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‘I dare say Captain Shaw will be in the West Indies or even Virginia by now. So at least he’s out there earning us all some money, whilst I’m stuck on shore sailing nothing better than a desk and your Kit’s off on some wild goose chase all of his own that I would have expected you to know about far better than I do.’
‘Aye, Ben’s proving himself the best of us all as usual,’ she said, affection very evident in her husky voice, and Hugh frowned fleetingly at hearing her so neatly avoid his implication she wasn’t as close to her protector as she hoped she was.
Then he forgot his doubts about that position himself as he pondered the possibility of her maintaining intimate relations with Kit’s business partner as well as Kit himself. He silently cursed the blond giant for apparently taking shares in his best friend’s doxy, especially when Kit could have shared her with him instead.
‘So why are you still here? You could easily have gone to sea in Ben’s stead, and I doubt very much anyone would have missed you,’ she informed him irritably.
Which was perfectly correct, he allowed fairly, even if it was brutally frank and deliberately tactless. Once upon a time, when he’d gone by another name and still possessed a relatively innocent soul, a number of good people had cared what became of him and some had even claimed to miss him sadly whilst he was away at sea. The few who were left to recall the blithe young idiot he’d once been probably welcomed the disappearance of the cynical sot he’d become from their lives with unalloyed relief, when he finally had the good manners to remove himself from polite society and the place he’d once thought of as home.
He reminded himself sourly that the past was dead and gone and he’d resolved to live for the day when he became Hugh Darke, a man who congratulated himself on caring for nobody, just as nobody cared for him, except somewhere along the way he’d come to value the good opinion of his rescuers. Still, at least he’d been able to tell himself that he’d never again be the gullible, arrogant young fool he’d been back then, before his world fell apart and everything he’d thought solid and safe melted away like mist.
Memory of the wanton havoc a careless and selfish woman could create in the life of a so-called gentleman should make him turn away from this one and barricade himself into his borrowed chamber until she gave up on him and went back into the night as swiftly and silently as she’d come. Unfortunately, she fascinated him far too much, even when he was sober and responsible; now he was three-parts’ castaway, he was much too forgetful that whatever sort of woman she was, she certainly wasn’t his, for all his driven wanting of her.
‘I’ve been ordered to stay ashore and run things here while they’re both busy playing on the high seas, or wherever Kit Stone happens to be hiding himself just now,’ he admitted gruffly at last.
His ruffled feelings about his part of their current mission were too apparent in his aggrieved tone and he hated to hear that faint whine of discontent in his own voice. From what he could see of his unexpected visitor’s face through the shadowed gloom, she looked quite tempted to push him down the stairs and have done with him for good. A part of himself he’d almost managed to smother in drink and duty would almost be glad if she could put a period to his worthless existence as well, but he shook off the deep sense of melancholy he suspected had a lot to do with returning sobriety and wondered how soon he could drown it in brandy again. The sooner he got rid of the confounded woman and got back to this useless excuse for a life the better, he decided bitterly, then frowned fiercely at the intruder, which made it a crying shame she probably couldn’t see in the dark how very little he wanted her here.
Chapter Two
‘So you’re playing at being in charge of Kit and Ben’s business ashore, whenever you manage to stay sober enough to care if it sinks or swims for the odd half-hour you can spare it, whilst they’re both busy risking their lives to make your fortune for you?’ the intrusive female asked Hugh, condemnation heavy in otherwise dulcet tones.
How irresistible her voice might be if she ever found anything to like about him, he mused foolishly. As it was, her question echoed about his head like knife blades and he wondered if she’d been sent to torture him with her nagging questions and the haunting scent of her, the ridiculous sensuality of her very presence in the same room with him when it was too dark for him to see the outline of her superb body. A vital, unignorable here-and-now allure that somehow reminded him with every breath that she was a very human woman and not a haughty goddess after all. A woman well used to satisfying a man’s every fantasy on her back—as long as that man had enough gold in his pockets to pay for the privilege. And, thanks to Kit Stone and Ben Shaw, he had more than enough gelt to buy a lovely woman for their mutual pleasure nowadays, and keep her in comfort while he did so. How unfortunate that the one he wanted at the moment belonged to a friend he already owed so much to that he must leave her as untouched as a vestal virgin.
