Viola grinned, stretched, flinched from the wonderful soreness all over her body, and finally opened her eyes. Sunlight peeked through the draperies, casting the bedchamber in a hazy morning glow.
She sat bolt upright.
Except for her shift draped across a chair and herself in the bed, the place was empty of everything but furniture. The man with whom she had made passionate love mere hours earlier, who had hired this chamber for himself, might never have been there at all.
Viola sat for a moment quite immobile, considering how among the various foolish things she had done in her life, to have practiced this lack of forethought was perhaps the most foolish of all. Unwisely, she had not assumed that the moment the wager ended he would leave her side, no matter the circumstances.
Now the discomforts in her body did not feel so wonderful. Instead she felt rather ill, her stomach tight and all her limbs soggy.
She swiveled, climbed from the bed, and took up her shift. It got stuck going over her hair, knotted strands tangled in the laces. She shoved it down and tied it over her breasts. Her sailor’s blood accustomed to rising with the sun told her it was still early morning, so she might not encounter others in the corridor. But her blood had also told her that Jin Seton would be present when she awoke. So it looked like her blood wasn’t as clever as she’d always thought.
Hand on the doorknob, she paused.
The wager was over. He had left. But that did not necessarily mean she had lost. It could, in fact, mean she’d won. If he fell in love with her, he was to admit to it, then to deed his new ship over to her and leave her alone forever. Even now he could be sailing to Tobago to collect his assets, which would allow him to complete the purchase of the sleek little schooner in Boston. Perhaps he had simply gone to fulfill the terms of the wager.
Or perhaps not.
She went to her chamber, dressed in breeches, shirt, and vest; slung her coat over her shoulder; and took up her bag. Depositing the key with the proprietor, she pressed a coin into the housemaid’s palm, then went out into the sunny morning.
The walk to the wharf was only fifty yards. Sam sat on the dock beside the yawl bobbing in the water, dangling a piece of straw from between his teeth. He sprang up and tugged his cap.
“Morning, Cap’n. How was that hotel? I ain’t never stayed in no hotel before.”
“Good morning, Sam. It was fine, thank you.”
She boarded the little boat and Sam rowed her to her ship, tentative nerves of triumph twisting about her belly now. Jin must be aboard or Sam wouldn’t be waiting for her at the dock.
She climbed the ladder and set her feet on her deck’s solid planking. Her home.
She called down to Sam, “You may have the day now. Take the yawl, but return by midday to bring me ashore.” To negotiate a cargo for her return trip to Boston, as she had told Aidan.
She started across the empty deck. Only old Frenchie dozed on guard duty atop the quarterdeck, another two sailors below on rotation. Otherwise her ship was deserted.
Except for Jin Seton.
He ascended the stairs from the main hatch, and Viola’s heart climbed into her throat. He looked nothing out of the ordinary-simply dressed, sober, handsome. Perfect.
He saw her and paused at the head of the stair. They stared at each other, the deck between them crisscrossed with shadows of spars and lines cutting through morning sunshine. Heart galloping, she went forward and he did as well, and they halted at a distance. Viola’s insides twisted. With what words could she possibly begin this day?
Instead, he began it.
“When can you be ready to leave?”
She could not breathe. His gaze was quite serious.
“I suppose this is your way of telling me you’ve won the wager?” She forced through her closed throat.
His gaze remained steady upon her.
He had made love to her and she had given him some pleasure, but at the wager’s commencement he had promised to tell her the truth of it. So this was the truth: she had not succeeded in making him fall in love with her. And she, her insides howling strangely like a hurricane, must abide by the terms upon which they had agreed.
“I can be ready in a sennight. Less than a fortnight, certainly,” she heard herself say without knowing how the words came. “I will need to conclude negotiations regarding the cargo my ship will carry to Boston. And arrange matters with the men, of course. Becoua will captain the April back to Boston and put it into Crazy’s care.”
“I regret that I must return you home against your will,” he finally said. “I wish it were otherwise.” He spoke with a gentle sincerity that actually hurt in the pit of Viola’s gut like someone was driving a pole into her. “Viola, I am…” He paused. “I am sorry.”
He was sorry for her. Sorry that she had lost the wager. Sorry that she had not succeeded in making him love her.
In this, however, she trumped him. Because she was a great deal sorrier than he. A very great deal. For now the truth slammed into her like a jib boom swinging in a crosswind. It had been many days since she wished to win for the reason she had given him-that she did not want to return to England. In truth, she had wished to win because it would have meant that he loved her, and she wanted that. She wanted him. He filled her longing, stretching the loneliness that made her ache at sunset through her like a storm that only he could calm. She was in love with him. She knew now that she had given herself to him the night of the fire not because she needed comfort, but because she was in love. She had been in love with him long before her ship docked at Port of Spain.
