by Hawke, Jessa
“Is she quite the girl, then?” Nicholas asked his brother once the two of them had cleared out into the park outside.
For a moment, Brent did not say a word, but simply ran his hand through his close-cropped blond hair. When he spoke, his voice was low. “It’s not her, Nick,” he said, and Nicholas felt his heart catch at the old familiar name tossed between them. “She’s a nice enough girl, smart even, and quite the looker, if you can learn to appreciate it. It’s just this whole damn mess between Lord and Lady Connols.”
Nicholas knew what he meant. Members of Society liked to pretend that just because they had money, the ordinary mortal troubles of the world did not concern them at all, and nothing could be more human than his mother being unfaithful to his father. In many ways, he admired her gumption, but perhaps that came from reading so many dramatic novels. Still, his father cut an imposing figure, and if Lady Connols was brave enough to risk his wrath and not only be with another man, but also bear that other man a child, well, he had to hand it to her, it was likely she possessed a steel pair of something only gentlemen were supposed to have.
He found it surprising that he could admire such a quality about her, but the fact of the matter was that members of their class never did marry for love. In spite of the little matter that Brent had gone from being his brother to only his half-brother, Nicholas did not feel any more distant from him and the only rage he felt for his mother was directed at the fact that her indiscretion had been discovered and was causing such upheaval in all their lives. But for the fact that she had found love? No, he could never hate her for that.
Maybe that was the elusive element that had escaped him with every woman he had ever been with. Renowned as an egalitarian lover, he had never wanted for a warm body in his bed; the women from the houses asked for him back sans charge, and many a lady had sidled up to him during a party to request a few clandestine moments alone with him. Something, however, was always missing, and as he wondered what it was, his thoughts turned to his prospective bride, Lady Ania Cromwell. If Brent held her in high enough regard to acknowledge her intelligence, then perhaps there was a chance something could be forged between them that could last. He knew that if anything, what he had learned from this whole mess with his family was that he would never stray if he could help it. And so he would let Ania Cromwell know. In due time. After she had warmed to the marriage bed, as he sincerely hoped she would, knowing full well the capacities of the female body for pleasure, both his own and theirs. He would give her the money her family desperately needed, and perhaps she would be the companion he had been looking for this whole time.
“This has been quite a lot to digest,” Nicholas finally said to his brother. “Not only have our fates switched, but now there is a third party involved. This is what not having at least a civil relationship with your lord leads to,” he muttered, feeling the bitterness rise sharply on his tongue.
“Nicholas, you’ve been reading those damn serials again!” Brent cried. “All this talk of fates and civil relationships, what nonsense. This is what our lives are; this is what they will eventually turn into. Look, Ania is a nice enough girl, but she’s a gentle-bred lady. So she spies in the bushes on romantic trysts—it doesn’t mean a damned thing! She’s still a frigid little member of the ton, just like her impoverished parents.”
Nicholas was a bit shocked. He knew that once the day was over and the dust had settled, Brent would return to his normal, jovial self. But what sparked his interest was more what his brother had just mentioned about Ania Cromwell. Perhaps that natural curiosity she seemed to have would bode well for them both in the bedroom and out; he admired an inquisitive mind and always found that the more intelligent a lady was, the more inventive she was in the bedroom.
“I say, Brent, you’ve gone quite sour. What if I asked you to manage my estate?” Nicholas asked.
His brother’s light blue eyes lit up. “You mean it, Nick?”
“Yes. I can’t be bothered with any of that, and you know all the ins and outs of it. You will be my right-hand man. I’ll have enough on my hands with this impending family you know Lord and Lady Connols will want me to start right away.”
His brother nodded slowly. “That will leave me free to read, and everything else. Nick, it would be an honor.”
Nicholas let out a sigh of relief. His brother’s face had returned to its normal, serene expression, and the tumultuous world around them returned to its epicenter on them both. Finally, they had narrowed down the fallout after the disaster to just the two of them. While it had affected them, surely it would affect no one else.
