Sophia looked to Laura who was finishing her tea.
“If Laura doesn’t mind…”
“Not at all. I have my easel here. I shall be happy so long as the light remains good. You go and I’ll paint – but don’t elope.”
She felt the color drain from her face. Laura noticed and laughed.
“Oh, you do take things too seriously! All I meant was be sure you’re back in plenty of time to get ready for the Hoyle’s dinner party tonight.”
Outside, the salt-tinged air mixed with the fragrant scent of flowers in bloom, and she breathed it in with relief.
“I hadn’t realized how much tobacco stank until I smelled what the envoy’s men were smoking,” she said as they walked down a shell grit path out to the street.
“It’s shisha,” said Kit. “The tobacco is mixed with molasses and vaporized in the nargiles.”
“You seem to know a lot about it.
“I’ve been exposed to it.”
Kit half-smiled and put a hand at her back to urge her safely by an approaching donkey and cart. “I see your curiosity has returned. Well, now I’m at your disposal. By the end of today, you’ll understand my cloak and dagger mystery.”
*
He had been up since dawn readying himself for Sophia’s inevitable questions. He promised he would answer them and he would. He would simply approach it as an academic exercise – something as dead and harmless as the ancient civilizations she researched. As long as the questions never touched on the personal, he could answer them without damage to his soul.
Palermo had suddenly become stifling with Selim Omar in residence – the stench of the nargile was only one of the impositions that grated on him. Kit couldn’t be certain – not with any evidence that would satisfy Bentinck, at any rate – but he was sure the Calliope and her crew were being watched.
More importantly, he suspected Sophia and her cousin were being watched also. He had half-thought about mentioning it to Samuel Cappleman and Jonas Fenton but the professor was too focused on his antiquities – Kit suspected he would struggle to identify the present year. Cappleman was a babe in the woods – so intent on his Grand Tour, so eager to sample the delights of other cultures, he was heedless to the dangers.
And there were many, which was the reason he had suggested a week-long trip to Catallus. The island contained just a small fishing village but possessed a wealth of unexploited ruins to keep the antiquarian and his assistant happy – and safer. Besides, the fishing had been poor recently, and any payment Jonas offered for laborers would be welcomed by the islanders.
“Captain aboard!”
He nodded to the day watch and directed Sophia to his quarters. He opened the cabinet holding blue leather-bound logs, different to the oxblood red journals that identified the Calliope’s naval records. He withdrew one and placed it on the mapping table in front of Sophia.
“I’m sure this will create more questions than answers, but it’s a place to start.” After a moment’s hesitation, he dropped a hand on her shoulder. “I’m going topside to talk to Elias.”
There was more than just business that took him back on deck. He didn’t want to see Sophia’s face as she read the accounts for herself, nor did he need to see what was in those volumes again. It was he who’d personally written down the names and details of those rescued.
Some of them were so traumatized that it took days to simply get a name and home village out of them. But others needed to talk – it was a soul-cleansing catharsis in which they recounted their mistreatment and terror. They told their stories and he would listen. Some seemed relieved he didn’t recoil in horror. Kit imagined others would later on. It would be a strong person who didn’t weep or throw up at their tales. But he understood – oh, how he understood.
“It would have been easier to just tell her you were a pirate,” noted Elias, moving over slightly so Kit could take a look at the charts he was examining.
Kit ignored the comment and focused his attention to the map.
“What are our options?”
“I’m going through Jonathan’s notes. He’s going to be missed on this voyage, but he’s left us a lot to work with. Starting on Catallus puts us within a day’s reach of both Tunis and Pantelleria.”
“Good. Our strike will have to be lightning fast – no hanging around to see the damage. It will have to be accurate from the first fusillade.”
“Well, we’re ready. The men have been practicing with the cannon. Even in full tacking maneuvers, we’re down to less than eleven minutes. Have you given any thought to that Greek fire concoction Miss Green told you about?”
He hadn’t. His nights were filled with dreams of Sophia but, in them, he was not exploring her mind. He wasn’t going to confess to that.
“No, but I take it you have been thinking about it?” he replied instead.
Elias shrugged. “I’ve been trying to break it down based on the characteristics she described. I’m working on it with Giorgio. We have some ideas we’re going to test on Catallus.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sophia closed the volume, her throat dry and her chest heavy. There were more than three hundred entries written in the journal. Most merely recorded the location found, and name, approximate age, and place of origin – if still recalled – plus a physical description. They were men, woman and children – the youngest a child of four years.
About twenty entries were detailed; some of the stories spanned whole pages. The narrative was bald, almost clinical, but the dispassion with which their accounts were told did not lessen the horror.
There were children who had watched resisting parents slaughtered before them; men beaten, starved, and chained to the oars of galiots, in some cases for years. Women – nay, some of them young girls not much older than nine years – sold like cattle to men who raped them; worse, many were passed around the camps and tortured. And young boys too were sodomized and prostituted.
