“I can promise you that it didn’t cost him nearly as much as it cost me.” Gerard’s silky tone flogged her raw nerves. She was thankful when he continued his clipped recitation. “I returned from a voyage to Gibraltar, after inadvertently dismasting a Spanish frigate carrying gunpowder to the French, to find myself something of a hero.”
“A role I’m sure you relished.”
A rueful smile curved his lips. “It had its charms. I was presented at court and wooed by the Royal Navy. There were very few salons in London that weren’t open to me.”
Very few beds either, Lucy deduced. It was only too easy to imagine the handsome young captain soaking up the simpering admiration of the ton’s beauties. A pang of jealousy disturbed her. How plain and unsophisticated a lowly knight’s daughter must have seemed to him!
She hid her discomfiture behind a venomous smile. “So how did this idyllic interlude come to an end?”
“With the appearance of a stranger at a masked ball. A stranger claiming to represent a high-ranking naval official who could grant me the one thing fame and fortune couldn’t buy me. I’d already been offered a chance to take the lieutenancy exam, but this man promised me command of my own ship.” His voice softened with remembered longing. “A captaincy in the Royal Navy.” As if already regretting that he’d revealed too much, he paced away from her, tension coiled in every step.
“Go on,” she whispered, aching with bleak suspense.
“I’m sure you’re aware of the thin line that separates privateering and piracy during times of war. I was offered a chance to tread the lawful side of that line. To sail to the Caribbean, capture and board French and Spanish frigates, and return one-fifth of their booty to His Majesty to fund the war effort. My crew and I were to split the balance. My anonymous benefactor would commission a ship and the Lord High Admiral would issue a letter of marque to legalize my activities and keep the French from hanging me should I be captured.”
His lips twisted, but this time his contempt was only for himself. “Such a scheme couldn’t help but strike the patriotic fancy of a brash young man who’d spent his life dreaming of serving his king. The intrigue alone was irresistible. I met my benefactor’s representative at masked routs, in shadowed alleys, priest’s confessionals. I never saw his face or knew his name. I wasn’t to understand the reason why until it was too late.”
“You were captured,” Lucy said with dread certainty.
“I was betrayed!”
She recoiled from his damning shout. She had exasperated him, infuriated him, possibly even enraged him during his weeks at Ionia, but he had never raised his voice to her with such violence. Her gaze dropped to his clenched fists. She’d seen firsthand the damage they could do when their threat was unleashed. For the first time, she entertained the painful possibility that she might have more to fear from this man than heartbreak.
Following the direction of her gaze, Gerard slowly uncurled his fingers and released a deep breath. “I was captured,” he conceded, “off the coast of San Juan. Two days before, a Spanish merchant vessel had surrendered without a fight. I boarded her, showed the captain my letter of marque, and proceeded to divest her of her cargo.” His eyes sharpened at the memory. “Three thousand pieces of gold, silver bars, spices, cotton, indigo, silk, cinnamon. A treasure to warm the moldering heart of Captain Kidd himself.”
“And the heart of His Majesty, I’m sure.”
“I was never to know. We were captured by a French warship and taken to a fortress in Santo Domingo. Even when the guards were clapping me in irons, I laughed in their faces because I knew they hadn’t the evidence to convict us of piracy. I still had the Lord High Admiral’s letter of marque in my possession and I’d had the foresight to stash our prize in San Juan.”
“Buried treasure. How romantic.” Her droll tone implied the opposite.
“My benefactor’s henchman came calling the next day. It had been agreed upon that he would be waiting in the islands to defend me in the event of such a situation. All he required was the letter of marque and the location of our cache.”
For a stunned moment, Lucy lost the threads of her sarcasm. “And you told him?”
Wheeling on his heel, Gerard shot her a scathing look. “You’ll have to forgive me my naïveté. That was back when I still had faith in mankind.”
Lucy met his gaze and said softly, “I seem to remember suffering from just such a grave condition myself.”
