Captive Bride (38 page)

“
Th’others
scrambled for the boats when she caught
afire
,” Mattie grunted. “Boys are well enough, seeing as these
fellas
ain’t
pirates after all.
Nothing to worry about.”

“Nothing to worry about.”
Jin cracked a hard laugh. “I am trussed like a roast pig and the
Cavalier
is hundreds of feet below. No, I haven’t a care in the world.”

“Don’t you try fooling
me.
I
knows
you care more about our boys than your lady, no matter how much you doted on her.”

“Wrong, as usual, Matt.”
He glanced up and saw clearly now the flag of the state of Massachusetts hanging limp in the rain that pattered his face. He’d lost his hat. No doubt it happened at some point during the scuffle from long boat to enemy deck when he’d abruptly realized he had ordered his men to board an American privateer,
not
a pirate vessel. Rain dripped from the tip of his nose into his mouth. He spit it out and slewed his gaze around.

Shrouded in silvery-gray, the deck of the brig was littered with human and nautical debris. Men from both crews lay prone, sailors seeing to wounds with hasty triage. Square sails hung loose from masts, several torn, a yardarm broken, sections of rail splintered and cut through with cannon shot, black powder marks everywhere. Even taken unaware, the
Cavalier
had given good fight. But the Yank vessel was still afloat.
While Jin’s ship was at the bottom of the sea.

He closed his eyes again. His men were alive, and he could afford another ship. He could afford a dozen more. Of course, he had promised the
Cavalier’s
former owner he would take care of her. But he had promised himself even more. This setback would not cow him.

“
We seen
worse.” Mattie lifted bushy brows.

Jin cut him a sharp look.

“What I
means
to say is, you seen worse,” his helmsman amended.

Considerably worse.
But nothing quite so painfully humiliating.
No one bested him.
No
one
.

“Who did this?” he growled, narrowing his eyes into the rain. “Who in hell could have crept up on us like that so swiftly?”

“That’d be Her Highness, sir.” The piping voice came from about waist high. The lad, skinny and freckled, with a shock of carrot hair, stretched a gap-toothed grin, swept a hand to his waist, and bowed.
“Welcomes aboard the
April Storm
, Master Pharaoh.”

Every muscle in Jin’s body stilled.

April Storm.

“Who is the master of this vessel, boy?”

The lad flinched at his hard tone. He flashed a glance at the ropes binding Jin and his helmsman about waists, chests, and hands to the mizzenmast, and the scrawny shoulders relaxed.

“Violet
Laveel
, sir,” he chirped.

“Quit smirking, you whelp, and call your mistress over,” Mattie barked.

The boy’s eyes widened and he scampered off.

“Violet
la Vile
?”
Mattie mumbled then pursed his thick lips.
“
Hnh
.”

Jin drew in a slow, steadying breath, but his heart hammered unaccustomedly
quick
. “The men are prepared?”

“Been
pr‘pared
for months.
Won’t do a lick o good now they’re all tied up.”

“I will do the talking.”

Mattie screwed up his cauliflower nose.

“Keep your mouth shut with her, Mattie, or so help me I will find a way to keep it shut despite these ropes.”

“
Yessir
,
Cap’n
, sir.”

“Damn-it, Mattie, if after all this time you so much as think of throwing a wrench in—”

“Well, well, well. What do we have here, boys?” The voice came before the woman, smooth, rich, and sweet, like the caress of brushed silk against skin. Unlike any female sailor Jin had ever heard.

But as she sauntered into view from around the other side of Jin’s helmsman, she looked common enough. Through the thinning rain, he had his first view of the notoriously successful Massachusetts female privateer, Violet la Vile.

The woman he had been searching out for two years.

Sailors flanked her
protectively,
casting dog eyed glances at her and scowls at Jin and his mate. She stood a head shorter than her guard, coming to about Jin’s chin. Garbed in loose trousers and a long, shapeless coat of worn canvas, a thick bundle of black neck cloth stuffed beneath her chin, a sash with no fewer than three mismatched pistols hanging from it, and a wide-brimmed hat obscuring her face, she didn’t particularly resemble her sister. But Jin had spent countless nights in ports from Boston to Vera Cruz drinking sailors and merchants under the table and bribing men with everything he had at hand in search of information about the girl who had gone missing a decade and a half ago. That she looked less like a fine English lady than any woman he’d ever seen did not mean a damn thing.

Violet la Vile was Viola Carlyle, the girl he had set out from Devonshire twenty-two months earlier to find.
The girl who, at the age of ten, had been abducted from a gentleman’s home by an American smuggler.
The girl all except her sister believed dead.

The brim of her hat rose slowly through the rain. A narrow chin came into view, then a
scowling mouth, a slight, sun-touched nose, and finally a pair of squinting eyes, crinkled at the corners. They assessed Jin from toe to crown. A single brow lifted and her lips curved up at one side in a mocking salute.

“So this is the famed Jinan Seton I’ve heard so many stories of?
The Pharaoh.”
Her voice drawled like a sheet sliding through a well-oiled block. Thick lashes fanned down then back up again, taking him in this time with a swift perusal. She wagged her head back and forth and her lower lip protruded.
“Disappointing.”

Mattie made a choking sound.

Jin’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know who I am?”

“Your crewmen.
Boasting of you even as they were losing the fight.”
A full-throated chortle came forth and she plunked her fists onto her hips and pivoted around to the sailors gathering about.
“
Look’ee
here, boys!
The British Navy sent its dirtiest pirate scum to haul me in.”

