Scandalous Desires

  Mick paused outside the dining room to catch his breath. And now he’d brought her to his secret hidey-hole that only Harry, of all his men, knew about. He was exposing himself, he knew. Ah, well, and he couldn’t even regret doing it. She and the babe needed to be hidden while Harry did Mick’s bidding in London and this was the safest place.

  With that thought he opened the door to the dining room.

  Silence was already inside, sitting primly on the right hand side of the head of the table. She wore a simple blue and white print gown—one that he’d had sent up to her, for she’d fled her brother-in-law’s house with only the clothes upon her back. It gave him a satisfied feeling to see her in clothes that he’d provided for her and he smiled as he prowled down the length of the room toward her.

  She met his gaze steadily though her cheeks stained pink. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d join me, Mr. Rivers.”

  He cocked his head. Had he imagined her emphasis on his assumed name? “And leave a lovely lady like yourself alone? I think not.”

  “Humph.”

  He sat and looked at her. “How is Mary Darling?”

  “Fast asleep after playing and having a bath,” she said. “The nursery is lovely.”

  “I’m glad you like it.”

  “Rose and Annie are obviously practiced nursemaids, and what is even better, they seem to like Mary, and she them.”

  He grunted. “It would take a hard heart to turn away from my Mary Darling.”

  A smile curved the corners of her lips. “You didn’t seem too enamored of her when you first met.”

  “She has a forceful personality, as do I. We just took a bit to get to know one another.”

  She eyed him suspiciously. “I think your Irish has mysteriously disappeared from your speech, Mr. Rivers.”

  No, he’d not imagined the emphasis. He shot her a warning look as Mrs. Bittner entered with a steaming dish.

  The housekeeper bustled around the table serving roasted chicken, boiled vegetables, jellies, and fruit. A little maid trailed behind her, acting as acolyte to the service.

  “There now,” Mrs. Bittner exclaimed when the table was laden. “Will you be wanting anything else, sir?”

  “Thank you, no,” Mick murmured.

  The housekeeper nodded in satisfaction and left with the maid.

  “Will you have some chicken?” Mick asked as he reached for the dish.

  “Yes, please,” she answered quite politely. “Are you in disguise here?”

  He ought to have known she wouldn’t let it drop.

  He gave her a wing and some breast meat. “Not exactly, but I find it… useful to have a place where I’m not known as the pirate Mickey O’Connor.”

  She waited until he’d served himself and then tasted the chicken. “Then you’re a simple English gentleman when you’re at Windward House.”

  He nodded. “More or less.”

  “And do you really build ships?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “How did I come to be a shipbuilder, do you mean?” He cut into his chicken. “Several years ago I hired Pepper to manage my money. He advised me that it would be wise to invest some of it in a business that wasn’t linked to my pirating.”

  “But why shipbuilding?” she asked. “You could’ve chosen anything, couldn’t you?”

  “I suppose.” He ate a bite of chicken and chewed as he thought. “I’ve always admired the ships that dock in London. I used to sit and watch them for hours at a time when I was a lad. Shipbuilding seemed a natural business to invest in. Too, there was an established shipbuilder—his business has been in his family for three generations—who was in need of financial backing. That was where I came in.”

  “Then the investment has worked well for you?”

  He shrugged. “I make nearly as much from the shipbuilding business as I do from pirating.”

  She frowned a bit, drank a little of her wine, and set the glass carefully down.

  He tensed with foreboding. He expected her to bring up again the topic of him retiring from pirating, but she spoke about something entirely different instead.

  “That night when the palace was attacked,” she said, “you told me that you had thrown vitriol in the Vicar of Whitechapel’s face, but you did not tell me why.” She looked up at him, her hazel eyes dark in the candlelight. “Can you tell me now?”

  He froze as her question caught him off guard. He’d been expecting the question all this long week, yet she’d chosen to ask it when he’d at last come home. For that at least he supposed he should be grateful.

  He took a sip of the wine because his mouth had grown dry. It was a French wine and of an excellent vintage, but it tasted like vinegar in his mouth.

  “I was a boy,” he began and then stopped. How could he tell her? This was the most wretched part of his life—the most wretched part of him. How could he expose her to it?

  She waited, sitting quietly, her back straight, her eyes clear and innocent, and he could only stare at her, the words clogged in his throat.

  “Michael?” she whispered at last. “Michael, can you tell me?”

  And her voice was like a drought of sweet water relieving his thirst, quenching his pain.

  “I was a boy,” he said again, holding her gaze, for it seemed the only way he could speak this terrible evil. “And me mam and I lived with him, Charlie Grady, the Vicar of Whitechapel, though back then he was only Charlie Grady. He made gin in St. Giles and he sent me mam out to walk the streets at night.”

  She didn’t say anything, but her eyes seemed filled with sorrow. Sorrow for him, that innocent boy, long dead now.

  “Sometimes she’d bring her customers back with her, but mostly she sold her wares out on the streets, and she never said naught to me about those nights, but once in a while I’d hear her crying…” His voice trailed away and he watched his hand as he fingered his glass.