Sophia rose from the table and brought a linen to her eye to dry her tears. From the window of the cabin, she saw the busy dock and the city beyond it. How could the city and its people go on while someone was doing that to another human being, another child of God? She felt as Eve must have done after she had eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In doing so, she knew evil, and now Sophia wondered whether she could ever know good again.
The door opened behind her. She saw Kit in the window’s reflection. He stopped and appeared to study her.
“Now you understand why we do what we do,” he said quietly. Sophia’s outrage erupted in anger.
“Why you? Why aren’t the mightiest armies of the world stopping this evil? We have passed bills in our very own Parliament abolishing the slave trade and the forcible transportation of Africans from their rightful homes, and we do not protect our own citizens from predation?”
Kit sighed and leaned against the door jamb; Sophia faced him.
“I can’t answer for governments, kings and presidents,” he told her. “I’m a humble sailor. Occasionally, the British, the French, the Dutch and the Americans will send in ships to prevent the raids, but it will take a full army’s occupation of North Africa to stop it completely – at least that’s what Lord William thinks.”
“Why you?” she asked again, but this time her voice was a whisper.
Kit came to her.
“Because someone has to.”
His hands rested on her shoulders, rubbing them gently. Her eyes widened as she remembered.
“The cannon. I saw it right in the officers’ dining room. I thought I must have dreamed it.”
Kit grinned.
“No one expects a ship our size to carry that level of firepower. I had a lift built running right up the Calliope’s amidships. We can stop vessels three times our size with a cannon that big. And on our last ship, we did – and still had enough space in the hold to take a sizable haul of gold.”
Sophia frowned as she worked out what he was not tel
ling her.
“The Calliope is more than a merchant vessel,” said Kit. “And I make no apologies for taking plunder. However, that makes her an outlaw. Bentinck tolerates what we do because I give him intelligence from along the African Coast, although he will refuse to acknowledge it officially if we’re caught.”
“Who is Kaddouri?” she asked and a silence stretched out between them. “I overheard you talking to the priest in Lisbon.”
More silence. The look in his eyes was hard and, for a moment, he seemed far away from her.
“Kaddouri is the man I’m going to kill.”
*
She had turned away at his words. He stared at her lustrous hair, black as a raven’s wing, but he needed to see her face. He knew what she was thinking – her ashen face had told him what she read in the journal disturbed her.
No sane person could read it and not be disturbed. The fact that reports of such brutality no longer disturbed him said a lot about his sanity.
His crew and the discipline of staging successful raids was the only reason why he was here today. If he could martial his rage and his helplessness into something useful, it would at least prove his misbegotten life had purpose.
Now, he had introduced Sophia into his mess and he hoped she was stronger than he. Kit needed her to hold on to her sweetness to help connect him to the world outside of the darkness he inhabited.
Sophia’s expression was closed to him. He was losing her, as though she was being pulled away from him on a riptide. He had to make her understand, so if she could not love him, she at least would not hate him.
Kit turned to his collection of maps and unfolded one. Sicily sat to the west, Crete to the east, the coasts of Tunisia and Libya filled the bottom. Across it were handwritten annotations: dates and numbers corresponding to the number of people taken or killed.
“The churches keep records of dates and places. They also collect money for ransoms, but it’s never enough,” he said. “Our trading business puts us in the same waters. Sometimes, we go looking for trouble, sometimes trouble looks for us.”
“Is this Kaddouri responsible for all these people?” she asked.
“Some. Not all. But too many.”
“Why him? Why Kaddouri above all these pirates?”
“Because I’m just one man and the Calliope is just one ship?” Kit made an attempt at levity to bring her back to safer waters. Judging by her expression, it was not something he was going to get away with.
“I didn’t pick this fight, but over the years it’s become personal.”
And it was the truth. He watched Sophia mull over it anyway, weighing up how much he could be trusted, no doubt. After a lengthy silence, she nodded slowly.
“How can I help you?”
The answer was more than he dared hope. Kit looked deep into her eyes. He indulged himself, touching her cheek and feeling it radiate with heat.
“Save me, bella,” he whispered. “I’ve lived in the darkness for so long I had forgotten there was light. I’m afraid of losing my humanity. I need you to help me find it again.”
He felt Sophia’s arms around him like a lifeline. He grasped eagerly and held on, enfolding her into his embrace.
*
Sophia held him close and breathed in deep. Kit’s vulnerability touched her deeply, along with a horrifying realization – he’d been a slave.
She closed her eyes as she recalled the testimony she read of a ten-year-old boy scarred and brutalized, and all of a sudden she could see Kit at that age. A compassion she didn’t know she possessed flooded her being.
At that moment, she felt she understood him better. He was a man trying to reconcile his past, forever trying to rescue the boy he had once been.
