A silence.
“You think…” His expression was indecipherable. “Go on.”
“At the ball, your reaction to my brother Jonathan was rather striking. You said he could have been Mr. Hardesty’s twin. Jonathan looks very much like Lyon. And Lyon disappeared at night a year ago. And the woman who allegedly broke his heart is Miss Olivia Eversea.”
“The Olivia,” the earl repeated darkly, after a tick of silence. She heartily approved of his tone, because she could never say Olivia Eversea’s name in any other way.
“I tried, mind you, to tell my brother Jonathan what I learned from you about Le Chat. And his reaction told me I shouldn’t attempt to tell my father. Because I can tell you this: no one in my family will believe me. No one listens to me. They’re all very fond of me, of course, but I’m not certain they see me as needed. So why would they believe a woman? Why believe me, especially in light of my so-called rash behavior? Someone needs to find Lyon before you do, Captain, because I know how you intend to deal with him. And if I told you about my suspicions, Captain…would you allow me aboard your ship? Of course not. You are my best hope, Captain Flint, for finding Lyon and saving his life…from you. Furthermore—”
“There’s a ‘furthermore’?” His voice was utterly inflectionless.
“—I’m not a child. I’m a lady born of one of England’s finest and oldest families, and I daresay even you know how to behave in the presence of a lady. Regardless of the inconvenience I’ve caused you, I’ll thank you to remember whatever manners you’ve managed to feign to date, because the ones you’re exhibiting do you no credit and merely reinforce the prevailing opinion, Captain Flint, that you are a savage.” She delighted in giving the S a serpent-like sibilance. “The measure of a gentleman is how he behaves when he hasn’t an audience to witness the beauty of his manners. And I wouldn’t expect you to understand this, my lord, but centuries of fine breeding have ensured that I need not, as you say, exert myself if I choose not to. Only the likes of you equate the actual need to work with virtue. It is in fact due to the work of my ancestors that I no longer need to, and my family considers this a mark of honor.”
During this, he moved only once: to blink. As though she’d flicked water into his eyes. After that, his eyes remained unnervingly vivid and disconcertingly, dispassionately interested.
She was done.
But he was quiet for such a long time after she stopped speaking that the fury animating her drained away for lack of a target. She felt hollow, spent, a cocoon abandoned by the caterpillar. A puff of air would carry her off.
He seemed thoughtful.
“And you honestly believe based on your younger brother’s resemblance to Le Chat and the name of his ship that your brother—Lyon, is it?—is a notorious pirate?”
Well, anything he said in that particular tone of voice was bound to sound ridiculous. So she didn’t reply.
“And you intend to do…what? Stop me from bringing your brother to justice?”
He was perilously close to mirth. Or hysteria. Something she wouldn’t appreciate, she was certain. He issued his words with great care and control.
She simply straightened her spine. She would not confess to the fact that she hadn’t thought quite so far as that. But she excelled at thinking on her feet. Or rather, she preferred to think on her feet, for it was the one way she could coax excitement from the routine of her life.
“Consider that you might be able to use me for bait on your stops in search of my brother, Captain Flint, if my brother is indeed Le Chat. You may be able to flush him out if you send word ahead that I am accompanying you. And yes, I fully intend to warn him of your presence…once you lead me to him. For if he is indeed Le Chat, I am certain all is not what it seems. Lyon is not a vicious pirate. So may the better player win.”
Good heavens. What an array of expressions chased each other subtly over his face in the long silence that followed.
The earl stared at her a moment longer.
“Tell me, Miss Redmond…” he said thoughtfully. “Are you often bored?”
She could have sworn the ground beneath her feet swayed.
Her vertigo must have shown. She stared at him, feeling all but stripped bare. How did he know?
Because the corner of his mouth tipped up. I thought so, was what it meant. He was amused. The bloody clever man understood her too well, and too easily. But he was eons away from believing her.
This was when she had her epiphany: She was the one who had always been treated like a pet. Coddled, indulged, scolded, occasionally mildly punished, but kept always, always on a rarified, invisible silken tether, reeled in by her brothers or parents no matter what she did or where she went, no matter how absurd or reckless. No one particularly needed her. And she was of course so much more than equal to every single blood in London.