She had played a very foolish game, and lost.
“I won’t back down on my part of the wager, if that’s your concern.”
“I know you will not.” It might be pity he felt, but the distance in his crystal gaze struck her even more forcefully now.
And quite swiftly, her anger rose. Perhaps so swiftly because she had anticipated this outcome. In her heart she had known even last night when she went to seduce him that she would lose. Yet she had gone anyway.
“I have hired a sloop,” he said. “I will sail for Tobago this morning to visit my bank to pay the fine on the April, and I will purchase a ship to take us east. I’ve been told there is a suitable vessel for sale at port in Scarborough.”
“I suspected you wouldn’t want to wait to collect your schooner in Boston first.” She didn’t truly care whether they sailed in a yawl or a hundred-gun frigate across the Atlantic. She didn’t care about anything except berating herself for the fool she’d always been.
She was tired of loving men who could not love her back. Aidan never had. He spoke the words and even made the gestures. But he did not treat her with love. She saw this now more clearly than she had seen anything before. She saw it perhaps because the man standing before her had never spoken the words or made the gestures, and she wanted him more than she had ever wanted Aidan.
It infuriated her-her weakness. Her hardheadedness. Her blind foolishness. Beginning now, she would never again love a man until he loved her first. Never. To not be loved in return hurt far too much. Her insides felt as though someone had scooped them out with a galley ladle.
“We should depart before the storm season commences,” he replied. “It is best we not delay.”
“Of course.” She would write to Mrs. Digby and her renters and Crazy and let them know she would be gone for an extended absence. She would negotiate a cargo so her crew would be able to carry back home at least some gold in their pockets. She had much to do and no practical reason to stand around mourning a misguided attachment except that her body seemed to want to remain near his as though he were a pole and she a pathetic little compass needle. She wiped her damp palms on her breeches. “I should get to business if all is to be ready by the time you return from Tobago,” she said briskly. “You’ll be gone a sennight or so?”
“Yes.” His eyes were quite cool now.
“All right.” She nodded. “Until then, Seton.” She passed him and strode aft toward the companionway on which he had made love to her. She knew he watched her as she went below, and hoped he felt buckets of guilt for forcing her to do what she didn’t wish to do. But he was not stupid and they both knew the truth of it. He had always known this would be the outcome. As he said from the beginning, her wager had been a child’s game.
And she had lost.
She had lost him before she ever had him. No amount of anger would ease the pain of that.
“Mr. Julius Smythe?”
Jin swung his gaze up from the glass of rum gripped in his fist.
“The very one.” His voice sounded dull. But most everything did in this palm-frond-and-plywood excuse for a rum house along Tobago’s least traveled byway. The pub was so close to the breakers crashing against the rocks twenty feet below, little else could be heard. Occasionally a gull’s cry. More frequently the protests of his own conscience.
He studied the man as though seeing him for the first time. Spare of frame and height, with curly brown hair, skin the color of oakwood and quick eyes-English, African, East Indian, Spanish-he appeared an unremarkable specimen of humanity. A mestizo. Not a man of distinction. No one of note. Which made him particularly good at the living he pursued. And particularly useful to Jin since they’d first met years ago.
Joshua Bose extended his hand, a charade they enacted on each encounter in the event that any interested party might be watching.
“I am Gisel Gupta,” Joshua said, East Indian this time, apparently. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, sir.”
Jin gestured him to the chair across the table.
“You will have a glass with me, Gupta?”
“Thank you, sir.” Joshua sat almost daintily, straight-backed on the edge of his seat. He placed a thin leather satchel on the table, then his palms flat on the satchel. “I hope your journey to Tobago was a smooth one.”
“It was fine.” Brief, the sloop he had hired at Port of Spain a fair enough vessel.
“Mr. Smythe, at the time of our previous meeting I had been misinformed as to the whereabouts of the object which you seek.”
Jin revealed none of his surprise, or disappointment. He had hoped that this time Joshua would bring him the box. He had, in fact, prayed. But prayer from a man like him did not take God’s attention, only right actions. Of late, Jin’s actions had nothing of rightness about them. But perhaps God simply did not exist, which would explain a great deal.
“Ah,” he only said.
“The information I received from my contact in Rio did not satisfy me, you see. He indicated that the object had changed hands in Caracas in October of 1812, when in fact from the itinerary with which I supplied you last August, it seemed impossible that its courier at that time would have been anywhere in that region. He was, in fact, in Bombay.”
“Bombay, hm?” Jin nodded thoughtfully. He cared nothing for this minutia. But Joshua would insist on relating it; he relished the details of his work, and he could not share it with any other. Jin only wanted the contents of that box, if after sixteen years its contents yet remained within. He was fairly certain of that impossibility. Nevertheless, he played this game. He had become quite adept at playing such games, like the game he had played with Viola Carlyle three days earlier on the deck of the April Storm before he left Trinidad.
