Stephanie Laurens - Lord Of The Privateers

Entirely serious, Duncan shook his head from side to side. “I won’t break ship’s law.”

Royd grinned—man-to-man—and rose. “I know you won’t—you’re too clever for that.”

Duncan’s brilliant smile bloomed again. “Goodbye.” He held out his hand.

Royd grasped it, but instead of shaking hands, pulled Duncan into him. He hugged Duncan’s slight body and ruffled his hair, then when Duncan squealed with laughter, let him go. “As your mother said, be good.”

With that, he turned to Isobel. “Let me go down first.”

He suited action to the words. She’d elected to wear an ivory carriage dress, severe and form-fitting. When they met in office or shipyards, she routinely wore darker colors, most likely to better withstand the inevitable dust and grime. Although no hue could mute her vivid coloring, certainly not in his eyes, the ivory outfit, with its matching hat, gloves, and half-boots, made her a cynosure for all eyes, male and female alike. And although he knew she could swim, he would rather she didn’t get dipped in the drink; his men wouldn’t be able to catch her, but he knew her weight and could.

He dropped into the tender, caught his balance, and looked up. She was already more than halfway down.

Accustomed to going up and down ladders, she knew the knack of accomplishing the feat in skirts. He’d never worked out how she did it, but her skirts never flared, nor did they tangle her feet.

She slowed as she neared the end of the ladder and stopped on the last rung, leaving her swinging just above the tender’s side.

He reached up and grasped her waist. She clung to the ladder for an instant—whether to allow him to adjust to their combined weights or simply from surprise—then she released her grip on the ropes, and he swung her inboard and set her on her feet before the middle bench.

“Thank you.” She looked down, brushing her skirts.

Royd glanced up at the deck and saw Liam Stewart looking down, a grin on his face. Royd sketched a salute. “Command is yours, Mr. Stewart.”

Liam snapped off a salute in reply. “Aye, aye, Captain. We’ll see you in Southampton.”

The opening in the ship’s side rattled back into place. Duncan’s face appeared over the top edge. He waved energetically. “Goodbye!”

Royd grinned and waved back. He glanced down and saw Isobel, seated on the middle bench, smiling and waving, too.

One set of hurdles cleared.

At his nod, Williams, at the tiller, barked an order, and the four sailors seated on the benches fore and aft bent to the oars. Royd sat beside Isobel, and the tender came smoothly around and set off for the harbor and the inner basin beyond. “We’ll use the water stairs before the Castle Hotel. It has the best stables in town—we’ll be able to hire a carriage and four there.”

She nodded. A moment later, she murmured, “What you said to Duncan—that was...clever, too.”

His gaze on the hulls ahead of them, instinctively plotting the course Williams would take through the maze, he replied, “As we both know, there’s no point hoping he won’t have wild impulses. The best we can do is teach him to think through the consequences—that there always will be consequences—before he gives in to the wildness.”

She snorted softly. “Spoken as one who knows all about wildness?”

He nodded. “Just like you.”

* * *

Apparently, Frobisher captains used the Castle Hotel on the Harbour Parade frequently enough to not just be recognized but welcomed as princes. The landlord greeted Royd effusively and, immediately on being informed of their need, showed them to a small, well-appointed private parlor where they might wait in relative peace while his ostlers scrambled to harness the house’s very best team to their fastest, most recently acquired carriage.

That exercise didn’t take long. Having declined an offer of tea, as soon as the head ostler looked in to report that their conveyance stood waiting, Isobel declared herself ready to depart.

She’d spent the fifteen minutes in the parlor mentally listing all the subjects on which she needed to quiz Royd in an attempt to force her mind and her witless senses from dwelling on the recent scintillating moments when he had touched her—when he’d lifted her from the ladder to the rowboat in a potent display of mind-numbing strength, then later, when he’d handed her from the boat to the water stair and had to seize her and steady her when her boot slipped on the slimy stone. In that case, she’d landed flush against him, breast to chest, and had lost her breath. Then she’d tumbled into his gray eyes and nearly lost her wits entirely; she’d only just resisted the urge to haul his head down and kiss him.

She knew perfectly well what caused such reactions—there was no sense pretending they had never been intimate—but the effect of such moments was proving to be more intense, more distracting, and indeed, more discombobulating than she’d foreseen.

Of course, he had to hand her into the carriage, but that much touch, she could deal with; even though there was no escaping the undercurrent of possessiveness that imbued even that minor gallantry, she could ignore it.

After the head ostler shut the door and the coachman cracked his whip, the carriage—excellently well-sprung and obviously new—rocked out of the inn yard and wound its way out of the town and onto the highway.

She waited as long as she could—as long as she could bear the impact of his nearness without reacting in any way. They were bowling along, the repetitive thud of the horses’ hooves a steady, reassuring rhythm, when the sense of being private and alone with him at close quarters grew too intense, and she surrendered and broached the first topic on her list. Or, at least, the first point she thought it safe to address.

The implication underlying Royd’s discussion with Duncan over breakfast that morning had been that, when in Freetown, she would accompany him off-ship. While that was precisely what she wished, she had to wonder how far his new policy of including her in his mission would stretch. Now, however, wasn’t the moment to examine that issue; better to wait until she knew more about Katherine’s whereabouts and the details of his mission.

That said, he would know she would have noticed the change in his tack.

“I’ll admit that while I’m”—reassured? appeased?—“impressed by your willingness to take me into your confidence with respect to this mission, I’m unsure as to whether you will be, for instance, interested in my opinions on the matter.”

He was sitting opposite her; across the carriage, he met her eyes. “I am. I expect to hear your opinions.” His lips twitched. “Indeed, I feel supremely confident that I’ll hear your opinions whether I invite them or not.”

She sent him a distinctly unimpressed look.

His smile deepened, and he settled more comfortably against the squabs. “But yes, I expect us to work together on this. Unless your cousin has fallen prey to some other scheme entirely—which, frankly, is unlikely, not in such a relatively small settlement—then I expect our goals will align, and our paths forward will be intertwined.”

She studied him for a full minute, trying to see, to imagine... “You’re no more likely to invite a woman to share command than the next captain.”

“But I’m not inviting just any woman to join me—I’m inviting you.”

The intensity in his gray gaze assured her he meant exactly that with full knowledge of the consequences. She couldn’t stop herself from baldly asking, “Why?”

“Because despite all the storm water under our joint bridge, we’ve always—since I was eleven and you were six, for heaven’s sake—worked well together. Our characters are similar, so we understand each other instinctively, often without the need for explanations—which we both find boring—and our talents are astonishingly complementary.” He hesitated, then went on, “You might not realize how rare that is, but as a team...we’re blessed.”