He was the first to look away. “That was the last I saw of the wretch. Without the letter of marque, I had no way to prove myself a privateer and not a pirate.” His face darkened. “They hanged my crew the following day, all the way down to the sailmaster’s nine-year-old apprentice. They would have hanged me, but my earlier boasts had planted enough doubt in their minds that they feared reprisal from the British government.” He added with chilling gentleness, “Do you know what it is for a captain to outlive his crew, Lucy?”
Lucy recalled standing on the misty deck of the Tiberius, imagining the ghostly strains of betrayed sailors vowing vengeance. The notion didn’t seem quite so fanciful anymore.
She shivered. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want your pity,” he snapped.
“Then what do you want?” she cried. She could no longer bear his enigmatic baiting. It was like being batted about by the elegant, but deadly, paws of a leopard.
He swaggered toward the bed. It took every fiber of her will to keep from shrinking back into the pillows. “Would you care to know the name of the ship my benefactor provided me? The recommissioned beauty the French gutted and sank off the coast of Santo Domingo?”
“Not really,” she whispered, her mouth going dry.
He ignored her. “The Annemarie.”
Lucy blanched. A sick feeling blossomed in her belly. “Annemarie was my mother’s name. I’ve never heard of such a ship.”
Gerard arched one eyebrow. “My benefactor always did have a droll sense of humor. It was his idea to give me the alias Captain Doom.” Her heartbeat quickened as he leaned over the bed, flexing his hands on the headboard behind her to imprison her between his muscular arms. “So you see, my dear, you can’t blame me for being a villain, because after all, I’m only what your father made me.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“YOU’RE LYING!”
With that impassioned cry, Lucy ducked beneath Gerard’s arm and sprang out of the bed, desperate to escape his taunting presence. A moment earlier she might have judged herself too weak with shock to stand without foundering, but now outrage fortified her as she took her turn at pacing the immense cabin.
“You’re lying,” she repeated, turning on Gerard like a mother tigress defending her cubs. “My father is a good man. He’s dedicated his life to serving his country and king.”
“He’s dedicated his life to serving himself!” Gerard snarled.
He was looking at her as if he hated her as much as he hated her father. Refusing to be distracted by the sharp pain in the region of her heart, Lucy retreated behind the cool veil of logic.
She faced him, her hands linked before her with contemptuous calm. “Upon what evidence do you base your absurd accusation?”
Amusement at her bravado glimmered briefly in his eyes, jarring her more than his antipathy. “Your father had the perfect motives. Jealousy of a young, healthy naval hero with a bright career ahead of him. Greed. Desperation.”
Lucy gave an unladylike snort. “My father is a wealthy man. He wasn’t born so, but the King rewarded him handsomely for his years of loyal service.”
“I don’t dispute that. What I do dispute is his rather careless method of disposing of his wealth.”
“That’s ridiculous. The Admiral is a most frugal man. We’ve always lived comfortably, but never beyond our rather modest means.”
Gerard laughed, a hearty rumble that mocked her stilted defense. “Your father is a bloated wastrel who’s spent every night since long before you were born at the gamb
ling hells in Pall Mall and St. James. When White’s and Brook’s tired of his unreliable credit, he fled to the less reputable establishments in Covent Garden. By the time of his accident, he’d not only managed to piddle away his annual income at the gaming tables, but his pension and the roof over your pretty little head as well.”
Lucy drew in an unsteady breath, thankful her hands were linked to hide their sudden tremor. Her world was shifting around her again and she feared one more lurch might destroy her fragile balance for good.
She met Gerard’s gaze squarely. “You once accused me of concocting elaborate fictions to justify my actions. I must now accuse you of the same. My father would no more resort to reckless wagering than he would to drunkenness or slothfulness or—or …”
“Or piracy?” Gerard provided. “Not even with creditors banging down his door? Not even when facing bankruptcy and scandal?” His slanted smile took on a bitter twist. “We all know how your father loathes scandal, don’t we?”