But this had left her entirely unprepared for the likes of the Earl of Ardmay.
His voice deepened, softened, lowered. The change was instantly disorienting, as she’d been using his asperity for a spine.
“And I would never, ever, Miss Redmond, equate the type of ‘work’ to which I was referring a moment ago with…virtue.”
It was like incense drifting out from beneath the closed door of a bordello, his voice. She didn’t so much hear as feel it; brushing up against her skin like rough silk.
It was also utterly calculated.
He was toying with her now. He found the whole circumstance so amusing he’d decided to play with her.
And it almost worked. She drew in a deep sustaining breath.
He’d cornered her into reasoning with him. Which for her felt like walking out on wobbly gangplank over uncertain waters. This was very much a last resort for Violet when it came to men. She’d heretofore always…well, managed them—which had staved off boredom nicely since strategy was invariably involved.
Pets or servants, indeed.
“Do you have brothers or sisters, Captain—Lord—”
“Captain will do. God knows. I might have dozens of them. I haven’t the faintest idea who my father is.”
Violet’s mind went blank. Her mouth parted a little. Then closed again. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for a conversation with a man like this. Then again, it was difficult to imagine another man quite like this.
He had no one? No family at all? She was conscious suddenly of an aberrant sweep of pity and swatted it back. This was not a man who needed, or would graciously accept, pity.
“I appall you.” He made it not a question but a statement.
She sighed. “Rather,” she admitted. “Are you trying to?”
He blinked in surprise. And then, to her astonishment, he grinned, and three unforgettable things happened at once: A dimple, a devastating crescent moon, appeared at the corner of his mouth; his eyes lit, and it was like watching lightning crack over the surface of a dark sea…
…and Violet stopped breathing, as surely as that lightning had struck her square in the chest.
“I doubt I have to try to appall you, Miss Redmond. I suspect I need simply…be.”
She breathed again, but she was still staring at the place the dimple had been. She dug her fingernails into her palm to punish herself for momentary witlessness.
Enormous, frightening men should not be allowed to possess anything quite so whimsical as dimples, she thought resentfully.
His face was softer now, but she wasn’t so optimistic as to believe she’d actually charmed him.
“Nonsense. You underestimate me, Captain Flint,” she said coolly.
This was pure bravado. He had in fact estimated her rather well up to this point.
Mostly you weary me, Captain Flint.
Well…and you frighten me. And no man had ever before frightened her.
Worst of all, you intrigue me.
This last was the most terrible realization of all, as it was the first time it was genuinely true for her of any man.
And it was the fault of a split-second smile and a dimple.
She gravely disliked the realization that she was human.
Her legs were trembling now from a toxic blend of fear and fatigue and bravado-maintenance when heretofore all that had been publicly required of her was pride and arrogance and elegance and wit. She wanted to sink into the oblivion of sleep, to forget him. But she thought of that dark, swaying, fetid little hole of a berth and the hard bunk stretched over with a lumpy bread-slice thin mattress likely teeming with the types of creatures her brother Miles would cheerfully write books about and manage to make sound fascinating.
She hadn’t dared sit on it; she’d sat on a chair near it, and eyed it as though it was a predator for the remainder of the night. It had been a bad few hours, indeed. And then the feel of the ship lifting anchor and heading out to sea had nearly made her burst from her cabin in panic.
She thought of Lyon, and how it would be to have him home. And she glanced at the earl’s chessboard and thought of her brother Miles longingly now. His head would likely be bent over chess across from old Mr. Culpepper’s near the fire at the Pig & Thistle in Pennyroyal Green, engaged in chess warfare while his wife, Cynthia, adoringly and peacefully looked on.
How she wished she could have spoken with Miles about her suspicions. Would he have listened to her? Likely not, especially if she’d mentioned the bit about the Gypsy girl and Lavay. Even Miles would have given a tug on her invisible leash and a pat on the head.
Inspiration, albeit a desperate one, struck. So the earl could not be managed, per se. It didn’t mean that games were entirely out of the question. That strategy could not be applied. She desperately wanted to win back a measure of pride. Not to mention credibility.
