The Duke Page 4

  “You might have seen much more of the world than I, Shark Bait, but I am not a complete fool. I recognize a taradiddle when I hear it.”

  “Shame there’s no portraitist here to paint you in all your glory now.”

  “You were obviously truant from your lessons the day they taught gentlemanly flattery.”

  He laughed easily and she felt it all the way to her toes inside his shoes.

  On the way home she paused before the last turn in the road and told him that she must redon her own shoes.

  “People will not understand if they see me now,” she added.

  “I gave your shoes to the woman to clean an’ polish,” he said.

  “But she is already fully occupied nursing her husband! You should not have done that, not for—for . . .”

  He offered her the smile she never saw him show others, a private, contented smile.

  “Not for me,” she said firmly, willing him to understand.

  “Lass, she’ll have payment for it.”

  Amarantha had no response. The house had been entirely bare: no jar of grain, no salt fish, not even a manioc root in the bin. Since the devastation of the storm, famine had come to the poorest on the island who could not afford the expensive foodstuffs brought on ships, and beggars were everywhere. In offering the woman compensation for this small task, he offered her dignity.

  Amarantha felt the most urgent need to take up his hand and kiss it.

  She did not.

  She removed the boots and walked in only her stockings, feeling his gaze on her the remainder of the way and loving it. She had a horrible suspicion that she was falling in love with him, which was not possible. She had found her angel in a tiny church in Shropshire. This big, rough man with shadowy eyes and a bad reputation could mean nothing to her.

  He was not the marrying sort. The women at the hospital said it in moments of idle chatter, and Mrs. Jennings’s new acquaintances confirmed it. An established bachelor, Gabriel Hume had mistresses in every port. He liked women, drink, and game, and was never seen in a church, reformed or Anglican.

  Amarantha suggested that perhaps he was Presbyterian, as most Scots were.

  “My lady,” the gossip said, “by all accounts, he is not even Christian.”

  “My maid heard that he attended a heathen service at the Abbott plantation,” another woman said in a hush.

  “No!” another gasped.

  “But I thought the slaves on the Abbott plantation were Baptists,” a third woman exclaimed.

  “One in the same, of course,” the gossip said with a dismissive flip of her hand.

  Amarantha was skeptical. She knew the hospital volunteers from the Baptist church to be good, decent Christian women. As for Captain Hume, he was unusual, but surely the admiralty would not promote a heathen to the rank of captain. So she asked him about it.

  In reply he smiled the gentle smile she was coming to believe was more natural to him than the roguish grin.

  “Seems to me, lass, there should be more to religion than church walls,” he said only. “An’ more to faith than rules.”

  She did not know what to make of him. He seemed as indifferent to the scandalized whispers of the gossips as he was to the deference of those who admired him—a friend to all yet an intimate of none. In his company she felt light and fevered at once, excited and unsettlingly right. Despite his initial vow to undo her betrothal, he asked nothing of her and seemed content with friendship.

  But occasionally, when she saw him watching her, she knew she was lying to herself to justify the time they spent together. At those moments she saw in his eyes the same desire that she had seen there the first day.

  She was playing with fire—not the contained flames in a hearth, but the unbridled bonfires she had loved at harvest festivals back home—dangerous yet so beautiful that she wanted to stand as close as she could.

  As her nurse had warned her on those festival nights, girls who played with fire got burned.

  Chapter 5

  Lords of the Ocean

  “Where’ve you stashed the good whiskey, Gabe?”

  “Majorca,” Gabriel mumbled, staring at the navigational chart. He had been staring for an hour and his eyes were blurring.

  “The good whiskey is in Majorca?”

  “Tunis.” He followed the curve of the route with his fingertip. “Majorca to Tunis . . . What in the—”

  “Captain!”

  Gabriel lifted his eyes to his cousin.

  “Aye?” he said, but his head was still in the charts. At his admiral’s suggestion he was studying these in particular, and an account of apprehending Barbary pirates near Gibraltar too.

