I Kissed an Earl

by Julie Anne Long

  He was still studying her. “Miss Redmond?”

  “What is it?” she snapped.

  “You look horrible.” His voice was brutally cold and censorious.

  She recoiled as though he’d struck her.

  Her first thought was, “That’s impossible.” She was Violet Redmond, after all.

  He began to enumerate her flaws on his fingers. “You’ve dark shadows beneath your eyes. Which are red, by the way. You look pale. Nearly haggard. Almost as if you haven’t slept for days. I wonder why that is? Could it be that something is preying upon your mind?”

  She stared at him through eyes slit with fury.

  “But your hair is perfect,” he concluded snidely.

  Scoundrel!

  “My conscience is not tormenting me over something I’m not telling you regarding Le Chat, if that’s what you’re implying.” Her words were taut.

  “I know it isn’t. It’s not what I’m implying.”

  This brought her up short. She began to frown. Then stopped immediately, smoothing fingers across her forehead.

  “You are not precisely the picture of radiant health, Captain. Speaking of sallow complexions and dark shadows and the like. You look quite…quite…disreputable, in fact.”

  He dropped his mouth open in mock horror. “Surely not disreputable!”

  “Worse than that.” Still, she could not bring herself to say savage.

  His voice went frighteningly gentle.

  “Ah, but do you know what my trouble is, Violet?” Very ironic. “Because I do. Here it is: I am the captain of The Fortuna. I have a great responsibility to my men and now to the bloody King of England. My fortunes are dwindling. My reputation and my entire future rest upon my success in capturing this pirate for bounty. And yet…”

  And he leaned toward her slowly, slowly, confidingly, hands folded casually folded on his knees, his hat dangling from one of them. The more forward he leaned the more backward she leaned, until she was pressed back against the admittedly very comfortable seat of the landau.

  He dropped each syllable heavily, wearily, ironically.

  “…and yet I cannot sleep at night for wanting you.”

  No lawyer had ever made an accusation sound quite so egregious. And yet it was infused with a sort of desperate wryness.

  Her breath left her in a tiny shocked gust.

  She stared at him. And then pressed her hands involuntarily against her eyes, like a child, wanting to hide from her own frustration and from the weary yet ferocious, wry and very determined desire she saw in his face.

  And because she feared his will was more powerful than her own, and acknowledging this was a concession on her part indeed.

  And then she pulled her hands away from her eyes so she could glare her feigned indifference properly.

  “Tell me you don’t want me,” he said the moment she did. A quick low demand.

  Her hands sought and found each other, folded tightly together in disciplinary solidarity in her lap. No: you will not touch him.

  He shifted farther forward and spoke in a low, hard, persuasive rush. “Tell me you haven’t lain awake each night imagining nothing else but my hands on your body. And my mouth on your breasts. And my cock inside you, Violet.”

  Her lips parted on a shocked oh. Heat roared over her body.

  He knew precisely what he was doing to her. She’d been nearly savage in his arms, after all. He knew what she wanted, and how wildly she responded.

  “I don’t think of your cock in precisely those terms,” she said tightly.

  She’d never said such a word aloud in her life. It was desperately coarse and erotic and as thrilling as brandishing a loaded weapon. Then again, he’d handed the weapon to her.

  So to speak.

  It had the desired effect of shocking him. His eyes flared wide. She’d momentarily thrown him. He was not so impervious, then, as he seemed. He was not invulnerable. She was reminded again of her power over him. It was a power that baffled and tormented him, and perversely made her want to protect him. As she’d always wanted to protect him.

  I don’t want you like this, she thought desperately.

  But she didn’t know how she wanted him.

  “Well, then,” he drawled softly, pensively. “Why don’t you share with me which of my parts you do think about when you’re alone? I might find it instructive. I might even put them to use for your pleasure. I know so very, very much about pleasure, Violet. And I know you enjoy an adventure.”

  You would think by now you would have learned not to toy with him, her conscience told her, shaking its head wearily.

  She could hear her own breath now, shallow and ragged with fury. And frankly, feral want.

