Page 7 of The Pirate’s Stolen Bride (Cavalier Cove)
CHAPTER SEVEN
A FINE MESS
R émy cooled his heels down in the empty taproom while Her Ladyship bathed and ate her dinner in their shared room. He had barely slept in three days. He was worn to the bone, and yet he couldn’t stop thinking about the woman he had stolen.
He was going to have to find a way to return her to the bosom of her family—without getting caught.
Whatever mad hope had driven his impulsive snatching of a refined lady had been nothing but another one of his countless follies. There was a reason he only slept with unhappily married women, widows, and whores. Innocents were trouble.
Harriet was the very definition of innocent—and trouble—yet something had possessed him to snatch her away from everything she knew.
You have been nothing but a curse ever since the day you were born. He could hear her words, overlaid with his mother’s exasperation as he got into one youthful scrape after another. Poverty had forced her into the oldest trade, whoring for soldiers during the Wars. She’d done what she had to in order to support them, and his antics hadn’t made her life any easier.
Miss Turner’s words had cut deeply, not that he would ever allow her to know she’d slid the knife between his ribs. He would finish his ale, rest tonight, and figure out a plan to return her to her uncle in the morning. That was what she wanted.
A stone sank in his gut. What had he expected? That he would abscond with her and she’d fall in love with him?
He didn’t want love, much less a wife. He wanted to sail and trade goods and not be caught evading the Excise Officers. Rémy wasn’t like his cousin. He didn’t need an adorable little daughter or a beautiful wife with a cheeky sense of humor.
Why, then, did he feel like returning Harriet to her family would hurt more than cutting out his own heart?
If he was honest with himself, a habit he assiduously avoided, he’d liked the way she curled against his body in his tiny captain’s bed. Yes, he’d spent the fitful hours fighting a cockstand until he realized she was burning up, but there had been an unexpected sweetness in the way her body fit against his. He couldn’t stop thinking about it.
He’d never cared for another person the way he’d spent every hour anxiously waiting for her fever to break and her coughing fits to lessen. The way she’d popped awake after three days of illness and promptly told him off, well, that stung more than he liked to admit.
He glanced at the clock hung above the gleaming wooden bar and judged that enough time had passed for Miss Turner to finish her bath. He had to face her ire eventually. Might as well get it over with.
Upstairs, Rémy knocked on the door and asked loudly, “Are you decent?” He grimaced. That wasn’t the right thing to say to a fine lady. He was too uncouth and, facing facts, piratical, for a woman like this. He’d taken one look at her and had to have her. Now, he didn’t know what to do with her.
“Come in,” she called out. Or that was what it sounded like. The syllables weren’t distinct coming through a solid oak door, and although he spoke it fluently, English was not his mother tongue.
Bracing himself, he entered and stopped short at the sight of her sitting naked in the hip bath, braiding her hair over one shoulder. The water covered everything up to the undersides of her full breasts, which she attempted to cover with both arms, abandoning her unfinished braid. Her glorious legs dangled out of the tub.
Even her feet were pretty.
“I said, could you wait?” she seethed. Her freckles were swallowed by the wave of red cresting over her cheeks.
“Then you should have spoken more clearly.” He enunciated each syllable. Her finished supper tray sat on the table near the window, so he grabbed it to take it down to the kitchen.
Turning, he discovered a maid peeking into the room. They were the inn’s only guests for the evening.
“Is your wife quite well?” she asked, puzzled.
Miss Turner’s furious gaze burned into his back.
“She is fine. Fully recovered from her ordeal.” A rough fit of coughing from behind him proved the lie, but he ignored it. “We depart in the morning.”
He thrust the tray into the startled maid’s hands and shut the door. Where would they go? He couldn’t take her back to the Spectre. He couldn’t take her to his cousin Thierry’s house in Cavalier Cove, either. Rémy couldn’t endanger Adeline and their newborn daughter, Lilou.
This time, Rémy had done something so risky that he couldn’t even turn to his closest friend for aid.