  It made no sense. Theia was thousands of miles from the Mediterranean, awaiting the arrival of the northern oak that would be her new mizzenmast. These charts were a test designed for him to prove that they had not made a mistake in assigning such a command to a man so young.

  “What do you want, Jonah?”

  “The good whiskey. Trouter kept it in this cabinet.” Jonah tapped the tip of a navigation divider to the small cupboard door.

  The captain’s quarters on the Theia were not large, but they were well-appointed. And his. Five weeks of command as yet, and he had spent none of them under sail, instead commanding his crew in building, sewing, caulking, polishing, and reprovisioning.

  And watching an extraordinary girl being extraordinary.

  “’Tis run dry,” he said, and returned his attention to the chart spread over the table.

  “Run dry? The good whiskey has run dry? I beg your pardon, Captain, but who are you and what have you done with my cousin?”

  Gabriel rubbed his temples with thumb and fingers. Tossing his measuring stick onto the map, he circled the table, opened the cabinet, and pulled forth a bottle.

  “The no’ good whiskey,” he said, shoving it into his cousin’s palm. “’Tis all I’ve got. I’ll send the boy in the morning for more o’ the good.”

  Jonah eyed the bottle. “Why not send him tonight?’

  “Because I’ve no’ the time to drink whiskey at present.”

  Jonah stared at him. Then he took up two glasses, set them on the table, and poured a dram in each. Tossing himself into a chair, he lifted his glass high.

  “To the memory of Gabe Hume, the companion, the brother, the finest scoundrel this side of the Atlantic, the man I once knew and admired. May he rest in peace. But I highly doubt he will, not surrounded by all those flames.” Jonah looked over the armrest at the floor, as though peering into hell.

  Grabbing the other glass, Gabriel took the chair across from him. Studying the chart for hours hadn’t gotten him answers anyway.

  “What’s got you out of sorts, cousin?” Jonah said, sipping the whiskey and crinkling his nose.

  “I’m no’ out o’ sorts, you landlubbing sponge,” he said, not drinking. He’d no need for a muddled head. “I’ve work to do.”

  “So much work that you cannot enjoy a glass of whiskey on a balmy tropical night?”

  He said nothing to that. He had allowed Jonah to entice him into drink only four nights earlier. He had awoken with the devil of a head and—after seeing to ten different tasks on his ship—nearly missed the opportunity to accompany the prettiest girl on the island on a stroll out of town.

  The prettiest girl anywhere.

  She had walked down the high street in stocking feet. Not even the molls he’d known would do that. But she had not batted a cinnamon eyelash at it. Between wearing his boots where others could see and stripping her feet for any ogler’s enjoyment, she had chosen to strip.

  She had the tiniest ankles. But strong calves. Everything about her was a study in contrasts: vivid eyes and tresses, yet a voice that could soothe a man in an agony of pain, as he’d seen her do at the hospital; blithe disrespect for propriety, yet a firm sense of commitment; a quick, brilliant smile, yet a wariness with him that drove him mad with frustration.

  Like a wild creature tha
t had been caught but not tamed, skittish of man yet intrigued, she danced just out of his reach.

  He wanted to touch her. He needed to touch her. Days spent in her company, the need distracted him to no end. And nights—nights, it was all he could think about, her delectable little curvy body in his hands, under his mouth, beneath him.

  He wanted inside her more than he had ever wanted inside a woman before. And he had imagined every possible scenario for making it happen—

  “How is the English gentle-maiden?”

  Gabriel blinked.

  His cousin lifted a blond brow. “Thinking about her again?”

  Thinking. Fantasizing. Panting like a dog.

  “She is . . . unusual.” Exceptional. Like no woman he had ever met, certainly no woman of her pedigree. Yet she was hardly more than a girl—a girl who had been hurled into chaos in an alien land and responded with the courage of a weathered sailor and an endless supply of affection for people she should never even notice.

  And she was so damn pretty he couldn’t make himself stop staring.

  And the way she looked at him sometimes, as though if he offered her any part of him she might nibble it . . . or lick it . . .