Surely.
* * *
From the edited version of the Illustrated Lady’s serial:
The Princess and the Pirate
The pirate’s hands closed roughly around the breadth of her hips, and Marguerite gasped, equal parts outraged and excited at what was happening. Ever since three days ago, when she had been taken prisoner aboard the ship, she had been unable to ignore the handsome captain’s dark blue eyes and chiseled chin. It was only the fact that he was a damnable scoundrel who had robbed her father’s ship of goods that kept Marguerite from pursuing all manner of indecent thoughts whenever he strode into a room.
At first, she had hated him most acutely. But ever since he had unchained her from the bottom bunk below deck and begun treating her like the lady she was, she had allowed herself to see a gentlemanly side to him that she had not considered him capable of. That was true, until she had demanded a better dinner and he had flown into a rage, calling her a snob and a half.
How dare he? How dare the scoundrel? If he knew, if he only knew, how hard she had had to work to achieve her manners after her mother had died in the fire she, Marguerite had caused. And although she had done it escaping from the terrible truth about her father, she still blamed herself for it every single day of her life. So what right had he to judge her for everything that she had accomplished?
“You think you know me,” Marguerite hissed fearlessly into the pirate’s face. “But you know nothing about me.”
“And you think you know me?” he demanded to know.
“I know honorless swine when I see it,” Marguerite replied and watched his blue eyes darken until she was sure she had gone a step too far and this, surely, would cost her her life. After all, heavens only knew what they had done to her father; she had not seen him in days, and for all she knew, they had made him walk the plank ages ago. She swallowed a lump as the pirate’s face began to bear all the signs of his exploding his anger on her.
“Where do you get off saying I have no honor?” he finally asked her, and for the first time, Marguerite considered that she may have actually wounded his pride. Who would have thought a scoundrel capable of such an emotion?
The pirate’s hands moved from her hips to tangle with the small fingers of her equally small hands. At first, Marguerite could barely breathe, since she thought he was going to pull her towards him, but quickly realized he was taking her somewhere. She tried to staunch the foolish thumping of her foolish girl heart as they rushed past the crew, who were at this point roaring drunk and beyond the point of caring that their captain was carrying on with the booty. So to speak.
He led her deep into the bowels of the ship to a door that was locked. From the belt on his own deliciously slender hip, from which Marguerite found it difficult to draw her eyes away, he procured a key, which he proceeded to fit into the lock, rusted by the dampness in the deepest part of the ship. Terrified of what lay beyond the door, Marguerite held her breath as she heard a low moan emanate from behind it, but the captain fearlessly pushed it open.
There, in the deep dark through which not even the light from the flickering torch the pirate captain brandished like a weapon could pierce, something shifted. A wave of fear passed over Marguerite and she drew closer to the pirate, clasping her hands around his arm, her terror so acute that she barely noticed the bulge of muscle beneath her palms as she gripped the
captain for dear life. A shape was emerging from the depths of the shadows, a hunched-over, lumbering shape that looked sickly like the nightmares Marguerite had suffered soon after her mother’s death.
Death, death, it was Death who was coming from the depths!
But quite suddenly, just like that, the face of the great monster from the dark was coming into the small pool of light and its features were arranging themselves into some semblance of a face, and not just any face, but a familiar one at that. With an audible gasp, Marguerite realized who it was that was coming at the pair of them from this great hidden part of the pirate ship.
“Papa?” she asked, hardly believing it to be true.
Oh, but she would remember that moment for the rest of her life. The way she and her father gripped each other, sagging with relief at knowing that they were not lost to each other forever. The way her mind filled with a spreading pool of calm for now she knew that she would not have to search the whole world through to find him, that he was not lost to her the way her mother was lost, that at the very least, she had not destroyed both of her parents within a year of each other.
It was, after all, her fault her father’s ship had been captured in the first place.
