The Notorious Lady Anne: A Loveswept Historical Romance (20 page)

“We’ve already pulled the ships onto land, as you can see,” he said. “Let me show you what we found.”

For the next hour, Phin pointed out areas of concern on the ships. Planks that needed to be replaced, other areas of damage from the storm. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t already suspected and already planned for, so she wasn’t all that concerned. Yet, even as she listened with half an ear, she also kept track of her men and their progress, so she was fully aware when Addison emerged from the trees and made his way to the ships.

Phin’s gaze went to Addison, and his eyes narrowed. “What’s
he
doing here?”

“I’m not sure, but it looks like he’s here to help careen the ships.”

Phin made a derisive noise. “Why would he help us?”

Emmaline wondered that as well, as she watched Addison pick up a scraper and make his way toward the underbelly of a ship.

After completing the hot and demanding task of burning the crud off the bottom of the ship to make for easier scraping, Emmaline looked up to find Nicholas working a few feet away. Unlike the other sailors, he hadn’t shucked his shirt in deference to the heat, but he had rolled up his sleeves, revealing arms darkened by the sun and corded with muscles. Her heart beat a little harder, her hands sweat a little more and her breath came a little faster.

Why did she have to have such a fierce reaction to the one man she couldn’t be attracted to?

As if sensing her gaze on him, he glanced at her, offered a small smile and turned his attention back to his work.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

He shrugged, concentrating on the hull. “It’s better than sitting alone in the house.”

She resumed her scraping. Weeks of Nicholas Addison as her prisoner? Her heart skipped a few necessary beats. What was she to do with him? Better yet, what was she to do with him
when all of this was finished? Release him? He would forever be a threat to her safety, now that he knew who she was and where she lived. If she let him go, she would always live under the uncertain cloud of not knowing when he would report her to Kenmar, or even the king himself.

And yet, keeping him as a prisoner wasn’t possible. She could never imprison such a vibrant man, never take him away from a loving family. “Your home is beautiful.”

Her gaze flew to his bent head. He concentrated on the dead marine life, but somehow he’d moved closer without her realizing it.

“Thank you.”

“I have a small town house in London, but it’s just a house,” he said. “Home to me is the home I grew up in with my parents and brother and sister.”

She refused to think of Nicholas as a boy, playing with his brother and sister, a loving mother and father proudly standing by. She’d long since accepted her fate as an only child of a father who didn’t want her, and a mother who didn’t have the will to live for her.

“Do you plan to live here forever?” he asked.

She pried off a particularly stubborn barnacle. “Why do you want to know? Information gathering?” The moment the caustic remark left her lips she wished it back, not wanting to ruin the comfortable camaraderie, the easy conversation. The closeness.

Nicholas sighed and turned to her. The heat was stifling, the breeze nonexistent. Sweat dampened his shirt, plastering it to his chest, outlining the chiseled muscles beneath. Muscles she’d laid her hand against for the glorious moments she kissed him.

She returned her gaze to the blasted barnacles, refusing to look or be tempted.

“No, I’m not gathering information. I’m making conversation.” He sounded irritated, but she should be the irritated one. He wasn’t acting like a prisoner should. What prisoner willingly helped his captor clean her ships? What prisoner
asked
to be put in a dungeon?

“Emmaline.”

She closed her eyes at her whispered name, willing him away. Maybe she
should
build a bloody dungeon to put him in.

“Look at me.”

She swallowed and made a halfhearted swipe at a barnacle. With slumped shoulders, she lowered her arm and turned to him.

“I’m not going to turn you in to Kenmar or anyone else.”

“I wish I was able to believe you.”

“What will it take to make you believe?”

“Tell me which of Blackwell’s ships is carrying the gold.”

His eyes flashed. Lines bracketed his mouth. “I can’t do that.”

She pressed her lips together and turned back to her work. “Then we have nothing else to discuss. I don’t have time for
conversation
. Not when I have three ships to ready for sailing, a ship of gold to find and a father to ruin.”

Nicholas’s gaze was as forceful as the winds that rocked the ships during a hurricane, but still she didn’t look up. Nicholas Addison confused her, confounded her, angered her. If he wasn’t going to give her the information she required, she had no need of him. And certainly no more time for her errant and completely unacceptable feelings for him.

He sighed, and a few moments later began scraping again. The silence was deafening, a living thing pulsing between them. What did it matter? He was nothing to her but a prisoner. No, he was a nuisance. A nuisance she wished she’d left with his crew. Or better yet, with Alphonse. She blew a stray hair out of her eyes. All right, maybe not Alphonse, but certainly with his crew, for Nicholas had been nothing but a sword in her side since she’d kidnapped him. Her intention of gleaning information from him obviously had not worked. He was no more willing to give her the information she needed than she was willing to release him. “You don’t like what I’m doing.” The words were out of her mouth before her mind had time to process them. Mortified, she scraped harder, praying he hadn’t heard. But, of course, he had.

“Scraping rubbish and muck off the hull of a ship?” His laughter made her cringe, even as it made her heart beat harder.

She didn’t look at him, because she didn’t want to see if there was laughter in those blue
eyes as well.

“Not many of us like this arduous task,” he said.

“As if you’ve ever breamed a ship before.”

Another silence, this one filled with condemnation, but she refused to regret her words.

They needed to be reminded of what they were. And what they were not.

“I don’t mind physical labor, Emmaline.”

She moved to the next section. “You’re an aristocrat.”

“So I should lounge around all day, and let you do all the work?”

“Many would.”

“I’m not one of those many.” By the sound of his voice, she knew he’d moved closer, but still she refused to look at him.

