Seduced by a Pirate

FOUR

Griffin kept telling himself that he wouldn’t recognize his own wife. There was something swashbuckling about that notion, he thought, something that took the edge off the way he felt.

Not that he could put into words precisely how he felt, other than that his stomach got this rocky only in the most choppy of seas.

By the time his hired carriage trundled up the rather long road that led to his house—a house he’d never seen but had apparently acquired eight years ago—and finally stopped, he would have described himself as irritable.

Pirates didn’t have nerves, damn it.

Out of the carriage, he adjusted the ruffled linen at his wrists. He had dressed particularly magnificently, in a coat of Prussian blue with silver buttons. His breeches fit like a glove, and his boots were made by Hoby.

Inasmuch as he had to limp in the door, he reckoned he might as well look as good as possible doing it.

It seemed he owned a comfortable, sprawling mansion, which stood on a small hill looking over Somerset countryside. Its mellow brick had weathered to a rosy orange. In the distance he could see fruit orchards and fields spreading out to the sides. It was a working farm, then, not a nobleman’s estate. It was large and imposing, but not extravagantly so.

As unlike the house he’d grown up in—the country estate of a viscount fiercely aware of his place in the hierarchy of the peerage—as could be imagined.

This was a house designed for a family, though of course that was not the case.

Maybe Poppy had brought her family to live with her? He vaguely recollected that she had a great number of siblings. Merchants generally had many children.

Shark came around the carriage, holding Griffin’s cane. “Would you like me to summon the butler so he can have you carried in on a litter?”

Griffin glanced at him. “Stuff it, Shark.”

Didn’t it say it all that Griffin couldn’t make it to his own bloody front door without a cane? For all his was mahogany topped with a dull ruby, and hid in its innards a vicious blade, in the end it was an old man’s stick.

Pride goeth before a fall, he thought, hobbling toward the front door. And damn it, he had been proud. He’d racketed around the world, collecting pirate’s booty and investing it. Rather surprisingly, money made money. It turned out that timber made money, as did spice, and birdcages, and whatever else he and James felt like picking up and shipping to a different part of the world.

But then a pirate had slit his cousin’s throat and almost killed him, and the same man had slashed Griffin’s thigh. And James had realized he was still in love with his wife, and decided to return to England. There was no such realization in store for Griffin, since he had known his wife for precisely one day. But he did know that a pirate with a game leg is a soon-to-be-dead pirate, which was just as important an insight.

He’d come home because he couldn’t think of another bloody thing to do. He had travelled the world. He had made a fortune eight or nine times over. Nothing left but waiting for the grave, he thought grimly.

As he stumped his way to the bottom of the steps, the front door swung open. Griffin straightened, expecting a butler to materialize, but the shadowy entryway appeared to be empty.

He glanced at Shark with a raised eyebrow. Shark fit into the sleepy green landscape around them about as well as a mastiff at a tea party.

Best not go in,” he said now. “Might be an ambush.”

Griffin snorted and hauled himself up the steps. If his leg didn’t improve, he’d probably find himself killing people just to relieve his own irritation.

The entryway was deserted. It was large and gracious, with a marble staircase that curved gently up and then to the left. Not bad, he thought. But where on earth were the servants?

A noise came from somewhere behind them, just a scrabble. They hadn’t been retired from the sea long enough to dull their reflexes; Shark drew his dagger in one smooth movement, swinging about to put his back against the wall. Griffin flung the door shut, poised to unsheathe the blade concealed in his cane.

A small boy had been crouching behind that door. A boy clutching a wooden sword and wearing an eye patch.

After fourteen years at sea, Griffin knew a pirate when he saw one. This one’s visible eye was wide, and his chest rose and fell with gusty breaths.

Griffin hadn’t been around children much . . . ever. He stood staring down at the boy for a moment before he snapped, “For God’s sake, Shark, put your blade away.”

The boy couldn’t be more than five or six, and he was clearly scared out of his wits. But his lips firmed and he pushed himself to his feet. His knees were scabbed and smeared with dirt, but he was obviously well-born.

Mama won’t want you here,” he said, just as Griffin was trying to figure out whether he should say Ahoy, mate.

But we’re pirates,” Griffin said, suppressing a grin. “She must like them, since she has you.”

Cautiously, the boy slid an inch or two to his right, obviously planning to make a run for it.

Griffin jerked his head at Shark, who stepped back. But the child didn’t move any further. He was a brave little thing.

Where’s your butler?” Griffin asked.

We haven’t got one,” the boy replied. “We don’t need one, because no one comes to call except our friends.” His eyes narrowed a bit. “You aren’t friends, so you shouldn’t be here.”

There must be some mistake, Griffin thought. Was the address his agent had given him incorrect? Though that was hard to understand; he could see the card in his mind’s eye: Arbor House, Somerset.

Is this Arbor House?” he asked.

No, it isn’t!” the boy shouted, and then he ran full tilt, disappearing through a door at the back of the entry.

We’ve made a mistake with the address,” Griffin said, somewhat relieved. “The child’s mother can give us proper direction so we can find—”

He broke off. Shark was regarding him with a distinct trace of pity in his eyes.

Griffin’s next words were unrepeatable.

I was sitting on the box, you see,” Shark said. “I seen the sign, clear as can be. It said Arbor House.”

