Thief of Hearts Read online

  Drawing off his boots, he eased open the library doors, edged his way through the deserted entrance hall, and bounded up the curving staircase to the second floor.

  Gerard’s knuckles hung poised in the air, an inch from Lucy’s door. He slowly lowered his hand to the brass knob. Why give her an opportunity to refuse him? He’d already concocted a lame fable about a suspicious character lurking about the lawn beneath her window. He had no intention of telling her the suspicious character was him.

  He turned the knob, prepared to tactfully, if grudgingly, withdraw if he caught her in some alluring state of dishabille. But as the door swung open, granting him entrée to the deserted room beyond, he wasn’t sure he could have retreated had someone held a gun to his temple.

  His weighted steps lured him in like a man who had wandered in a barren desert for decades only to stumble upon an abandoned harem, a perfumed bower ripe with the memories and promises of sensual pleasures. His starved senses reeled beneath the subtle assault.

  Lucy’s refuge was the antithesis of the spartan masculinity that pervaded the rest of the house. A welcoming fire crackled on the brick hearth. Swags of ivory lace draped the testered bed, enveloping the rumpled bedclothes in a gauzy veil. The furniture was inlaid with satinwood, its delicate lines curved and embellished with fanciful curlicues. Plush rugs of dizzying varieties overlapped the floor as if every rug that had ever dared to mar the Admiral’s polished planking had found its way here, rescued by Lucy’s generous hand.

  Gerard grinned as he circled the room, delighted by his discovery—the flawlessly groomed, impeccably coiffed, never-a-ribbon-out-of-place Miss Snow was an abject slob! Captivated by the room’s untidy charm, Gerard ran his palm over the unmade bed, tweaked the toe of a pink stocking slung brazenly over the canopy, buried his fingers in the seductive waterfall of silk and lace spilling from the half-opened drawers of the wardrobe.

  An abject slob with decidedly decadent taste in undergarments, he mused, caressing the creamy silk of a champagne blond chemise between his forefinger and thumb. He surrendered it with lazy reluctance. It would hardly do for Lucy to return to find him fondling her intimate apparel.

  Pausing at the cluttered dressing table, he brought the unstoppered mouth of a cut-crystal bottle to his nostrils, dizzied by the clean, lemony fragrance that was so distinctly Lucy. A wheeled tea cart, tarnished with age, crouched near the window seat, its surface littered with miniature clay pots overflowing with a profusion of blooming gloxinia.

  Gerard stroked one of the fuzzy, veined leaves, thinking how like their mistress they were, prickly in appearance, but sheer velvet to the touch. A patchwork quilt lay abandoned in the window seat. He fingered its frayed hem, smiling to imagine Lucy engulfed in its cozy depths. As he let the edge of the quilt fall, a fat sketchbook tumbled to the floor.

  Gerard squatted to examine it. He shuffled through page after page, the shame he should have felt at such blatant prying suppressed by pure amazement.

  No insipid watercolors these, but charcoal sketches, etched in bold, passionate strokes. He’d never dreamed the delicate blooms of a gloxinia could be reproduced with such sensual violence. He laughed aloud to discover tucked among the floral sketches a crude caricature of a Royal Navy officer worthy of Hogarth in his heyday. Lucy would undoubtedly deny it if he pointed out how much the bloated prig resembled the Admiral.

  His laughter faded as he flipped the page to find a young woman, little more than a girl, with the same bell-shaped flowers twined in her dark hair. Her mischievous smile was marred by an aura of indefinable sadness.

  The sketchbook was snatched from his hands. “Mr. Claremont! What in blazes do you think you’re doing?”

  Lucy stood over him, her hair damp, her silk negligee clinging to her body in all the wrong places. She hugged the sketchbook to her chest as if to shield both it and herself from his hungry gaze. Gerard’s excuses failed him, driven from his mind by that haunting sketch and the lemon-scented musk of Lucy’s freshly washed skin.

  “Who was she?” he asked, rising slowly to his feet.

  Lucy didn’t have to take a second look at the sketchbook. “My mother.”

  “You remember her?”