The barkeep dropped a smudged tumbler on the table and glanced at Jin’s full measure of rum. He wrinkled his nose, then thumped the bottle down and moved off.
Joshua reached into the pocket of his paisley waistcoat and withdrew a kerchief. With precise care he wiped the glass clean, refolded the linen and returned it to his pocket, and set his glass forward for Jin to fill. He took one sip, then placed the glass on the table.
“As I said, I was unsatisfied with this information. So I went to Rio to pursue that avenue personally.” His smile flashed. “I am happy to report that in Rio I discovered that which we have all along sought.”
Jin’s heart tripped. His fingers slipped across the glass in his palm ever so slightly.
“Did you?”
Joshua’s narrow nostrils flared, his mouth curving into a smile now.
“I did. And may I say, sir, how happy I am to now offer you the information which you hired me to find three years ago?”
“You may.”
A wave hurled itself against shore, sending white vapor into the pristine blue sky. Wind whipped at the heavy palm fronds about the pub’s roof, the heat of the sun bearing down all around the shaded canopy. Because of this moment, whatever the outcome of his quest, he would remember this place clearly. His curse was remembering that which would be best forgotten-like the woman he had called mother, and the last thing she said to him before she allowed her husband to take him to be sold at the slave market.
“Where is it, Gupta?”
“It is in the possession of His Excellency Bishop Frederick Baldwin of the Church of England.” He fairly wiggled on the chair, growing taller as his spine stretched in pride. “In his house in London, sir. It has been there for several years as part of a collection of treasures from the East.”
London. Not in a distant land. Not gone forever, destroyed as it should have been with the rest of his mother’s belongings when she died five years after her husband sent her bastard son away.
In London. And so Jin would be in London by late summer, after he returned Viola to her family in Devonshire.
“Thank you for this, Gupta.” He stood. “Where would you like your fee delivered?”
Joshua blinked, his eyes widening. Jin supposed he ought to reward the man with more, with some display of satisfaction or anticipation. But at present he hadn’t the will for it.
Shaking his head once, Joshua stood and tucked his satchel beneath his arm neatly. “To the usual place, Mr. Smythe.”
Jin held out his hand. “It has been a pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Gupta.”
“Likewise, sir. I hope you will not forget Gisel Gupta the next time you have need.”
“I will contact you.”
Joshua stepped away from the table.
“Gupta. Wait. I do have need of you at this time. In Boston.”
“Yes, sir. Boston is a fine city.”
“I need you to find a sailor and interview him for me. The sailor’s name is Crazy.”
Two minutes later, he watched Joshua weave through the tables and chairs and walk across the pebbly yard to his horse, then mount and ride away.
He glanced down at his untouched glass of rum. He might indulge in a moment of celebration. For three years he had paid Joshua Bose to search out the box. For twenty he had thought about it, imagining that box held his salvation-the key to his identity. Now, finally, he knew it to be within his reach. But he had no taste for rum, or any of the other spirits he’d had before him over the past three days.
Three days, and the sweet, rich flavor of her still lingered on his tongue. Three days and he could not yet erase her scent from his senses. Three days that already felt like a millennium.
He still wanted her. He wanted her hands on him and her soft lips caressing his skin and her dark eyes hot with desire and pleasure as he had her. He wanted her again. Goddamn it, he wanted her every day for a month. A year. He told himself to cease thinking of her. He failed at it.
Castle would follow her home; he was certain of it. He had passed the planter heading toward the April Storm as he left Port of Spain.
He had engineered it, but he did not like it. Castle might be an unexceptionable sort, but he didn’t like the opportunist bastard.
But, no. That was unjust. Castle was not a bastard. Jin had spent the evening with the harbormaster and naval officers and their wives learning about Aidan Castle, and he was unsurprised. Castle was the favored son of a modestly situated family in Dorset, a solid member of the respectable English gentry, a man who might as well try his hand at marrying into a noble family through an illegitimate daughter.
Jin was the bastard. The man without family or home. The mercenary. The thief. The murderer who would never fully atone for the evils he had done. Not when he was still committing deeds that went against his conscience.
She did not wish to return to England, to leave her life on the sea, and yet he was forcing her to do so. Perhaps his guilt was mitigated by what he was giving her in return. She deserved better than Aidan Castle, but she loved him. Jin might take comfort in his good deed if he weren’t so damned distracted by his own desire.
The journey would take a month or six weeks if the wind stayed with them. The neat little thirty-gun brig he’d purchased the previous day would make it a comfortable trip. But it was going to be a hellishly long month trying to remain aloof from her. If he touched her again, he would be playing them both false. He was not the man for Miss Viola Carlyle.