“But that’s not what you asked, was it?” he said.

She scraped harder. Her tool slipped, and nearly sliced her thumb open. Sweat dripped down her temples and into her eyes. She lifted a shoulder and swiped at it, blinking the sting away.

“You want to know what I think about your plan to ruin Blackwell Shipping.”

It wasn’t a question, but she shook her head anyway. “I care less what you think.”

“Ah. That’s why you asked then?”

She swung around to face him, staggering back when their noses nearly collided. He was far closer than she thought. So close that the heat from his body made her hot, and she was able to see the black rings around his blue eyes. “Whether you approve of my plans to ruin Blackwell Shipping or not is none of my concern.”

“And yet you still asked.”

Her fingers tightened on her scraping tool, and for a wild moment she thought about smacking him with it, but the violent moment quickly passed. She’d killed men before, but every death on her shriveled soul had been for a purpose. She would never thoughtlessly take a life, because each man she condemned to a watery grave dogged her every step and haunted her
deepest sleep. She didn’t need one more.

Her anger dissipated and she loosened her hold on the tool, perturbed that Nicholas had pushed her to this point. That she cared enough to allow him to push her to this point.

As if sensing her emotions, he stepped back. She took a deep breath of humid air that wasn’t filled with the masculine scent of Nicholas Addison.

“You’re correct,” he said. “It’s not my place to say whether I like your plan or not. I don’t understand it, because I’ve never disliked someone as much as you dislike Daniel Blackwell.”

Emmaline let out a very unladylike snort and turned back to the ship. Her feelings went way beyond dislike, but she wouldn’t go into that again. Nicholas knew her story. There wasn’t much else to say about it.

He grabbed her wrist in a gentle hold, stopping her from scraping. Surprised, she looked up into his intense glare, and the anger that tightened his mouth and pinched the skin around his eyes.

“I don’t like what you’re doing because it might get you hurt. I think you should give up your idea of revenge, and live your life another way. A happy way. Because I don’t think revenge makes you happy.”

Her anger wasn’t as dormant as she’d hoped. It rose in a great wave, swamping any other emotion she might have been feeling for the very proper, very aristocratic Nicholas Addison.

“Pray tell. What is your idea of happy, Captain Addison? Attending balls and parties? Sitting on charity committees? Drinking tea with the other ladies? Or maybe it’s riding through Hyde Park at the fashionable hour?”

His eyes snapped blue fire, but her words hit their mark. Did he honestly believe she’d be happy leading such a superficial life?

She laughed harshly. “I’d rather run a dagger through my eye, thank you very much.”

Far off in the distance, her men laughed and joked with one another, but they might as well have been on a different island, as far as Emmaline was concerned. She saw nothing but
Nicholas’s intense stare, felt nothing but his fingers circling her wrist. Experienced nothing but the anger vibrating between them.

“This is the life I chose,” she said softly. “The only life available to me.”

“Not true. Give up piracy, settle down. Dorothy is willing to provide a dowry.”

He was grasping at straws. Living a fairy tale.

She ripped her wrist from his hold, and held her arms out to her side. She was wearing breeches and a worn shirt. Sweat caked her face, and she was positive she smelled as bad as the dead sea life they were scraping from the hull.

“What man would have me? What man would want a wife who can careen a ship? Who can steal everything he owns and run a cutlass through him at the same time? What man would want a wife who can cuss like a sailor because she
is
a sailor?”

She shook her head, blinking away the tears pressing against the backs of her eyes. Blast him for making her think of another life. Another way. That particular ship sailed long ago, and she wasn’t even on the passenger list.

“I chose the course of my life. A husband and children are not part of it.” She looked him in the eye, willing him to accept her words for the truth. “After all the things I’ve done, I don’t deserve that.”

He glared at her, arms crossed, legs planted wide, looking more like a pirate than she felt at that moment. “Is that what you think? You don’t deserve to be loved?”

The intense anger pulsating from him had her taking a step back. He matched her with a step forward. She didn’t realize she’d taken another step until she came up against the hull of the ship. She pressed herself to it, flattening her palms to the rough wood. Nicholas was suddenly so close that she felt the heat radiating off his body. She stared at his lips, inches from hers, remembering the feel of them. He planted his hands on the hull, one on either side of her head, trapping her.

She was a hellion with a cutlass, a master marksman with a pistol, but this … this was out of her element. She didn’t know how to react. What to say. What to do. She wanted him to
step away, to give her room to breathe, to think. She wanted him closer, wrapped around her.

“Well, do you think you’re unworthy of love?”

She lifted her eyes from his lips, and met his heated gaze. “I’m a pirate. A pirate who kidnapped you. How can you speak of love to me?”

“You don’t see it, do you?”

“See what?”

He shook his head and stepped away. Immediately she missed his presence, the heat of his body, even though the heat on the beach was already stifling. She wanted to draw him back to her, but that was madness. Insanity.

“Your father was a fool, but don’t make the mistake of painting all men with the same brush.” He turned on his heel and walked away, leaving her to stare after him.

Furious, she wanted to chase him, to give him a piece of her mind, to tell him he was wrong, that she didn’t paint all men with a tainted brush. Instead she picked up her scraping tool and turned back to the hull.

What did it matter what he believed? He was here for one purpose, to help her bring down her father. Anything else was a waste of her time.

The next morning, Nicholas’s leg ached like the very devil. Hot pokers shoved beneath his kneecap wouldn’t have been less painful. Even though he defied his doctors’ predictions about never walking again, they’d been right in one aspect—he would forever be plagued with the aches and pains of his injury.