A | B | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14A | 14B | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30A | 30B | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41A | 41B | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45A | 45B | 46A | 46B | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56A | 56B

---

PART II

---

MAY, 1780
THE DOVECOTE
LONDON, ENGLAND

ELLIOTT COULD NOT have imagined any gift greater than the awe on her face when he told her how he had taken that fleet—unless it was the look he hoped he would garner when he described his next plan.

But there was time for that yet, what with her need to regain her strength. He did not understand the mechanism of this weakness she carried, but everyone had one and most managed somehow. How many sailors had peg legs? How many had hooks for hands? How many had other injuries that kept them from functioning as whole persons, but still did the work of a whole person?

This, he thought, was her pegged leg, and she knew how to manage it.

The coach halted. When he alit and assisted Celia out, they were in an alley. A door opened immediately, spilling light onto the rancid, rotting-food-strewn cobbles. He could not muster any shock when they were led up the servants’ stairs to the fourth floor, shown to a rather spartan room, and an older woman clad in a nearly transparent wrap swept in just behind them and closed the door.

“Jack.”

“Nonny, please do not lecture me. I must eat whilst I have the excuse of a gentleman’s company whom my uncle trusts.”

She gave him the once-over and curled her lip. “I can see why ’e trusts ’im.”

Elliott almost laughed, but Celia growled. “Look at me.”

That was when the madam did, in fact, look at her. She gasped, and put a hand to her mouth. “Begorra, Jack,” she whispered. “Ye’re no bigger’n a spoon!”

“Aye, and as full of life as one, too! Feed me!”

The woman swept back out without a word.

“She knows the details of your circumstance?” Elliott asked as he stepped in front of her and began to untie the ribbons holding her bodice to her stomacher.

“As much as she can whilst I cannot slip out of the house,” Celia grumbled, her head bent to assist him. “I still have not been able to rendezvous with Paulo concerning your return message.”

“Ah, yes, the message bidding me adieu,” he purred, walking around her panniers to pull the gown from her shoulders. “After which,” he grunted as he threw the heavy silk onto the bed, “you proceeded to continue your ruse with no intention of telling me who you were.”

She huffed as she worked at her hoops, and he began to untie her laces. “I was—am—very angry with you and I have so many things storming in my mind, I did not know what to do. Rather, what I wanted to do. And if I did know, which of those things to do first.”

“Ah.”

“But then … ”

“Food.”

“Aye. Additionally, extracting myself from Rathbone House is not without its dangers, and I may have requested your assistance in that as well. But now I have the luxury of time until he’s sent back out to sea.”

“He won’t be assigned a ship,” Elliott said matter-of-factly as he pains­takingly pulled at her laces so that he could slip her stays off and re-dress her without having to re-lace them. “The Admiralty thinks he is still too obsessed with Sarah. And having been outfoxed by Captain Fury twice and vanquished by her once is not a record they care to see in an otherwise brilliant strategist.”

“Not as brilliant as you.”

He grinned. “Arms up.”

It was a struggle to get the garment off, but once it was, he threw it on the bed with the gown and turned back only to gape at her.

“Good God, Celia.”

“Am I so very awful?” she asked in a small voice.

He nodded slowly, still staring, appalled.

The door thumped open and in swept the madam, leading footmen laden with trays of food. She stopped short and stared at Celia as slack-jawed as Elliott had been. “You allowed that?”

Celia shrugged sheepishly and swept her hands down over her muchly reduced bosom and nipped waist. “I … had a debt to pay.”

“Had?”

“’Tis done. I’ll not be back in London once I leave, but now I don’t know when that will be.”

“This is the worst ye’ve been.”

“Aye! I was not under the same roof with the object of my task!” Elliott watched as she went to the table and sat, then began to eat even before the footmen had finished setting out the dishes. “We shall return tomorrow and every night thereafter for … a while. At least until I am back in my usual stays.”

“I should think so,” the madam muttered, then asked him with great pomposity, “An’ who might you be?”

Elliott raised one of his brows. “No one whom you should make an enemy of,” he purred, and smirked when she flushed.

“Well then, Jack, I’ll leave ye to it. I’ll send Phoebe to dress ye when ye want to leave.”

“Now,” Celia said around a mouthful of food. “I want this damned wig off now.”