  Judas.

  “Unusual.” Jonah snorted. “Unusually wrong for your head, that’s what. Odd’s blood, cousin. I’ve never seen you so preoccupied with a skirt. It is positively unnatural for men like us.”

  “Men like us? By that do you mean naval officers with a thousand an’ one responsibilities or former naval officers with nothing to do but drink an’ borrow my money?”

  “Right! Remind me of my place. As though I could ever forget that you won Theia or that you sit a step closer to a title than I.”

  “No’ a step closer, cousin. A life.” Gabriel wrapped both hands around the glass and stared into the amber liquid. As many times as he had wished his brother across the world—anywhere else but tormenting him—he never wished his father gone.

  “An unworthy life, in your brother’s case.” Jonah scoffed. “And two lives closer for me, of course. But I wouldn’t want you dead anyway, not so that I could be duke. Whose whiskey would I drink? Though I suppose if I were laird of Kallin and Haiknayes I could afford to buy my own.”

  “Aye.” Gabriel smiled.

  “You miss it.”

  “Hm?”

  “Haiknayes.”

  “Aye.”

  The rolling emerald hills and magnificent medieval fortress that belonged to the Duke of Loch Irvine in Midlothian were the only place on earth he would rather be than at the helm of a ship. Haiknayes had been a boy’s adventure palace, with its high stone walls fashioned of granite, its battlements from which an arrow could be shot far enough to lose sight of it, and its secret nooks to hide in when his brother came searching.

  “Crime it can’t be yours,” Jonah mumbled. “She never played favorites, I know, but I suspect your mother would’ve rather you had Haiknayes.”

  “The dukes o’ Loch Irvine have been masters o’ Haiknayes—”

  “For centuries, I know. Blast tradition.” Jonah swiveled the remainder of the whiskey in the bottom of his glass. “No land for you. You, Captain, shall live out your years on the sea instead, and die an old victorious salt. Heroically, of course.”

  “Writing my epitaph already?”

  “Not until I’ve drunk up all your whiskey.” Jonah grinned. “Gregory’s hired me.”

  Gabriel sat forward. “As land agent?”

  His cousin nodded. “He’s eager to return to England. He said if I made the place productive, he would take me on as partner.”

  “Now this deserves a toast. To my rapscallion cousin, now successful Jamaican planter.”

  “I hope so. And I’ll repay the gold I owe you as soon as I’ve got it at the ready.”

  “No, you willna, you penniless mongrel.” Gabriel set down his empty glass. The debt he owed Jonah was far greater than any number of borrowed coins: the debt of his life, won thirteen years ago, the day his mother died. Alone on the docks at Leith, a skinny, weak lad far from his father’s abstracted grieving and his brother’s coldness, blinded by tears he could not show at home, Gabriel had not even heard the youths coming. But he had felt their hands. And the straps that had tied him down. “You needn’t ever.”

  “You cannot refuse me an outing now, can you, Captain?” Jonah gestured to the bottle on the table. “A bottle of the good whiskey, in my honor.”

  “Aye, but I’ve a pile o’ papers to read.”

  “And nocturnal dreams of an English maiden to hurry to, no doubt.”

  “Rule your tongue concerning the lady, cur, or I’ll cut it out.”

  Jonah laughed. “This is a first. What is it about this girl that’s so special, Gabe?”

  Gabriel looked out the window toward the quay. “Have you ever considered how fine an’ fragile females are? Their bones. Even the heartiest o’ them, so small.” Small enough to break with a single hand, as his brother had done to a maid—a girl who, his brother said, had grown too outspoken for a woman, who had it coming to her.

  “To a giant fellow like you,” Jonah said, “all females are small.”

  “’Tis a cruel, jesting God that made these creatures so strong within, so resilient, yet so inferior in form.”

  “Bloody hell, Gabe,” Jonah exclaimed, standing abruptly. “The English maiden is having her way with your head. You sound more like a poet than a sailor.”

