Page 9 of Thief of Hearts

C HAPTER E IGHT

G ERARD LEANED AGAINST A WROUGHT-IRON lamppost, his thumbs tucked into the pockets of his waistcoat, and slowly counted to ten. He braced himself for the shrill woman’s scream that should follow.

Ominous silence drifted from the mouth of the alley where Lucy had disappeared.

He drew out his watch and frowned at it, then straightened, beset by a sense of foreboding. He’d wanted to rid himself of the Admiral’s brat as an obstacle to his employment, but he’d never intended for her to be hurt. What if she’d swooned? Or fallen and struck her head? An image of Lucy lying crumpled on the cobblestones, her hair spilled around her pallid face, sent him stalking toward the alley.

He marched around the corner, then froze, his jaw dropping in shock at the sight that greeted him.

A masked man lay flat on his back on the cobblestones, cowering beneath the sharp point of the parasol pressed to his throat. Gripping the parasol’s ivory handle in her gloved hand, Lucy stood over him, looking as cool and composed as if she’d just come from a garden party. Gerard’s abrupt appearance drew no more response from her than a delicately arched eyebrow.

“Please, miss, don’t hurt me!” the thief was whining, his brogue so thick the words were almost unintelligible. “I didn’t mean no harm, honest I didn’t.” His voice rose to a relieved squeak as he saw Gerard glaring down at him in disgust. “Help me, mister, won’t ye? Don’t let her hurt me! It was bloody awful. She beat me about the head, tripped me, then damn near skewered me with that umbreller thing. Why I thought ye’d never—”

Gerard stilled the thief’s dangerous babbling by fixing a hand around his scrawny throat and lifting him to his feet. “If you’ll excuse me, Miss Snow, I must dispose of this rubbish.”

She dusted off her gloved hands. “The wretch tried to steal my reticule. Shouldn’t you turn him over to a constable?”

Gerard tightened his grip. The lad’s feet kicked vainly at the air. “When I’m through with him, he’ll wish I had,” he promised grimly.

Gerard returned a few moments later to find Lucy admiring the sweetmeats and comfits in the window of a confectionery shop.

He stopped directly behind her, aware that he was standing far too close for propriety, but too furious to give a bloody damn. The source of his anger galled him even more than its intensity. He wasn’t angry at her for thwarting his scheme. He was angry at himself for that brief instant when he’d actually cared about her welfare. God knows he’d already wasted enough of his mercy on her.

Studying her unruffled reflection in the shop window, he demanded, “Why the bloody hell didn’t you scream? If I hadn’t been following at a distance, anything could have happened to you.”

She faced him, showing no sign of being intimidated by his bullying nearness. “It takes more than one incompetent thief to make me scream. Besides, I had the situation well in hand. I do believe I’ve proved my point, Mr. Claremont.” She ducked out from beneath his shadow and snapped open her lethal parasol as if he might well be its next victim.

“What point might that be?”

“That I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself. I’ve really no need of your services.” She shot him a look from beneath the dancing fringe of the parasol that might have been flirtatious coming from any woman other than the Admiral’s daughter. “But I’ve decided that I’ve no right to deprive you of your position. Therefore, all you must do to assure your future at Ionia is please me.”

On that magnanimous note, she flounced away, her parasol twirling at full sail. Gerard refused to give her the satisfaction of trotting obediently at her sandaled heels.

He pulled off his hat and slapped it against his thigh, thinking it a pity that he had neither the time nor the inclination to show his employer’s daughter just how much he could please her.

Gerard strode away from the great house as if pursued by the demons of hell, lengthening his strides as he heard the telltale creak of a sash window on the second floor.

“Oh, Mr. Claremont! Excuse me, Mr. Claremont!”

He flinched at the familiar dulcet tones and briefly considered not slowing his pace. Considered marching past the gatehouse, out the gate, and all the way to London to find the quiekest horse, coach, or ship that would carry him beyond earshot of that musical voice.

He had fully expected the Admiral to be a tyrant, but the man’s imperious daughter was proving Genghis Khan to be nothing more than mildly petulant.

“ Mr. Claremont! There you are!” she exclaimed, as if they hadn’t parted company less than fifteen minutes ago when she’d ordered him to sharpen each of her charcoal pencils with a dull kitchen knife. He felt fortunate she hadn’t demanded he lick them to a point.

Blinking rapidly to clear the murder from his eyes, Gerard swung around and marched back to the house until he stood beneath his young mistress’s window like some lovestruck swain of yore.

“Yes, miss?” he gritted out dutifully between clenched teeth.

“Could you meet me in the green salon, please? I have need of your services.”

As Gerard stomped his way around to the servants’ entrance, he muttered beneath his breath the services he’d like to perform for her, one of which he was certain would at least shut her up for a few minutes.

