifetime ago, but she’d never forgotten that look in a man’s eyes. Greed and lust, a predator’s cold need, marking her, using her, ruining her beyond redemption. All she had, all she was, to be sold to the man with the deepest pockets.

“Tumbled the chit right out o’ her hammock, sheets an’ all, did you, mate?” asked the first seaman, fumbling in the bag around his neck for another coin as he leered at Caro. “Saints, but she’s finer than any o’ the drabs we seen in the fancy houses on Water Street. How much’ll you take for a turn wit’ her?”

“Not a farthing,” said Jeremiah with a quiet authority that startled Caro.

“Ah, mate, we’s only askin’ to share yer good fortune!”

“The lady’s with me,” said Jeremiah, his voice rumbling deeper. “And she’s not for sale.”

The man raised his hands and backed away, intimidated by the threat in Jeremiah’s voice. “Meanin’ no offense, gov’ner. She’s yours, an’ there it ends. No offense.”

But his companion had had his courage bolstered by more rum, and he lurched toward Caro to snatch the coverlet away. “Come on, lovey, let’s have some sport.”

The knife was in Jeremiah’s hand in an instant, the long blade flashing in the moonlight. The second sailor yowled and stumbled back, clutching his arm where blood was already darkening the slashed sleeve of his jacket.

“I told you,” said Jeremiah as he guided Caro past them, “the lady’s with me.”

“You would have killed him, wouldn’t you?” whispered Caro. The ease and violence with which he’d defended her stunned her. Frederick would never have dreamed of doing such a thing, even if he’d been able. “Just like that, you would have killed him.”

Jeremiah made a disgusted sound deep in his chest as he wiped the knife’s blade clean. “If I’d had to, aye. But that bit of English foolishness wasn’t worth the killing.”

She tried to smile. “But this bit of English foolishness was worth defending that way?”

He glanced at her sharply, surprised by the quaver in her voice. She looked small and waifish, her mouth pinched and her eyes still wide from what she’d just witnessed. Belatedly he realized that while dockyard arguments and drawn knives were nothing new to him, she’d be accustomed to more tender circumstances. He longed to take her in his arms and reassure her, to hold her until the fear left her eyes, but the memory of that well-loved husband stood uneasily between them, and instead all he did was slip the knife back in the sheath at his waist and clear his throat.

“There’s nothing foolish about you, lass,” he said gruffly, “except, maybe, the way you’ve rigged yourself out. But we’ll remedy that directly.”

He pounded on the door of a shop with men and women’s second-hand clothing hanging from a rod in the window until a sleepy old woman answered the door.

“Can’t ye read the sign, ye great bluff baboon?” she said. “We’re closed.”

“Not now, are you?” Jeremiah raised a guinea in his fingers to glitter in the moonlight, and at once the woman opened the door. “The lady needs a gown, and whatever else she pleases.”

“Ain’t ye the Lord Generous,” grumbled the woman, eyeing Caro critically. “What’s become o’ yer own clothes, girl?”

“She lost ‘em throwing dice with a crimp,” answered Jeremiah dryly. “Look quick about it, ma’am, we haven’t all night.”

Chapter Six

Within an hour Caro was dressed decently, if not fashionably, in a linsey-woolsey gown with a checkered scarf tied around her throat and over her breasts and a chip bonnet with a limp pink rose on her head, and perched on a bench across a table from Jeremiah in a bustling tavern near the water. Before her sat a slice of onion pie topped with yellow cheese and a tankard of cider, and nothing in her life had ever tasted so good. Although she guessed the hour must be closer to dawn than midnight, the tavern was full of sailors, shipwrights, carters, colliers and their women, and Caro leaned closer to Jeremiah to hear him over the din of their laughter and shouted conversations and the fiddle player near the hearth.

“I said, Caro, that Stanhope will think you’ve vanished from the face of the earth.” He thumped his own tankard of ale down on the oak table for emphasis. “As far as he’s concerned, you have. Look at you! No one would ever believe you’re a countess now!”

