Miranda Jarrett - Regency High Society Vol 2 - Sparhawk's Lady / The Earl's Intended Wife / Lord Calthorpe's Promise / The Society Catch

“Surely you will grant me safe passage now, signore! Who else but I, Tomaso, has ever brought you an English lady for your amusement?”

“She has not the look of a lady.”

“But the other one, the grandiosa contessa Inglese, assured me it was true!” exclaimed Tomaso, clutching his hands anxiously before him. “Would she have paid me so handsomely if it were not so, eh?”

Abruptly Caro raised her face, tears streaming down her cheeks. “The Dowager Lady Byfield did this? Betrayed me when I trusted her friendship, sought her help for her only son? Frederick’s mother hated me enough for this?’

Tomaso shrugged. “You were an inconvenience, cara mia, a difficulty she wished gone. You betrayed her son, eh? Now she has betrayed you.”

Caro bowed her head over Jeremiah, overwhelmed by sorrow and guilt. This was her fault, not just for firing the gun, but for everything, from the very beginning. If she had not gone to Jeremiah that first night, he would live still. She had brought the death of the only man she’d ever really loved. Her body still bore the warm evidence of their lovemaking not an hour before, and the enormity of her loss swept over her.

“On your feet, woman, so I might look at ye,” ordered Hamil. “Stand, or I’ll have ye dragged to your feet!”

Slowly Caro rose to face him, forcing herself to meet his gaze even as she swayed on her feet. No matter what Dorinda had done to her or what she had done to herself, she was still the Countess of Byfield, and for the honor of Frederick’s name she must not cower.

Oh, dear Lord, poor Frederick, and her heart sank even lower. How she’d failed him, too!

Hamil’s eyes narrowed. “Your name, woman. The truth, or with Allah as my witness I shall end your miserable English life now.”

“Caroline Harris Moncrief,” she said softly. “Countess of Byfield.”

“You swear it by all that ye infidels hold sacred?”

She nodded, her eyes filling again. “But why did you have to kill Captain Sparhawk?”

Hamil sniffed contemptuously. “He’s no more dead than I, m’lady, no thanks to ye. He’ll wish he were when next he wakes, but no ways worse. If I wished him dead, I woulda seen it done right, but what use would a dead man be to me?”

Her eyes widening with disbelief and hope, she began to drop down beside Jeremiah, but Hamil’s hand jerked her back to her feet.

“Come,” he said harshly. “I am your master now, and ye must think no more of him.”

Slowly, painfully, Jeremiah fought his way back to consciousness. He was on a ship. He knew that much from the slow rocking and the distant rushing sound of the waves, and the familiar sound was the one thing of comfort to him. His whole body ached and throbbed, but the searing, blinding pain was concentrated in his left temple, as if whatever had caused it still hammered against his head. He wanted to curl into himself against the pain and retreat again into unconsciousness, but his legs felt strangely heavy, too heavy to move.

From a distance beyond the water, he heard a woman call his name. Her voice was gentle, familiar, and instinctively he turned his head toward it for comfort, groaning at the pain the slight effort caused him.

“Jeremiah, love, you’re going to be all right,” murmured Caro as she placed another damp rag, torn from her petticoat, onto the angry, bruised lump on Jeremiah’s head. All she’d been given to tend him was a bucket of water and a tiny lamp to keep away the rats here in the hold of Hamil’s xebec, and she knew she should be grateful she’d been granted that much. The gash on Jeremiah’s head had been relatively minor, as Hamil had predicted, but the bruise worried her for the damage that might lie behind it. “You’ll be fine, I swear it, you will. Oh, love, will you ever forgive me what I’ve done to you!”

“What the devil have you done now?” croaked Jeremiah.

With a startled gasp Caro bent closer. “You are alive!”

“Barely.” He forced himself to open his eyes a fraction, her taut, worried face spinning before him in dizzy circles. “Damnation.”

“Here, drink this.” Gently she lifted his head enough for him to sip from the dipper of water. “But don’t move any more unless you wish to. There’s no reason to, anyway.”

“I can’t. What happened to my legs?”

“Nothing,” she said angrily. “Hamil’s men put you in irons, though where he thought an unconscious man would run I’ll never guess.”

Hamil. At once the whole bitter scene on deck came back to him. “I should never have given you that pistol. They could have killed you.”

“I was afraid of what you would try to do,” she confessed. “I thought I could shoot him first because no one suspected me. If you had even moved, they would have murdered you.”

“It seems they half did anyway.”

“I know.” She hung her head forlornly, the dipper clutched tightly in her hand. “There’s more that’s my fault, Jeremiah. It was Frederick’s mother who betrayed us first, selling us to Tomaso like sheep at the market. Your only misfortune was to be with me. Oh, I know I should never have trusted her, but for Frederick’s sake, I—I believed what I wanted to.”

Jeremiah reached out to take her hand, fitting his fingers into hers. He understood why she’d done it, maybe better than she did herself. With a family as strong as the Sparhawks behind him, it pained him to imagine poor Caro so starved for a parent’s affection and approval that she would turn to a mother as evil as Frederick’s.

“It’s done, and I’ll live,” he said, wondering whether it was love alone that had changed him, or if being struck on the head had had something to do with it, too. There’d been a time when he would have berated her for her misplaced trust and blamed her for how desperate their situation had become. But now all he saw was how much worse it could be; they were both alive, relatively unharmed, and they were still together. “I’ll hear no more about it being your fault.”

She would have wept if she’d had any tears left. “You’re too good for me, Jeremiah,” she whispered. “Far, far too good.”

“Good for nothing and fit for less, is closer to the mark,” he said gruffly. “But how are you, sweetheart? I knocked you harder than I intended, but I wanted you out of Hamil’s way.”

“I’m fine, now that you are, too.” She lifted his hand to her lips, her smile shaky. “Most likely I would have come closer to hitting Mount Vesuvius than Hamil.”

“True enough,” he agreed, thinking how strangely wonderful it was that, even as Hamil’s prisoners, they could still make jests. “We shall have to work on your aim.”

With a loud scrape the hatch overhead was lifted off, and a beam of bright sunlight pierced the gloom of the hold. Swearing, Jeremiah lifted his arm to shield his eyes. Three of Hamil’s crewmen dropped through the opening without bothering with the stairway, and motioned for Caro and Jeremiah to climb the steps to the deck above.

Caro scrambled to her feet, her hands squared defiantly on her hips. “Captain Sparhawk can’t be moved,” she said sternly to the tallest man. It didn’t matter that the man spoke no English; her voice and manner were expressive in any language. “He has suffered a very grievous wound to his head, and I don’t want him injured further.”

The man lifted his bearded chin higher, clearly offended to be addressed so insolently by a mere woman. His hand went to the hilt of his saber, another kind of wordless message.

But Caro held her ground, unimpressed. “I’m not going anywhere without Captain Sparhawk, and so you may tell Mr. Al-Ameer if—”