Lucy forced herself to ignore his well-placed jab. She had been taught to respect logic above all else, but she was beginning to despise Gerard’s grasp of it.
She began to pace again, charting a wide course around his unavoidable presence. “If what you’re saying is true, how could you be so bold as to just stroll into our lives?” She paused as a disturbing possibility occurred to her. “Is Gerard Claremont even your name?” she asked softly, already dreading his answer.
“It is now. Richard Montjoy, the man Lucien Snow gulled, died in that fortress by the sea. Gerard Claremont survived.”
Lucy inexplicably felt as if she’d been robbed of something precious. “What if someone in London had recognized you? My father? His alleged henchman? One of Lord Howell’s guests?”
“Your father was already lamed when he hatched his plot. I have reason to believe he never saw me, except from a distance. My appearance has also changed drastically since my brief tenure of fame. I sported a beard for one thing.”
Lucy lowered her gaze, remembering his beard only too well, the teasing prickle of it against her cheek when the man calling himself Captain Doom had taunted her with his carnality.
“My hair was long then,” he continued, “worn in a Hessian tail, and much lighter than it is now.” His cocked eyebrow belied the gravity of his words. “After all, I hadn’t spent five years out of the sun, chained to a stone wall in a French fortress, watching my youth and vitality waste away.”
Lucy was shaken. His crew’s grim fate must have, in some ways, been more tolerable than his own. This time she was wise enough to bite back her pity. He’d made it clear he had no use for it.
Besides, she thought, studying him from beneath her lashes, there was nothing wasted about this man. He exuded raw power. It was a tribute to his consummate skill as an actor that he’d kept it leashed long enough to appear the most exemplary of servants while in her father’s employ.
She was forced to scramble for the threads of her unraveling argument. “What did you hope to find in the Admiral’s library? Do you think he would have been foolish enough to retain evidence that could convict him of plotting such a ruthless scheme?”
“Not foolish. Arrogant, perhaps, but never foolish. When the truth comes to light, as I can promise you it soon will, that letter of marque will be the only thing standing between your pompous papa and the gallows. As long as he has it in his possession, he can be convicted of swindling and fraud, but not piracy.”
“That doesn’t explain why he would hire someone to protect me.”
“Did he? Or was he protecting himself? When he read in the newspapers of my untimely resurrection, he wisely chose not to travel by sea. But it obviously never occurred to him that Doom might abduct you. Perhaps he feared the man would try to make contact with you again. Would tell you the truth just as I’m doing now. The authorities might not believe a convicted pirate, but what if the Admiral’s own daughter denounced him?”
Against her will, Lucy remembered the Admiral’s grueling interrogation after her rescue by the Argonaut, his suspicious, sidelong glances. The words tore from her raw throat, as if saying them with enough fervor could somehow make them true. “That’s utter nonsense. He hired you because he cares for me. I’m all he has. He needs me.”
“You’re bloody well right he needs you. So he can savor his role as martyred cuckold. So he can punish you, every hour of every day, for your mother’s indiscretions. She had the sheer audacity to die on him, but she left you in her place to pay for her sins. Quite the doting papa, isn’t he?”
At Gerard’s brutal words, the fierce pain of his betrayal struck her anew. She swayed on her feet. He reached for her.
She recoiled from him, infused with strength by the desperate need to avoid his touch. She couldn’t afford to forget that his tenderness, his consideration for her well-being, were nothing more than the tools of a coldly calculated ruse. His eyes darkened at her withdrawal, but he didn’t press.
She had to escape him. She knew better than anyone that there was nowhere to flee on a ship, but blind panic sent her striding toward the cabin’s door. “This is an outrage. I won’t stand for it. I demand to be released at the nearest port or I swear I shall—”
Gerard stepped neatly into her path, blocking any hope of flight. Lucy’s breath caught in her nostrils, deceived by the comforting scent of him—tobacco, the spice of bayberry, now mated with the wild and salty tang of the sea.
