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

“Caro, lass, hush,” warned Jeremiah, unsteadily rising to his feet by leaning against the bulkhead. “This isn’t worth your neck. You know it could be we’ve made Tripoli and they’d like us to go ashore.”

“Oh.” Slipping her shoulder beneath his arm to help him walk, she glanced at him sideways, the proud, haughty countess suddenly gone and only a scared, vulnerable woman in her place. “Somehow everything will be all right, won’t it, Jeremiah?”

He sighed deeply, wishing he could be both truthful and encouraging. “Somehow, aye, it will, love. With you by my side, it always is.”

He knew he didn’t deserve that bright smile from her, but he claimed it anyway. God only knows when she’d have reason to smile again, and wherever he was bound, that lovely memory might be all he’d have to comfort him.

The midday sun off the water was blinding, slicing like razors into Jeremiah’s head, and he stopped at the top of the companionway, struggling to adjust to the brightness before he must face Hamil. He had a brief impression of a coastline, the curving arms of a wide bay, the white fortress city of Tripoli.

One of the seaman jabbed him in the back to hurry, and with enormous effort he raised himself from Caro’s support and forced himself to walk unassisted, the heavy iron chain dragging between his feet. Hamil stood aft near the wheel, watching them approach, and Jeremiah prayed not to falter or fall beneath his enemy’s eyes.

“Sparhawk.” Hamil looked him up and down, his lip curling at how torn and dirty Jeremiah’s clothing had become. “I didna remember the name until this morn.”

“Hamil or Gordon, I didn’t forget yours.” Jeremiah’s disdain equaled Hamil’s as he studied the Scotsman’s opulent dress, the silk sleeves billowing in the wind and the gold thread and sequins on his waistcoat twinkling like tiny reflected suns. Gotten up like some ten-guinea French whore, thought Jeremiah contemptuously, all spangles and tinsel and empty show.

“I took your Chanticleer, Sparhawk,” said Hamil slowly as he studied Jeremiah, the gentle burr of his accent softening the calculated cruelty of his words. “A bonny little brig. I sold her to the Bey of Tunis, who fancied a Yankee-built toy. Alas, the bey’s men are better suited to camels than the sea, and she broke up on the rocks off Zembra not a fortnight after I sold her off.”

Jeremiah felt as if he’d been struck again, and feeling Caro’s fingers tighten around his in silent sympathy did nothing to ease his sense of powerlessness. To learn that his Chanticleer, lovingly built to his own designs not four years ago on the river at home, had been casually, carelessly destroyed at the whim of a heathen ruler was to lose another friend. Until then he hadn’t realized how some part of him had planned to rescue the brig along with Davy. Grimly he wondered if the Chanticleer ’s fate was some awful premonition, that he and Caro and Davy were all doomed to die like the brig on this same bleak, cheerless coast.

“I took your vessel last winter, Sparhawk,” said Hamil. Swiftly he reached out, grabbed the neck of Jeremiah’s shirt and tore the front in two. Instantly Jeremiah recoiled, his hands bunched in fists at his side as the two halves of his shirt fluttered back in the breeze. His chest was left bare, the jagged pale scar unmistakable beneath the whorls of dark hair, and Hamil’s smile was wide.

“I took your Chanticleer,’ he continued, satisfied by what he’d seen, “and ye gave her up with nary a fight or a whimper.”

“Damn your lies,” answered Jeremiah sharply. “Isn’t this scar proof enough? We fought your thieving deceit to our dying breath.”

“Then why, Sparhawk,” taunted Hamil, “do ye still live?”

“To see you go to the devil first, Hamil.” Forgetting all caution, Jeremiah spat at the Scotsman’s feet. “God help me, I’ll see you in your grave.”

“As Allah wills,” said Hamil, glancing briefly at the spittle on his red boots, “ye cowardly son of a Yankee bitch.”

Jeremiah lunged toward him, the shackles clanging across the deck, and immediately four of Hamil’s men seized his arms. He lashed out against them blindly, furiously fighting as much against his own sense of helplessness as the four men who held him fast. But he was still weak and his own strength soon exhausted, and as they jerked him, panting, roughly to his feet, Jeremiah barely had breath enough to curse them all.

But Caro, where was Caro? Twisting wildly, he searched for her and found her, standing pale and rigid with self-control, with a turbaned sailor holding each of her arms. The longboat for shore was being lowered, and clearly she would be a passenger in it. With sickening clarity, Jeremiah realized how neatly he had let his temper play into Hamil’s hands. What easier way could there have been for her to be separated from him?

“Where are you taking her?” he demanded. “By God, if you harm her—”

“Ye shall do what, my fine Yankee captain?” The Scotsman stepped closer, his blue eyes bright with malicious amusement beneath his bristling ginger brows. An ill-fed boy rushed to kneel at his feet and wipe his master’s boots clean, and when he was done Hamil carelessly kicked him aside. “Ye canna help yourself. How can ye help the lady?”

Nothing Hamil said could have wounded Jeremiah more, for what he said was the truth. She was at the ladder now, her pale hair blowing around her face and her blue eyes wide with longing and despair as she looked to him for the help he couldn’t give. They were going to take her and he might well never see her again, and there wasn’t a blasted, bloody thing he could do to stop them. So much, he thought bitterly, for the power of love. He had failed them all, his ship and crew and now his own dear Caro.

“But ye are not the only cowardly American,” continued Hamil scornfully as he pointed over the larboard rail. “Ye have much company.”

There in the shallows of the harbor lay the frigate Philadelphia, once the pride of the tiny American navy, run aground and then surrendered in confusion by her captain to the pasha’s men. Now in place of the stars and stripes that Jeremiah himself had proudly fought beneath flew the green flag with three white crescents of the frigate’s captors, and even at this distance Jeremiah saw how sadly ill kept the once-great ship had become.

The three hundred Americans of the Philadelphia ’s crew were already prisoners in that white city; Jeremiah would make it three hundred and one. He thought again of the wreck of his own hopes here in the same harbor, and craned his neck for one more glimpse of Caro.

But the space where she had stood was empty, and so, he knew, was the place where his heart had been.

“Where are you taking me?” asked Caro as the spray from the boat’s oars blew into her face. She clung to her seat as they raced across the bay, her gaze never leaving the xebec where Jeremiah still remained. “To some other prison?”

Hamil frowned. “No prison, m’lady. Ye are a countess. Ye shall be a member of my household for so long as it pleases.”

She didn’t want to know who would be pleased, or how. “I can tell you now you’ll get no ransom for me.”

He shrugged. “It’s not for the ransom that I took ye, m’lady.”

She could no longer make out the people on the xebec’s deck, and she wondered with despair if they’d taken Jeremiah back to the hold. Dear God, she prayed, let the lamp still be there, for she didn’t know what would happen to him if he was forced alone into the darkness. She could not forget her final sight of him earlier, exhausted and defeated as he sagged between the sailors supporting him, the pain and defeat in his eyes already almost beyond bearing. “What will you do with Captain Sparhawk?”