I had always heard that the eyes were a window into one’s soul. As I stared into his, I could not determine if they were merely shuttered or if the rumors about him were true: that he possessed no soul to speak of because he’d traded it to the devil for immortality. By all accounts, the life he pursued was one that should have led him to an early grave. Yet, there he sat, his ghostly blue gaze unwavering, challenging . . . dangerous. A time would come when I would question the wisdom in not walking away, but I longed for more than I possessed and so I stood my ground, refusing to be put off. I often look back on that stormy night and wonder how different my life might be now had I realized that the journey he would take me on was one that I would soon discover I had little desire to travel.
—The Secret Memoirs of an Adventurous Lady
London
April 1858
He didn’t look at all like a hero.
Lady Anne Hayworth had expected him to be . . . well, at least tidy. She’d never seen a man so unkempt, with three buttons on his shirt undone to reveal a narrowing V of chest that to her surprise seemed as bronzed as his hands. He sat alone at a table in the corner of the tavern as though he owned the establishment, although she was well aware that he didn’t. Or at least she didn’t think he did. The particulars about him were as difficult to find as the man himself.
Standing before him she was sorely tempted to take a pair of sharp shears to the ebony hair that hung to his shoulders and a razor to the stubble darkening his jaw.
She was accustomed to gentlemen rising when she approached. Instead, he continued to slouch in his chair, leisurely trailing one long thick finger up and down his mug, his gaze fastened on her as though he were imagining what it might be like to stroke that finger along her throat. It was an absurd thought, and she had no idea from whence it had sprung. She was not used to men openly looking at her as though they were contemplating doing wicked things with her.
No, no, this man wasn’t hero material at all.
Perhaps the gentleman at the door, the one she’d questioned, had directed her to this man as a cruel prank. If so, she would demand he return the sovereign she’d paid him for his assistance. Still, on the off chance . . .
She cleared her throat and said, “I’m searching for Captain Jack Crimson.”
“Crimson Jack. And you found him.”
“I see. Captain Crimson Jack, the adventurer?”
One side of his mouth curled up slowly into a mocking smile. “Depends. What sort of adventure are you looking for, Princess?”
“I’m not a princess. My father is an earl, not a prince or a king. He—” She halted. The particulars of her heritage—of anything at all actually—were none of his concern. “I was told you are a man who could help me.”
As he raked his insolent gaze over her, her stomach quivered, and she balled her white-gloved hands into fists at her side to stop them from trembling.
“Depends on what sort of help you’re needing,” he said. “If it’s an adventure between the sheets—”
“Definitely not!” she snapped at the arrogant cad.
“Pity.”
Pity? Obviously the man had no standards. She knew she was not a beauty. She lacked color. Her hair was a ghastly white, her eyes silver. Her nose too small, her lips too plump. She knew she should seek help elsewhere, but he had come so highly recommended. Instead, she heard herself ask, “May I sit?”
The chair in front of her wobbled a bit, and she realized that he’d nudged it with his booted foot. Mannerless jackanapes. Still, she could not discount the fact that she had been assured that he was a man she could trust not only with her life, but with her virtue. He wasn’t in the habit of forcing women, but then based on his handsome features alone—not to mention that wicked smile—she suspected women stumbled over themselves clambering into his bed. She, however, would not be one of them. She pulled out the chair farther and sat. “I am Lady Anne.” She halted there. Her father and brothers would not approve of her plans, which was the very reason that she’d chosen to be secretive. “I wish to hire you to take me to Scutari.”
“Not a very nice place for a holiday. What say I take you to Brighton instead?”
“My fiancé isn’t in Brighton,” she snapped. She squeezed shut her eyes as they began to sting. Her family had told her it was a bad idea to go to the place where so many soldiers had died during the Crimean War, to visit the hospital and grounds where Florence Nightingale had fought to save so many lives. But it wasn’t so much that she wanted to go there. It was quite simply that she had to.
She opened her eyes to the expressionless man sitting across from her. If he thought anything at all about her outburst, he didn’t show it.
“You don’t need me to get you to Scutari. You can purchase passage—”
“I wish to journey on my schedule. I want to get there quickly. I don’t intend to stay long, but it’s imperative that I—” Damn the tears that once again threatened. She was stronger than this. She would be stronger than this. She swallowed. “—visit with my fiancé and return home before the Season begins.”
A handkerchief, surprisingly white and pressed, appeared before her, held in a large roughened hand. She took the offering and dabbed gently at her eyes. “Thank you.” She looked down at the scarred table, then lifted her gaze. “I didn’t expect this part to be so incredibly difficult.”
