A Most Unladylike Adventure. Elizabeth Beacon

room to beat out a dance on the inside of his reeling skull instead.

      ‘Confounded din,’ he mumbled and, liking the sound of his own voice in the suddenly eerily quiet house, he roared out a challenge in his best hear-it-over-a-hurricane-at-sea bark. ‘I said you’re making a confounded din!’ he bellowed as he stamped through the doorway into a stairwell that looked vaguely familiar.

      ‘Not half as much of a one as you are,’ a woman’s voice snapped back as if he were the intruder and she had a perfect right to steal about in the dark.

      Her voice was as low and throaty as it was distinctive, so Hugh wondered if she was more afraid of drawing attention to her peculiar nocturnal activities than she was willing to admit. Yet the very sound of her husky tones roused fantasies he’d been trying to forget for days. Her voice reminded him of honey and mid-summer, and the response of his fool body to her presence made him groan out loud, before he reminded himself the witch was Kit Stone’s woman and would never be his.

      He cursed the day he’d first laid eyes on the expensive-looking houri in his friend’s fine new offices dressed in an excellent imitation of a lady’s restrained finery, with an outrageous bonnet whose curling feathers had been dyed to try to match the apparently matchless dark eyes she had stared so boldly at him with. Such a speculative, unladylike deep-blue gaze it had been as well, wide and curious and fathomless as the Mediterranean, and he’d felt his body respond like a warhorse to the drum without permission from his furious brain. It had seemed more urgent that Kit never discover his notorious captain lusted after his mistress than handing over the report of his latest voyage his employer had demanded as soon as he’d docked in person, so Hugh had left the expensive high-stepper alone in Kit’s office with a gauchely mumbled excuse and a loud sigh of relief.

      She’d responded to his gaucherie with a few cool words and a dismissive glance that made him feel like an overgrown schoolboy, instead of a seasoned captain of eight and twenty with an adventurous naval career behind him and one in front as master of a fine ship of the merchant marine. Since he was done with reckless adventures, he did his best to avoid the enemy nowadays, as well as his old naval brothers-in-arms, who thought it quite legitimate to hunt down ships like his in order to steal his crew of experienced mariners and press them into the navy. It was a second chance that Hugh valued, so somehow he’d kept his eager hands off his employer’s whore and returned to his ship and the relative peace of his cabin to await Kit Stone’s summons to discuss this last voyage and plan the next one.

      Now Kit had gone off on some mysterious mission known only to himself; and the other half of Stone & Shaw was probably in the Caribbean by now, while Hugh Darke was drunk, in charge of Kit Stone’s house and business and fantasising over his doxy. There’d be hell to pay if Kit heard so much as a whisper of them being here in the middle of the night together, him stale drunk and her … What exactly was the high-and-mighty little light-skirt doing here when her lover was absent, and in the stilly watches of the night to make bad worse as well?

      ‘Did you hear me?’ she demanded from far too close for comfort.

      He swayed a little, then corrected himself impatiently as he wished the annoying witch would stop nagging and let him think. ‘How the devil could I avoid it, woman? You’re yelling in my ear like a fishwife.’

      ‘I’m not yelling, you are,’ she informed him haughtily, ‘and where’s my b …?’ She seemed to hesitate for a long moment.

      Which, even still half-drunk as he was, Hugh thought very unlike the headlong siren who’d so tempted him with her ultramarine come-hither gaze that day in the city. Confound the witchy creature, but he’d had to drink out of the island to get a decent night’s sleep all these weeks later because she had haunted his dreams with the most heated and unattainably alluring fantasies any female had ever troubled him with in an eventful life. He couldn’t have her, had told himself time and time again that he didn’t really want her and it was just a normal lust-driven urge that drove him to dream about her, given he was a normal lusty male and she was very definitely a desirable and perhaps equally lusty female, given her profession. Then he’d gone on to reassure himself that she was nothing like the almost mythically sensuous creature he was fantasising her to be.

      In reality, the rackety female was probably coarse and calculating under all that lovely outer glamour and fine packaging. Far too often he’d reassured himself she was just a Cyprian, told himself he’d only have to know her to learn to despise her for selling all that boldness and beauty to the highest bidder. Somehow, now she was so close to him again and he was so lightly in control of his senses after all that cognac, the sensible voice of reason was in danger of being drowned out by the hard, primitive demand of his body for hers, as the very sound of her husky feminine tones rendered him powerfully, uncomfortably erect the instant they loomed out of the night and wrapped her toils round him. He fervently hoped her night eyes and well-developed instincts weren’t honed enough to tell her what a parlous state he was in and he bit down on a string of invectives that might have shocked even such an experienced night-stalker as her.

      ‘Where’s my bad, bold Kit?’ she finally managed, secretly horrified at what her very correct and stern brother would have to say about her various deceits, if he ever found out about them, of course.

      ‘No idea, he’s his own man and goes his own way,’ he told her absently, wondering why she wasn’t much-better informed about Kit’s whereabouts than he was, considering her supposedly special status in his life.

      If she were his woman, he wouldn’t let her out of his sight long enough to even look elsewhere, let alone allow her to roam about in a dark and virtually deserted house in the middle of the night, tormenting a poor devil like him who didn’t much care whether he lived or died at the best of times. Yet with her here, the scent and elusive shadows of a playful moon and its lightly concealing clouds playing with her face and form, and the night cool and silent all around them, suddenly the threat of Kit’s wrath wasn’t the deterrent it ought to be. When they had first met, his youthful employer had sobered Hugh up from a far worse carouse than this one before recklessly trusting him with the command of one of his best ships when nobody else would risk a rowboat to his sole charge, for how could a captain control his ship when he couldn’t control himself, or even care that he’d fallen from master of nearly all he surveyed headlong into the gutter?

      Until this dratted woman sparked all these unwanted urges and one or two wickedly tempting fantasies that made him recall his other life and all the bitter betrayals it had contained, he’d been doing so splendidly at sobriety as well. He’d almost been in danger of becoming a useful member of society, until something occurred to remind him how useless he actually was; but, he decided with a cynical twist of his lips that might have passed for a smile in a dim light, it would have been a fine joke on society if he’d only managed to bring it off.

      ‘Drat him for not telling me, then,’ the major cause of his latest downfall muttered at his gruff disclaimer and there wasn’t light enough to see if she looked as defeated and desperate as she sounded, before she seemed to recall another option and asked in a brighter voice, ‘Has Ben gone too?’

      ‘I dare say Captain Shaw will be in the West Indies or even Virginia by now. So at least he’s out there earning us all some money, whilst I’m stuck on shore sailing nothing better than a desk and your Kit’s off on some wild goose chase all of his own that I would have expected you to know about far better than I do.’

      ‘Aye, Ben’s proving himself the best of us all as usual,’ she said, affection very evident in her husky voice, and Hugh frowned fleetingly at hearing her so neatly avoid his implication she wasn’t as close to her protector as she hoped she was.

      Then he forgot his doubts about that position himself as he pondered the possibility of her maintaining intimate relations with Kit’s business partner as well as Kit himself. He silently cursed the blond giant for apparently taking shares in his best friend’s doxy, especially when Kit could have shared her with him instead.

      ‘So why are you still here? You could easily have gone to sea in Ben’s stead, and I doubt very much anyone would have missed you,’ she informed him irritably.