“You do play chess, my lord?”
He stared at her.
“Chess,” the earl repeated. As if he’d never heard the word before in his life.
She gestured to the handsome chess set arranged on table in the far corner of his cabin.
“You see, I very much prefer not to sleep in that…that…vole hole…tonight—”
“I cannot tell you how it breaks my heart that you’ll be missing your sleep, Miss Redmond. And voles always appear quite rested to me. Very vibrant creature, the vole.”
She soldiered on. “I propose that we play a game of chess for the right to sleep in your much finer accommodations. If I win, you will sleep in the vole hole tonight.”
As for chess, she’d had the very best teachers that Sussex could offer. And Miles, her brother, had honed his skills against her. She knew very well how clever she was. In spite of herself.
He almost winced at her temerity. “You’ll…play chess for the right to sleep in my bed?”
But even he knew this was a too-easy innuendo. His mouth creased at the corner again. She watched it warily, less he launch another smile at her.
But he’d also once again managed to make her sound ridiculous.
“I shall, as you say, exert a little effort”—she was not unaware of a certain dark flare in his eyes just then, just as she was not unaware that she’d said it deliberately, for effect, as she was a quick learner indeed and not above bull-baiting—“and if I win the game, I will sleep in a more comfortable bed. You will sleep in the vole hole. Are you afraid I’ll win?”
She knew the earl would be unimpressed with that particular gambit.
There was a silence, as he somberly assessed her.
And then he sighed, and there was so much genuine weariness in the sound she very nearly succumbed to sympathy before she recalled that the weary exasperation was all for her.
“Miss Redmond…for heaven’s sake.” Such dramatic, infinitely strained patience in his voice. “Good…God. I am captain of this ship. Why on earth you’d think I’d engage in a game of chess for…for…” He shook his head, as if he could hardly bear to finish the sentence. “I excel at chess,” he said almost weakly. She had the sense he’d bury his face in his hands and rock it back and forth in a second.
“Then the game will be over quickly,” she said briskly. But her hands were cold and clammy; she’d crossed her fingers for luck in the folds of her skirt.
The earl studied her. Looked at the door, as if contemplating the rewards of freedom versus the rewards of humoring his stowaway.
Then he sighed again and strolled to the chessboard. He reached out and pensively fingered the burnished ivory head of a knight.
“How much money did you bring with you on your voyage?” He looked sharply up at her. “I’m assuming you did bring money.”
The question surprised her. “Twenty pounds.”
“Twen—” He stopped. He shook his head again, with a cryptic, disbelieving half smile. “All right, then, Miss Redmond. We shall play one game of chess. If you win, you may sleep in my chambers instead of the accommodations assigned to you. I will sleep in the vole hole, as you so insultingly refer to the accommodations you’ve been assigned on my ship. And I will leave you at the next port, and arrange to hire someone to accompany you safely home. Using your money.”
Oh. She did know a twinge of guilt when he put it that way: “vole hole” was indeed insulting. She supposed it had been impolite of her; then again, he hadn’t yet drawn out her finer qualities.
Nevertheless, his proposition wasn’t precisely what she had in mind.
“But—”
“Do not argue with me. I am not finished. And if you lose, you will give me five of your twenty pounds to cover the cost of your board and transport, and I will deposit you and your trunk on the dock at the next port. If the wind remains fair, we’ll reach port Le Havre in two days. You can find your own inn, find your own way home, you can join a traveling menagerie, you can apply to a brothel, you can go to the very devil, for all I care. For you have taken for granted the protection of men your entire life, Miss Redmond. You have taken for granted your comfort and privilege and safety. Even now you think I’ll see to your comfort, that some man will always look out for you even when you behave in unconscionably reckless ways. And I…” He paused, fished in his pocket, thumbed open his watch. Consulted the time. His mind, even as he delivered this speech, was elsewhere. “…don’t like it.”
He lifted his head when he said this. His eyes bored into her. He allowed these words to echo in the room for a second. His expression made it profoundly clear that he meant them.
She said nothing.
“Even now—even now—you probably don’t believe I’ll simply abandon you to your fate.” He thumbed the watch closed, tucked it away again. “I invite you to test me.”