None of them involved the trivial tasks he’d been forced to undertake in the past week: balancing her embroidery frame on his knees at an afternoon tea while she’d proceeded to poke him with her needle whenever the dull conversation tempted him to nap, picking up her gloves each time she dropped them on a shopping excursion, turning the pages of Lord Howell’s incredibly dry memoirs for her, as if she were too frail or addlepated to do it herself.

He might have been better able to tolerate her bullying had it been delivered with even a hint of malice, but each command was delivered in a tone of irreproachable sweetness, each coaxing smile accompanied by the beguiling flash of a dimple he’d never noticed before. She’d plainly abandoned her campaign to have him dismissed in the hopes of driving him to resign. Or to strangle her. Her transparency amused him almost as much as it infuriated him.

Her constant demands on his time left him with only the black hours of night to invest in his own stakes. Exhaustion was preying on his already frazzled temper, but he was only too aware that every minute lost to sleep was another minute to be endured in her company.

The drawing room door was ajar, just as he’d expected it to be. His armor of professional indifference nearly cracked to find Lucy bent over the settee, peering intently at something on the opposite side. He eyed her muslin-molded derriere in a mercenary light, the temptation to plant his boot in the middle of it surpassed by a far more disturbing and primal urge.

He snapped off a crisp bow. “At your service, miss.”

Her outstretched finger quivered convincingly as she pointed at something on the far side of the settee. “Do hurry, please. It gave me the most awful fright.”

Snorting beneath his breath, Gerard went around the settee and peered at the place she indicated. “I don’t see a damn”—he cleared his throat—“I don’t see anything, miss.” Her title escaped with an unintended hiss.

“Of course you do. He’s horrible. He almost gave me a fit of the vapors and I can assure you I’m not a woman given to vapors.”

Sighing, Gerard drew off his spectacles and took a second look. A tiny spider, nearly invisible to the naked eye, was inching his way valiantly down a gossamer thread. Gerard felt nothing but pity for the little fellow. He reminded him of himself—kept dangling over a hazardous precipice, dancing to Lucy’s tune.

He slid his spectacles back on and gave Lucy a look of biting patience. “What would you have me do, Miss Muffet—er, Miss Snow?”

She fanned her fingers at her throat. “You are my bodyguard. You’re supposed to protect me from things that might do me harm.”

A devilish sense of peace washed over him. “Very well, miss.” He reached inside his coat to draw out a pistol and fixed the hapless creature in his sights.

Lucy’s gasp of alarm was genuine. Her gray eyes widened as she ogled the shiny weapon. He knew she’d had no inkling that he possessed a pistol, much less that he never left the gatehouse without it.

“Mr. Claremont, whatever are you doing?”

He lowered the weapon. “Protecting you, of course. Wasn’t that what you wished?”

“Surely you don’t intend to shoot the poor creature.”

“What do you suggest? Shall I flog it? Deport it to Australia? Capture it and deliver it into your father’s hands?”

She sank down on the settee. Her hair shielded her face as she mumbled, “You might remove it to the garden.”

To the garden, Gerard thought. Where she’d undoubtedly found it to begin with.

Her unexpected mercy disturbed him more than her duplicity. To counteract its jarring effect, he slid the pistol back into his coat and gave her a sinister leer. “Wouldn’t you rather I crush it into the rug with the heel of my boot?” He lifted his foot a menacing inch.

She flung her hair from her eyes. “Oh, no! You mustn’t. He is one of God’s creatures after all and I’m sure he had no intention of causing such a row.”

She rushed to the hearth to retrieve a brass snuffbox whose immaculate surface suggested it had never known use. She scooped the spider into it without even a shred of squeamishness and handed it to him.

He gazed at the poor creature skittering in circles at the bottom of the snuffbox, wondering if it felt half as trapped as he did.

“There,” she said, waving an imperious hand. “Now you can see that he comes to no harm and finds a pleasant home.”

“I shall consider it my sacred charge.” He swept out one arm in a full court bow, mocking them both. “Anything for you, my lady.”

“’Twas the Battle of Chesapeake Bay in March of ’81 when those damned Frenchies threw up a blockade to stop us from delivering supplies to the British forces at Yorktown. Thomas Graves was rear admiral then and I tried to warn him he’d best not waste time lining up all those ships in perfect formation. Tommy, old chap,’ I said quite frankly…”

The Admiral droned on and on like an enormous bumblebee. Gerard would have sworn the sand in the gleaming brass hourglass perched on the edge of the library desk had frozen to a halt hours ago.

By listening to Lucien Snow dictate his memoirs, Gerard had discovered only that it was the Admiral’s keenest regret that after a lifetime of petty skirmishing with the French, he’d been robbed by his injury of commanding the English fleet in some of her greatest victories. He believed it should have been he who defeated the French fleet in the Battle of the Nile. He who should have been offered a barony, been given a generous pension by Parliament, and earned the fame and fortune awarded instead to an inexperienced whelp of a rear admiral named Horatio Nelson.

