Page 31 of Match Made in Heaven (The Cricket Club #5)

T he London docks were never quiet, but a sense of pride washed over Jack as he helped Ella across the gangplank onto the Siren .

The desire to share surged within him—parts of the ship he wanted to describe to her, stories of his crewmates he hoped would make her laugh.

However, as Ella stepped carefully aboard the strong wooden clipper, that rush vanished.

Watching Ella inspect his ship, his home, his life , was more than enough.

The pensive, admiring look she wore while she traversed the main deck set his heart at such ease that Jack had to place his hand over it, making sure it was still working.

The Siren had never had a woman aboard before. And seeing Ella pause near the stern, the moon at her back creating shimmering diamonds off the water, made Jack want to keep her there forever.

“Was it you who named her?” she asked, finally breaking the trance.

Her grave expression startled him at first. He’d only wanted her to enjoy herself as he gave her a glimpse into his real life, his true self.

But then Jack understood that that was the very reason she was so serious.

Ella had recognized the importance of this moment better than he had.

Jack’s fingers ached. He wanted to touch her in the same soft, exploratory way she swept her hands over his ship.

“No, she was named before I bought her. I thought it was appropriate, since she’d called out to me.

The moment I saw her cutting so effortlessly across the water, I knew I had to have her. ”

“She belonged to someone else?”

“She did.”

Jack made his way to Ella. His steps felt forced, unsteady.

It was like he was being pulled from the inside out without knowing how to make himself right again.

At an early age, Jack had understood how to get things, make them his.

Hard work and determination were just as important—if not more so—than money.

Money made things easier, but hard work made them possible.

But his need for Ella was different. Jack could weave himself in knots for days and still not come up with a scenario where Ella could ever be his. Too many others would be hurt. Too many of the people he loved most in this world.

Ella watched him come to her. He could see the lines of her neck tense, her lips rubbing against each other as she considered her next words. Jack didn’t want to talk anymore. It was fruitless, but it was also sensible. Reasonable. Words created the wall between them that they dared not break.

“Did the previous owner want to give her up?”

Jack shook his head. He was a few feet away from her. Ella backed up against the stern, her elbows bent as she clutched the edge.

“Then how did you get her?” she asked. Her voice became deeper, more breathless, as she continued to keep this moment civil and innocent.

Jack couldn’t shake the feeling that someone else was controlling his limbs.

Because he knew touching Ella was dangerous, but his arm reached out anyway.

He captured the side of her face, and his resistance fled.

Ella’s eyes drifted closed as she gave herself up to it.

Jack took the invitation, wrapping his other arm around her waist, pulling her closer until their bodies were flush.

Her hesitance came when he tried to coax her head to his chest. Lord, how Jack wanted her to lie against him.

He wanted to feel her eyelashes flickering on his skin, feel her breath as it synced with his.

Just that, nothing more. Holding her would satisfy him for a lifetime. It would have to.

Her eyes clung to him. Sad and tortured, the brown orbs peered into his soul, telling him that this was futile, that the only place and time she would ever truly belong to him was on this ship, the place where he was a different man, a man who could steer to the horizon and hope.

“Jack.” It wasn’t a question, nor an invitation. Perhaps it was a plea, begging him to stop, to drop his hand to his side and give her back her freedom. But Jack didn’t hear it that way.

He caressed the soft spot just under her cheekbone, imagining that he and only he could coax a smile from her.

But Ella did not smile.

Her head fell, but she lifted her hands to him, gripping the sides of his jacket. Tension seized him as he waited for her next move. Would she shove him away or pull him closer? Both decisions were the right one.

“We can’t keep doing this,” Ella said. A breeze came off the water, teasing the curls hanging along the sides of her face.

“We’re not doing anything.” Oh, but that was a lie, and Jack was almost ashamed he’d said it. These small looks, the barely there touches, the intimate, fleeting moments, meant more, said more, than anything that Jack had ever experienced with a woman.

Ella’s laughter was biting. She was angry. At herself. At him too, probably. Raising her head, she contemplated the ship once more. “You’re going to leave.”

