The Road to Ruin

by Bronwyn Stuart

  “I’ve seen your da’s lot and this ain’t them. We have to go now.”

  “Wait, you can’t be sure. We have to find out.”

  James looked to Hobson, who shook his head so minutely anyone else might have missed the gesture. James turned the dagger in his hand and sheathed it in his boot. “We are leaving right now.”

  He towed her from the room, all thoughts about her breeches and bare skin forgotten. “Do you have boots for her?” he asked Hobson.

  “In the carriage. They’ll be a mite big but they’ll do.”

  “We can’t leave like this until we are absolutely sure,” Daniella pleaded as they fled down the stair. “What about your bags and your clothes? And if it is my father and he wants to trade, we have to meet him halfway.”

  “Where the rest of his crew can slay me? We meet on my terms, not his. We meet, as you said from the start, in his refuge, which he will protect from violence, including his own. If it is your father, and Hobson seems quite certain it is not, he can give chase. He will have to keep most of his men on the ship or the beach to protect it, yes?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But—”

  “No, Daniella. No buts. We need to leave. I will not have it end like this.”

  She tugged against his hand, dragging him to a stop. He glared. She glared back.

  “I won’t go. We have to be sure.”

  James didn’t hesitate. He tugged her hand again until she was off-balance and then bent forwards, scooped her over his shoulder and kept going. She shrieked and lashed out but he didn’t pause. They’d stayed too long. He was lucky they hadn’t been murdered in their beds. Damn that innkeeper for his lies about treacherous shoals and hidden rocks.

  They had to get as far away as they could. As fast as they could. He would not think on why her perfectly sane reasoning suddenly made no sense at all. He absolutely refused to wonder why the thought of trading her back to her father made his gut clench and his chest ache.

  Bloody pirates!

  Chapter Twenty

  Riding atop a man’s shoulder had to just about be the most undignified way to travel. Her stomach jarred painfully on James’s bones with each of his leaps. He wasn’t walking anymore but neither could he run with her. She was heavier than she looked. She smiled and went lax. Like the last time he’d kidnapped her, she had to appear biddable until she could attempt an escape. If it was her father—and really, what other likeliness was there that another pirate followed? It wasn’t as though there were an abundance of them floating about, despite what the gossip papers reported—if it was her father, she would go to him and beg him to release Amelia and James’s mother. God, she didn’t even know the woman’s name. Her father would listen to her in this. He would. The blood thrummed in her veins with both excitement and trepidation.

  “Hobson, you and Patrick ride behind but tell him to stay close. Give him one of the muskets if he doesn’t have his own. We only need to know how many there are and if they appear capable. You are both to shoot anyone who looks or acts or smells like a pirate if they come too near.”

  Daniella gasped. “You can’t shoot at them, they’ll kill you.”

  “Not while I have you,” he pointed out, his voice filled with smug superiority.

  “And if it isn’t my father? Do you think another pirate is going to care if I live or die?” She hated the way her breath huffed in and out as she tried to reason with him.

  “We’ll all be dead by that stage. It won’t matter what anyone thinks.”

  She could imagine that particular headline. They would all go down in one giant blaze of scandal. The wild and hoydenish sister of a man knighted by the king found dead in her breeches alongside a marquess with two black eyes, also in breeches, also dead.

  “Put me down—I’ll walk. We can move faster that way.”

  “Don’t need to.” James grunted as he set her on her feet. He didn’t give her the chance to lash out as he pushed her into the carriage and onto the floor. He climbed in after her and shouted the order to go, to go and not stop for anything or anyone.

  “Dammit, let me up,” she cried. Every time she tried to sit up, James pushed her back down. She slid on the floor and her head smashed into the unforgiving hardness of timber when they took a corner too fast. A hard lump, most likely to be a boot, dug into the back of her shoulder.

  “Stay down and hold on. You are safer on the floor.”

  “I would be safer if I had killed you when I last had the chance.”

  He smiled grimly. “You keep saying that, yet here I sit.”

  Another corner and they both had to hold on, James to the strap above his head and Daniella bracing outwards with her hands and feet. When James lifted his legs to jam them against the opposite bench right above her body, Daniella took her opportunity. She reached out and with an almighty tug ripped the dagger from his boot.

  James roared and reached for the dagger but another corner saw him topple off the seat and land atop her with an oomph.

  She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs were on fire, her ribs hurt: he was crushing her. “Get off,” she wheezed as swirling black spots played havoc with her vision. Her fingertips tingled and still she couldn’t draw a proper breath.

  Her fingers were already lax when James pulled the dagger from her hand. She didn’t care. She had to draw breath before she passed out. Once he was up, kneeling with one knee between hers, his breath as harsh and short as hers, he sent her another fierce glare. “Do not try that again.”

  It took only minutes, though it felt like an hour, for her to regain her lungs’ previous composure, such as it had been. Her throat burned and she worried he’d broken something in her chest. She still braced with her bare feet and tingling arms as they barrelled around corner after corner at breakneck speed. Her muscles screamed at her but fury numbed the pain to a persistent ache. At one stage she felt two wheels lift from the ground only to slam back down and still they went on.