Elliott decided to sit at the table and share in the repast. Soon enough a comfortably clad woman charged in without knocking, but she stopped short at the sight of him and said, “Looks to me like you’d want yours off, too.”

God, wouldn’t he! But he simply nodded and ignored her shock when his hair tumbled down out of it. “Lawdamercy, who’d’a thought?” she whispered.

But it was Elliott’s turn to be shocked when Celia’s tight braid tumbled out of her wig, and the whore set herself to raveling it. It was a fiery orange in the candlelight, a beacon as strong as this siren’s song. He could not stop staring.

Neither of the women noticed. “Three hours, Phoebe? Wake me at two of the clock, will you, with another meal whilst you dress me?”

She nodded as she finished brushing Celia’s hair. “’Tis my week off, so I’m at your beck and call.”

“Excellent. I’ve no coin with me, but apply to Paulo.”

“Thank you, luv.”

Neither Elliott nor Celia spoke as they ate, but it was not an uncomfortable silence. He was pleased to see her eating slowly, nibbling, taking short rests. It had been some time before he noted that her hands were trembling rather badly.

“You are in a bad way,” he muttered.

She nodded. “Aye. More than even I suspected. It … sometimes sneaks up on me. I thought I was doing well, but then—” She shrugged and sipped at her lemonade. “I don’t understand it. I should have sought your assistance imme­diately, but I was too angry and proud, and now see God’s punishment for it.”

Elliott snorted. “Do not think to cozen me with God’s will or punishment. I know your tricks.”

She snickered.

After another moment spent in contemplation of which of many conver­sations they must have first, he opened his mouth, but shut it when she said:

“Tell me of your family. Aboard the Thunderstorm, you could not wait to get home, but now there is trouble amongst you.”

It was a reasonable request and as good a place to start as any, he supposed. Mayhap the best place. “My father and older brother are dead as you know—” His jaw ground as he looked down at his plate. He did not like to think of it too much.

“You loved them very much?”

He nodded. “Aye,” he muttered. “I— My father was very kind. Though he would not be swayed on the matter of sending me to sea, he regretted having done so as disaster after disaster befell me. He felt the blame lay solely with himself and his pride. After I was released from Newgate, he told me he would give his life to undo what had been done. And then … he did.”

“And your brother? Phillip, was it?”

Elliott nodded and smiled a bit at the memory. “Flip was … fun. He could persuade me and Lucy to mischief we would never have dared, and we spent our childhood causing all sorts of trouble. He never did outgrow it, even though Lucy and I did. My father thought it … amusing, but my mother most definitely did not.” Elliott laughed wryly. “Flip would have been a terrible earl.”

“And your mother, then?”

“My homecoming has not been without difficulty.” Elliott took a deep breath and thought about the weeks since he had made land. “I went home from Newgate a broken man, weak, half mad. But the estate was no less broken than I.” She nodded and he realized, aye, she would understand. “Camille tended me whilst my mother and other sisters tended the estate. I knew what terrible straits it was in—and Flip still spending as if we had any blunt. I knew a way to rebuild the coffers and was angry enough to flout the law once I regained my strength and sanity. My family—well, everyone, the villagers, tenants—were desperate enough to participate in my smuggling and hide it from my father, who would have forced me to stop on pain of reporting me, and my brother, who would have spent it all. My brother-in-law is the local magistrate, so we had another ally there.

“My mother is particularly gifted with money, like yours, and Lucy—my older sister—is particularly gifted at running an estate and capitalizing on the villagers’ skills. Between the two of them, they took what I brought them and made the most of it. I intended to stop once I knew the estate could prosper on its own. I felt I had adequate revenge against the Crown, making the earldom wealthy in spite of the obstacles thrown in its path. The tenants and villagers were fat and happy, so the noblesse oblige was fulfilled. I’d done what I needed to do, so I could go on with my life and spend it how I wanted. I was free. But then I returned from my last cruise to France to find my father and brother dead and my mother nearly so.”

“That is when you went out to make war on Britain?”

He shook his head. “Not quite. I went to Parliament the very next session to take up my new duties. That session, the issue of paying our soldiers’ and mercenaries’ wages came forth, and the pay ship was voted upon. The thought vaguely occurred to me that if Navy protocol held true and if I had a ship big enough I might be able to take the fleet. But it was fantastical thinking and I had no real motive, so I forgot about it—until I found out Lord Kitteridge would be commanding it.”