She grinned, and took another bite of the pie. To see Jeremiah Sparhawk across from her now, his face relaxed and his green eyes warm as he teased her, made it easy for her to forget the pistols and the long, bloodied knife at his waist. He really wasn’t much better than the highwayman they’d pretended he was. Maybe no Americans were. His gift for self-preservation would make him perfect for the task she meant to set before him, and with his chivalrous inclinations on her behalf he’d be bound to agree. Now if only she could convince herself that her own feelings toward him were equally mercenary!

For the first time, she wished she knew more of men and the world. Before she’d met Captain Sparhawk, she’d been able to divide them neatly in two: there were the precious few like Frederick and Jack Herendon, who treated her with kindness and respect, and then there were all the others, who looked at her with a blatant mixture of contempt and lust. But no man she’d ever met treated her like this oversize American, teasing and bantering with her one moment and then willing to fight to the death for her honor the next, and to her confusion, she liked it. She liked him, more than she should, certainly more than was proper for her as Frederick’s wife.

Jeremiah covered her hand with his and the warmth of his touch raced through her. “You’re quiet, lass,” he asked with real concern. “Weariness, or is there something else that ails you?”

“Weariness.” How could she ever admit that he was what ailed her? “Nothing more, nothing less.”

Self-consciously she withdrew her hand, but as she sipped her cider, her eyes met his over the tankard’s battered rim. There was gray streaked through his black hair at the temples, and from the deep lines that fanned from his eyes when he smiled, she knew he’d seen much of life, not all of it good. But she also knew better than to ask. She had more than her own share of secrets to keep hidden.

“Then I’d best find us lodgings for what’s left of the night.” He kept his hand on the table after she’d pulled hers back, unspoken admission of her rebuke, and he studied it now as if surprised to find it there. “Though truth to tell, I like where I am just fine.”

In the crowded, noisy, smoky room his smile was for her alone, an invitation she had no right to accept. She must end this now, while she still could.

“I told you I would pay you back your kindness with the information you wished about your friend, and I will. But first I must tell you of Frederick.”

“You don’t have to,” said Jeremiah quickly, perhaps too quickly. But he didn’t want to hear again of the paragon that was Caro’s husband, or how much she loved him. No, he didn’t want to hear that again at all. “You’ve told me more than enough already, and I wouldn’t want you to speak of anything that might cause you pain.”

Selfish, conniving bastard! He couldn’t believe he’d actually said that, especially after the lovely, grateful smile she gave him that he didn’t deserve.

“No, Captain, I’ve scarcely told you anything.” With a sigh she pushed the pewter plate to one side and clasped her hands on the table before her. She looked very young in the old-fashioned bonnet, her face framed by the curving brim, and he’d meant it when he’d said no one would believe her a countess now. “Frederick’s mother, the dowager countess, still lives, though she is very old and not well. I’ve never been presented to her. Before I was Frederick’s wife there wasn’t any question of it, but when she learned we planned to wed, she left England for Naples so she wouldn’t have to acknowledge me. It was—is—very painful for Frederick, though of course I understand entirely.”

Yet the way Caro looked down at her hands, rubbing one thumb against the other, told Jeremiah that she didn’t understand at all, and that the elder Lady Byfield’s scorn wounded her every bit as much as it did Frederick. Pompous old bitch, thought Jeremiah angrily. His sister had told him how she herself had been snubbed in certain aristocratic circles simply for being an untitled American who’d had the audacity to marry the younger son of an English lord, and he imagined what those same overbred vultures would make of poor Caro.

“Two years ago this summer Frederick’s mother finally agreed to see him again,” she continued sadly, “and with great joy and eagerness he booked his passage to Naples. She specifically excluded me from her invitation, but Frederick held great hopes for their reconciliation. I wept for days and days after he sailed. We had never been apart, you know, not since my fourteenth birthday.”

Jeremiah nearly choked on his ale. He’d known she’d been young, but fourteen, for all love!

“I had one letter from him,” she said, unaware of his reaction, “brought by another ship that had met his, and then nothing more because—why is everyone running away?”

All around them men were shouting and abandoning their drink and their women to crowd out the back door, some not waiting their turn and climbing through the windows instead.