Again, not a question. Jack answered it anyway. “Yes.”

“And your brother is going to get better.”

“Yes.”

“And I…” The wind kicked up again, ripping the sentence away from her.

Jack pressed firmer into the small of her back. He needed her to finish that thought. The rest of his life depended on what she was about to say. “What?” he asked. His throat was like sandpaper, his words coming out entirely too rough.

Ella’s eyes were limitless, pools that he could sink into and never find his way out of. Dark and mysterious, enchanting and beguiling. They were the true Sirens.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” she began. Pausing, she brushed the curls out of her face, tucking them behind her ears. “I have been hiding something.”

“I don’t care.”

“Don’t say that. You will care.”

Jack shook his head. “I won’t. Everyone hides things, Ella. It’s not a sin or a secret. I’ve been hiding something since the moment I met you.”

“What?”

Jack leaned forward, resting his forehead on hers. He filled his senses with her sweet scent, the lavender mixing with the salt air urging him to continue. “I don’t think it’s necessary for me to say it,” he replied. “I haven’t been doing the best job hiding it.”

Ella drew away. Jack smiled ruefully, straightening his stance. He needed to see her clearly. He needed to see exactly how those brave, intrepid words affected her.

“Ella?” he asked.

Her frown deepened. She appeared to be working up courage. Had Jack said the wrong thing? Should he have let her speak? What could she have possibly done that would make her this cautious with him?

The gangplank rattled and feet slapped on the deck, reckless and unsteady. The voice that accompanied it was equally so. “Ella! Ella! You shouldn’t be here! You, you there.” Fingers snapped irritably. “You have no right to touch my fiancée!”

Jack twisted around, positioning Ella behind his back.

A heavy man claimed center stage on the main deck, jutting a hip out in a flourish as if posing for a book about treasure-hungry buccaneers.

He was younger than Jack, or greener at least, with a bush of dark brown hair on his head and a youthful, smooth chin that only needed a shave once a week.

That chin was thrust into the air now, the moonlight glinting off its pale skin.

“Who are you?” Jack asked. “And who the fuck said you come aboard my ship?”

The man’s hand fell off his hip as he shifted into panic mode. Evidently, he hadn’t thought past his one gallant line. He craned his head past Jack. “Ella?” he said. “Ella, tell him who I am.”

Jack heard Ella sigh. “This is Lord Lucas. A family friend—”

“Your fiancé !” he huffed self-importantly.

Jack lifted one eyebrow, drawing out the moment while rubbing the bottom of his chin with the back of his hand. “Hmm.”

The gangplank groaned again as two more pairs of boots clambered onto his ship, unannounced and uninvited. This time, at least, Jack wasn’t completely lost.

Fresh from their ball, Ella’s sister and her large husband hurried to stand next to the young lord, their expressions equally contrite. “We are so, so sorry, Lord John—” the husband started, but his wife quickly cut him off.

Cordelia glared at her husband. “He’s sorry,” she countered. “Ella?”

Ella emerged from behind Jack. “Do you have to tell your husband everything ?” she asked, tone venomous.

“I didn’t think he would tell Lord Lucas.”

Daniel huffed. “I didn’t think it was a secret! You told me that Ella was going to see the ship. Lord Lucas asked where she was, and I told him.”

Cordelia spun toward her husband, her frosty countenance making the poor man cower. “From now on, everything I tell you is a secret. Yes?”

The marquis nodded glumly.

Cordelia whipped back to Lord Lucas. “All right, my lord, let’s get you home. You shouldn’t have come.”

“You’re damned right,” Jack interjected.

Lord Lucas shrugged off Cordelia’s hand, his face mottled in various shades of red.

One lonely vein pulsed in the middle of his large forehead.

“I will not leave without Ella. She’s mine, and I respect and love her too much to let her disgrace herself with this, this”—his sneer belittled Jack from head to toe—“ merchant .”

An unexpected chuckle sprang forth from Jack. He’d expected pirate .

