Julia London - Regency Vows - A Gentleman 'Til Midnight / The Trouble with Honour / An Improper Arrangement / A Wedding By Dawn / The Devil Takes a Bride / A Promise by Daylight

With a quiet oath, James crossed the dressing room to the bedchamber and looked in. “What does the doctor say?”

“Very little,” William said with barely concealed disdain as James entered the chamber. “They may be superficial bruises, or they may be life-threatening. Naturally, he cannot tell.”

Katherine scowled at Phil. “I see you’ve occupied yourself with pen and paper.”

Phil merely shrugged. “No need to thank me, dearest. I was already writing to India—it was nothing to dash off one more.”

“Such an awful tragedy,” Honoria said. “Absolutely terrible. I shall go to Lady Effy’s and quell the inevitable rumors that will arise with both you and James absent.”

* * *

IT WAS THE MIDDLE of the night when Katherine opened her eyes to find that she had dozed off on the daybed in Millicent’s dressing room. A figure stood facing the fireplace.

James.

She pushed herself up, and he turned. “William and Philomena are sitting with her,” he said. “She’s still sleeping. There’s been no change.” His coat lay over the back of a chair, and he’d rolled up his shirtsleeves to his elbows the way he used to do aboard the Possession.

She fought her way out of the sleep she hadn’t meant to fall into. Memories of the carriage ride exploded into her mind before she could stop them—his mouth on her lips, his hands on her breasts, his body buried in hers. The hasty buttoning, fastening and tucking as the carriage rolled to a stop.

He brought her a glass of water and she took it from him, careful not to touch his fingers. “You needn’t have stayed,” she said, letting a sip of cool water slide across her tongue.

“True enough.” The clock on the mantel tick-tick-ticked. In the fireplace, logs cracked and snapped.

He was so beautiful it was all she could do not to stare. And the more she tried not to think of their lovemaking, the more the memory grew, pulsing and breathing with a life of its own. “There’s nothing more to be done,” she told him. “You’re free to leave if—”

“I’m not leaving.”

“Very well.” Her fingers remembered the hard ridge of his jaw, the solid muscles on his torso rippling beneath his shirt.

His eyes lighted on her, smoldering with what they’d done together. “Was there bad blood between Millicent and her brother before she went to the Continent?” he asked.

“She didn’t like him, but that was all I ever knew.” Katherine stood and paced a few feet away, but the room was too small to offer the distance she needed. “When I met her in Venice she would have done almost anything to join my crew. Three years later, she was determined to stay in Malta and attend surgical school. When she learned we’d sailed from Malta while she slept, I had to order an extra watch for three days and nights for fear she would go over the rail with an empty cask and try to make it back.”

“A fool’s errand that would have left her dead.”

“She wanted to attend that surgical school so badly.”

“Another fool’s errand. Did you learn what made her so desperate to join you at the first?”

Katherine made a noise. “The father of the children she’d been hired to care for. Apparently he didn’t believe her duties should end once the children went to bed. I still don’t know if she was running from a threat or a fait accompli.”

“Christ.” James rubbed his forehead.

“I shall take her to Dunscore with me.” She prayed it would be soon, and not just for Millie’s sake. “I cannot turn her into an acceptable candidate for a school of medicine, but at least there she’ll be safe.”

His gaze shot to her. “Nothing about your plan has changed, then.” After what happened in the carriage, hung in the air.

“I intend to do what I must.”

Marry me, Katherine. The choice she’d rejected taunted her. He did not repeat it.

“You said nothing about your captivity at the hearing. It might have made a difference. It still could. I shall speak with Winston and ask him to reconvene the committee.”

“Good God.” She almost laughed. “Those men cared about nothing more than preventing my return to sea and putting me under the control of a man’s hand. I could have set forth every detail and the result would have been the same.” James stood in front of her now. Secret places she’d hardly been aware of before grew warm and moist beneath his gaze.

He was remembering, too. It was there in his eyes, along with the torment of his wild imaginings about her life with Mejdan al-Zayar.

“It might have elicited sympathy,” he said.

“Nothing could have done that after Lord Edrington’s revelation,” she said mirthlessly. “In the face of which you defended me.” Which only proved the depth of his guilt. It all seemed so ridiculous now. Nothing in the past could be changed.

“Yes.”

“Because of the debt.”

“Because I should have perished with the Henry’s Cross, and because everything I told the committee was true. Anyhow, I’m alive because you did not leave me to die.”

“I gave the order to do it.”

“You are an experienced sea captain, Katherine. Unlike the committee, you don’t need me to explain what that entails.” His tone was dark. Rough. “The kinds of decisions one has to make.”

She could see what he was thinking as clearly as if he’d told her. “Such as whether to engage the corsairs over the fate of a small merchant ship,” she said. The two decisions—his and hers—should have made them even, except that she had changed her mind about hers, and nothing he could have done differently would have changed the outcome of his. “Your regret is wasted on that. My experience would have been the same had you never happened upon us.”

A muscle worked in his jaw. It was a perfect time to tell him the truth about life with Mejdan al-Zayar—about crowded market vendors hawking bright scarves and sparkling bangles, about screaming with laughter as the dogs snatched Tamilla’s new silk slippers from the harem and left the slobbery pieces beneath the tangerine tree in the courtyard, about Mejdan’s daughter Kisa and her telescope. His torment would be better directed toward any number of English girls married off to men of their fathers’ choosing, who ended up slaves to a marriage bed that brought only pain and disgust.

“I am sorry I gave that order,” she said instead.

“You shouldn’t be,” he whispered harshly. “I am not sorry I gave mine. Only that I failed to execute it properly.”

“You nearly killed me, and I you. The score is even, Captain—” his eyes blazed at that “—and now that there is a solution, we may finally be free of each other.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

“YOU’RE GOING TO marry her?” Nick’s outrage exploded into James’s library at half past nine the next morning.

James didn’t bother to look up from the desk. He’d returned from Katherine’s at four, and a few hours’ restless sleep left him in no condition to deal with an outburst. “Marry whom?”

“Katherine Kinloch.” Nick walked right up to the desk and braced his hands on the surface. “You could at least have told me before you let it fly all over London.”

“I assure you, I have no plans to marry Lady Dunscore.” He kept his voice cool, but a hot sensation snaked down to his loins.

“No? Everyone at Lady Effy’s was agog with the news—and the fact that neither you nor Lady Dunscore were present. I don’t suppose that was a coincidence.”

An excuse not to be at Lady Effy’s last night was possibly the one good thing to come of all this. “No, it wasn’t. We were both needed in aid of a mutual friend.”

Nick glanced at James’s crotch and snorted. “Mutual friend.”