Katharine Ashe - How to Be a Proper Lady

“So, this be your plan?”

“It is.” He unsnapped the spyglass from the cradle on the rail in which he had set it earlier. A sail had breached the far horizon just after dawn, and Jin assigned Mattie the watch all day, with sharp-eyed Matouba in the crow’s nest. She might be the most contrary female on the seven seas, but Jin would not let anyone near her. Until he had her safely aboard his ship, no vessel would come within range of Viola Carlyle-friend or foe.

He peered out over the darkening horizon, the current lifting the bow in easy dips and rises beneath his feet. The ocean in all directions was perfectly clear.

“Seen anything today?”

Mattie leaned his bulk against the rail and picked at his teeth with a stick. “Fish. Swells. Clouds.”

“Clouds?” The sky was wide open, clean blue darkening to pink and lavender.

“Just testing. You seem over distracted lately. Didn’t know if you’d notice.”

“Mattie,” he said quietly, “I have killed men for offering me less grievous insults.”

Mattie glowered then pursed his fleshy lips. “Ain’t ever kilt no lady, though, have you?”

Jin turned about and strode toward the stair, then down into the brig’s belly. The air was close below, the low-ceilinged deck lined with sixteen heavy iron cannons tail to tail. Hammocks hung between their hulks, the lumpy shapes of sailors resting in preparation for the night watch. The April Storm was much larger and considerably less graceful than the Cavalier, an inelegant, aged brig. Its boards creaked beneath his footsteps as he moved forward toward the officers’ closetlike quarters, the shipmaster’s cabin dead ahead. She liked to spend dusk atop the quarterdeck. Now he could return the spyglass to her quarters without confrontation.

He moved into the narrow corridor between the officers’ bunks and almost collided with her.

Without hat and cravat obscuring it, the shape of her face was nearly a heart. Dark curls swept back from the peak of her brow, revealing quite clearly her delicate chin, soft mouth, and big eyes staring up at him as though he were some sort of monster. A swift flutter of black lashes dipped over violet pools, and slowly, like a rising tide, a pink flush stole over her cheeks.

As though in choreographed response, heat funneled into Jin’s groin.

Inconvenient. He should have seen to that particular necessity while in Boston. He didn’t need a woman aboard turning him into a randy lad, a sailor after a long cruise confronted with an unreasonably pretty face.

Not merely a pretty face. She wore only a plain white cotton shirt now. No coat or waistcoat disguised the edges of the useless undergarment beneath it-an undergarment that did nothing to hide the round beauty of her breasts pressing at the laces of the shirt. Breasts the perfect size to fit into a man’s hand.

A lady should wear more than that. If this lady wore more than that she would not be quite so… distracting.

Mesmerizing.

But he didn’t need her breasts at such close quarters to remain stalled in the corridor. The curve of her lush lower lip to her chin decorated with the small dark mole fixed him in place. It seemed as though a master artist had lovingly painted a portrait of a pretty girl, only to find her too perfect, and added that spot to mar his work, but it produced the opposite effect.

“Can’t help yourself, can you?” Her voice came between them beautifully smooth.

Jin blinked. Lifted his head he had not realized he lowered.

“They never can.” Her tone did not alter.

He stepped back. Straightened his thoughts.

“I was returning this.” He proffered the spyglass. His voice was rough.

“Stole it while I wasn’t looking, and now you hope to return it before you’re caught?” She arched a single, slightly unkempt brow. “Take care, Seton. You’re acting like an anxious pirate.”

He drew in a tight breath through his nostrils. “A sail breached the horizon this morning. I put a watch on it.”

The dark eyes narrowed. “And you didn’t see fit to inform me?”

“It failed to show again.”

“You’re accustomed to doing things your own way, I think.”

“I like to spare my captain unnecessary concerns when she no doubt has more important matters to see to.” Like taking the damned telescope from his outstretched hand so that he could return atop where he belonged and where she and her underclad, soft-lipped, sharp-tongued provocation were not. His collar felt hot. And other regions of his body. But he had never been a man ruled by lust. He would not become one now.

But something more than lust drew him. He knew this even as he sought to deny it to himself. Her brazen confidence, her unafraid tongue, her successes in the face of the setback of her entire life, even her crew’s idiotic devotion marked her as an exceptional woman. A woman quite unlike any he had known.

