The Rebel Pirate by Donna Thorland

Author:Donna Thorland
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

Sarah had not seen James Sparhawk for a month. He was more handsome than she remembered. But different. This was not the same man who had talked hulls and hawsers with her father in Salem, who had almost kissed her in an empty parlor and challenged Micah Wild.

This man was every inch the naval officer. His hair was combed and queued, his satin waistcoat smoothly pressed and pin neat, his linen snowy white, his shoes polished and buckles sparkling.

And he was staring at her with dangerous intensity. Instinct told her to defuse it.

“Your wrist has healed,” she said.

“Yes, so it has. Coming here, like this,” he said, his eyes raking her ensemble, “was risky and stupid. What if Hobbs hadn’t shown you directly to the wardroom?”

So much for defusing the tension. “I’m dressed too expensively for an ordinary sailor to proposition,” she said. She had faced down Captain James Sparhawk once before. She could do so again. Of course, she had been holding a pistol at the time.

“You are barely dressed at all. And for that reason—among others—some might not bother with a proposition.”

“I told the captain’s servant that you had sent for me.”

“But I didn’t. What if I hadn’t admitted you?”

“The steward would describe me. Mr. Cheap said that after four weeks’ confinement, you were unlikely to turn down a shapely trollop. It seems he was correct.”

“No, he wasn’t. I was going to give you—her—money to go away.”

“Mr. Cheap suggested that would only happen if you’d found yourself a pretty wench among the crew’s women.” She’d seen them plying their trade between the gun carriages as Hobbs had led her through the main deck, most pleasant but plain, one of them winsome as a Fragonard, bent over a cannon and being tupped silly by a bellowing Yorkshireman. The earthy carnality of the scene had made her pause and flush.

“Mr. Cheap is no doubt an expert on trollops, but I did not engage one,” Sparhawk said, closing the distance between them. “Not even after I was told you were dead.”

The door was already at her back. There was nowhere left to retreat. And suddenly she knew that coming herself had been a mistake, that she should have sent Benji, taken the risk that Sparhawk might not believe a stranger, because she did not have the power to resist this man.

Sparhawk touched her cheek with the hand he had broken saving her brother, trailed his fingers down her throat, between her half-bare breasts, to rest at the top of her stays. His expression was that of a man who had been in an open boat for a week: parched.

“My shade would have been touched by your forbearance,” she said, removing his hand and taking a step to the side. “How is it that I am supposed to have perished?”

He did not pursue her, but his expression told her he was undeterred. “In a fire,” he replied. “When I suspected I might be detained, I sent your father’s pistols and his cutlass—along with money and a letter—north with one of Gage’s actual spies.

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