  “Of course not.” Lucy’s voice was brisk with disdain. “She had the grace to die of childbed fever a week after my birth, sparing my father any further embarrassment from her scandalous behavior.”

  Bravo, Lucy! Gerard thought. He wished nothing less for the Admiral than a taste of that magnificent sarcasm. “It appears to be a remarkable likeness. Was there a portrait? A miniature?”

  She dodged his relentless pursuit, seeking refuge in the forest of potted blooms. “Smythe described her for me.” Lucy’s free hand drifted over the plants almost absently, correcting the angle of a crooked pot so its leaves could drink in the meager light. “Gloxinia were her hobby. All of these came from clippings rooted from her flowers. Smythe cared for them until I grew old enough to tend them.”

  Gerard’s jaw tensed. Any man who would fight for twenty years to keep a woman’s spirit alive, both in these frail blooms and in the even more fragile memory of her daughter, was not a man to be underestimated.

  “I don’t know why she chose gloxinia,” Lucy went on, plucking away a dead leaf. “They’re the fussiest flowers in the world. They have to be watered from the bottom. They only favor the morning light.”

  Gerard could barely conceive of what it must have been like to be the Admiral’s bride. “Perhaps she needed something to nurture.”

  Lucy rewarded him with a flash of silver in her gray eyes. “That’s rubbish! She wasn’t the nurturing sort. She was a woman of weak moral fiber who cared for nothing but parties, champagne, and her latest lover, whoever he might have been that particular week.”

  Gerard knew Lucy was too bitter to recognize the inconsistencies in her own behavior. Even as she denounced her mother, she tenderly nursed her sole link to the woman and struggled to resurrect her, if only as a ghost sketched in charcoal.

  Gerard realized then that the Admiral had not banished Lucy to this cozy haven. She had retreated here of her own accord to punish herself for her mother’s sins, be they genuine or existing only in the Admiral’s twisted memory. He suspected this wasn’t the first time she had willfully shut herself away from her father’s unfounded accusations, his bullying, his rigid tyranny of her time.

  Gerard advanced on her, hand extended, more determined than ever to goad to life the vibrant spirit he’d glimpsed in her art. “I want to see more of your work.”

  Both the gloxinia and her mother were forgotten as Lucy clutched the sketchbook with both arms. “I think not, sir. Your position may give you license to spy on me, but not to snoop through my personal belongings.”

  “Come now, Lucy,” he coaxed, favoring her with a shameless smile that had melted wills much sterner than hers. “Don’t hide your light under a bushel. Those sketches are quite impressive.”

  She backed against the tea cart, rattling her precious pots. “And you, sir, are quite impertinent.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  He reached for the sketchbook, but she ducked beneath his arm to make for the open door. Gerard’s reflexes had been honed on fleeter prey than she. He slowed her flight by pressing a stocking foot to the hem of her negligee, then caught her around the waist, fully intending to tickle her into submission if necessary.

  But he had not wagered on the lush feel of her in his arms, her trembling acquiescence to his playful embrace. His body betrayed him without remorse, damning him to hell and back for his own rash folly. He touched his lips to her hair, breathing in its soapy scent, drinking in its silken texture.

  “Don’t!” Her piteous whisper seized his heart. “I don’t like to be touched.”

  He rubbed his cheek to the velvety softness of her temple, groaning hoarsely as her body melted against his in helpless response. “On the contrary, Lucy. I think you’d like very much to be touched.”

  His
splayed fingers were recklessly parting the folds of her negligee to prove his point when the forgotten sketchbook slid from her arms, spilling at their feet a flawless drawing of a majestic schooner drifting out of the mist, a single stark word etched on its bow.

  Retribution.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  LUCY FROZE IN CLAREMONT’S ARMS AS they both stared down at the fallen sketch. His embrace underwent a subtle shift, the arm beneath her breasts tightening to imprison her without mercy against the muscled wall of his chest. His breathing resounded in her ear like the threat of distant thunder.

