Simon hesitated at the step off the gangway onto the quay. It had been less than two months since he’d last set foot on English soil, yet it seemed like years. A Barbary Coast prison could do that, he supposed.

“I’m starving,” his oldest friend Daniel Steinberg said peevishly from behind him. “Hurry up, Simon. Between the weather and Harry getting me shot, I never thought we’d make it back from this voyage. Whenever I set foot on a ship it turns into a disaster.” Despite the bullet wound in his thigh, Daniel still looked as smart as always, trim and fit and dressed tiptop, only a slight limp giving him away. Simon, on the other hand, looked like something the cat had dragged in after mauling it.

“Why,” Simon, said, rounding on Daniel, “did you have to bring Harry? Just because you’re shagging him does not mean that he has to go everywhere with you.”

“Yes, actually, it sort of does,” Harry Ashbury said smoothly from behind Daniel. “And, also, it’s my ship.” He was annoyingly tall, and still looked annoyingly rugged and good-looking despite a torturously rough crossing. The eye patch he wore from a decade-old injury made him more appealing than not.

Focusing on Harry rather than how wonderful the rather dark and dingy quay looked kept Simon’s emotions from overwhelming him. He was quite sure he’d ever seen a more wonderfully dilapidated, decaying, moldering piece of brilliance in his life. Every piece of rank grayish-green, sway-backed, slime-encrusted board announced he was home. And there were even a few pieces of new timber here and there where repairs had recently been made to this section of the wharf. No doubt Ashbury’s doing. His trading company offices were along this section if he remembered correctly.

“But he is so annoying,” Simon said to Daniel, ignoring that it was Harry who actually responded to him. “Was he this annoying during the war?”

“You have always been annoying,” Harry said, impatience finally creeping into his tone. “I remember that quite clearly.”

“Yes,” Daniel agreed, switching allegiances as quickly as a debutante changed dance partners. “I’m beginning to wonder why I was in such a lather to rush off and rescue you. Everyone was in tears over poor Simon’s fate. I pity your poor jailors. You most likely annoyed them to death.”

“Really?” Simon asked with exaggerated interest, gritting his teeth against the memories of exactly what his jailors did to him in the few weeks before Harry and Daniel showed up to rescue him. Peckish or no, Simon wasn’t going to put up with Daniel’s notoriously sharp tongue. “Do you think so? Did they look annoyed to death when they shot you? I wish I’d annoyed them into shooting you both.”

“Stop it, both of you,” Harry said, his voice cracking like a whip. “I have put up with your bickering for the last week because you were both suffering from your injuries. But even I have a limited store of patience.” He sighed. “Simon,” he said in that quiet, soothing tone Simon really hated, as if he were speaking to a bedlamite. “I know you’ve been through a great deal and this is difficult—”

Simon cut him off. “Don’t be tedious,” he snapped. He stepped onto the quay, ignoring the shiver that raced down his spine as the fresh brand on his back tightened and stung painfully. The unusually hot weather intensified the brackish smell of the water and he gratefully took a deep breath of the rank perfume. He would have preferred cooler weather. He’d had enough of the heat in Africa.

He waved down a hackney with a stiff arm and limped toward it.

“Where are you going?” Daniel asked in alarm, grabbing his arm.

“Home,” Simon said, shaking his hand off. “I still have one, don’t I?”

“Of course. As far as I know.” Daniel didn’t sound as confident as his words would indicate. “You were paid up before…” He trailed off.

“Before I was kidnapped?” Simon finished for him. “Yes, I was.” He climbed up into the hackney, refusing to show how tired he still was, even after a week of lying about the ship’s cabin.

“Come home with us,” Daniel urged, refusing to let Simon close the door. “Let us take care of you.”

“I can take care of myself,” Simon told him firmly, tugging the door. “Contrary to popular opinion.” He got the door closed and called his destination to the driver, and the carriage took off with a lurch that nearly left his stomach on the wharf.

He had to close his eyes on the ride. For starters, he didn’t have his land legs back and was quite queasy. He was tired of casting up his accounts across the English Channel, so he was determined to hold onto them across London. And he really couldn’t handle being home again. He could admit it now that he was alone. Finally. At last. He truly loved Daniel, and he found Harry to be a more than tolerable companion, but all he’d wanted for the last week and a half was to be blessedly, quietly, alone.

He hadn’t been alone since he’d been thrown into the hold of a stinking ship with a sorry lot of other kidnapped bastards on their way to slavery—if they were lucky—on the Barbary Coast. Most had been snatched to be sold and then hopefully exchanged for ransom. A practice that had all but died out among the Barbary pirates thanks to the efforts of the Royal Navy and the Americans.

But there were still a few who dallied in it. The truth was that the victims taken with Simon weren’t the kind who would fetch a high ransom, or any ransom at all, most likely. Which meant slavery. They had to earn their price somehow.

He’d lived with a background symphony of hopeless sobbing, painful cries, grunts, groans, begging, weeping, cursing, beatings, rapes, and all manner of violent trespasses day and night for almost two months. He’d had to defend himself countless times—an almost impossible feat after he’d been beaten by his jailors for imagined transgressions several times. And after Daniel and Harry had rescued him, he’d had to listen to Daniel’s apologies and recriminations and platitudes. Which had been all well and good for the first day or two, but by day three Simon had been ready to jump ship, or throw Daniel overboard. And Harry knew it. Damn Harry and his all-seeing eye. The fellow was far too observant.

All Simon wanted was to be alone with his thoughts. Was that too much to ask for a poor man who’d been kidnapped, beaten, tortured and rescued?

Alas, it was not to be.