A cheer went up, huzzahs and whistles across deck. Seamen crowded closer with toothless grins and crackling guffaws, brandishing muskets and cutlasses high. She raised her hand and silence descended but for the whoosh of waves against the brig’s hull and the patter of rain on canvas and wood. Her gaze slued back to Jin, sharp as a tack.

“Guess I should be flattered, shouldn’t I?” Her voice was like velvet. For a moment—a wholly unprecedented moment—Jin’s throat thickened. No woman should have a voice like that.
Except in bed.

“Why did you sink my ship?” The steely edge he had learned as a lad came to his own voice without effort. “She was the fastest vessel on the Atlantic. What kind of privateer are you, putting a prize like that underwater? You could have kept her, or sold her. She would have taken a fine price.”

She screwed up her brows.

“It’s true, I could’ve kept her, Master Brit.
Or sold her.
But I’d a feeling the master of the
Cavalier
wouldn’t allow his ship into another’s hands. Was I right?” She grinned. “Of course I was. Then when you found your freedom you’d be pestering to get her back until I’d have had to sink another of your ships until you left my coast alone. No thank you kindly.” Her eyes glinted.

“Our countries are no longer at war. You should have released us when you realized who we were.”

“You didn’t give me much choice, swarming aboard my vessel without invitation.”

He shook his head in astonishment. “You were making to board us. What are you doing sneaking around like pirates in the rain?”

“Looking for fools bent on glory,” she said with infuriating ease. “What kind of idiot attacks a pirate vessel?”

The sort that had seen first-hand a man’s feet nailed to planking and other unique freebooter tortures.
The sort that had once been as merciless, and now spent his days trying to atone for those sins.
He would never again allow a pirate ship to sail free.

“Anyway,” she shrugged, “it was such fun seeing the mighty
Cavalier
go down, I couldn’t resist.”

Red washed across Jin’s vision. He tried to blink it away. His gut hurt. Damn and blast he wanted a cutlass and pistol more than life at this moment.
Or perhaps just a bottle of rum.

She smirked.

Two bottles
.
They said she was a fine sailor for a woman, but no one said she was mad.

“What will you do with my crew?” His voice sounded uneven now.
Damn
and
blast
.

A single brow arched high again. “What do you think I’ll do with them? Trade them for
profit?”

Jin’s spine stiffened. “You would not. You couldn’t sell more than half, if you did.”
The half with brown skin.

“Of course I won’t, you heathen.” Her tone did not alter from the satin.

“What then?”

A gust of breeze blew the misty rain sideways. The ship leaned and the woman widened her stance. She
pursed
her lips.

“I’ll put you off tonight when we come in to port. They’ll take you into the jail there and the constable will decide what to do with you.”

“Constable?”
Mattie grunted.

“What, big fellow? Do you want to stay aboard?” She cast him a crooked grin. “I could use a brute like you around here. You’re welcome to remain if you wish, and leave Lord Pharaoh here to rot behind bars with the others.”

Mattie’s cheeks went beet red. Jin’s fist ached to slam right into his helmsman’s meaty jaw. Mattie was a fool about women.

But he took a measured breath instead. With that speech she had given away all he needed. She had given away proof of her origins.

In his twenty-nine years Jin had sailed from Madagascar to Barbados. He had drunk with men from Canton to Mexico City, and he had heard nearly every language on earth. No single utterance had ever sounded
so
sweet to him as Violet la
Vile’s
West Country long ‘A’. The woman was Devonshire born and bred or Jin wasn’t a sailor. It did not matter that he’d lost the
Cavalier
. He had found his quarry.

His crew believed she was yet another bounty to be collected, a quarry assigned to him through his work for the government. She was not, rather
his own
private mission. With Viola Carlyle’s return to England, his debt to the man who had saved his life would be repaid at last.

“Thank you, mum.” Mattie ducked a jerky bow against his bonds. “I’ll be staying with me mates.”

“Suit yourself.” She eyed Jin. “I suppose you expect me to have you untied, pirate.”

“I do.
Quickly.”

“
Not a pirate no more, miss
,” Mattie grunted. “Not for two years now.”

Her eyes glinted. “It gives me pleasure to call him one.” She lifted a brow. “He doesn’t like it, obviously. He is as arrogant as they say.” She sauntered toward him, halting inches away. She tilted her head back, her
hatbrim
hovering just above his nose as she scanned his face slowly with her squinting eyes.
Unusual color.
So dark blue they could be called violet. Thus her false name, no doubt.

Up close her skin shone warm from sun even under the canopy of rainclouds, nothing like an English lady’s delicate pallor. Her mouth was fuller than he had first thought, lips chapped at the bow, a small flat mole on one side riding the curve of her lower lip. Freckles dusted her pug nose.

Not pug.
Delicate.
Almost lady-like.

He gave her stare for stare.

She wrinkled the almost lady-like appendage.

“Arrogant.” She sighed on a rough whorl of air.
“And still disappointing.
I’ll admit I expected more of the legend.”

“I can give you more, if you wish.” And he would. As soon he got free of these bonds he would give Viola Carlyle exactly what she should have had fifteen years ago.

He would give her family back again.

Viola chuckled. “Oh can you?”

“I can do you damage even with my hands tied behind my back.” His voice was gravelly, ice blue eyes intense.