He’d checkmated her before the game even began.
She stared up at him. After a moment, she swallowed.
He noticed; she watched the flick of his eyes. She saw satisfaction in those eyes. It struck her that he was the sort of man who forever assessed his surroundings, would miss nothing, as anything could become important at any time.
Her intestines were quivering like aspic, but:
“Challenge accepted,” she said, her voice steady enough.
He nodded once, as if her acceptance was of supreme indifference to him, and with a shiny-booted toe, languidly pushed out a chair for her. Across from the white pieces, naturally. He gestured for her to sit.
Through some tacit agreement no attempt was made to converse throughout the game. They had no idea how to talk to each other pleasantly, anyway, the refined-savage captain with the unlikely title and the stowaway aristocratic virgin, and both were wary and already weary of each other.
And yet Flint couldn’t say the game was objectionable. He enjoyed the silence, the necessary stillness, the feel of the elegant pieces in his fingers.
The set was a gift from his old friend Captain Moreheart, making their game more symbolic still.
He enjoyed it, that is, until it became clear he was losing.
Flint had played chess with rajas and rogues, with a range of obsessively skilled scholars of the game. He was clever, he was thoughtful, he was resourceful, he was ruthless and inventive, and he brought all of his best qualities to bear on the chessboard. It made him a very, very good player.
She was better.
When this dawned inexorably upon him, he suffered greatly…inwardly. Up welled a sense of outrage he tamped with some difficulty, but which stirred immediately with her very next clever, deliberate move. He suffered a veritable in-out tide of pride and outrage.
It was supplanted at last with dark amusement. A bead of sweat trickled down the back of his neck, traveling the road of his spine. My pride dissolving, he thought, sardonically.
She was steering him skillfully to the conclusion she wanted.
As she had, in a way, all evening, he realized suddenly.
I’ll be damned.
She didn’t gloat. She made her moves and then looked up at him with calm, if wary, expectance, signaling with those vivid, fatigue-ringed eyes that it was his turn.
And eventually something else stirred, something unwelcome and unexpected very begrudging: admiration.
Behind that smooth, pale forehead her mind clicked along with an easy and unexpected precision, a knack for strategy that might have been channeled into some masculine pursuit—perhaps battlefield maneuvers, or torturing prisoners—and might have served a useful purpose. Might not have tormented her the way he was certain it did, given her demonstrable predilection for rashness. Still, some women threw themselves into good works, he thought sourly. Perhaps he ought to suggest it to Miss Redmond.
Who taught you to play chess? With whom do you play? One of your brothers?
It seemed to him the sort of game she’d have no patience for. And yet…and yet…she was so dogged in pursuit of her brother. So very convinced of the truth of her quest, however absurd it seemed on the surface, however reckless.
What is it like? To love so fiercely, to feel so part of a family, of a place?
Soon enough he would have the luxury of building his own destiny—Le Chat was the means to his ends.
He refused to allow silence to draw curiosity out of him in the form of questions. He was certain Miss Redmond would know precisely how to exploit curiosity, interpret it as some kind of softening. But silence had a way of splintering things into details, for the mind disliked disengagement. He’d learned this in a Turkish prison. It could turn moments of nothingness into diversions. And he couldn’t help but notice things in the silence. A tiny punctuation mark of a mole drew the eye to the elegant half-heart shape of the top lip, the soft full swoop of the lower. Her skin took the lamplight the way a good pearl would. Fine-grained and unlined thanks to the lifelong protection of bonnets and hats.
Odd. He rarely viewed women in terms of…parts. Primarily he simply heartily partook of women and they of him. And now he was thinking of Fatima and not of the game. He shifted restlessly.
You underestimate me, Captain Flint.
And yet he’d so seldom underestimated anyone. He was freshly reminded of how dangerous it was to do so.
He’d learned another humbling lesson in prison: how to accept one’s fate like a man. He knew his chess doom was about two moves away. And so he manfully waited for Violet to make the first of those moves.
After a moment he noticed that she was taking inordinately long to do it.
She sighed, and her head tipped into her hand, which received it as though her palm had been carved specifically to fit her chin.
He waited.
And waited.