“How long has it been since you saw him?”
“Four years, almost to the day. I saw him off at the railway station on the morning that he and so many others in service of the Queen began the journey to the Crimea. He looked so incredibly dashing, so confident. Promised to be home in time to go pheasant hunting . . .” She cleared her throat. “I’m frightfully sorry. I’m not sure why I’m telling you all this.”
Especially when his eyes held no compassion, no warmth. She didn’t know why he’d bothered to offer her the handkerchief unless it was simply that he couldn’t abide tears.
“Have you ever been separated from anything, anyone you held dear?” she asked.
He clenched his jaw, and she quickly shook her head. “I’m sorry. That was a silly question. You’re a seaman. I’m certain your life is filled with separations.”
“Where I’m concerned, don’t be certain of anything, Princess.”
“I told you that I’m not—”
She saw triumph light his eyes. He’d baited her, and her anger had shoved her sorrow aside. What sort of man was he? Compassionate one moment, distant the next?
Very primly, she folded the handkerchief and extended it toward him.
“Keep it.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’ve not handled this encounter at all well. As I said earlier, I wish to hire you to take me to Scutari. I’ve heard you have a remarkably fast ship and you are an exceptional captain.”
“True on both counts. But I transport cargo, not people.”
“I’m willing to pay handsomely for your ship and services: two hundred pounds.”
She’d shocked him. She could tell by the way that he slowly trailed his gaze over her, without insolence, but with a new measure of respect, as though truly seeing her for the first time.
“That’s a good deal of money,” he finally said.
“Enough to make you go to Scutari, Captain—” She shook her head. “What is your last name, if not Crimson?”
“Jack will suffice.”
“I couldn’t be so informal.”
He plopped his arm down on the table, palm up. “Give me your hand,” he ordered.
“Beg pardon?”
“Your hand.”
His eyes held a challenge that she couldn’t mistake. She saw no harm in doing as he asked. She was wearing gloves after all. Taking a deep steadying breath she placed her hand in his.
Before she could blink he curled his long fingers around her wrist. Then slowly, ever so slowly, he began releasing the buttons on her glove with his other hand.
“Captain—”
“Shh.”
She watched in horrified fascination as he leisurely peeled off her glove and set it aside. With no request for permission, he lightly trailed his fingers over hers, then circled them around her palm, following the various lines as though he expected them to guide him somewhere. His fingers were callused, rough, scarred. She doubted he ever wore gloves.
“Your skin is like silk. Your fiancé is a very fortunate man,” he said, his voice scratchier, rougher than it had been moments earlier.
“Not as fortunate as you might think.”
He didn’t question her further, but rather he seemed enthralled by her hand, by the lines that traversed her palm. “There is very little room on my ship for formality,” he said, returning to her earlier comment regarding how she was to address him. “You would have to sleep in my cabin.”
“But surely you would not be there.”
With no rush, he lifted his hooded gaze to hers. Her heart was pounding so hard that she wondered if he could feel it in the throbbing of her pulse at her wrist. “Not always, no. But I would eat my meals there. Study my charts there.” A heartbeat of silence. “Bathe there.”
She swallowed hard. She could be on deck when he was bathing. Besides, how many baths would the man need in the week or so it would take to reach their destination? “I’m sure we could work out a suitable arrangement.”
A corner of his mouth lifted. “It’s bad luck to have a woman onboard. My men would not be particularly pleased by your presence. You would have to remain very close to me so that I could offer you protection.”
He was striving to manipulate her now, seeking to intimidate, to make her wary. She had four brothers. She knew how the game was played. “I sought you out because I’d heard that you were somewhat of a hero—”
He tightened his jaw, narrowed his eyes, and she realized he wasn’t at all pleased with that characterization.
“—although the particulars regarding your heroics were not forthcoming. But I was assured you had excellent command of your men. Surely if you tell them to behave, they will behave.”
“For the chance at one of your kisses, I suspect they’d be willing to risk the bite of a cat-o-nine.”
“I don’t give my kisses freely.”
“And I have no need of your two hundred pounds. So tell me, Princess, what else are you willing to barter?”
Lord Tristan Easton, more commonly known along the waterfront as Crimson Jack, couldn’t stop his smile from widening as she released a small gasp and snatched her lovely hand free of his grip. He wasn’t certain he’d ever encountered such silkiness before. Or such fire in a woman’s eyes. But then he wasn’t in the habit of taunting women. Yet something about her called to the devil in him.
“You’re a cur,” she snapped.