  Gabriel cocked a grin. “Canna a man be both?”

  “When he’s pining over a girl?” Jonah’s lips twisted. “If he’s a Scot, I suppose.” He went to the door then looked over his shoulder. “It is only pining, Gabe? It isn’t more? Is it?”

  “’Tisn’t pining. ’Tisn’t anything, Jonah. She’s a pretty girl. ’Tis all.” A pretty girl who turned him inside out. A pretty girl he wanted to touch more than he had wanted anything in a long, long time.

  Ever.

  Blast it. What in the hell was he thinking?

  He took up his hat.

  Jonah’s face lightened. “Coming out after all?”

  “Aye.” The chart could wait. “’Tis time to show me if a landlubber can hold his drink as well as a seaman.”

  “I’ll wager you a bottle he can,” Jonah said.

  “I will welcome that wager.” And with it temporary oblivion in which he might, for a few hours, forget that she was another man’s.

  He did not touch her. Ever. So close their hands came many times, but never actually meeting. It seemed, in fact, that he took great care not to touch her. Except when he had teased about carrying her like a princess, he never even offered his arm to her.

  This tantalizing stasis suited Amarantha poorly. Every day the respectful distance kept by the object of her increasingly reckless desires made her mad with frustration. She desperately needed advice, but letters were months crossing the ocean. In any case it was not safe to put her feelings on paper: someone other than Emily might read them.

  Seeking out the comfort of her betrothed’s company, Amarantha found none. Preoccupied with restoring the church and the homes of his parishioners, Paul had little time for conversation.

  “But it has been weeks since the storm,” she said. “How many homes have yet to be repaired?”

  “Do you doubt the extent of my responsibilities?”

  “No, to be sure!”

  “One cannot quantify the measure of a soul’s needs, my lady.”

  “Oh. Yes. I see.” But she didn’t really. She was discovering that she was entirely inadequate for her future role as the wife of a minister. She intended to learn, though. She would make him proud. “How many parishioners have you?”

  “The faithful include five free families—”

  Only five! Amarantha hid her surprise.

  “—two English families, and fourteen enslaved souls, only two of whom are a married pair, of course.”

  “Why do you say of course?”

  “Slaves are not permitted
to marry. Their masters consider them property. One does not marry one’s cow to one’s bull, does one?”

  “But they are men and women!”

  “Indeed. Men and women whose lives are dictated by those who care nothing for the eternal soul, only for gold.”

  “Oh. Then . . .” She knew nothing, but she didn’t much like being continually obliged to admit her ignorance to him. “What about the couple in your church? How did they come to be married?”

  “Recently I had the honor of joining them together in that holiest of bonds.”

  She gasped. “But haven’t you now put them in danger of punishment?”

  “Better the whip of man’s displeasure than the scourge of God’s wrath.”

  To Amarantha, this did not seem like a good moment for opaque metaphors.

  “I don’t entirely understand,” she said yet again.

  “Of course you don’t, dear lady. You are still young. But as both your minister and husband—”

  Not husband yet.

  “—it falls to me to teach you about that which your mother, in her feminine humility, spared you.”

  Her mother’s humility? Every room at Willows Hall boasted three mirrors so the lady of the manor could admire her beauty from all angles.

  “The unfortunate situation of this God-loving man and woman,” Paul continued, “due to tasks demanded of them by their master, is to be continually thrown together, often in isolation from others. The man confided this to me. He assured me, however, of the purity of his feelings for her. I counseled him that rather than sin they should wed. Then, as man and wife, they would risk only the pains of the strap, but never the terrors of eternal damnation. He was able to convince her of the wisdom of this, and they were married in secret but in the full presence of God.”

  Amarantha’s stomach churned. She ducked her head. The courage they possessed in order to be true to both their love for each other and their faith awed her.

  But in her months on the island she had seen the punishments masters meted out to slaves for even minuscule offenses. The choice between love and mortal peril which this man and woman had been forced to make horrified her. How could it be right to demand that of any person? How could it be just?