Griffin felt as if someone had given him a kick in the stomach. It seemed . . .

It’s not as if you kept yourself pure as a lily,” Shark said, interrupting that thought.

Keep to your place, for God’s sake,” Griffin said with a scowl.

Shark shook his head. “You was having a fine time; she’s got the same right.”

I don’t see it that way,” Griffin said tightly.

Yer title doesn’t give you the right to be an ass.”

Griffin shot him a look, and Shark finally shut up. Griffin had allowed his men wide latitude—but in the end he, and he alone, was captain.

He limped across the entry and pushed open the nearest door, discovering an empty sitting room. It was rather lovely, hung with watered silk and a painting of the Thames that was as beautiful as any he’d seen.

But there were also piles of books, and a group of soft chairs before the fireplace where a chessboard lay waiting to be used. Someone had tossed embroidery to the side, and a piece of knitting had fallen to the floor.

Even more telling, a toy ship lay on its side, surrounded by a scatter of tin soldiers. The ship was flying a tiny Jolly Roger.

His wife had moved on.

She can’t have married someone else,” he muttered, half to himself. “I would know. Pettigrew would have told me. She’d have to have declared me dead.”

No sign of a man,” Shark said from his right shoulder. “The little one and herself, I’d guess. No pipe. No brandy.” He nodded toward the side table. “That’s sherry.”

Don’t spit,” Griffin said. “Spitting is not allowed in a gentleman’s house.”

I wasn’t going to spit,” Shark said, offended. He’d spent the last two months soaking up all the information he could from a sailor who had once worked in a noble residence. “I’m just saying that yer missus has got a child, but she don’t—doesn’t—have a man.”

Or she hasn’t brought him into the house,” Griffin said, through clenched teeth.

He backed into the hall again. The next two doors opened, respectively, into a dining room and a small, very feminine sitting room.

The fourth door—the one the boy had fled through—opened, unexpectedly, into a courtyard shaped by two backward-extending wings of the house. It was charming, paved in uneven bricks, with a couple of trees providing shade. On the far side he could see a broad lawn spreading down to a lake.

There he goes,” Shark said, laughter rolling in his voice.

A small figure was tearing down the hill, his legs pumping. At the water’s edge, there was a flutter of white skirts and a parasol.

Griffin stepped forward into the courtyard but immediately realized he couldn’t walk to the lake. By the time he reached the bottom of that hill, he’d be sweating and shaking. His leg was already throbbing, thanks to the steps leading to the front door.

You can sit over there,” Shark said, jerking his head toward a table with a crowd of serviceable chairs. It stood to the side of the courtyard under the shade of a spreading oak tree. Griffin sank into a chair with a sigh of relief.

For some time, nothing happened.

They sat and listened to birds singing. At sea, the ship was accompanied by seagulls’ wild shrieks. By comparison, these birds sang Mozart arias, speaking to each other in trills and tremolos, performing elaborate courtship dances on the branches over their heads.

Minutes passed. Apparently, Poppy had paid no heed to the boy, who by now must have told her that pirates had taken over the house. You could hardly blame her for ignoring his nonsense. Yet it wasn’t safe to have a house open like this, a house without, as far as he could see, any male servants. What if robbers stopped by? Marauders?

After a while he couldn’t take it any longer. “See if she’s coming,” he growled at Shark. “And if she isn’t, step down the hill and ask her if she would be so kind as to greet her husband.”

Shark walked over and looked toward the lake. “She’s coming up the hill,” he said. Then: “You never mentioned your missus was such an eyeful.”

Griffin narrowed his eyes, and Shark shut his mouth, retreating to a chair.

He should probably send the man off to the servants’ quarters, except there didn’t seem to be any servants. And Shark would undoubtedly send the cook into hysterics if he strolled in without introduction. The saber scar on his chin lent him a particularly ferocious air.

Griffin sighed and pounded his aching thigh again. Shark had no need to remind him that Poppy was beautiful. Her face was pretty much the only thing he remembered about their wedding night. There he had been, all of seventeen years old and skinny as a twig, whereas she had been an older woman of twenty: exquisite, shapely, utterly beautiful. Terrifying.

The outcome was hardly unexpected.

He’d left a virgin wife behind, though it appeared she hadn’t stayed that way. The wave of anger he felt was unfair to her, and he knew it. A man couldn’t leave for fourteen years and expect his wife to remain faithful.

Though wasn’t Penelope faithful to Odysseus?

Odysseus probably satisfied his wife before he took off for war. Likely gave her some children. Griffin had read Homer’s tale so long ago that he couldn’t quite remember.

Still, he had never imagined that his wife might take those unconsummated wedding vows as lightly as he himself had. That she might have a child. A son. A boy who would inherit his title and be viscount someday.

He’d stayed at sea for years precisely because he loathed his father’s obsession with titles, nobility, standing, et cetera. He couldn’t start caring about that claptrap now.

Where the hell was the boy’s father? The pirate was a smart, scrappy little fellow who likely hadn’t been told he was a bastard. He would learn that later, in school.

Actually, he wouldn’t, because the pirate wasn’t illegitimate. He was born within the bounds of marriage; in fact, he stood to inherit a viscountcy. Griffin’s mouth tightened.

A smaller version of himself in more ways than one.

You’d better not swear like that in front of yer wife,” Shark observed. “She won’t like it.”