‘I mind my own business—would I could say the same for you, madam,’ he informed her sharply, in the hope she couldn’t read his bitter frustration at her unavailability or discern his ridiculous state in this gloom.
‘Kit and Ben are my business,’ she informed him impatiently and confirmed every conclusion he’d already reached about her, which really shouldn’t disappoint him as bitterly as it did somehow, especially considering he already expected the worst of her and most of her gender.
‘Not at the moment they’re not, since there’s a few hundred leagues of ocean between you and their moneybags, so you’ll just have to ply your trade elsewhere until they return,’ he drawled as insultingly as he could manage.
‘That’s it! Out you; go on, you get out of this house right now, you verminous toad!’ she ordered as if she had every right to evict him from the house Kit had told him to treat as his own while he was away.
‘Firstly, you’ll cease your screeching, my girl,’ he ordered as he grasped her arms in a steely hold, in case she started scratching and biting in retaliation for being thwarted as was the habit of her type—bred in the gutter and inclined to revert to it at the slightest provocation he decided unfairly, considering he’d long ago concluded nobody could help where they were born, mansion or hovel, and that he preferred hovel dwellers over their better-off neighbours nine times out of ten.
‘Damn you, I’ll screech as long and as loud as I choose to,’ she snapped back and he shook her in the hope it would rob her of breath. Her noise and her closeness and the elusive, womanly scent of her as she fought his grip with a determination he secretly admired was making his head pound again.
‘Secondly, you’ll get out of my room,’ he went on doggedly.
‘We’re not in a room; even if we were, it wouldn’t be yours.’
‘Irrelevant,’ he dismissed and felt something strange under the controlling grip he couldn’t bring himself to make a punishing one, despite his disillusionment with her sex and the urgent need he felt to be rid of her before disaster struck, something besides warm, soft, tempting woman. ‘And what the devil are you doing running wild about the place dressed in a man’s shirt and breeches and not just asking for trouble but begging for it, you idiot woman?’ he demanded harshly, quite put off his list of demands by that shocking discovery.
At least he wished fervently he really did find her unconventional attire shocking, instead of far too sensually appealing for comfort or safety as his exploring hand on her neat derrière made her squirm even more determinedly against him and curse him with an impressive, if far from ladylike, fluency while she was doing so.
‘How I choose to dress is none of your business and never will be,’ she informed him sharply at last, but if she could still blush he was almost sure she was doing so from the sudden increase in body heat under his exploring fingers.
‘No, it’s clearly Kit Stone’s or Ben Shaw’s business, and therefore mine in their absence,’ he asserted, senses sharpening despite the brandy, as he felt a terrible threat to his jealously guarded aloofness in that demand for more information and carried on all the same. ‘Come on,’ he urged recklessly, making her obedience irrelevant by tugging her after him all the way downstairs and into the kitchen, where at least a fire was still burning faintly, even if the manservant Kit employed was snoring in the porter’s chair in the hall, more drunk than Hugh had managed to become so far despite all his efforts before this confounded woman came along and spoilt his chance of a decent night’s stupor.
Now, he supposed bitterly, he’d have to endure his usual nightmare-haunted sleep replaying a past he’d so much rather forget, if he was to be allowed any rest this night at all, which currently seemed doubtful with Kit Stone’s woman actually here in the flesh rather than in spirit for once and making sure he had no chance of resting, even when he wasn’t dreaming about her writhing under him, moaning out her desire and then her lusty pleasure as he satisfied every single one.
Setting a taper to the dying fire, Hugh lit a candle, decided he didn’t believe his eyes and lit a whole branch of them. He wasn’t often rendered speechless nowadays, but he couldn’t think of a single word to say as his eyes roved over this extraordinary night visitor with numb astonishment. Numb because all the blood and feeling he still had left in him rushed straight to his loins and stopped there to torture him with the mere sight of such blatant allure. It should definitely be a crime for any woman to go about dressed like that, he decided bitterly. A felony carrying with it some sort of severe but not deadly punishment that would put her off taunting poor devils like him with her goddess’s body and those endless, neatly feminine legs. An amateurish attempt at binding her breasts had only made them seem all the more worthy of a sensual exploration and as for that sweetly rounded derrière of hers … If she didn’t realise what a temptation it posed to any red-blooded male who set eyes on her, then she ought to be locked up for her own safety until he’d taught her to know better.
