Free Never Trust a Pirate by Anne Stuart

for taking the blame for his own ineptitude, but of course he ignored her completely, as he’d ignored her before. Which suited her fine—she didn’t want his rheumy old eyes on her.
    “You’d best go up to bed, girl,” Mrs. Crozier said, and Maddy ground her teeth. Answering to the name of “Greaves” had been bad enough—the convenient “girl” was impossibly demeaning. “The captain will probably want to see you, and I don’t think you’ll be wanting to face him tonight. He’d probably fire you on the spot. I’ll tell him I’ve sent you to bed.”
    She was ready to put off seeing him for as long as she possibly could. “That won’t be a problem?”
    Mrs. Crozier shrugged her thin shoulders. “You’ll simply have to prove yourself, same as anyone. If you do your job and keep out of his way the captain won’t have anything to say to you. But if you’re lazy or nosy you’ll be blistered with words, you will. I hear tell they don’t use the lash on his boats—all he has to do is use his tongue.”
    It was a sudden, disturbing image. He’d used his tongue with her, in an entirely different manner from what Mrs. Crozier was describing, and it had demoralized her completely. She sincerely doubted he kissed his erring crewmembers, though there were stories about long trips…
    No, not the man who’d put his mouth on hers. And she wasn’t even supposed to know that men did such things, but she’d always had a great curiosity and one of her father’s retired captains had explained things to her. She still couldn’t quite fathom what men did together, and she certainly couldn’t imagine the captain, but then, she was hopelessly naïve in some matters and preferred it that way.
    “There you go again,” Mrs. Crozier snapped. “That faraway look in your eyes fair gives me the chills, it does. Like you’re seeing ghosts or something.”
    Well, that was at least one form of defense against the old biddy, Maddy thought. “Beg pardon, Mrs. Crozier,” she said meekly. “I was just thinking of something.”
    “Don’t you go be thinking about the captain! He doesn’t have any interest in a pert housemaid, not when he’s got a beauty like Miss Haviland, so you can put it right out of your mind. If you were a doxy he’d pay the price easily enough, I imagine, but he doesn’t soil his own nest, if you know what I mean.”
    “I’m a good girl, I am,” she said immediately, putting just the trace of a whine in it. “I left London because my employer was trying to take advantage of me. If I’m not going to lift my skirts for a lord I’m for certain not about to lift them for a sea captain.”
    Mrs. Crozier was not impressed. “I’m thinking your lord didn’t look like Captain Morgan. For all that he’s part gypsy the women fall all over him, and I expect you will too. Just don’t make a pest of yourself.”
    “Yes, Mrs. Crozier.” She’d make a pest of herself, all right, just not in the way Mrs. Crozier imagined. Things had suddenly become a great deal more difficult. An elderly sea captain, no matter how larcenous, seemed a lot easier to deal with than someone like the man who…
    No, she couldn’t think about it, not tonight. Tonight she had to find her way up three flights of stairs to her attic, lugging water to wash in and sheets for the bed, and she had to pray there were no bats to greet her.
    It was the least she deserved after such an exhausting day.
    She wasn’t counting on it.

CHAPTER SIX

    L UCA WAS NOT A happy man. With Vincent Haviland’s rheumy eyes on him, he had danced attendance on Gwendolyn and was rewarded with the beautiful smile that lit her blue eyes, her slight, restraining touch on his arm, a mild flirtation that hardly suited their engaged status. Mrs. Haviland was looking at him as if he’d crawled out of a sewer, and he would have given almost anything to lean over and inform her that’s exactly where he’d come from.
    Ah, but he had a role to play, a