The Admiral’s daughter sat at a sturdy writing desk, her hair sleeked away from her face and bound at her nape with a blue velvet bow. Sunlight streamed through the bay windows, edging her delicate profile in gilt. Her pen never ceased its scratching as she transcribed her father’s memories in her tidy script.

How did she remain so bright-eyed, Gerard wondered, when she must have heard these musty stories a thousand times? Of course, given her worship of her father, she probably considered them more compelling than gospel. It was difficult to believe the docile little mouse was the same despot who had had him summoned from the gatehouse at dawn to retrieve a hairpin that had slipped into a crack in the parquet floor. He lifted the bone-china cup to his lips to hide his simmering resentment.

“More coffee, sir?”

Gerard was startled by Smythe’s appearance at his elbow. The butler’s fleet-footed stealth never failed to unnerve him. He’d come dangerously close to gutting the man with his soup spoon more than once in the past week.

That would have been a crime he regretted keenly, for upon discovering that Gerard despised the insipid blend that passed for tea in the Snow household, Smythe had taken to brewing a pot of rich, dark Colombian coffee each morning just for his pleasure.

“Please?” Gerard shot the butler a grateful look as Smythe filled the cup to its rim. He warmed his hands on the porcelain bowl, hoping its fragrant steam would revive his waning attention.

“… that would have been the year old George finally swallowed his pride and knighted me,” the Admiral was saying. “It galled him to distraction to admit the son of a common tanner had saved his royal neck. Eighty, wasn’t it? Or was it eighty-one?”

“Eighty-two, sir,” Smythe interjected. “After your noble sacrifice at the Battle of Sadras.”

“Ah, yes. Sadras!” The Admiral’s eyes misted over with memories of past glories. Gerard clenched his teeth against a snarl.

Her pen flying, Lucy cast him a reproving look, reminding him that he was neglecting his own duties. He’d gallantly volunteered to sort through a moldy stack of the Admiral’s personal correspondence for pertinent dates and names. All he’d managed to learn so far was that most of the Admiral’s friends were as pompous and overbearing as he was.

“… so when the mist cleared at dawn, I found myself staring down the hungry mouths of eighty-six French cannons. There was nothing for me to do but give the order for ‘General Chase’ and—”

“Seventeen ninety-six,” Gerard blurted out before his employer could embroil them in yet another interminable battle. “Would that have been the year of your unfortunate injury, sir?” He blinked owlishly behind his spectacles, using the innocent demeanor they afforded him to his best advantage.

The Admiral’s pendulous eyebrows inched together. Lucy’s pen stilled. Smythe bent to dust a spotless globe, studiously avoiding Gerard’s eyes.

Interrupting the Admiral’s dictation was simply not done.

Wagering his dubious future that the man would be unable to resist the flattery of sincere interest, Gerard rose and paced around Lucy’s writing desk as if unable to contain his excitement. “One account of the battle claimed that even after the splinter of lead pierced your calf, you refused to relinquish command. That despite your agony, you ordered them to strap you to the mainmast where you continued to shout the orders that won the battle.”

“The box, Smythe,” the Admiral snapped.

Smythe bustled over to a towering secretary and drew out an ornate brass coffer. Gerard rested his hip on the edge of Lucy’s desk, forcing himself to ignore the lemony scent of her hair and the suspicious glint in her eyes.

With great ceremony, the butler presented the coffer to the Admiral, who drew a key from a ribbon he wore around his neck and unlocked it. Gerard half expected a pair of dueling pistols to emerge. Was he going to be shot for his impertinence?

“State secrets of the Admiralty,” Lucy whispered to his elbow, her reverent tone chafing his raw temper. “Not even Smythe is allowed a key.”

Instead of a weapon, the Admiral drew out a newspaper, yellowed and frayed with age. A nostalgic smile played around his lips. “This would be the piece you referred to. I fear my gallantry was greatly exaggerated,” he admitted modestly. “I would never have been able to direct the battle had it not been for the unwavering support of my commanding officers.”

Lucy began scribbling madly as without further prompting, the Admiral launched into a tediously detailed accounting of the Mediterranean battle that had ended his naval career.

No one would have guessed from Gerard’s enthralled expression and admiring murmurs that he wasn’t hearing a single word of it. All of his attention was focused on the gleaming coffer lying open on the Admiral’s desk.

Late that night, Lucy sat at her dressing table, drawing a silver brush that had belonged to her mother through her hair in crackling strokes. Her scalp tingled with pleasure at the sensual coddling. The Admiral was out for the evening, attending another interminable strategy session in the Admiralty Court. Lucy longed to savor each minute that she could call her own, but deprived of her father’s strict accounting of her time, she felt a trifle lost. And alone.