‘What the devil are you doing strutting the streets at night dressed like a female resurrectionist or an undertaker’s apprentice?’ he finally managed, faintly surprised, until they came out of his mouth, that he’d got that many words left in him.
‘It’s nothing to do with you what I choose to do, or where I decide to go while I’m doing it,’ she told him and wrenched her arm out of his slackened grip at last so she could fold it belligerently across her body, trying her best to look as if she’d every right to go about dressed in black breeches and a dark shirt with a black cravat knotted about her slender neck. Her crow’s-wing dark locks suddenly cascaded down her back, like the wickedest promise he’d seen in a long time, when she shook her head defiantly at him and her neat black-velvet cap finally gave up trying to contain so much dusky luxuriance.
‘You just made it a lot to do with me, Witch,’ he informed her hoarsely and let his eyes rove as they pleased over the very feminine body he’d reluctantly fantasised over since the black day he’d found her waiting in Kit’s office, looking as if she had every right to be there and he was the intruder.
‘Men!’ she condemned impatiently, as if his sudden fascination with her long slender legs and those neatly rounded, womanly curves, so blatantly on show, was entirely his fault and nothing to do with her unconventional garb or extraordinary behaviour at all. ‘You’re all the same.’
‘Now there you’re almost certainly mistaken,’ he lazily informed her, making no attempt to disguise his wolfishly thorough appraisal of her well-displayed charms, for if she aspired to meet some impossibly gallant chevalier who’d be so overwhelmed by her sensual beauty that he’d offer her anything she demanded of him during her peculiar night wanderings, she should never have embarked on a career of selling herself to the highest bidder in the first place. ‘We’re all different, but we think alike when presented with nigh-irresistible temptation, such as you pose any red-blooded male by going about dressed like that.’
‘On the contrary, it seems to me that you don’t think at all,’ she muttered darkly and frowned at him as if she had the right to find his blatantly sexual scrutiny of her outrageously displayed body ill-mannered at best and deeply insulting at worst.
Hugh wondered how she expected any red-blooded male to actually think while she was standing there displaying her assets so generously that he’d soon only function on pure, or impure, instinct alone if she wasn’t very careful.
‘You could be right,’ he told her with a wickedly unrepentant grin as he forgot his headache and began to enjoy himself by living down to her expectations. ‘At the moment I’m too busy fantasising about the feel of your magnificent body writhing under me as you desperately beg me to take you to paradise to waste much of my energy on rational thought, my darling.’
‘I’m not your darling and I’m prepared to bet you don’t know the first thing about what would truly transport a woman to paradise,’ Louisa snapped back, wishing she felt as cool as she sounded as she stood in front of this outrageous, drunken and dissipated man in her shirt sleeves with everything going wrong with her wonderful plan of escape, even now she’d finally got away from Charlton.
She’d shed her jacket and been forced to leave it behind when it had been caught on a spike put there by an inconsiderate neighbour of Kit’s to prevent the stealthy and desperate using their roof for nefarious purposes such as hers. Doing her best not to remember how terrified she’d been then, swinging between safety and a forty-foot drop to her death by one hand as she had wrestled the inextricably trapped coat undone so that she could finally wriggle out of it and haul herself to safety, she shivered in the unreliable light of those untrimmed candle wicks this sot had lit to inspect her by.
Until her brother or Ben came back to put the world right for her, she might still be discovered and marched up the aisle so fast the vicar wouldn’t have time to ask what she’d been up to that she deserved this and why she was protesting every step of the way. She reassured herself that could only happen if she was caught and resolved to stay in this scandalous disguise for the rest of her life if she had to, rather than endure such a fate. So she did her best to glare defiance at the wretched man while she convinced herself even his company was preferable to roaming the streets now she was grown up and vulnerable, open to the use and abuse such a reckless female might attract from rogues like this one, if she wandered about even more freely dressed in what was left of Charlton’s fantasy disguise.
