Regency Vows: A Gentleman 'Til Midnight / The Trouble with Honour / An Improper Arrangement / A Wedding By Dawn / The Devil Takes a Bride / A Promise by Daylight. Julia London
NEEDED TO get away from the sea, and it couldn’t happen quickly enough.
James stalked through the lower gun deck, snatched up the oil rag he’d been using and attacked the salt clinging to the hinges on the nearest gun port.
The sea had addled his brain—he’d seen it happen to better men. God, what had he done?
He licked his lip and tasted drying blood, just as a splash of salt spray hit him in the face. Damnation—he swiped his eye with the back of his wrist and heard William calling him.
“James.”
“Go away.” Instead, William came over and stood next to the cannon. James stood, too, and the motion made his face throb. “Don’t take directions well, do you?”
“Not from you.” William stood with his feet shoulder-width apart and folded his arms. “I came to apologize.”
“Sod off.” James turned away to oil the next hinge. There wasn’t a trace of apology in William’s voice, not that James wanted an apology. Or deserved one. She’d pushed the limits of his patience until he’d boiled over. Christ, he was a disgusting wretch, on fire for the very qualities her ruination had produced—a ruination that was his own damned fault.
The sooner this bloody ship docked, the better.
“What are your intentions toward Katherine?” William demanded.
“My intentions?” James tossed the rag aside and turned back, disbelieving. “You catch us in a compromising position and now what? You think to force my hand? I can’t imagine your captain approves this approach.”
“She may be the captain, but she’s still a woman. A very vulnerable one with little experience fending off men who try to seduce her.”
When an Englishman wearing a Barbary costume and gold in his ears demanded that one do the right thing, it was a sure sign the world had turned on its head. James felt his lip crack and pressed his fingers to it—too hard, though, and he flinched. “I begin to wonder how well you actually know Captain Kinloch, for all your professed friendship. Perhaps you’ve failed to notice the cutlass at her side, and her willingness—nay, her eagerness—to use it?”
“And the fact that she didn’t.” William’s eyes hardened. “If you lure her into an affair, I promise I won’t be so gentle in my next dealing with you.”
“I have no intention of luring Captain Kinloch anywhere—least of all into an affair. Captain Kinloch is the last woman I would ever contemplate having a liason with.” That was a bloody lie.
“Your actions half an hour ago prove otherwise.”
“The only thing my actions prove is that I’m a man who’s been too long at sea, and Captain Kinloch is a very beautiful woman who, apparently, has been too long at sea, as well.”
William got right up in James’s face, but this time James was ready. William would not strike him again. “If you make her fall in love with you,” William said, “if you break her heart, I swear on all that’s holy you’ll regret it.”
Fall in love with him? Good God. “Such pretty romantic notions, Jaxbury. For God’s sake, all I want in the whole world, all that’s driven me for months, is the prospect of consuming large volumes of cognac in front of the fire. I assure you, breaking Captain Kinloch’s heart has no place in that plan. She has no place in that plan.” Never mind that at this particular moment he would give up all the cognac in France for a single rut with her. God.
“That’s just fine,” William said. “But if it’s true, then I would suggest you stay the hell away from her.”
As soon as he repaid his debt, it was a suggestion James had every intention of following.
OF COURSE, IF the debt depended on his own sense of obligation, he could simply forgive himself and be done with it.
The idea had no small amount of appeal several short days later, standing with Captain Kinloch and Miss Germain in front of the late Lord Dunscore’s towering house in St. James’s cloaked by the rank London evening, with an impatient hired hack in the street and no answer at the door. He held Anne against his chest to shield her from the damp and contemplated whether it would be possible to break down the door.
“Perhaps they assumed you were never returning and closed the place up for good,” Millicent hissed into the drizzly night.
“And left the lights burning?” Captain Kinloch shot back in a tight whisper. “There must be servants here.”
“Deaf ones.”
Meow! came Mr. Bogles’s outraged protest from inside a lidded basket.
“If we can’t get in,” Captain Kinloch snapped, “we’ll go to Philomena’s.”
James was just about to risk an almost certain nighttime spectacle by rapping the knocker a third time when the door finally cracked open on silent hinges. A skew-wigged servant scowled out at them.
“Dodd—” Captain Kinloch started, but James had no patience for that.
“Do excuse us.” He pushed past the old servant into a grand marble foyer that left no doubt as to the extent of the wealth Captain Kinloch had inherited.
“Now just wait,” the man sputtered. “You can’t—”
“Please tell your footmen to bring her ladyship’s trunks from the carriage.”
“I beg your pardon!” came Mr. Dodd’s indignant protest. “I—” Then suddenly he sputtered, “Lady Katherine?” Comprehension dawned. “I—I mean, your ladyship! I had no idea. That is to say, we had no word— We weren’t informed of your arrival.” He swept into a deep bow.
“The trunks,” James ordered, and was instantly sorry when Anne roused in his arms. “Go back to sleep,” he tried to murmur, but it came out more like a muttered command.
“The trunks. Of course. Of course!” The man finally spurred into action.
Millicent carried Mr. Bogles’s basket inside, while his repeated meows echoed through the foyer as footmen finally began carrying trunks up the great, curved staircase. Captain Kinloch stood frozen beneath a blazing silver chandelier, looking as vulnerable as Anne felt in his arms.
“Your ladyship is aware,” Mr. Dodd started, but paused. “That is to say, does your ladyship intend...”
For God’s sake, this was more than James could tolerate on a few moments’ sleep snatched during a pothole-ridden coach ride that had lasted an eternity. He glanced around for somewhere to put Anne and spotted an upholstered bench against one wall.
“Intend what?” Captain Kinloch came to life suddenly. Sharply.
“Does your ladyship intend to—” Dodd swallowed visibly “—evict Mr. Holliswell and Miss Holliswell, then?”
Her ladyship’s head whipped around. “Holliswell.” Her tone sliced through the air like her beloved cutlass.
Bloody hell. James went to the bench, fighting an urge to hold Anne closer rather than put her down, but Millicent gathered Anne away from him before he could decide otherwise.
Mr. Dodd wrung his hands. “He and Miss Holliswell have...set up residence, you see, and—”
“In my father’s house?”
“We did protest, your ladyship. Let me assure you!” Dodd’s eyes traveled from Captain Kinloch’s turban, down the length of her loose hair and over her woolen wrap, to the billow of Barbary trousers peeking out below and the boots that had served well on a ship’s deck but were unspeakably outlandish here. “But it’s well-known that Mr. Holliswell