  There were no words for the way she felt about James Trelissick in those minutes. After the night they’d shared, how could he treat her this way? He spoke of trust yet wasn’t it supposed to work both ways? Trying to take his dagger probably hadn’t helped her there but he was acting a fool. All of it could have been over and done with had she been able to see the ship. She would have known right away if it was her father. They could have brokered their hostage deal and even now be on their separate ways.

  How could Hobson tell the difference between one ship and another? He’d seen The Aurora only once in the midst of a battle.

  She ground her teeth in frustration.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said to her, his voice low but without menace this time.

  “I rather doubt that,” she bit out.

  “You know this was the right move.”

  “I know you are an idiot. This is your family we’re—” She slapped a hand over her mouth but then had to reach out as the carriage barrelled around yet another endless corner.

  His eyes went hard. “Who told you?” he asked through teeth clenched so tight his jaw ticked beneath the stubble. “Did you know about them before I took you?”

  “No! I did not! But it doesn’t matter who told me. You should have. I could have helped you.”

  He barked with forced laughter. “Now you are saying you would have helped me? That tells me you haven’t known for very long. Was it Hobson or Willie? No one else knows.”

  Not that you are aware of. She would not reveal Patrick’s part in it all. She would let James think it was one of his loyal men who’d revealed the truth. “We could have told my brother about your mother and sister and he could have thought of something. He might even have reached out to my father without any of this nonsense.”

  By his reaction, she could tell he’d thought about it. “Why didn’t you ask him for help?” she asked when he didn’t answer.

  “Your brother and I aren’t well acquainted and as far as I understand he is completely in the dar
k about it all. I paid someone to dig around in his house and put an ear to the ground but it turned up nothing. He is completely oblivious. At least he was.”

  “What do you mean, you paid someone?”

  “Half your brother’s household are capable of being bought for the right price and the other half hate him so much they give away their information for free. Germaine could not be trusted to broker any sort of deal. Amelia’s reputation would have been in tatters for a certainty.”

  “What about her life? What if my father doesn’t have her? You have wasted precious time.”

  His jaw tightened again. “This is where the trail led me. There was nowhere else to look.”

  “So you took me in retaliation, an eye for eye. If something has befallen them, will you kill me in return?”

  “I don’t have to take your life to ruin it, Daniella. I only have to tell your father that I have bedded you and within you grows my seed. Do you think it wouldn’t break his heart to see his unmarried daughter pregnant to his enemy?”

  She knew how her father would react to that and it wasn’t the type of noose that hangs a man until dead in which James would find himself. He was right about breaking his heart though. She didn’t want her father to think her a whore, or worse. What’s more, she would not be forced to marry James at the end. She needed to be back on her ship with her men, with her friends, her accepting family.

  *

  “Did you bump your head or did I break your brain when I hit you?” she asked, her green eyes narrowed. “Was it all an act then, last night? The dream? The violence?”

  It was no act on his part. But what of hers? Even in his anguish, she hadn’t admitted to knowing the truth about his possessions, about his mother and sister, missing on the high seas, taken by pirates. The way she felt about a woman being a man’s pawn, she would have revealed earlier her knowledge of her father’s hostages.

  In fact he wouldn’t have spoken to Daniella the way he had if he wasn’t in complete agony. Sweat beads formed on his brow and ran in rivulets down his back to dampen his shirt. Inside his boot the stickiness of his own blood was warm and uncomfortable. Not a fatal amount but enough. When she’d ripped the dagger from his boot, the sharpened blade had sliced right through his hose and into his skin.

  He’d begun to think of her as a partner in this predicament rather than the means to the end. He hated himself for that. He could not and would not risk the only family he had left for Daniella. A pirate. A wild immature girl with a conniving woman’s body.

  The space between his eyes throbbed mercilessly and his head ached along with the rhythm set by his erratic heartbeat.

  “I have neither the time nor the patience to keep fighting with you, Daniella. I’ll have your word now, as a pirate, as a woman, as a Germaine, that you will not do anything stupid while we make this last dash for the border. Do you understand? Can I have your word?”

  “Who gets to decide what is stupid?” A hint of a smile ghosted over her lips but didn’t quite reach her eyes.

  “Just ask yourself if I would find it stupid and go with that. Actually, I’ll have your word that not only will you not try to escape or run, you will tell me every move before you make it.”

  “That is unreasonable. I will not consent to it. I can give you my word I won’t run or escape but that is all.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “What do you want from me, James? I will not submit to you. I will not bow at your feet and call you my master.” Her eyes grew wide. “That is what this is about, isn’t it? It kills you that you can’t control me, that you can’t control the situation like you did your men in the war. You couldn’t control your sister or your mother or your brother and it eats away at you inside.”

  She knew everything about his brother as well? Damn. “I cannot control anything in this cat-and-mouse chase, Daniella. I just want to know your antics won’t leave me dead in a ditch somewhere.”