‘Aren’t you willing to add me to your stable of lucrative lovers then, my darling doxy?’ he suddenly asked as if he had every right to insult her.
He’d only set eyes on her twice in his life, for goodness’ sake, and she doubted he even remembered their first encounter now, given the reek of brandy on his breath whenever he came near her. Not knowing her at all, he somehow thought he had every right to eye her like a starving dog slavering over a juicy bone—surely he couldn’t know a visceral, wayward part of her was inclined to look at him the same way and only made the rest more furious.
‘Firstly, I’m very particular whom I allow to even call me darling, Captain Darke, and secondly, I certainly wouldn’t take a man like you to my bed, even if I wasn’t,’ she informed him haughtily, kicking herself for letting him know she’d been fascinated enough to find out what his name was after that first sight of him in Kit’s office.
‘You put such a high price on your charms, then?’ he asked as if he was surprised.
She had to bless his consumption of brandy for fogging his wits that he hadn’t even noticed her faux pas, even if it fuddled him into mistaking her for Kit’s mistress rather than his sister. After all, she didn’t want him to think of her as his employer’s close kin, did she? No, of course she didn’t. If he knew who she really was, he might ruin everything by handing her back to her temporary guardians, so it was far better if he thought her no better than she should be and let her stop here for the night.
‘A very high one indeed,’ she assured him with a toss of her head, which she hoped told him it was beyond anything he could pay, if he had anything left of his share of the last cargo after buying enough brandy to inebriate even him.
‘How’s a man supposed to know if a woman’s price is worth the paying when he’s not even been permitted to check the quality of the goods? Strikes me you’re asking a man to buy a pig in a poke, my dear.’
Good heavens! The appalling man really thought she was a streetwalker, casually selling her body for a bed and food in her belly as well as the clothes on her back. More of a roof-walker, her sense of the ridiculous reminded her, and the past years of suffocating respectability threatened to fall away under the liberty of his wild conclusions about Miss Alstone, spinster of impeccable birth, if not exactly unimpeachable upbringing. Maybe Aunt Prudence was right and she’d never be the proper lady she should have been since birth, if only said birth hadn’t taken place in a rundown lodging-house, so perilously close to the rookeries of St Giles it was almost a part of them.
She’d never know now how differently she might have felt about the world if she’d come into it at lofty Wychwood Court, a vast Tudor mansion in the county of Derbyshire that was the Alstones’ ancestral home. A house she’d never been invited to visit and doubtless never would be now, since her Alstone cousins seemed intent on ignoring any relations low enough to run the streets for most of their childhood and then lower the family name still more by taking to trade in order to make up their lamentable lack of the proverbial penny to bless themselves with. Reminded how little she’d enjoyed a life of cramping propriety, she made herself meet this monster of depravity’s sceptical gaze and match his cynical scrutiny with one she hoped he’d find just as difficult to meet.
‘The customer always has the choice not to buy,’ she said boldly, as if she fended off such outrageous provocation every day of the week and reminded herself that, if not for Kit and Ben, she’d probably be exactly what this poor apology for a gentleman thought her right now. ‘And I can take my pick of those who want to do so whenever I like.’
‘The most readily caught fish doesn’t always taste sweetest.’
‘But if you throw them back, I’ve found the little ones often live to grow up and learn a lot more, which makes catching them again into much better sport.’
‘I’ll have to be the one that got away, then, for hooking me would prove a challenge even to the most cunning enchantress, let alone an amateur angler like yourself, Miss … Confound it, whatever is your name, woman?’
‘Miss Confoundit? Now why didn’t I think of that?’
‘I’ll just make one up to call you by then, shall I?’
‘No, it’s …’ Louisa racked her brains for something suitably exotic, something an aspiring Cyprian might use to intrigue ardent gentlemen with plenty of gold in their pockets, if not rude and probably impoverished sea captains. ‘Eloise La Rochelle,’ she invented on the spur of the moment and decided she rather liked it.