  He was enjoying this. He was also clearly in hell. Then again, he was eminently adaptable, and had managed to make a sort of heaven from hell many times in his life.

  She was new at this.

  He gave her a small, tight smile.

  “Go on, Violet. Say you don’t want me. Make me believe it.”

  “Unfair,” she muttered.

  “Unfair?” He sounded genuinely astonished, almost disappointed that she could only come up with that pallid word. “Fair? What the bloody hell does ‘fair’ have to do with…any of this?” His knuckles were white, so hard were his hands clenching the brim of his hat.

  Any of this. Meaning desire. Pirates. His diminishing fortune. The fact that they could not be more at cross-purposes regarding Lyon Redmond’s fate.

  “It isn’t my fault,” she tried desperately. I’m suffering, too.

  “Like. Hell,” he disagreed evenly.

  Well. So American he sounded then. And hardly gallant. He did have a point, however. It was somewhat her fault. She’d rather courted it all from the beginning.

  “All I ask is that you look in my eyes and say it, Violet. And make me believe it.”

  Bastard.

  She bravely looked into his eyes. Felt her heart constrict when she saw again those shadows ringing them, fatigue deepening the lines about them. His face was taut with emotion that she knew was equal parts frustration and something he would never admit to, something that was frightening and startlingly new to both of them, and had a good deal to do with why he’d saved that jasmine blossom in the book.

  But desire was so much simpler to understand, and so desire is what they called it.

  She leaned forward a little, matching his posture.

  “I. Don’t. Want. You.”

  Rivers had flowed uphill with more ease than she’d uttered that sentence.

  Once she’d done it, she felt utterly spent. In saying it, she’d won. I have no more lies in me, she thought. If he asked me to say it again, I simply couldn’t. He could take me now. Her limbs were weak.

  He blinked.

  And before her eyes the ferocity slowly went out of him. Blood returned to the knuckles. His hand loosened on his hat. He laid it delicately on the seat next to him. And studied her quietly.

  Too drained to do anything else, she looked helplessly, wordlessly back at him.

  Then he sat back and transferred a brooding stare out the carriage window.

  And was silent the rest of the way to the inn.

  She couldn’t help but note that brooding suited him every bit as much as…

  Every single other thing he did.

  Lavay was the jarringly sunny opposite of the earl. They found him easily, as his hair shone like a polished doubloon in the raucous smoke-filled murk of the inn. He was lounging with long legs outstretched, managing to make the scarred table and sturdy battered chair he occupied look like a throne. In his hand was a tankard of ale and over him bent the barmaid who’d brought it to him, as though she was about to ease herself into his lap. From the surly, resentful faces of the men at the tables surrounding him and the condition of their pint glasses—nearly empty—she’d been lingering with Lavay for longer than was practical.

  “Ah! Sit, my friends, sit,” he greeted them che
erily. “Polly will bring each of you an ale, won’t you dear?”

  Polly straightened with apparent reluctance to take a look at Lavay’s friends. Her bosom shifted tectonically in her bodice and continued quivering for some time after she stopped moving. Corkscrews of red hair sprung from beneath the edges of her white cap and she’d a veritable galaxy of freckles over skin fairer even than Violet’s, and her brows and lashes were nearly invisibly fair.

  She took the swift measure of the large thunderous earl. Her round face became comically fulsome with appreciation.

  “I will bring you anything you want, monsieur,” she vowed on a purr. “Ma grandpére Ned, ’e brew the finest in all of Brest.”

  Her hand went up over her own breast as if by way of illustration, and the earl followed it there with his eyes.

  “I’ll have a whiskey,” Violet told Polly coolly. “And seven pints of ale.”

  Three pairs of eyes turned on her in astonishment.

  Because that’s what it will take to even begin to take the edge off my nerves and temper.

  But something wriggled into her awareness beneath the nerves and temper. She began to frown. The barmaid’s name was Polly. And her grandfather Ned? Polly was the name of Ned Hawthorne’s daughter. She served the patrons at the Pig & Thistle and had had been moony every since Colin Eversea’s marriage.

