Chapter 7

THELONDON DOCK WAS TEEMING WITH ACTIVITY,but it was no different from the last time Gabrielle had been there, when she’d set off three years ago for the Caribbean, so confident that she could find her father. The arriving vessels accounted for most of the extra wagons that late in the day, transporting cargoes from ship to warehouse or straight to market. The sounds, the smells were almost familiar, and had so distracted her that she hadn’t seen the cart that had nearly knocked her over, or the man who’d prevented her from falling. Perhaps if she had seen him first, she wouldn’t have been so surprised by the immediate attraction she’d felt, and wouldn’t have made such a blundering fool of herself because of it. Good grief, she’d never in her life behaved so outrageously before, and all he’d tried to do was help her!

Her ship had sailed up the Thames early that morning, but it had taken most of the day before the

passengers were rowed to the dock. She was glad of the late hour. It allowed her to get a room for the night and to delay delivering the letter in her pocket.

Two of her father’s crew were trailing at a discreet distance behind her, the two he trusted most, Richard and Ohr. They’d been sent to England with her to protect her, and to make sure the lord to whom she was delivering the letter complied with the favor her father was requesting of him. The men made two of the most incongruous chaperones imaginable, and yet, if they weren’t accompanying her, she doubted that she would go through with this.

She was to go husband hunting in the grand style favored by the English ton. She’d been sent ahead with her chaperones to get started on a magnificent new wardrobe for that very reason, and to catch the tail end of the summer Season. Her father was in the middle of ransoming two hostages, so he couldn’t leave just yet, but he’d promised to join her in a month or two. She’d argued that she could wait for him. He’d argued that this couldn’t wait. He’d won.

Margery had come as well. It wasn’t surprising that the middle-aged woman had staunchly refused to let her travel to England without areal chaperone, as she put it, but then, unlike Gabrielle, she’d missed their homeland terribly. She’d been excited during the whole trip about finally going home. As soon as they’d reached the dock, she’d rushed off to find them a carriage to hire, no easy task with so many arrivals that day, but she maintained she knew exactly how tonot take no for an answer and it took her only an hour to prove it, which Richard had teased her about all the way to the inn.

Gabrielle tried not to think about what was causing her such apprehension right now. Instead she thought about her time in the Caribbean with her father. Not until recently had either of them considered the disadvantages of her staying in that part of the world with him, that she would be missing all the things a young marriageable Englishwoman should be doing after reaching eighteen. She couldn’t say she regretted it, though. Not for anything would she have missed those wonderful years with her father.

The two men joined her and Margery for dinner and stayed to keep Gabrielle company. Ohr was playing cards with Margery, who had worn herself out with her excitement over being home, so she wasn’t paying much attention to the game or the conversation.

Out of Nathan’s crew, Ohr had been with him the longest. He used a host of fake names, too, as they all did, but Ohr happened to be his real one. If a last name went with it, he never bothered to mention it.

Most people assumed he was calling himself a nautical term when he introduced himself. Gabrielle had certainly thought that herself. Which was why he always volunteered, without being asked, that his name was spelled with anh. That he had the look of a half-breed Oriental, even wore his excessively long black hair in a single braid down his back, kept anyone from questioning it. They merely assumed, without knowing any better, that it was an Oriental name.

Over six feet tall, he had a face that seemed ageless. He mentioned once that his father had been an American who often sailed to the Far East. Ohr had joined the crew of an American ship sailing back to the Western side of the world, with the thought of finding his father, but he’d never gotten around to trying, had become a pirate instead.

The second crewman who her father had sent to watch over her went by the name of Jean Paul and a host of other names. But he’d revealed to her in secret when they’d become friends that Richard Allen was his real name. He’d told her that much, but no more about his past, or where he really came from, and she’d never pressed. He wasn’t much older than Gabrielle, and he stood out among the pirates not because he was so tall and handsome, but because he was always meticulously clean, both his person

and his clothes.

He wore his black hair long and queued back, kept his face shaven except for a trim mustache. His clothes were as flamboyant as everyone else’s but spotless, and his high boots always shined. He wore no gaudy jewelry, though, just a single silver ring with some sort of crest on it. He had wide shoulders but was slim of build, and his green eyes sparkled. He seemed to always be flashing his white teeth with a smile or a laugh. Gabrielle found him to be appealing, a very lighthearted young man.

Richard practiced his French accent constantly, though it was still as atrocious as it had been when she’d first met him. At least he’d stopped slipping with the “bloody hells” when he got emotional, which were a dead giveaway to his real nationality.

She’d asked him once why he bothered to pretend to be a Frenchman when the fake names were enough for most of the pirates. He’d merely shrugged and said he didn’t want to be like the rest of the pirates and he was determined to master the disguise before he gave it up.

Richard had told her once that while he had wanted to make romantic overtures to her, he was afraid her father would kill him if he did, so he’d managed to resist the urge.

She’d laughed. He was a charming young man, humorous and daring, but she’d never once considered anything more than friendship with him.

But that she’d only formed a platonic relationship with such a handsome young man as Richard Allen didn’t mean she hadn’t succumbed to a few romantic attractions over the years in the Caribbean. It was just as well that most of them had been sailors, though, aside from Charles, because a seafaring man was the last kind of man she wanted for a husband, having grown up with firsthand knowledge of how infrequently they were ever at home.

When she did marry, the man would have to actually share a life with her. That’s how she envisioned marriage. If he was gone for months at a time the way sailors were, if she ended up being left mostly alone, then what would be the point of marrying?

Her mother had had a similar opinion. So often over the years, she had told Gabrielle that it was pointless to love a man who loves the sea. The competition was too great.

“Why did you let him upset you,chérie ?” Richard asked as she paced the room.