When she had come into his room at the hotel seeking to seduce, he told himself it would not harm either of them to enjoy another night together. But when she asked if he wished her to leave, he’d had the insane urge to grasp her hand again and insist that she never leave. The panic that had sloshed through him then lingered even now.
“Captain Seton?”
Slipping his palm over his cuff, the slim weight of the dagger tucked within his sleeve at ready use, he turned.
“Aha! I knew not that I would be so fortunate so swiftly! They told me at the wharf that you had gone in this direction not two hours ago.” The naval officer rode toward the canopy on a fine dappled gray, in blue and white uniform with gold encrustations of rank and honor on his shoulders and chest. Behind him two other officers drew their mounts to a halt at a distance, the wind blowing about their hat plumes.
Jin released the dagger hilt and moved to the edge of the lean-to, into the sun.
“How may I help you?”
The officer removed his hat and bowed smartly from the saddle. “Captain Daniel Eccles, at your service, sir.”
Eccles, Halloway’s lieutenant when the Royal Navy finally caught up with the pirate Redstone.
“As I am at yours, Captain.” He bowed.
Eccles smiled broadly. “May I join you for a drink?”
“Of course.”
Eccles motioned his officers to dismount and introduced them. They were sober-browed and neatly disposed in their crisp uniforms, so different from the ragtag collection of sailors aboard the April Storm. But men of the sea were largely the same at heart. With few words they made themselves agreeable and showed their intelligence, and both were gentlemen, as was Eccles.
“That must be your ship anchored at Scarborough,” Jin said, watching them drink. “She is impressive.”
“I was fortunate to get her. But I did not see the wily Cavalier at dock. Where is she berthed, at Crown Point?”
“She has been sunk.”
Eccles’s eyes widened. His officers glanced at one another.
“Sunk? The Cavalier?” His brow wrinkled. “I hadn’t thought it possible, not with you at the helm.”
“It was, I admit, unexpected.” As was this tightness in his chest that would not abate. “Where are you bound? I understand from the port official at Port of Spain that you have been cruising this sea for some months.”
“Ah, then my next question is answered. I hope he gave you the letter I left with him for you.”
“He did. Thank you.”
Eccles smiled. “When my admiral commands a task of me, I obey, of course. You have influential friends at Whitehall, Seton. I think I am nearly jealous.”
“A man with a ship like yours needn’t be jealous of anyone, Eccles.”
The naval officer laughed. “You are quite right. But we are bound for England shortly, in fact. Our cruise is at an end and we’ve only to take on provisions, then will be heading home.”
Slowly Jin leaned forward, finally taking up his glass of rum. Here was a solution.
“Captain Eccles, I myself have been given a challenging task for which I am in need of assistance. I wonder if you could help me.”
“If it is within my power, of course. Any favor for the man who turned the crafty Cavalier’s purpose from thieving to good work. Redstone would not have done it, no matter how we hounded him.” He regarded Jin quite seriously. Eccles knew Redstone’s true identity, as only those who had been there on the sea off the coast of Devonshire that day. The pirate Redstone who had preyed on the vessels of wealthy peers had not been forgotten-or entirely forgiven. It was ironic, given that Jin had actually captained the Cavalier most of the time Alex Savege-in his other persona-had been its master. Yet now Jin was the hero and Alex ever after the mistrusted villain despite his noble lineage.
Not irony. Rather, a mockery of decency.
“Thank you,” he replied. “I have the honor of conveying a lady from Trinidad to Devonshire, the daughter of Lord Carlyle. I have no doubt she would be infinitely more comfortable aboard a ship of the line in the company of naval officers, than otherwise.”
Eccles nodded. “We have accommodation for ladies aboard. Modest, but suitable. My wife is with us and will be glad for feminine company. Will you join us aboard then?”
“I will accompany you in my vessel.”
Eccles nodded. “The more guns the better should we meet with threats.”
Jin swallowed the last of the rum, and felt the heat slide down his throat into his gut.
“Eccles, might you have room aboard your ship for yet another passenger? I have an acquaintance, also on Trinidad now, who may be looking for passage to England shortly as well.”
“We can make space for him if you wish.” Eccles lifted his glass. “Any friend of yours is welcome aboard my ship. Who is he?”
“A planter. English-born but now quite American. And he is a friend of the lady. His name is Castle.” The man who would spend the month with her instead of him, as she would have if he had not found her and altered her life.
He glanced at Joshua’s half-filled glass still on the table. After three years, his search for his father would soon come to an end. And after two years, he would finally cease living with Viola Carlyle as the purpose for his actions. His quest would be over, his debt paid.
Eccles raised his rum. “To England, then,” he toasted.
Jin shifted his gaze to the querulous sea. “To England.”