He should leave her here and send word to Maggie at the Cock and Bull about where to find his friend’s missing ward. By the time anyone arrived to retrieve her, he could be halfway back to France. He scrubbed his face. Rémy had never been this tired in his life. He would sleep now and decide how to handle his stolen spitfire in the morning.
Sloshing water brought him back to the present. Naked, Miss Turner rose from the hip bath and began toweling her body.
His mouth went dry. He’d had ample opportunity to ogle her fine legs, but her gentle curves and slim waist left him reeling.
“The water is still warm if you would like a turn.”
To his consternation, she didn’t sound angry.
“I don’t need one.” He’d bathed this morning while waiting for the effects of the willow bark tincture the innkeeper had brewed for Harriet to take effect. What he needed was rest. He’d spent the past two nights dozing in that uncomfortable rocking chair.
He had no words, in French or English, to describe the sense of panic he’d felt when laying her feverish body in the bed. Miss Turner had barely been awake, moaning with pain. The thought that he might have endangered her life with his rash actions forced him to face facts: he liked her too much to let her die.
“I owe you an apology,” she said without looking at him. She’d donned that awful wrapper and resumed braiding her hair.
“You do?” He couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d gotten down on one knee and proposed marriage to him.
“I know as well as anyone what it is like for your own family to resent your very existence. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“There is no need to apologize, Your Ladyship. I am the source of your troubles.” The truth stung like pouring alcohol on a wound.
“Please stop calling me ‘Your Ladyship.’ I’m not a lady.”
“Your uncle is a duke,” he said flatly.
“But I am not a lady. I was born illegitimate to his youngest sister. No honorifics confer to me because of who my father was, a lowly stable hand. She was only fifteen when she bore me. He was just seventeen. Young and stupid, according to Uncle Monty.” She gave the knotted belt an unnecessary extra tug and began picking apart her unraveling braid, her soft, slender fingers flying through the golden strands. “I was sent away to be raised by a distant relative so that my mother could make a good match.”
“What of your father?”
She snorted. “As if Uncle Monty was going to let his niece be raised by a stable hand.”
“Your parents simply abandoned you?” He couldn’t fathom it. Rémy’s mother had struggled, but as troublesome a boy as he’d been, he couldn’t imagine her abandoning him. The English were harsher than the French. Or perhaps it was only the difference between wealth and penury.
“My mother didn’t have much of a choice. If anyone had discovered that I existed, her prospects would have been ruined and an indelible stain left upon the Montague family name. My father was let go. I heard he made a name for himself in London at one of the racing tracks before he died. I never met him.”
She tied off her braid and sighed. “I knew none of this until I was old enough to start asking questions about my family. My mother reluctantly visited me a few times. She said I was a living reminder of her worst mistake, and requested not to be troubled with news of my life ever again. When I came of age, Uncle Monty stepped in to find me a suitable husband, and here we are.”
“I am the one who owes you an apology, Miss Turner.” Guilt burrowed into his bones. Initially, he’d believed she was highborn, and that her reputation would withstand whatever blow she endured by being stolen away by him. But now he understood that her position was more precarious than he’d previously thought. Marrying Lucarran, notorious devil though he was, might have been her only chance at stability.
He hadn’t just stolen a bride. He’d stolen her future.
Her brow furrowed. “I don’t know why I told you all that. I don’t expect or want your sympathy. I only wanted to explain that I regret saying that you are nothing but a curse. I spoke in anger and I am sorry.”
Rémy wanted to laugh, but there was no telling how his unruly and unpredictable lady would react if he did. He couldn’t articulate how much her apology meant to him, in any language. He therefore forced his expression into an unnaturally thoughtful posse.
“I ruined your life, Miss Turner.” Yawning, he tugged off his boots and collapsed into the bed. She could spend a few hours in the rocking chair if she didn’t want to sleep beside him. “You have every right to hate me.”
“But you also saved it,” he thought he heard her say as darkness claimed him.