  Ned Hawthorne owned the Pig & Thistle pub in Pennyroyal Green!

  Polly and Ned were hardly French names.

  “Bring a pint of dark, Polly, merci,” the earl said, unabashedly, overtly enjoying the view of the barmaid’s bosom the way one might admire any natural wonder. She was clearly accustomed to it. “And our friend here was jesting about whiskey. She will have one light ale.”

  He yanked out a chair for Violet with the other, and motioned for her to sit without looking at her.

  Lavay deigned to reel in his legs so the earl could sit in the chair next to him.

  Polly and Ned. Her spine was almost stinging with portent. Breathless now, Violet ducked her head and surreptitiously scanned the room. All around her were drinking sailors: it was evident from the weathered bristly faces, knotted neck cloths, dirty, turned-up sleeves on striped or dingy linen shirts. A scattering of men dressed very like the earl in casually elegant clothes seemed to be biding their time over ale while waiting to board ships leaving port. Myriad languages and accents rose and fell.

  And, of course, she saw Lyon nowhere.

  She closed her eyes in weary frustration. Thanks to Lyon’s cryptic note she was clearly now doomed to see portent everywhere. She was generally accustomed to causing surprises, but her nerves hadn’t yet become inured to enduring them again and again and again.

  Getting her eyes open again proved to be surprisingly difficult. Exhaustion was wrestling with her will. You wanted variety, she thought wryly.

  She got them open again. And saw the earl’s eyes darting from her face. He’d been watching her.

  His knee shifted, brushing hers beneath the table as he turned to look about the room, perhaps wondering what she was looking for.

  He might as well have drawn a finger up her bare thigh, such was the jolt of sensation. Violet felt her knees begin to yearningly drift apart beneath the table.

  She clapped them shut with considerable effort.

  He was all too willing to fight dirty. Lavay had said this about the earl. She really doubted the knee brush had been an accident, as much as she doubted he was innocent of the effect it had on her.

  One of the earl’s eyebrows twitched in feigned puzzlement when he noticed himself framed in her fixed, accusatory gaze. He casually craned his head again, and looked visibly relieved to see Polly wending through the crowd with his ale.

  Lavay, for his part, seemed entirely unaffected by the moods of his companions, but then he’d had a head start on the ale. “Well, I should tell you that I rowed out to The Olivia with Corcoran and Greeber. We were greeted by a few polite and quite closemouthed crew members, all of whom, I should say, were enormous, well-spoken and positively bristling with weapons. Would do our own crew proud, Captain. No, Mr. Hardesty wasn’t aboard. He was ashore. No, they didn’t know where he’d got to. He was likely in a meeting in Le Havre, as he was a Very Important Trader, and so forth. And as we could hardly demand to search the ship on circumstantial evidence…well, naturally we rowed back out again. BUT…”

  He leaned back, and drummed his fingers, and looked decidedly pleased with himself.

  “What?” Flint was in no mood for suspense.

  “…not before I issued an invitation for Mr. Hardesty to dine with me, Captain Flint, and Captain Flint’s doxie, Violet Redmond, aboard The Fortuna tonight.”

  “Doxie?” Violet choked.

  The earl pointedly did not look at her.

  Lavay seemed mildly puzzled. “Well, but of course, Miss Redmond. Didn’t you agree to be the earl’s—”

  “It’s perfect,” the earl interjected smoothly. “Lavay knows that we agreed early on, Miss Redmond, that your brother would, shall we say, object to the thought of you being defiled by the likes of me, which would make you very effective bait. Hence his stratagem. I commend it.”

  He took a little too much wicked, dark relish in the word defiled. With his eyes he warned her, and not kindly, to compose herself. Lavay was not stupid, and he was studying her with those cool gray eyes, and would draw conclusions about her and the earl she disliked.

  They were going to lure Lyon into a trap, using her as bait.

  Her hands turned to ice.

  “It’s the point of you continuing with us, isn’t it? You agreed to be bait?” the earl said with intolerable calm.