A laconic barmaid reached over to take Caro’s empty plate and swipe a rag across the tabletop. “It’s the pressgangs again, lamb,” she explained. “They’ve been at it so hot all this week that the few men left run like frightened coneys at the very hint o’ a lieutenant an’ his bullyboys.”

Slowly the woman straightened, hands on her hips and her full breasts jutting out above her bodice as she languidly surveyed Jeremiah. “Best tell your pretty sailor man here to turn tail with the others ‘less he wants to spend the next seven years servin’ against the French.”

Caro gasped and shoved her bench back from the table. “Oh, Captain, she’s right! There must be three score navy vessels in the harbor now—I saw them from the window at George’s house—and they’ll all be looking for men! Come, hurry, you don’t want them to take you!”

“Hush now, lass, they’ll not take me.” He caught her wrist and gently forced her back down to her seat. “I’m an American, mind?”

The barmaid sniffed. “Don’t be so sure, Yankee. There was two New Yorkers here the other night had their protections torn up right afore their eyes. The lieutenant called them bloody liars an’ read them into the king’s service anyways.”

Alarmed all over again, Caro tugged at Jeremiah’s hand. “Hurry, then, there’s little to be gained taking chances like this!”

“There’s no chance to it, Caro,” scoffed Jeremiah, touched and pleased by her concern. “I’m an American, and I’m a captain and owner of my own vessels. Six of ‘em, last I counted. They can’t touch me.”

Pointedly the barmaid studied how he was dressed and sniffed again, not believing his claim for a moment. “Please yerself, Cap’n,” she said with a dismissive shrug, “for here they be now.”

Abruptly the fiddler stopped playing in the middle of his tune, and every one of the people who remained—women, toothless old men and those missing limbs, sailors already serving with a ship and watermen protected by the crown—turned to stare in hostile silence at the six men standing in the doorway. At their head was a young navy lieutenant in a blue coat and two marines in red, and behind them stood three more seamen, clearly chosen for their size and fearsomeness.

The lieutenant scowled as he scanned the room. Empty seats with half-full tankards and tumblers before them were testimony enough that they’d arrived too late to find any useful men.

“An empty net tonight, eh, Lieutenant?” taunted one old man, his cackle echoed by the others. “The fish all slipped through yer net again?”

Angrily the officer searched the room for the man who’d mocked him. His gaze stopped when he spotted Caro and Jeremiah at their table near the far wall, and with a tight-lipped, predatory smile on his face he headed toward their table. One of the bad men, decided Caro uneasily, one of the ones who only wanted to hurt.

“You there, skulking behind the petticoats!” he said sharply. “What ship, eh?”

Her anxiety mounting, Caro watched as Jeremiah slowly rose to his feet, using his height to his advantage as he towered over the others. It seemed to her he was twice the size of the little lieutenant, and despite his rough, common clothing, there was more authority in him alone than in all three of the uniformed Englishmen combined.

The lieutenant knew it, too, and didn’t like it. “I asked you your ship, you insolent dog.”

“I’m not a dog, but a captain,” answered Jeremiah with a mildness that didn’t fool Caro. She thought of the pistols in his belt beneath his coat and the knife at his waist and who only knew what else, and prayed he wouldn’t be halfwitted enough to use any of them now.

“An American captain,” continued Jeremiah, “a shipmaster and an owner of nearly twenty years’ standing. I stood my own quarterdeck before you were breeched, you English puppy, and I’ll thank you to remember it before I report you to your betters for ill breeding.”

The others in the room hooted and laughed derisively. “Silence, all of you,” bellowed the lieutenant as his men raised their cudgels around him, “or I’ll have you all taken in for disrespect to an officer of the crown!”

The cudgels, not his threats, brought an uneasy silence, and the officer turned back to Jeremiah. “You claim to be an American captain. What ship? What port? Where, sir, are your papers?”

“I am Captain Jeremiah Sparhawk of Providence, in the State of Rhode Island in New England.” There was no mistaking the pride in his voice as he handed the lieutenant a document with a heavy red seal stamped into one corner. “Most recently of my own brig the Chanticleer.”

“The Chanticleer? I know of no ship by that name in port.”

“She was lost,” said Jeremiah softly, “last November.”

The lieutenant grunted as he took the document. “That’s convenient, isn’t it?”