  He hated to think about that time. Mostly he was able to push the memories to the back of his mind. Try to forget them, though he never could. Truth be told he didn’t want to think about it now. But she wanted to know, so for her he’d dredge up this foulness.

  He took a drink to rinse the taste of evil from his mouth.

  “She would sing to me in the evenings afore she went out, and her voice was sweet and low. She did her best to shield me from him, for he had terrible rages and then he’d beat me. He never liked me much.” He shrugged. That part of his story was common enough in St. Giles. “But when I were thirteen or thereabouts she got sick. It was winter and grain was running low. He couldn’t pay for it, the price had ridden so high, and without the grain he couldn’t make gin. And she—she was too sick to go out at night.”

  He paused and the room was very quiet. From without, distantly, they could hear someone laughing in the kitchen.

  He looked up at her because he wasn’t a coward and he wouldn’t have her pity him for one. “I was a fair lad, pretty as a girl, and there are those who like such things, you understand?”

  Her face had gone marble white, but she held his gaze and nodded her understanding once. No coward either, was his Silence.

  “He said he had a taker for me and that I was to do as the man said or he’d beat me until I couldn’t move. Well.” Mick inhaled, still holding those beautiful hazel eyes. “I was an innocent, had never touched a girl in me life, but I knew the kind of thing that would be expected of me. And I knew it wouldn’t be the once. After I’d done it, Charlie would want me to do it again and again until I was naught but a boy whore, despised by all. I wasn’t going to be that thing. We were in his distillery and he had the vitriol in a basin to use for the gin. I knew what it could do, had watched it burn through wood. I took that basin and dashed it in Charlie Grady’s face and then I turned and ran as fast as I could.”

  Silence gave a kind of shuddering gasp and spoke. “You had no choice. What he wanted you to do was abominable.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. B
ut me mam never forgave me for it. She spoke but once to me after that.”

  “Why?” she cried, the outrage in her voice a balm to his soul. “Why would she take his side against yours?”

  “Because,” he said low, “Charlie Grady is me father.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Now Clever John’s kingdom was safe from attack. With an invincible army the people grew used to peace and prosperity. And if Clever John found his days a little dull, he amused himself by climbing to the top of his mountain and surveying all he owned and controlled. But an army has many mouths to feed, and one day Clever John found his kingdom’s coffers bare.

  It was with a light step that he went to his garden and called, “Tamara!”…

  —from Clever John

  Michael’s greatest enemy was his father.

  Silence lay in bed late that night, sleepless and thinking of the things that Michael had told her over dinner. At the time, when he’d revealed what his father had done to him—had done to the mother Michael so obviously loved—she’d been too stunned, too sickened to ask anything more. They’d finished the dinner in near quiet. Now, as she lay staring sightlessly up at the dark canopy of her bed, questions and thoughts teemed in her mind. How could a mother let anyone, even a child’s father, do such horrible things to a boy? And once the child had defended himself, how could she take the part of the adult who cared so little for his soul?

  She shivered in the dark. So much about Michael was explained by his terrible history. She’d wondered how a man could become so cynical, so devoid of common pity, and now she had her answer. Pity had been seared out of him by his monster of a father. Charlie Grady might bear scars on the outside of his body, but they were nothing to the scars that lay within Michael’s soul.

  Yet now she realized there were questions she should’ve asked of him—what had he done all alone at the age of thirteen? What had become of his mother?

  Well, she wouldn’t get any sleep tonight wondering and thinking. Silence turned her head and looked at the door that connected her room to Michael’s. A faint light shone under it.

  Impulsively, she got up and tiptoed to the door. She pushed it open as quietly as possible. If he were already asleep…

  Michael was sitting bare-chested in a huge honey-colored wood bed. He had some papers scattered about the coverlet and a candelabra on the table next to the bed to give him light.

  He looked up as she entered.

  For a moment he stared at her, frozen.

  Then he set the paper he was holding down. “Silence.”

  She bunched her chemise skirts in one hand nervously. “I have two questions to ask you.”

  He nodded gravely. “What?”

  He hadn’t invited her in, but she came forward anyway and perched in a chair near the bed. “What happened to you after you ran away from your father?”

  He began to gather his papers together. “I did what any young boy does who finds himself alone in London. I worked.”

  She waited.

  He squared the edges of his papers and laid them on the table by his bed before looking back at her. “I ran away from St. Giles. I knew Charlie had survived the vitriol and while he lived he was a danger to me. So I begged for a bit and stole, as well, but it’s perilous for a lad by himself. There’s gangs o’ pickpockets and thieves who don’t like others poachin’ on their territory—not to mention the danger o’ bein’ caught. After a bit I made me way to the river and hired on to a wherryman, helpin’ him row and load and unload goods. That was durin’ the daytime. At night the wherryman and me stole what we could from the cargo ships.”

  He was matter-of-fact as he relayed this dangerous life. Sitting as he was now—large and fully grown, a man aware not only of his strength, but of his ability to command other men—he looked like he could handle anything and anyone.

  But he wouldn’t have been like this back then. Back when he was only a boy of thirteen. She knew about young boys—she’d spent the last year taking care of them. They were tough and reckless and yet at the same time so very sweet and vulnerable. Their cheeks were soft and their eyes apologized even as they fought to assert their independence with too smart mouths.