Tension tingled between them like lightning before a summer storm, but he didn’t lay a hand on her. There was no need to. The unspoken threat crackled in the air. As Lucy’s gaze shifted to his unyielding features, she was forced to acknowledge that this man, who had once vowed to hold her life as dear as his own, was now her mortal enemy.
“If you’ve any thoughts of escape, Miss Snow”—he lingered over her name as if to deliberately destroy any intimacy they’d once shared—“you’d best think twice. My men are a dangerous lot. Utterly ruthless. Trust me. You don’t want to fall into their hands.”
So they were back to that, were they? Lucy thought. Well, he wasn’t the only one who could read a cue. She tilted her head back, daring a mutinous glare. “You’ll forgive me, sir, if I find it difficult to trust you. Tell me, Mr. Clare—Captain,” she amended, each syllable laced with contempt, “was your time at Ionia worthwhile? Did you find the prize you were seeking in my father’s library?”
His gaze raked her, but Lucy found it impossible to decipher the peculiar blend of emotions in his expression. Amusement? Desperation? Regret?
His gaze returned to her face. “Oh, I found a hell of a prize. I just haven’t decided what to do with it yet.”
As he swung open the door to depart, Lucy didn’t know whether to be alarmed at being abandoned to her fears or relieved to escape his company. She could not resist a parting shot.
“Captain?”
“Yes?” he replied with scorching patience.
“You can blame my father for your villainy if it soothes your battered scruples, but you should never forget that every man is master of his own fate.”
He shut the door in her face, his gentle rejection underscored by the rattle of a key and the thud of a wooden bolt being slammed into place.
Lucy sank against the door, betrayed by her quivering knees. Perhaps the only skill she’d inherited from her father was her ability to bluff, for as long as Gerard Claremont was captain of this vessel, he was also master of her fate.
Gerard clenched the forward rail and braced his legs against the swell of the waves, savoring the sensation of once again being master of all he surveyed. After weeks of meekly taking orders from a man he loathed, it was a heady feeling, intoxicating and almost as potent as the temptation to abuse that mastery.
Undaunted by the winter chill and the ponderous gloom of gray seas meeting pewter-tinted skies, he sucked a breath deep into his lungs, hoping it might purge him of the remorse marring his reunion with the only mistress he had ever loved. She baptized
him in her invigorating spray and pressed her salty kiss against his lips. His years of captivity, spent buried in stone, yet taunted by the nearby chant of the sea, had only sharpened his craving for her open arms.
Every man is master of his own fate.
Gerard’s knuckles whitened with anger at the echo of Lucy’s grave rebuke. The prim and pampered Miss Snow had a lot of bloody nerve denouncing him. She’d never had her fate snatched from her hands and given into the hands of others. Cruel hands. Merciless hands. Hands that quenched the light and left him chained in filth and darkness for months on end.
When Lucy had strode toward the cabin door to so gallantly defy him, he had thought to put his hands on her, but hadn’t trusted himself to do so. Hadn’t trusted himself to test the boundaries of the dangerous shift of power that had occurred in their relationship. He had feared his hunger for her and his thirst for revenge might somehow meld, creating a violent maelstrom that could destroy them both. He knew instinctively that if he ever crossed that line, there’d be no turning back.
Unbeknownst to her, she’d already saved her father’s life once. Until he’d learned of her existence, Gerard had fully intended to wring his revenge from Lucien Snow’s treacherous throat. It was her gentle prodding of his slumbering scruples at their first meeting that had tempered his desire for vengeance with a craving for justice and birthed his mad scheme to infiltrate his enemy’s camp.
He wondered if some residual insanity had prompted him to bring her aboard the Retribution. His physical scars were fading, but the deeper mental scars of his imprisonment remained, carved when madness had gnawed like rats in the dark at the frayed edges of his reason.
It would have been far simpler to leave her unconscious on the floor of the Admiral’s library, no more aware of his true identity than she had ever been. She might have harbored her own suspicions about her bodyguard’s abrupt departure, but they would have been just that—suspicions with no proof to uphold them.