Long after, after she had convinced the pirate captain to update her father’s lodgings from the straw he was currently on to a rudimentary, but far more comfortable bed, that Marguerite realized why her father had been hidden away at all. He was the one man aboard his entire ship who knew the secret of the coveted Black Pearl necklace. The pirate captain had hidden him away to learn his secrets for himself, and the thought of it filled her with a simmering rage.
Back in his captain’s cabin, the pirate set down the torch, allowing for a small golden pool of light to gather at the center of the room. He made no motion to indicate to Marguerite what she should do with herself, and seemed, in fact, to be ignoring her completely. She held her breath as he stripped off his greatcoat, unbuckled his sword from his narrow waist, and began to unbutton his shirt, quite as if he had forgotten she was in the room at all.
“Why did you show me where you had hidden my father?” she asked.
The captain looked exhausted and took a few moments to answer her. “Because you were worried about him.”
“Yes, but now I can tell the whole crew where he is. I doubt they would be happy to learn that despite the fact that they thought he perished with his ship, he is actually alive and well, and so is the secret he keeps.”
“So you think that I kept him alive just to learn of the Black Pearl?” the captain asked, peering into her face a little too closely for comfort.
“Yes.”
“Do you really think me so ignoble, Marguerite?” he said softly, coming closer to her, so that she could feel the warmth of his chest on hers, could see clearly the dark stubble on his chin. Quite suddenly, she found herself possessed of the silly notion that it might feel quite nice against the palm of her hand, and if it would feel good there, it would feel good in some other places of her anatomy, as well. How she wished that part of her brain would go and shut up!
“Do you really think me such a monster that the only reason I would save a man from drowning would be for the worth of his knowledge rather than the fact that he is a human being?” the captain continued, locking eyes with her. “Perhaps this proves that even a pirate is human sometimes, too.”
She did not know how it happened, she only knew that his lips were soft on hers. She felt the blood rush from her head as he wrapped a solid arm around her waist and pressed her middle to his, working her mouth with a gentle savagery that made her want to scream. That kiss said many things, told many tales of desire, of longing looks drawn out for days, but most of all, it told the story of just how human the pirate captain truly was.
Human enough to simply save her father, god enough to make her swoon.
She could hardly believe this was she, with her arms closing around the muscles of his arms and shoulders, nails digging in and eliciting a deep growl from his tender throat. What had she done to deserve to feel this wonderful, this alive? He drew back from her, bit his lower lip, and Marguerite ceased to think altogether. Scarcely knowing where her boldness drew its source, she leaned forward and licked his sensuous bottom lip, and felt his tongue flick out in response. As she melted completely into his body, curiosity overtook her and she opened her eyes to find that his blue ones were watching her already. She almost drew back in her shock, but his arms kept her locked there, tongue parrying with hers until she lolled in his arms, a completely willing doll.
“Then again,” he whispered softy against her neck and he scattered kisses there, “maybe I saved him for all the wrong reasons, anyway.”
* * *
Ania leisurely wrote the last few lines while Margaret paced impatiently behind her. She never seemed to mind the ink splotches on her fingers as much as her mother did, but then, she did not pay attention to the same things her mother did and was a different creature entirely. Although she did a good enough job pretending that for the most part, her parents left her alone. Which was quite the splendid stroke of luck, she thought.
“Would you hurry up?” Margaret cried, exasperated at last at her sister.
“You cannot rush genius,” Ania told her wryly, with no hint of elitism at all in her voice. Margaret made a face at her and Ania almost laughed aloud. They both knew that in sharing this particular secret of Ania’s, they were both extremely privileged. Ania because it allowed her to express herself freely in a way that would never be accepted in the ton, and Margaret because it allowed her to one-up the parents who had managed to decimate the family fortune and leave her with extremely diminished prospects for a husband. Both women were now left with the role of having to save their parents from ruin, rather than being celebrated for their wit and personality.
“How do you get your ideas, anyway?” Margaret asked, reading over the last few lines Ania had written, waving the papers in the air to dry the ink.