  At that age Michael’s broad chest would have been narrow and thin, his arms long and skinny. He would’ve had the same brown eyes, but they probably would’ve dominated a thinner, more youthful face. She could almost see that phantom boy, lost and alone, determined to make his way by himself, because there was no one to help him.

  Her heart nearly broke.

  She inhaled. “Where did you live?”

  He shrugged. “On the river. At night I’d sleep wherever I could find a place to lay me head. There’re houses where ye can rent a bed for a night or part o’ a night, but they can be dangerous for a young boy, too. Often I slept on the boat if the weather was fair.”

  She watched him. He sat like a king in that great bed, his olive skin shining as if burnished in the candlelight. The coverlet was bunched carelessly at his hips and for the first time she wondered if he wore anything beneath the sheet.

  Hastily she raised her eyes. “And then?”

  “And then one night me master and me were set upon by a bigger crew o’ river thieves. We were beaten and the haul we’d taken that night stolen from us. And I knew then, as I crawled into a corner to lick me wounds, that I couldn’t survive as I was.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  He held out his hands in front of him, palms up, weighing his long ago choice. “I could be a wolf or a rabbit, it was that simple. I chose to be a wolf. The next night I went to the crew who’d attacked us and offered me services. They beat me again, jus’ to show me that I was at the bottom o’ their pack, but I began to raid with them.”

  He held her gaze and closed both hands into fists. “And when I was stronger, when I was no longer at the bottom and had learned to use a knife, I challenged the leader o’ the gang and beat him so badly he never walked straight again. I was fifteen and the leader o’ that river crew then.”

  He lowered his fists to the coverlet and looked at them. “In another couple o’ years I was the most feared river pirate on the Thames. I moved me crew to St. Giles and met up with Charlie again. He’d recovered from the burns to his face, but he wasn’t nearly at his peak. I could’ve killed him then, but I didn’t.”

  “Why not?” Silence whispered.

  He looked up at her, but she knew it wasn’t her he was seeing. His dark eyes were haunted. “She… she begged me. I hadn’t seen her for seven years and she got on her knees to beg for his worthless life.”

  Silence drew in her breath. What must he have felt to see his mother on her knees begging for the life of the man who had abused her—had abused Michael?

  “I let him go, more fool I, because of her, and he went and made his home in Whitechapel, schemin’, plannin’, buildin’ his power until he became the Vicar o’ Whitechapel.” Michael shook his head as if disgusted. “I should’ve squashed him like a bug.”

  “Your mother would never have forgiven you,” Silence said and she wanted to weep for him.

  He looked up. “She never forgave me anyway. I never saw her again alive.”

  “You tried to?” she asked gently.

  He snorted bitterly. “Many a time. He wouldn’t let me near her and I knew ’twould only bring her trouble if’n I saw her in secret. She loved that bastard until the end.”

  She’d loved Charlie more than her own son. Michael didn’t say the words, but Silence knew he thought them.

  She looked down at her hands and found that she’d squeezed her chemise into hopeless wrinkles in her fists. Carefully she opened her hands and smoothed the fabric.

  “When did she die, your mother?”

  “Four weeks ago.”

  Her head jerked up. “That recently?”

  He nodded. “It’s why I had to bring Mary and you to the palace. Once me mam was gone, there was nothin’ to hold him back from makin
’ me pay. I knew he’d try and draw his blood price from anyone close to me, particularly a woman. He’s always liked hurtin’ lasses.”

  “Your mother held Charlie Grady back from attacking you?”

  He looked away and nodded.

  She held out her hands urgently. “Then she did care for you, didn’t she?”

  He glanced back at her, his eyes raw.

  “She must’ve,” Silence whispered. “Even if she never saw you, she still loved you enough to keep your father from hurting you again.”

  He shook his head, and she could see that he was having trouble believing her. It would be hard, after a lifetime of seeing only one truth, to open oneself to another.

  His deep voice interrupted her thoughts. “You said you had two questions.”

  She looked up and saw that he was watching her intently, his black eyes hooded. She felt her face heat. Had he known what she was thinking?

  “Yes.” She clasped her hands together in her lap, trying to look calm. This was important. How he answered might change everything. “Why did you tell me all this?”

  He blinked as if the question wasn’t the one he’d been expecting. One corner of his wide sensuous mouth curved up ever so slightly. “Oh, love, I think ye know the answer to that one well enough.”

  Did he mean what she thought he meant? That he wanted her to know about him? Wanted to let her into his life? Her breath caught on the possibility. On the hope that he wanted from her what she wanted from him.

  And while she thought, he got up from the bed and answered the question she’d asked only in her mind.

  No, he wasn’t wearing anything at all.

  He was tall and broad and everything that was male, from the mounded muscles of his shoulders to the faint black hairs on his feet. And he was proudly erect.

  “Now, I have a question for ye,” he drawled, low and thrillingly dangerous. “Will ye be comin’ to me bed tonight, Silence Hollingbrook?”

  Silence lifted her chin, refusing to back away as Michael prowled closer, large, naked, and dauntingly male. “Yes.”