“I never claimed otherwise.” And he’d hang from the nearest yardarm whichever of his men was spouting tales that he was a hero. He wasn’t. Not like his brother Sebastian who’d fought in the bloodiest of battles and barely survived to tell the tale. “You’re asking me to go someplace that I have no desire to go. It needs to be worth my while to be so inconvenienced.”
Although presently he had no commitments other than lifting tankards of ale and doing as he pleased.
“Obviously the tales I’ve heard of you are untrue—you’re not a man of honor.”
He refused to acknowledge how her words bit into his soul. He’d long ago stopped caring how anyone judged him, so why the devil did he give a fig what she thought?
She rose elegantly to her feet. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time and mine. Good night to you, sir.”
With an indignant swish of her skirts, she pivoted on her heel and marched toward the door. Someone jumped forward to open it for her, and then she was gone into the storm.
Pity.
Tristan shifted his gaze over to the nearby table where a lad of sixteen was trying to entice a serving girl onto his lap. “Mouse,” he barked.
The boy immediately snapped to attention. “Aye, Cap’n?”
He gave a quick nod toward the door. “I want to know where she goes.”
Without delay or complaint the nimble lad took off. If anyone could follow her, he could.
Tristan caught the eye of the disappointed maid and signaled another tankard be brought to him. When it arrived he took a long swig of the thick dark ale and leaned back his chair until it bumped against the wall. His thinking pose.
He’d grown remarkably bored of late. Two years ago he and his brothers had finally made good on their promise—a bit tardy, but still they’d returned to London, routed their uncle, and reclaimed their birthright as the lords of Pembrook.
But London Society had not been so quick to welcome the lords back into the fold. Once Sebastian’s position as the Duke of Keswick was secured and their uncle dead, Tristan had returned to the love that had usurped Pembrook in his heart: the sea.
But after nearly twenty months of fighting tempests and gales, he was back on England’s shores, feeling untethered, as though he’d somehow broken free of his moorings. He had no desire to return to the tedious London ballrooms. While there, he discovered women aplenty to warm his bed, but they were all cut of the same cloth: satin and silk and lace. They were drawn to the danger he represented. He had only to smile and they fell into his arms. They presented no challenge.
The lady who’d been sitting before him was different. She’d stepped through the door as though she owned the night, had called down the rain, had commanded the thunder to rumble. With the most gracious movements he’d ever seen, she’d reached up and moved aside the wet hood of her pelisse.
He’d felt a quick, almost brutal tightening of his body in response to the exquisiteness of the face revealed. High cheekbones, flawless skin. Her hair, piled on top of her head, was not quite blond, not quite white. The palest of shades.
She’d spoken to a man standing nearby, and Tristan—who had never been jealous of any man—was envious. When the lady began wending her way toward him, he’d anticipated her arrival as he’d anticipated little of late. He’d made a wager with himself regarding the shade of her eyes. Green, he’d thought. But he lost the wager. They were a faint silver, haunting. They’d known tragedy. Of that he was certain.
But they’d not been conquered and he was suddenly of a mind to do so. Her fiancé was a fool of the highest order to go off and play at war when he had her here to warm his bed.
Sebastian had fought in the Crimea. He’d left half his face on the battlefield, perhaps even a portion of his soul, until Mary had come back into his life and made him whole again. So Tristan had no love for that area of the world, for the trouble it had caused his brother, but the notion of having Lady Anne on his ship intrigued him. Although he didn’t quite fancy the idea of delivering her to another man. Rather he wanted her for himself. For a time anyway. For a bit of sport, a bit of fun.
He wasn’t surprised that she’d not recognized him. He wasn’t decked out like a gentleman. It was also possible, since she was betrothed, that she’d not attended the two balls where he and his brothers had made their scandalous appearances after returning to London. The nerve of them to actually be alive and not devoured by wolves. While Sebastian might be frequenting those circles now, it would take a keen eye to recognize the similarities between the two men. Most people didn’t see beyond his brother’s disfigurement.
Tristan liked that she didn’t know how he fit into her world—quite uncomfortably if the truth were known. He’d hid it well with quick smiles, laughter, and teasing. But he had little desire to return to the maze of London Society. Rafe had the right of it. Better to stay in the shadows where they were comfortable. They’d been too long without politeness. It was a tight shroud, one he didn’t enjoy wearing.
He had a keen insight when it came to discovering buried treasure. He wanted this Lady Anne who’d dared approach him and offer him money. He could have taken it and then wooed her once she was on his ship, but that would have made it all too easy.
He stroked her discarded glove where it remained on the table. In her haste to leave, she’d forgotten it. He yearned for a challenge.
He was fairly certain that she would provide him with one—one he was likely to never forget.