“You would be surprised at how our neighbors and friends do carry on, my dear,” Ania answered, winking at her sister mischievously. “Why, half the time, they’re not so much ideas from my head as they are careful observations of what goes on in the terrace gardens during each society ball.”
“You mean the bouncing rosemary bushes....really bounce?” asked Margaret, and the two of them collapsed laughing onto the desk chair.
At that point, Crusoe, the manservant, came in to announce that one Lord Turnquist had arrived to call upon Margaret Cromwell and that Lord and Lady Cromwell wished to have a word with their eldest daughter. Margaret quickly gathered up the loose papers on the writing desk and bound them together with a satin ribbon just in the nick of time, as the doors to Ania’s office chambers burst open and her mother and father strode in.
Strode would be far too confident a way to describe their stride, surely. They looked a bit worse for wear, given the news of the last few days, and Ania could imagine why. As she shooed Margaret out of the room, she felt a sense of foreboding that left her quite sure that her hopes of late that perhaps the new Duke of Connols might have re-thought his decision to accept a brand new bride with his brand new estate and title.
In the sitting room, Margaret greeted her visitor. It was truly a testament to her parent’s huge self-interest that they did not notice these semi-frequent visits of the town’s most isolated gentleman. While many knew him as a convinced bachelor and patron of the arts, few knew him as the sisters Cromwell did, which meant that nobody knew that Lord Turnquist was actually Mr. David Thunrow, editor-in-chief of the mostly widely circulating underground paper amongst the ton. She had first met him when her sister had let her in on the little deception she had going and was unable to deliver her weekly manuscript herself. Margaret took it as a sign of great trust that her sister had been willing to let her in on the whole ruse, and that she had entrusted the precious papers into her hands.
What Margaret had not been expecting, ho
wever, was Lord Turnquist himself. Young, brashly blond, with snapping brown eyes, a narrow nose, and enough energy to work an entire farm all on his lonesome, he was both younger and more attractive than Margaret had been expecting. More than that, he paid attention to what Margaret had to say, which was unusual for her, especially when she was living in Ania’s shadow. Her sister, with her light brown curls that lit up in the sun and huge green eyes that were shaped rather like a cat’s, had no idea how attractive she was, especially when she began to talk; while both of the sisters were known for their wit and attractiveness, it was Ania who people were drawn to. Gentlemen, had she noticed them at all, always filled her dance card and seemed content enough to hear her chatter on. Margaret supposed it was because her ideas and connections about the world and theories were so unusual, even for an educated lady, whereas Margaret’s wit was drier, harder to draw out.
But David never made her feel that way. Since that first day, he had engaged her in conversation based on what she thought not only about her sister’s writing, but how she viewed the roles of both genders in the large functioning society. When he talked, Margaret often found herself a bit dazed and leaning forward as if hoping to catch every word that came out of his mouth. She hardly noticed that as time passed, she began to look forward to each one of the visits that he bestowed upon them, under the guise of calling upon her, and that she would take special pains with her gown and honey-colored hair, her most attractive feature.
Today, she had chosen a plum-colored gown that accentuated her waist and gave her hair quite a sheen. In the sitting room, Lord Turnquist was turning the pages of one of Lord Cromwell’s books; when he heard her enter, he raised his head and his face broke out into a wide smile. Margaret wondered when the room had become quite so light and why she was unable to hold his eye for long.
“How did you find the map-drawing this week, Margaret?’ he queried. They hid the nature of the papers from the busy ears of the servants under the guise of semi-regular cartography lessons. Pulling the ribbon from the sheaf she had just handed him, Lord Turnquist perused the papers quickly, getting a taste of the latest installment of the series he had commissioned from Ania. “Ah, I see that as always, you are progressing quite splendidly in your studies,” he said to Margaret in code, but she found herself blushing anyway, as if it truly was her work on the papers he held in between his square, strong fingers, and not the work of her older sister.