Katharine Ashe - When a Scot Loves a Lady

“Been pr’pared for months. Won’t do a lick o’ good now they’re all tied up.”

“I will do the talking.”

Mattie screwed up his cauliflower nose.

“Keep your mouth shut with her, Mattie, or so help me I will find a way to keep it shut despite these ropes.”

“Yessir, Cap’n, sir.”

“Damn it, Mattie, if after all this time you so much as think of throwing a wrench in—”

“Well, well, well. What do we have here, boys?” The voice came before the woman, smooth, rich, and sweet, like the caress of brushed silk against skin. Unlike any female sailor Jin had ever heard.

But as she sauntered into view from around the other side of Jin’s helmsman, she looked common enough. Through the thinning rain, he had his first view of the notoriously successful Massachusetts female privateer, Violet the Vile.

The woman he had been searching out for two years.

Sailors flanked her protectively, casting dog-eyed glances at her and scowls at Jin and his mate.

She stood a head shorter than her guard, coming to about Jin’s chin. Garbed in loose trousers and a long, shapeless coat of worn leather, a thick bundle of black neck cloth stuffed beneath her chin, a sash with no fewer than three mismatched pistols hanging from it, and a wide-brimmed hat obscuring her face, she didn’t particularly resemble her sister. But Jin had spent countless nights in ports from Boston to Vera Cruz drinking sailors and merchants under the table and bribing men with everything he had at hand in search of information about the girl who had gone missing a decade and a half ago.

That she looked less like a fine English lady than any woman he’d ever seen did not mean a damned thing.

Violet la Vile was Viola Carlyle, the girl he had set out from Devonshire twenty-two months earlier to find. The girl who, at the age of ten, had been abducted from a gentleman’s home by an American smuggler. The girl all except her sister believed dead.

The brim of her hat rose slowly through the rain. A narrow chin came into view, then a scowling mouth, a slight, sun-touched nose, and finally a pair of squinting eyes, crinkled at the corners. They assessed Jin from toe to crown. A single brow lifted and her lips curved up at one side in a mocking salute.

“So this is the famed Jinan Seton I’ve heard so many stories of? The Pharaoh.” Her voice drawled like a sheet sliding through a well-oiled block. Thick lashes fanned down, then back up again, taking him in this time with a swift perusal. She wagged her head back and forth and her lower lip protruded.

“Disappointing.”

Mattie made a choking sound.

Jin’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know who I am?”

“Your crewmen. Boasting of you even as they were losing the fight.” A full-throated chortle came forth and she plunked her fists onto her hips and pivoted around to the sailors gathering about.

“Lookee here, boys! The British navy sent its dirtiest pirate scum to haul me in.”

A cheer went up, huzzahs and whistles across deck. Seamen crowded closer with toothless grins and crackling guffaws, brandishing muskets and cutlasses high. She raised her hand and silence descended but for the whoosh of waves against the brig’s hull and the patter of rain on canvas and wood. Her gaze slewed back to Jin, sharp as a tack.

“Guess I should be flattered, shouldn’t I?” Her voice was like velvet. For a moment—a wholly unprecedented moment—Jin’s throat thickened. No woman should have a voice like that. Except in bed.

“Why did you sink my ship?” The steely edge he had learned as a lad came to his own voice without effort. “She was the fastest vessel on the Atlantic. What kind of privateer are you, putting a prize like that under water? She would have taken a fine price.”

She screwed up her brows.

“It’s true, I could’ve kept her, Master Brit. Or sold her. But it was such fun seeing the mighty Cavalier go down, I couldn’t resist.”

Red washed across Jin’s vision. He tried to blink it away. His gut hurt. Damn and blast, he wanted a cutlass and pistol more than life at this moment. Or perhaps just a bottle of rum.

She smirked.

Two bottles.

They said she was a fine sailor for a woman, but no one had ever said she was mad.

KATHARINE ASHE lives in the wonderfully warm Southeast with her husband, son, two dogs, and a garden she likes to call romantic rather than unkempt. A professor of European history, she has previously resided in California, Italy, France, and the northern U.S.

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Romances by Katharine Ashe WHEN A SCOT LOVES A LADY IN THE ARMS OF A MARQUESS CAPTURED BY A ROGUE LORD SWEPT AWAY BY A KISS A LADY’S WISH Copyright This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Excerpt from How to Be a Proper Lady copyright © 2012 by Katharine Brophy Dubois WHEN A SCOT LOVES A LADY. Copyright © 2012 by Katharine Brophy Dubois. All rights reserved under International and Pan-

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