He had known many women.

“Your responsibilities are not modest,” he murmured.

Her brow crept higher. “Doing it a bit too brown, don’t you think, sailor?”

“I am endeavoring to serve my captain, as promised.” And he was. Not as she expected. But a vow was a vow, and no peculiar confusion of desire or little woman’s taunts could undo what he had labored twenty-two months preparing.

“By setting her crew against her?”

He screwed up his brow in question.

“Frenchie and Sam,” she supplied. “The torn sail.”

“I did what you told me to do.”

She set her hands on sweetly curved hips. “And they knew you disagreed with me.”

“I shouldn’t think it would matter if they did. A captain is bound to overrule his lieutenant when he sees fit.”

“His lieutenant?”

Would that she were not a woman. “Her.”

Her eyes narrowed to a squint. But it did not detract from her loveliness. Goddamn it, he wished she were a snot-nosed lad he could take down with a well-aimed fist.

“You really can’t say it, can you?” Her voice rose slightly. “You can’t bear to call me captain. It kills you to even imagine it, you arrogant son of an Egyptian.”

Jin’s temper, well tied for days, slipped free of its moorings. He moved so that the space between them nearly disappeared and he was looking down at her upturned face.

“See here, you spoiled minx, I may be under your command but I am not required to accept-”

“Spoiled minx? Minx?” she exclaimed. “I don’t think a man has ever dared call me that.”

“Maybe if one had, you wouldn’t be so damned-”

“How could you possibly know whether I am spoiled or not?”

“I can see it well enough in your men’s behavior.”

“I warned you, you wouldn’t like it.”

“Would not like what?” Her flashing eyes? Her full lips? The wavy lock of hair tumbling over her brow, obscuring the perfection and rendering her yet more enticing?

“Serving under me.”

Under. Atop. Any way she liked it. And with a fiery temper like hers, he suspected he would like it quite a bit. Given all, the notion appealed more than it ought. The sparkle of challenge in her eyes went straight to his cock.

“You can’t bear it, you conceited excuse for a respectable privateer.” Her mouth curved into a satisfied grin. “Aha. That’s got a rise out of you.”

In a manner of speaking.

He sucked in breath slowly, battening down on his temper and arousal at once. “I am not an excuse for a respectable privateer. I am one.”

“You think that simply because you have a commission from your British government you no longer have the instincts of pirate scum?”

The rise abruptly fell, a bucket of ice dashed on his unwelcome ardor.

“I do.”

“Prove it.”

He grasped her hand, found it clenched, and peeled her fingers apart. He placed the telescope in her palm and closed her hand around it.

“I do not take that which is not mine by right.” He released her.

Her big eyes were in a tumult, her breaths fast. The reaction seemed excessive, but it suited Jin. It was closer to fear than her earlier attitude.

“It’s because I am a woman.” A quaver threaded through her satin voice. “Some men cannot accept orders from a woman.”

“It is because you are a harpy. And I am not some men.”

He left. If he remained in that damned corridor for another minute he might be tempted to tell her the truth.

It was not because she was a woman, a remarkably pretty one with ripe lips he could imagine performing all sorts of tasks other than spewing insults. It was not because he had been a pirate for much of his life. It was not even because he had promised himself to see her to England come hell or high water. It was because sometime over the past two years searching for a girl stolen from her home at a tender age, Jin had realized something profoundly disturbing. Something he rarely allowed himself to ponder.

She had a home to return to. She had a family. That she denied that now, even after so many years, living her life as though the family who cherished her did not exist, infuriated him.

He felt fury. Toward a woman he barely knew.

In his youth, anger had consumed him. For over a decade now, however, he had trained himself to turn that anger toward useful occupation. But this time it stared him in the face in the form of a willful woman who did not understand that the gift she threw away was everything some people-he-ever dreamed of possessing.

“Glum today, mum? On account of the weather, I wager.”

Viola slanted her cabin boy a scowl, then regretted it when his freckled face fell. He wasn’t but seven, full of good cheer and excitement about everything, much as she’d been when her father first brought her aboard his ship. Her ship for nearly two years now. The ship she called home, currently on its way to a man she hoped to also call home someday.