She squeezed his shoulders and looked at him – the man she had come to know in such a short space of time. There seemed nothing of helplessness here. His face was that of a man, the lines around his eyes and mouth were witness to both laughter and tears. She felt the muscles of his arms as she ran her hands down them. Strong arms, but they held her tenderly. His legs braced against hers were firm.
As though sensing her next thoughts, he leaned in to kiss her and it was with the passion she remembered at the embassy party. He plundered her mouth and she surrendered herself to it, allowing him to take what he needed from her while she was swept along with the tide.
Then she stopped.
“What?” he asked, sensing her reluctance. A marriage in name only. To buy her silence. Suddenly the deal didn’t sound so good.
“A marriage in name only?” she repeated out loud.
“Ah… I did say that, didn’t I?”
“You also said you were courting me – which is it to be, Captain?”
A feline grin spread across his face as he picked up on her tease.
“I was trying not to frighten you off with my unconventional form of lovemaking,” he said.
“I was raised in a convent. I wouldn’t know the difference between conventional and unconventional.”
Kit pivoted on his heel causing her to dip alarmingly. She scrambled for purchase on his shirt and found herself pressed against the full length of his body, leg to leg, hip to hip, chest to chest. Then he leaned in to make her cling to him more firmly and spoke into her ear.
“That puts me at a distinct advantage, wouldn’t you say?”
Then he waited in a position which couldn’t have been comfortable. And she waited.
“If I told you all the things going through my head right now, you would run and not look back – and I would let you,” he said.
“You don’t frighten me.”
“Maybe it’s me who’s frightened,” he said sardonically.
Sophia found her footing and pushed against him so they both stood. She settled a finger to his lips.
“You see only the darkness in you,” she said. “I see something else. I see a good man, a brave man, an honorable man. Your men see it, too. That’s why they’d follow you to the ends of the earth. They love you in their way, as I’m beginning to love you in mine.”
Kit’s eyes slowly closed. She caught a glimpse of emotion behind them before the lids closed. Had no one ever told him that? The image of the boy from the journal came to her once more.
“Help me to see the world through your eyes, Sophia.”
She pulled him into her embrace once more, frightened by the intensity of her feelings.
“‘And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch’,” she muttered.
He embraced her.
“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”
“Oh yes. I think we are.”
His hand traced slow circles along her back, teasing traces of sensation.
“So you’re not interested in a marriage in name only, Miss Bluestocking?”
“Hmmm.” Sophia closed her eyes as those fingers stroked her nape beneath the roll of her hair.
“So as far as you’re concerned, this is a real marriage?” His question was punctuated with open kisses across her cheeks and then to her ear, sending tingles down her back where his breath eddied. Sophia sighed with the pleasure of it.
“Have you appreciated what that means?” he asked. “A real marriage?” His hands swept down her back and pressed her closer to him so she felt his erection and a warmth grew between her legs in response.
“Have you ever given thought to what it means – ‘two become one flesh’, the joining?”
“You talk too much.”
“You’re right. I should use my mouth for other things.”
And he did, finding hers and kissing deeply; their tongues mated, sampling one another. Sophia felt goose bumps rush up her waist, following the trace of his hand as they settled beside her breasts, his thumbs leading the way across them, growing heavy and aching with anticipation.
Every sense seemed more acute. Sophia became aware of the sound of Kit’s harsh breathing – and her own, the smell of spice on his skin. His lips dropped
lower onto her neck and his hands fell fully on her breasts, thumbs flicking over her nipples.
“Kit,” she breathed.
“There will be no going back after this for either of us, Sophia,” he said.
“Make me your wife,” she whispered, leaning into him further. She heard a groan and his fingers pushed down the neckline of her gown, exposing more of her breasts to his touch. She opened her eyes and saw those sun-browned fingers hesitate.
His lips left hers. He rested his head on her forehead, his breathing heavy.
Still surging with emotion, tears welled in Sophia’s eyes. Why had he stopped? Was there something wrong with her? Two hands cupped her cheeks tenderly and raised her face.
“I want you and desire you more than I crave air. To take you to my bed, to touch you… I…” his breath hitched, then he exhaled. “You’re one of the few decent things in my life. I’ve never courted a woman – let alone loved one completely.”
Sophia’s lip trembled at his soul-searching kiss. One hand left her face and reached for the chain around her neck that held the gold ring he gave her.
“Against my baser nature, I want to wait. I want you to be free to wear my ring openly. I want you to be proud to be my wife. I want to shout from the rooftops that you’re mine. Let me honor and cherish you as you deserve. Let me win your love openly, Sophia, for all the world to see. Not in some secret midnight affair. Give me the chance to truly be the man you see when I look in your eyes.”
“Kit…” she heard the longing in her voice.
Kit raised her hands to his lips and kissed them.
“I’ve done so many wrong things in my life. Please, let me make this one right.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Regency Scandals and Scoundrels Collection Page 155