  Lucy shivered, overwhelmed by his intensity, his palpable strength, the potent masculinity of his stance. She was shamed by her own yearning to turn in his arms, mold her body to his, and offer her parted lips up like a sacrifice to a pagan god. Not even a lifetime spent in the Admiral’s shadow had prepared her to feel so vulnerable, so fearful of being consumed by another’s will. She pressed her eyes shut, dizzied by the nagging sensation that she’d danced this dangerous dance before, in another time, another place.

  “Stop it! You’re hurting me!” she lied, desperate to escape his assault on her bewildered senses.

  His arms fell away so abruptly that Lucy felt a pang of guilt, as if it were she who had hurt him. Still unsteady on her feet, she reached for the scattered drawings. Gerard snatched them from beneath her hand with a ruthlessness that warned her they were no longer playing some harmless game of cat and mouse.

  “What the bloody hell is this?” His eyes narrowed behind his spectacles as he thumbed through the sketches, taking care even in his haste not to crumple or smear them.

  Lucy held her silence, already knowing what he would find. Sketch after sketch of the phantom ship that had haunted her since it had first come drifting out of the mists of her imagination. The Retribution sailing across a bloated pumpkin of an autumn moon, cresting a mountain range of stormy billows, teetering on the edge of a churning whirlpool. The Retribution, her delicately etched rigging frosted silver by an unearthly web of lightning.

  Claremont’s taut voice radiated anger. “Quite a departure from your milksop seascapes, aren’t they? Positively brimming with passion and majesty.”

  He went abruptly silent, his stillness more frightening than his frenzied search had been. An alarmed squeak escaped Lucy as he pivoted on his heel to face her. He was beyond furious. The grim sparkle in his eyes made her father’s frequent rages appear nothing more than infantile tantrums. He took a step toward her; Lucy took a step away from him.

  The wall blocked further flight. Lucy shrank against it and was just contemplating screaming for Smythe when Claremont gently drawled, “Tell me, Miss Snow, does lunacy run in your family?”

  She clutched her negligee shut at the throat. “I can’t pretend to know what you mean. They’re just drawings. They’re of no import whatsoever.”

  He thrust a sketch in her face—a man, more phantom than reality, shrouded in mist, ghostly shadows of rigging crisscrossing his bearded face. “This is him, isn’t it? Your precious Captain Doom.”

  She tilted her head, examining the sketch from all angles as if she’d never seen it before. “I don’t remember. It could be anyone.”

  His skeptical gaze was sharp enough to flay the thin silk of the negligee from her skin. “Have you any idea what you’ve done?” he asked softly. “How you’ve endangered yourself? If Doom knew these existed, do you really think he could afford to let you live?” His voice rose to a shout. “Do you?”

  Lucy flinched. Claremont swore and whirled to pace the cluttered room, running a hand through his hair. “You seem determined to make the job of protecting you a challenge, Miss Snow. I can only surmise how grateful the Royal Navy was to receive sketches this detailed. Once they start circulating, your pathetic little life won’t be worth a trice to Doom.” He swung back around to confront her. “I’m sure the Admiral was delighted for you to turn your talents to such a noble cause.”

  Lucy slumped against the wall, shooting him a sheepish glance before quietly confessing, “My father’s never seen the sketches. No one has. Except for you.”

  Claremont sank down on the edge of the bed and gaped at her as if she’d suddenly begun to gibber in a foreign tongue. Lucy thought it might be ill-timed and rather belated to chide him for his impropriety.

  “I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me why?”

  Reassured by his rational tone, she glided to the bed and rescued her sketches from his limp fingers. She held the drawing of Doom to the light, gently passing her fingertips over his charcoal-shaded beard. She was too engrossed in her memories to see the strange shudder that passed through Claremont.

  She said softly, “It might shock you to know that I’ve searched this portrait for hours only to discover a thread of honor in this man’s countenance, a strain of nobility, if you will.”

  “Excuse me, but are we referring to the same fellow who adorns his neck with human ears and cheerfully rips the hearts from his victims while they’re still thumping?”

  Lucy winced. “A blatant exaggeration, I fear. Just one of the many grave injustices I’ve done the man.”