  Lavay had more to say. “I might have also put it about that the doxie Violet Redmond had been very reluctant to submit to the earl’s attentions at first, but that the earl actually preferred a bit of a battle every time, so he considered this an asset. And that he would be happy to share her with Mr. Hardesty if he was in need of a little fiery feminine companionship.” Lavay was proud of himself.

  “Good God. Very good work, Lavay,” the earl approved admiringly.

  Violet was horrified by the plan’s brilliance. “But…It will kill Lyon to hear it. He won’t be able to bear hearing it. He’ll be determined to…kill you.”

  “That is the point,” Lavay said a little too happily and bloodthirstily. “But no killing will take place if we can help it. We’ll simply apprehend him then.”

  The earl’s knee shifted ever so slightly again against hers as he turned to greet the barmaid like a long lost friend.

  This time Violet had no trouble jerking it away from him. Appalled, in that instant to be touching him.

  With what in God’s name had she been thinking?

  She hadn’t been thinking with her brain.

  Of course these men were deadly serious in their intent to capture Lyon. As the earl had said earlier in the landau, his entire future depended upon bringing him to justice. “Justice” in England was entirely too often synonymous with “hanging by the neck until dead.”

  Violet went silent. There was nothing like envisioning her brother dancing at the end of a rope or helpless at the point of a pistol to kill desire.

  Polly the barmaid seemed to have suddenly sprouted eight arms and each one was carrying a foaming pint of ale. She crouched to begin plunking theirs down on the table.

  “’ere you are, monsieur, the fine dark ye asked for and I hope you enjoy it, and for mademois—OH!”

  She dumped the entirety of a light ale down Violet’s bodice.

  Violet gasped and shot backward, toppling her chair, scrambling to her feet, sending the now empty tankard rolling the length of her shins to land on the floor with a clank.

  She flung out her arms, staring down at the sodden bodice. Ale had all but glued it to her.

  Violet stared pure evil at the barmaid.

  The men began to stand warily.

  Polly began babbling inconsolably. “Mon di
eu, mademoiselle, I am so, so clumsy! I am horrified! You must—”

  Without preamble she seized Violet’s arm with shockingly strong hands and dragged her through the chuckling, ogling crowd to the bar. She seized a rag and began scrubbing at her bodice and rattling rapid-fire unaccented, hushed and very aristocratic English at her.

  “Quiet. Quickly. Short answers. Are you or are you not the earl’s doxie?”

  Violet’s heart stopped.

  “Quickly! Yes or no?”

  “No. You work for—”

  “Yes. For God’s sake, don’t say his name,” she hissed.

  “Is your name really Polly?” Clever Lyon!

  “I’m asking the questions. Are you with the earl voluntarily?”

  “This is silk. Have a care. Yes.”

  Polly became a bit less vigorous with the scrubbing. “Why?”

  “To try to find Lyon. The earl wants to capture him. I want to find him. I am to be bait.”

  Dab dab dab Polly went at her bodice. “Are you truly well and safe?”

  The questions and answers were swift, under-breath, staccato.

  “The earl will not harm me. He is a good man. He has been charged by the king with capturing Le Chat.”

  He will test my will, he will haunt my dreams, he’ll make me peel potatoes, he’ll make me crave his touch with a mere glance, but no. He will not harm me.

  And why do I feel like a traitor to that bastard even now?

  Polly dabbed once more, giving up, and flung the rag over the bar.

  “Another two pint of ze dark and light,” she bellowed.

  Violet put her hand on Polly’s arm. “What the hell is Lyon doing? Why is he doing it? Please tell him to come home. Why can’t I see him? Please. Please tell me.”

  “He has more work to do,” Polly said shortly. “Hush now. Hush.”

  “Where is he going next? What does ‘two more’ mean? Tell me that at least! Is it ships?”

  “Enough.” Polly’s lips clamped closed. “We are finished. Go sit down. I’ll bring you another ale. Say nothing of this.”

  Violet drifted back to the table, damp, stunned, happy, furious, and utterly unmindful of the drinkers leering at her bodice, which was still clinging to her absurdly provocatively.