Celia smiled wryly, but said nothing.

“After that was done, I thought I would come home and put the earldom to rights— Mind, I was not truly paying attention to what my mother and sister were doing. It was enough that they were managing. I was at sea and had bigger worries. The earldom was not one of them.

“But,” he continued, sitting up and devoting himself fully to his meal, “I returned these two months past to find everything done. The manor, repaired and lovely. The grounds, immaculate and producing fruit and vegetables and sheep. The villages— Oh, and there. The village had barely five hundred people when I left, and when I returned, it had nigh a thousand. Now I had twice the number of people whose care was mine, and they were fat and happy, too.”

“Your mother and sister sound like remarkable women,” Celia said softly.

“They are. I cannot fault that. But now Lucy fears I will take her place. My mother is not accustomed to having me about at all, much less as the head of the family. And never mind that I’m the earl, but I am a commander. My father was not one, and was happy to let my mother rule.”

“I see.”

“No, mayhap you do not. My mother—who has been my most staunch sup­port—is now in a power struggle with me that I cannot abide. At the Grange, she and Lucy thought to countermand my orders—”

He was strangely gratified when Celia gasped in horror.

“Aye, you ken. And here— She despises living in London because my staff is mine, and they will not follow her orders no matter how imperious she is. Her phi­losophies, which I have followed for half my life, I have grown to consider naïve. She cannot conceive of a world where a man has no choice in the direction of his life, and our last argument on the subject left her with little reason to speak to me.”

“Oh,” Celia whispered. “She would hold your differing philosophies as a slight to her person?”

“Aye, well, the particular point of contention was over you.”

Her face fell.

“I tried to explain how you, a childless widow, an American, the captain of a ship—and further, a ship of war, an enemy ship—could not or would not come to the Grange to be my countess simply because I wanted that—and fulfill for me the only duty of the earldom left for me to fulfill, which is to have children. She thought your opinion on the matter of little consequence. I pointed out that you would very quickly become unhappy with nothing to do and subject to her whims, but she cannot fathom a woman such as you. Even my headstrong sister, with adult children of her own, obeys her.”

He felt Celia’s pitying stare. “Oh.”

He looked up at her, at this woman who knew his secrets, with whom he could speak so freely, to whom he could lay out the entirety of his troubles, and murmured, “In short, I found my home, that which I have longed to return to all these years, to exist only in my imagination. The people I love don’t know me and, further, they resent my intrusion upon their lives. I am a stranger in a strange land.”

“And you are still obliged to find a countess and beget heirs,” she muttered.

She missed his smile because she was glaring at her plate, but he did not hasten to enlighten her. Instead, he drawled, “Alas. A pirate stole my fiancée.”

She did chuckle reluctantly and said, “Georgina will be doubly grateful to me when she finds out she might have indeed become the recipient of your amorous attentions.”

“God save me from that. Why is she not here running your errands for you, by the bye?”

Celia shot him a look of pure irritation. “She was,” she snapped, “but then Man and Woman somehow found their way to Marquess Rathbone’s home after her former betrothed threw them out of his. I was forced to send her back to Rotterdam, as they would likely not recognize me, but they would for a surety recognize her. Man apparently decided the sea was a more fit companion than his wife and left without a word, but Woman’s continued presence at Rathbone House is another asp in the basket in which I am obliged to lie.”

Elliott burst out laughing and rubbed his mouth. “And you are Cleopatra. Almighty God, what a hash.”

She snarled at him. “If you had told me your name and circumstance when I begged you to, most of this could have been avoided.”

“Aye! Aye! Pax, woman. You were right. I have several grovels in my pocket, do you care to choose which is most to your liking.”

“All of them. Say it again.”

“You were right.” She raised an eyebrow. He rolled his eyes and huffed, but obeyed. “You were right, Captain Jack.”

Celia dropped her fork, sat back, and cackled. “I love hearing that out of your mouth.”

“And I love hearing you laugh. Are you finished eating? May I fuck you now?”

“Nay. But you may rub my arse until I fall asleep.”

---

If you don’t want to wait 2 years to get to the end, you can buy it here.
Pirates!