  Claremont’s eyes hardened to shards of jade. “What of the injustices he did you? Abducting you? Throwing you overboard like so much shark bait?”

  Lucy’s cheeks heated with the painful fire that had plagued them since her encounter with the pirate. “It’s not what he did to me, Mr. Claremont. It’s what he didn’t do.”

  Her impassioned words hung in the perfumed air between them. A gentleman would have pretended to understand. Claremont was no gentleman.

  He lounged back on his elbows, looking shockingly at home in the rumpled folds of her counterpane. “Do go on.”

  Her hands twisted together, unwittingly crumpling the edges of the sketch. “You know as well as I that given the circumstances, he might easily have … could have …” She searched for a delicate phrase.

  “Raped you?” Claremont offered coolly. “Stolen your virtue and left you for dead?” Lucy should have been mortified by his blunt candor. Instead she was mesmerized by the unholy mischief in his eyes, the black humor that twisted his mouth into a travesty of a smile. He indicated the sketches. “So all this time, because of his dubious restraint, you’ve fancied yourself protecting the man.”

  She nodded. “It was the least I could do after misjudging him so harshly.”

  Claremont rose from the bed, taller than she remembered, all traces of both mockery and amusement erased from his face. “You don’t need to read fiction, Miss Snow. You’re living it. Despite your tender and hopelessly romantic fantasies, this fellow Doom is not some misunderstood hero. He’s a desperate, ruthless bastard who has nothing left to lose and everything to gain.”

  “You speak as if you know him.”

  “I know many like him. It’s unavoidable in my profession.” He advanced on her, but this time Lucy stood her ground. For the first time, her bodyguard’s speech was underscored by the harsh cadences of the London streets. “And not one out of the bloody lot of them would let some spoiled, lonely brat—”

  Stung by his unfairness, Lucy cried, “But I’m not—”

  His next words robbed her of her defense. “—no matter how breathtakingly beautiful, stand in the way of what they wanted.” Claremont caught her chin in an implacable grip. “If your path ever crosses Doom’s again, God forbid, don’t make the mistake of underestimating him. He might not be such a gentleman.”

  Lucy blinked back tears as he tumbled her idol, trying desperately to hide how deeply his words wounded her. “So you think me a sentimental fool?” she whispered.

  His grip softened. His palm wandered up to smooth a wing of damp hair from her cheek. Her breath caught at his scorching tenderness. “On the contrary, my dear Lucy. I think your noble Captain Doom a fool. If I had a woman such as you at my mercy, I’d never let her go.”

  But Claremont did just that, striding from the room without so much as a backward
glance.

  When Lucy slipped into the library the next morning at exactly 0900, she found her father pacing in front of his desk, Smythe polishing a brass sextant as if his very existence depended upon it, and her bodyguard nowhere in sight.

  She had waged a restless battle with her bedclothes most of the night, trying to determine whether she’d been complimented or insulted, cautioned or threatened, protected or compromised. She only knew that every time she closed her eyes, she saw not the charcoal rendering of Captain Doom, but hazel eyes sparkling with raw emotion.

  She slid into her chair, hoping to find some peace by throwing herself back into the soothing rhythm of her daily routine, where thought was neither necessary nor desirable.

  Her father’s cane thumped a staccato warning as he limped around to glower at her. His eyebrows gathered over his aquiline nose like snow-laden clouds. It was the same look he’d leveled at her after her rescue from the Retribution. The same look he’d given her as a child when she’d thought to please him by blacking his uniform boots with India ink.

  She devoted her attention to organizing her pens and paper, resisting the overpowering urge to start blathering, confessing her guilt for lurid sins and passionate crimes she’d contemplated only in her most feverish imaginings.

  Instead, she forced herself to say “Good morning, Father. I trust you slept well,” as if she hadn’t deliberately avoided his presence for the past five days.

  He snorted in disgust. “Not as well as your Mr. Claremont, it appears.” He drew out his chronometer and glared at it. His ruddy color heightened. “I’d like to know what in thunder is going on around here. Has the entire discipline of this household gone to rot? What’s next, Smythe? Will you start languishing in your bed until noon?”