She knew exactly whom he was talking about—the handsome man she’d encountered on the dock—since she’d been trying to keep “him” out of her mind. But she didn’t have an answer that she cared to share, so instead she said, “I wasn’t upset.”

“You nearly took his head off.”

“Nonsense. I was just shaken,” she replied. “That cart would have knocked me over, if he didn’t grab me. But he pinched my arm so hard I think I would have been less hurt if I’d fallen to the ground, so he wasn’t really the least bit helpful.”

It was a blatant lie. Richard raised a brow to indicate he suspected that, causing her to blush and try a different reason, one that was true.

She continued, “I’ve been quite nervous ever since we set sail.”

“Hoist the sails!” Miss Carla squawked.

All four pairs of eyes turned toward the bright green parrot in the little wooden barred cage she was occasionally kept in. The bird had belonged to Nathan. She was a sweetheart when she was on his shoulder, but everyone else she regarded as the enemy.

During the first year, whenever Gabrielle tried to pet the bird or feed her, she usually yanked back fingers dripping blood. She’d been persistent, though, enough so that Miss Carla had eventually defected to the enemy camp, as it were, and Nathan had gifted her with the bird her second year in the islands.

The parrot’s vocabulary until then had merely been nautical—and disparaging about her mother. Even the name Nathan had given the bird had been a deliberate insult to his wife. He’d found it amusing to teach her phrases like “Carla’s a dumb bird” and “I’m an old biddy,” and the worst one, “A copper to drop me drawers.”

He’d been so embarrassed when she’d first squawked “Carla’s a dumb bird” in front of Gabrielle that he’d immediately marched the bird down to the beach to drown her in the ocean. Gabrielle had had to run after him to stop him, though she was sure he wouldn’t really have killed Miss Carla, and they’d both been able to laugh about it later.

Ohr tossed his dinner napkin at the bird’s cage, getting three hard flaps of her wings and a “Bad girl, bad girl” out of her.

Richard chuckled at the parrot, but then got back to the subject at hand, asking Gabrielle, “You’re nervous about getting married?”

That question threw her off. “Married? No, I’m actually looking forward to meeting all the dashing young men who will be in London for the Season. I hope to fall in love with one of them,” she added with a smile.

That was true, but she just wasn’t sure she wanted to live in England again, when she’d loved the islands so much. And she certainly didn’t like the idea of living so far away from her father. But she was still hopeful that she could convince the man she married to move to the Caribbean or, at the very least, spend part of each year there. “But calling in this favor from a man I don’t know and my father barely knows, well, I really hate the idea of doing that,” she added. “He could just close the door in our faces, you know.” She could hope.

“We’re here to make sure he doesn’t do that,” Ohr said quietly.

“You see!” she exclaimed. “Then we’d be forcing his hand, and you just don’t do that with English lords.

Do either of you even know him, or know how my father helped him to incur this favor?”

“Never met him,” Richard replied.

“I have, though I didn’t know he was an aristocrat,” Ohr said. “My experience of lordly types, minimal as it is, is that they are mostly popinjays who crumble at the least sign of aggression.” She couldn’t tell if Ohr was joking or not, but Richard made a sour look to that remark, which was very telling. Good grief, was her friend an English lord without ever having let on that he was? She stared at him hard, but he merely lifted a brow at her. He probably had no idea he’d stirred her curiosity with his

reaction to Ohr’s comment.

She shook the thought from her mind. It was absurd, anyway. Englishmen might become pirates, but English lords certainly wouldn’t. And the lord they would be visiting tomorrow could be the veriest dandy, but that didn’t erase her reservations. She was simply mortified to have to collect on a favor that wasn’t owed to her personally. She was the one who was going to end up being beholden, and she hated the idea of that.

She’d grown and changed a lot over the last three years. She’d found out that she could be resourceful, that if something needed to be done she could get it done. She’d survived a hurricane that had struck while her father was away, and she and Margery had pitched in to help the town recover from it. She’d been left alone with just Margery for weeks at a time when her father sailed without her, and she had liked making her own decisions.

She’d enjoyed treasure hunting with him, and she’d miss those adventures once she married. But mainly, she disliked reverting back to depending on others to get things done for her. So it simply went against the grain now to have to ask this English lord to help her.

“We could always hold him ransom until he finds you a husband,” Richard said with a grin.

She realized he was only teasing her now and she returned his grin. She’d say one thing for Richard, he had no trouble a’tall getting someone’s mind off of what they didn’t want to be thinking about. And she needed to stop thinking about that tall, handsome fellow she’d encountered on the docks today.

Good heavens, that man had been startling. She’d been broadsided, as her father might have put it, blasted right out of the water. It was no wonder she’d made such a fool of herself. But she would have been much more embarrassed if he’d noticed her ogling him, as she’d caught herself doing before he glanced her way.

He’d been a giant of a man with unruly golden brown curls. And she could have sworn his eyes were black, they were so dark. Such a fine figure of a man, but he was handsome, too.

She hadn’t meant to be so sharp with the man, but her heart had still been pounding from that cart that had bumped her, causing her to lose her balance. His grip on her arm had been rather tight, too. And she’d been afraid that Ohr and Richard, being so protective of her, might cause a scene because he had his hand on her.

Which wasn’t a silly fear. They’d already done so just ten minutes earlier when a sailor had merely jostled her. They’d nearly tossed the man over the wharf into the water. She’d told them then to be more discreet and walk behind her the way English servants were supposed to do.

Then, when the tall, handsome man had looked down at her with those dark eyes, his gaze turning sensual, she’d become more unsettled. And if that wasn’t bad enough, when he’d given her that engaging grin, she’d felt something stir deep inside her. So flustered by then that it took her a moment to even grasp what he was saying, her tone had come out sharper than she’d intended, enough to turn him rude.