He folded his arms slowly, giving the impression of a man bored with a child’s tantrum. Merchant didn’t bother him; there was an entirely different word that made him want to pound the pompous ass through the deck floor. “She’s… yours ?”

It was spoken so casually and low that Lord Lucas could not mistake the chill. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and over his starched, pristine collar. “Y-yes,” he stammered. “We’re engaged. Everyone knows it.”

Ella groaned, covering her face with her hands. “We are not engaged, nor have we ever been,” she growled through her fingers.

The lord scoffed, shifting his weight to his other foot.

“Well, maybe not officially,” he replied.

“But it was going to happen. You know it and I know it.” He flicked his head to Cordelia.

“Your entire family knew it and wanted it, but then you had to go and ruin everything with your charade with Winchester.”

Jack’s ears perked up. Every hair on his body stood on end.

Again, Cordelia tugged on Lord Lucas’s coat. “You’ve said enough. I think you should go to bed and sleep off all the drinks you had at the ball.” She threw her husband a beseeching look, and the giant sprang to action.

He positioned himself on the other side of the lord, towering over him. “Ah, yes, let’s go,” Daniel grumbled. “This isn’t the time.”

Lord Lucas snorted. “It’s the perfect time.

I know what your mother is up to. The woman thinks she’s Machiavelli, but I’m one step ahead of her.

She thinks sticking Ella in that house with that man is going to elicit a proposal, but she’s overplayed her hand.

” He crossed his arms, lifting a haughty brow at Ella.

“He’ll never want you. You have to know that.

He’s a rake and a scoundrel. Do you honestly think he’s going to be so grateful that he’s going to make you his duchess? Hardly.”

“Stop, please!” Cordelia cried.

“Why?” Lord Lucas asked with genuine surprise.

He was a man of the ton , through and through.

He actually believed his histrionics on this ship were gentlemanly.

“Look what your mother’s machinations have done!

The duke’s house is a den of hedonism, and it’s clearly rubbed off on her!

The old Ella wouldn’t be caught dead here in the middle of the night, making eyes at the duke’s brother. ”

Halfway through the lord’s heroic speech, Jack had given up.

He hadn’t the stomach for Lord Lucas or his gallant attempt at rescuing.

Instead, Jack locked on to Ella. She’d done her best, keeping up a steady, passionless expression, allowing the lord to throw his words and anger at her like freshly sharpened arrows.

Her back straight, her shoulders pulled back, she permitted herself to be the bull’s-eye for his frustration.

But then she flinched.

And Jack knew then that everything Lord Lucas was saying was true. About Ella and her mother. About Ella and Oliver.

Hypnotized by the moment, Jack watched a small, lambent tear pool under Ella’s left eye. It sat there suspended above her cheek, defying gravity. But then her jaw clenched, and her lips trembled. And that lonely tear fell, leaving a shiny trail of truth in its wake.

Jack would have killed an entire army in retaliation for that tear.

One man would have to do.

Jack lowered his head, squinting at his clean, freshly scrubbed deck. “Hmm,” he said to himself.

And then he charged.

Cordelia and Daniel had the good sense to give Jack a wide berth. Because when he brought his arm back, his swing was nice and wide. And when it made contact with the lord’s face, it made the delicious kind of pop! that sent shivers up spines and put smiles on faces.

Jack’s face, at least.

The lord screamed bloody murder and collapsed to his knees. But Jack needed more. He kicked the man’s chest, waiting for the thunk of the flailing body to smack the deck. A more satisfying sound had rarely been heard.

Jack turned to the marquis. His voice still remarkably calm and bored, he said, “Take care of him for me, will you? I don’t want his blood to stain my deck. Also, make sure his mouth stays shut about all of this.”

Daniel nodded at once, as readily as any good sailor, and peeled Lord Lucas’s body from the ground. Cordelia got halfway to her sister before Jack stopped her.

“Not her,” he stated. His voice wasn’t half so easy to control that time. “We have some things to discuss first. I’ll make sure she gets home safe.” He placed his hand over his heart and flashed a smile that could only be considered piratical . “You have my word as a gentleman.”