Perhaps her bodyguard’s restless energy was contagious. In the past week, Lucy had found herself both irritated and bemused by the man’s habits. He never snapped to attention when the Admiral spoke, never checked his watch for the time, never consulted the daily schedule Smythe persisted in supplying him with.

Henceforth, he was consistently late, always knotted his cravat at the breakfast table, and frequently misplaced his schedule. Lucy had found it in such diverse places as beneath the potted fern in the drawing room, stuffed between the antlers of the moose’s head mounted in the library, and draped like a tricorne hat over the terra-cotta bust in the entrance hall that the Admiral had recently commissioned of himself. The only thing her bodyguard did in an efficient manner was eat, shoveling in amazing quantities of food as if afraid it might be snatched away before he could finish.

Lucy had no way of knowing if her cheerful despotism was succeeding or failing. Mr. Claremont ruthlessly quenched his every spark of rebellion before she could take triumph in it. As his apathy toward her mounted, she’d had no choice but to escalate her irrational demands. She supposed she was being childish, but schooled as she had been to unquestioning obedience, this harmless bit of mischief was proving to be irresistible.

She winced as the brush snagged in an invisible tangle. She’d always hated her pale, fine hair. It tended to escape all but the most relentless combs and resisted any semblance of curl. If she had dared to trim it in a fashionable bob as Sylvie had done, she would look like a boyish elf.

Shoving aside the crystal bottles and snarled ribbons cluttering the dressing table, she studied her reflection as if it belonged to a stranger. Since the Admiral wasn’t there to chide her for her vanity, she gathered the slick fall of hair at her nape and tilted her head to study her features. High cheekbones, a sharply defined nose, and a mouth too wide for her pointy chin, all dominated by a pair of enormous eyes that would have been better suited to a puppy. Or a courtesan.

Sighing, she let her hair fall in a defeated web around her shoulders, thinking it a pity that while she was cursed with so many of her mother’s flaws, she had inherited none of her notorious beauty.

She pulled a crystal stopper from a bottle of lemon verbena and drew it down her neck until it nestled in the hollow of her throat. The smooth hardness against her tender flesh ignited a strange marriage of indolence and restlessness that made her breath come shallow and her heart beat fast. She became achingly aware of the blush of her breasts beneath the silk of her chemise, the painful cling of the sheer lace against their budding peaks.

She’d been seized by this inexplicable fever more than once since her encounter with Doom. She would awaken tangled in her sheets, shivering with yearning for some bittersweet fulfillment that drifted just out of her reach. Just as the Retribution and its mysterious captain had drifted out of her life.

Trailing her fingertips across the heated skin between her breasts, she imagined a lover’s hands in their place. Doom’s masterful hands. Her eyes fluttered shut, but instead of rendezvousing with her phantom lover in the clandestine shelter of darkness, she saw a man’s hands tempered with autumn sunshine. Strong, blunt-fingered hands, their tanned backs sprinkled with ginger hair, gently cupping the fulsome weight of her breasts in their palms.

Lucy’s eyes flew open. Her expression might have been comical had she not been so horrified. She snatched a hare’s foot from a dish of rice powder to smother the flames in her cheeks, then rose to pace to the window. Her unsettled gaze was drawn against its will to the gatehouse. Although it was well after midnight, a lamp still burned bright within the humble lodgings. Didn’t the man ever sleep? she wondered peevishly.

A peculiar hollowness had settled in the region of her heart. She feared she would never sleep either. Since wasting time was tantamount to mutiny in the Admiral’s eyes, she decided to surprise him by dabbing the finishing touches on her Cornwall seascape. A frustrated perusal of the room reminded her that she had left her easel in the library.

She belted a modest dressing gown over her chemise and slipped from the room, stepping over the sandals she’d abandoned in the corridor. Trailing her fingers along the banister, she tiptoed down the stairs, holding her breath without realizing it. She always felt slightly guilty when emerging from her bedroom after her scheduled bedtime.

She skirted the cavernous entrance hall, darting past the closed doors that veered off the hall like the spokes of a giant ship’s wheel. The bust of the Admiral glowered at her from its pedestal. Giving the squares of moonlight streaming through the bay window a wide berth, she hastened her steps as she approached the forbidding door of the library, wishing only to retrieve her easel before her father returned home to chastise her for invading his sacred domain.

Her trembling hand reached for the doorknob, expecting to feel the cool reassurance of smooth brass. Instead, her fingers closed over something warm, rough, and decidedly human. She heard a muffled oath and an ominous click. Before she could draw breath to scream, the hand beneath hers had clamped over her mouth. It drove her back until her shoulder blades pressed against the wainscoting.

A revealing shaft of moonlight penetrated the shadows and Lucy found herself being held at gunpoint by the very object of her wicked fantasies.