Nobody would dare drive Eloise La Rochelle to such desperation that she’d risk climbing out of a second-floor window to escape her uncle’s machinations and her importunate suitor, she decided whimsically. Indeed, Eloise would doubtless have far less respectable gentlemen than even this one climbing up the creepers to her scented balcony in their droves of a night-time to beg for her nigh-on legendary favours instead.
Would she accept any of them? she wondered, as she slipped deeper into the dangerous fantasy of being a very different female from the one she was in reality, or make them climb back into the night? Charlton could go back the way he came as fast as gravity could take him and she hoped it would teach him a salutary lesson, but Hugh Darke? Daring, dashing Eloise La Rochelle might just let him stay for a while, because he amused and intrigued her, of course, and to enchant him into parting with the dark secrets that lurked in those ironic grey-blue eyes of his, until he finally laid even his cynical heart at her feet. Then he could take his brooding gaze and his warrior’s body down the stairs when he left, to scandalise and intrigue passing dowager duchesses with his disreputable looks and piratical charm and make them long to be as young, bold, stunningly beautiful and irresistibly seductive as the notorious Eloise La Rochelle of such scandalous fame even they couldn’t pretend never to have heard of her.
No, she revised her story, he wouldn’t be able to leave. He’d demand, then beg, then sell his soul to stay with her, if he still had one. Infamous Eloise La Rochelle would spoil him for every other female he ever met and in return he’d satisfy her as extravagantly as she would him, or be banished to decline and fall alone as a punishment for his sensual failure.
‘And I’m the Queen of Sheba,’ he responded sceptically to her exotic nom de plume, bringing her back to here and now with an unpleasant jolt, as she struggled with the uneasy certainty that he wouldn’t fail to pleasure her in such an encounter, even if she was a little foggy about what such sensual satisfaction would involve.
A very uncomfortable present it was as well, where he didn’t look at all enchanted by her assumed name or shockingly displayed charms and probably wouldn’t beg aught but peace from the likes of her, so he could broach another bottle and swinishly lose himself in drink once more.
‘I suggest you act a little more regally from now on, then,’ she told him crossly, turning her back on that ridiculous fantasy of him falling at her feet, tortured by passion and his searing, insatiable need for her as she searched the Spartan-looking kitchen for something to eat instead.
‘Make yourself at home, why don’t you?’ he muttered ungraciously.
‘Certainly I shall and you can build up the fire whilst I do so,’ she demanded, wishing she could find something more appealing than a hunk of hard and cracked cheese and some pickled onions along with, of all things, a naval officer’s dress sword, in Kit’s larder.
‘Coste sends out for food whenever we’re hungry,’ Hugh told her as if that explained everything and, since they were both men, it probably did.
‘On the rare occasions either of you forsake the brandy bottle long enough to bother to eat at all, I suppose?’ she asked sweetly.
‘Whatever our domestic arrangements may or may not be, we certainly didn’t invite you here in the middle of the night to see if they were up to scratch,’ he mumbled gruffly as he bent to stoke the fire.
‘Which is just as well, considering you clearly don’t have any,’ she informed him disgustedly as she chewed valiantly on the hunk of cheese and wondered if even she was hungry enough to indulge in a pickled onion or two to force it down with, as she could see no sign of anything else remotely edible or drinkable.
‘We don’t need them,’ he informed her defensively, looking endearingly sheepish even as he did so. ‘Neither of us wanted a female nagging and criticising and poking her nose in everywhere it wasn’t wanted when we can manage very well for ourselves.’
‘No, you can’t. I can assure you that you and Coste really, really can’t manage anything more refined than a sty, Captain Darke,’ she told him fervently, as she finally gave up on finding anything else remotely edible in the dusty larder and purloined his branch of almost-gutted candles to make a more thorough tour round the dusty, dirty, unused room and the once-pristine scullery on the other side of the kitchen that turned out to be piled with every glass, tankard and mug Kit’s house possessed. All were dirty and looked as if they’d been so for too long. ‘And wherever have Mrs Calhoun and Midge gone off to?’ she asked at last.