And wait—
He frowned. Leaned across the board slowly, tentatively…and peered. A strand of dark hair clung to her lips. It was slowly, rhythmically fluttering. Her eyelids, which he’d thought downcast in thought…were closed. Her lashes shivered on her cheeks.
She’d fallen asleep!
Well!
He leaned back in his chair, greatly amused. He crossed his arms over his chest.
Apart from that wayward strand of hair, she still looked as though she’d stepped out of a toilette presided over by French maids. Was this neatness a skill or an aberration? Somehow Violet Redmond didn’t seem mussable, and mussability, in his opinion, was critical to the sensual appeal of any woman. And she wasn’t one of those women who looked innocent in their sleep, despite that strand of soft hair fluttering over that decidedly lush mouth. He couldn’t imagine her ever being restful, the sort of woman who could soothe as well as pleasure a man, and Fatima excelled at this. Even now, Violet Redmond’s eyelashes shivered against the pale blue skin beneath her eyes as though they could barely contain the rush of foolish plans.
He could almost pity the Redmond men, for surely keeping her restrained was a battle they’d been destined to lose.
He was wickedly tempted to allow gravity to have its way with her. There would be some satisfaction in seeing her face drift inexorably down toward the chessboard, in imagining her awakening the next morning with an imprint of a rook on her cheek and the drool of sleep gluing her to the board.
Mussed, in other words.
She breathed in…breathed out.
Breathed in…breathed out.
Breathed in…breathed—
Bloody hell. He drew in a sharp breath. Puffed it out forcefully. And slid his chair quietly back and stood.
He didn’t want her to wake up with a rook print on her check.
This realization irritated him. Could the Swedish fjords, for instance, claim any responsibility for their own majesty, for the respect they inspired? Or were they just made that way?
Violet Redmond was just made that way.
There was something about her inherent dignity he felt compelled to honor, as though some atavistic servile quality in him responded to her centuries of breeding.
It didn’t make him happy. But there it was.
He took another deep fortifying breath and bent low enough to scoop an arm behind her calves, and he got the other across her bent shoulders, and with some maneuvering he managed, awkwardly, to heave the sleeping woman up over one of his shoulders.
Oh God. The scent of her hair swamped his senses like sensual laudanum, induced a brief delicious paralysis. Her arms flopped down his back and her fingertips dangled tantalizingly across his arse, inconveniently reminding him of how long it had been since any woman’s fingertips had dangled over any sensitive parts of his body and communicating vivid suggestions to his groin. She muttered something irritably then—it sounded like “Lavay.” Surely not.
He forced himself to move. And his arm wrapped tightly around her deliciously female thighs, he hastened as quietly as he could across the room. For the duration of those three swift steps his deprived senses nearly shrieked “WOMAN! You’re holding a WOMAN! For God’s sake, you fool, a woman!” and lunged like chained dogs to savor how she felt, how she smelled, and it was everything he could do to keep his hands from wandering over his cargo.
But he’d known worse temptations. He wasn’t a boy.
And he deposited her on the bed—his bed—quickly and gently, rather the way one would deposit a grenade. She sighed and murmured and frowned, but her eyelids never lifted and her head tipped to the right and her mouth dropped open slightly.
He’d seldom seen a sleep so abandoned.
Bloody foolish girl, he thought with an invigorating surge of fury. He ought to call all the Redmond men out. Who had been so misguided as to allow her to take protection for granted, given her wild spirit, to trust so? She was so exhausted she’d fallen asleep in front of a strange man who was hardly harmless. Who was perfectly capable of making love to a woman he disliked to satisfy a physical urge. Of skillfully persuading any reluctant woman that she wanted him to do precisely that.
He was a man, after all, and it was how men were made.
He backed away from her, eager for the door. His hand was on the knob when he paused, shoulders slumping. He sighed. He turned. And took himself back to the chessboard.
And with two fingers, flicked his queen over onto her back.
Miss Redmond would see it when she woke the next morning. She’d discover he’d known the outcome of the game. And if she were clever enough, she’d understand that no matter what she did, he would always know what her next move would be.
“Checkmate,” he whispered dryly to himself.
And he took himself off to sleep in the vole hole.