  “I look after myself.” She lifted her chin back so he could once again see the mess that was her neck, the bruises purpling until her throat was almost dark blue. “And if you find yourself in a ditch, it will indeed be because I put you there.”

  “You were lucky I was…not myself last night. Even you cannot take on a man in charge of his faculties. You cannot take on a group of ruffians without your father or your crew at your back.”

  “I killed a man two days ago, did I not? I also disarmed you. Twice.”

  “You did but we were there also that first time. Had you been alone, those men would have taken their turn raping you. They then would have taken you back to their place of hiding and raped you again. The first time you fought back, you would have been tied up or killed. Either way, you would have been raped again and again and again, dead or alive. You had one ball in one pistol and a tiny knife. That is one dead man, perhaps. Much harder to shoot a target that moves than one at your back.”

  Her eyes turned glassy and flat. “I am not useless.”

  “I never said you were. Without you, there would have been one more man for Hobson or myself to dispatch. Without you, I have no leverage against your father to get my mother and my sister back.”

  She did not like that honesty. By the look on her face, she hoped James would say something else. What that something was, he didn’t know.

  She needed the truth.

  It didn’t mean she had to like it.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  They didn’t get more than a mile down the road before a bullet hit the back of the carriage, splintering the wood with a deafening crack that made them both duck for cover. When they began to slow, James knew without a doubt they were done for. Nowhere to run and hardly anywhere to hide. It was stand and fight to the death or be captured. Either way they wound up exactly the same. Dead.

  He stared down at the finally silent Daniella and wondered how things could have possibly catapulted so far from his plan. “For what it’s worth,” he started and then paused, unsure of how to continue. “I was trying to do the right thing. For you and for my sister.”

  “I know you were.” The admission hurt her: he recognized that frown now.

  “I can try to hold them off if you want to make a run for the tree line?”

  She shook her head. “I won’t make it very far and we both know it.”

  The jingle of the harness and the shuffle of the horses’ hooves signalled they could go no farther. The carriage creaked as Willie fought to control the beasts; fear was all around them now. James didn’t even bother reaching for a pistol. The sound of hooves bearing down and the shouts of men meant they were outnumbered. Perhaps he could bargain for Daniella’s life? She wouldn’t make it home unscathed but she would make it home. She was resourceful and resilient. Two things he reluctantly admired most about her.

  A booming voice drifted along the road. “Come on out of the carriage and show yourselves. You’re outnumbered and outplayed.”

  Outplayed? Odd.

  Daniella caught the inference as well and sat up from her position on the floor.

  James raised his brow but she only shook her head.

  He lifted the glass pane in the door and called back, “I’ll first be needing your word I’ll get a chance to speak to your leader before you put a ball in me.”

  Murmurs followed and then, “You aren’t really in a bargaining place right now, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  James would have chuckled had the circumstances been different. “I’ll kill the lady myself before I let you get your grubby hands on her.”

  “No need for that, Lasterton. We need the girl in one piece.”

  They knew who he was? Bloody pirates. “Will you be taking her back to her father then?” he asked.

  “Eventually.”

  That answer was not good enough. “Do you recognize the voice, Daniella?”

  She was thinking about it. Hard. “I’m not sure. I think I do but it’s been an age since I last saw him. I thought he was dead. I
say we get out.”

  “No.”

  She breathed deep and looked him squarely in the eye. “I know you think you have the upper hand but do you not think when it comes to pirates I might know more than you? Please, James, this is not your battlefield and these men do not fight with honour or with pride. You don’t speak their language and will probably get us all killed.”

  As if the men outside had heard her whispered words the one doing the talking called again: “Your men aren’t comfortable at the point of my swords, Lasterton, and I can’t guarantee there won’t be blood spilled if we don’t hurry this along. The tide is going out and so should we be.”

  Dammit. Of course they had Hobson and Patrick as well. Unlatching the door, James stepped slowly from the carriage to stand on the side of the muddy road. There had to be at least two dozen tan-skinned, toothless, filthy ruffians surrounding a paler man atop a fine—probably stolen—horse. He wore dark leather breeches and boots and the brightest crimson silk waistcoat James had ever seen. No shirt, no necktie or cravat.

  Despite their shaggy appearances, the pirates were well armed and looked ready to spring into action at the say-so of the paler one.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” James said as he stepped clear of the carriage, arms and hands out to show he was unarmed.

  “Darius? Darius, is that you?”

  “Hello, Little Lamb.”

  James opened his mouth to ask whether this man was friend or foe when pain exploded in the back of his skull and his world slowly sank into darkness. Daniella’s screams were the last sounds in his ears as consciousness melted away into a bottomless abyss of nothing.

  *

  “Unhand me at once,” Daniella demanded, feeling only slightly ridiculous in her boy’s clothes, minus the boots she’d never got around to putting on.

  “You are in no position to be making demands, Little One.”

  “I am not your little one anymore, Darius. What do you think you’re doing carrying me off like this?” Lying bent over the pommel of a man’s horse was only slightly more degrading than riding on his shoulder, and no more comfortable.