Free Never Trust a Pirate by Anne Stuart Page A

brand-new reputation, hard-won and relatively honest. His thieving, pirating days were behind him, as well as his whoring and brawling. He’d decided to marry a very beautiful, very proper young lady, and he needed to ignore his rebellious second thoughts. From now on, when at home, he was going to be the perfect model of a captain and a budding industrialist. He knew Gwendolyn—she would revel in her role as leader of Devonport society. She’d assured him she had no aspirations toward London, and he believed her. In London she’d be nothing, the daughter of a country solicitor. Dukes’ nieces were thick on the ground already, and her tenuous claim to aristocracy would be ignored for the greater scandal of whom she’d married. Here in Devonport, where shippinglines were more important than bloodlines, she could queen it over everyone, because there was simply no one better than he was at running a ship, be she powered by sails or steam.
    He understood the ocean and the vessels that plied it. While his heart would always love the beauty of the clipper ships, his practical side responded to the power and speed of steam and steel. Fools had tried to race him, and they always lost. Other fools had tried to lure his best men from him—they lost as well. Now, with a burgeoning fleet of two ships, soon to be three, he was unstoppable.
    So why was he suddenly troubled by the young woman who’d entered his household this very day?
    He seldom noticed maids—this house and living on land was a tedious and always temporary necessity, and he paid little attention to the disreputable state the house was in until Gwendolyn gently brought his attention to it. It had to be sheer coincidence that he’d run into the girl earlier, trying to fight off three drunken sailors, the silly cow.
    Except she was no cow. She was a rare beauty, with a fire inside that was carefully banked but still glowing, a fire that made Gwendolyn seem pale and lifeless in comparison. He’d been a fool to kiss her, but he’d taken the excuse, simply because he wanted to be bad, be outrageous, do something that would horrify his fiancée had she ever found out. Kissing a beautiful woman in the rough neighborhoods of Devonport had been as good a way as any to vent his frustration, and if the girl had been willing he would have pulled her deeper into the alleyway and taken her up against a wall like a sailor just home from the sea. There’d been something about her, about her soft, unskilled mouth, her flashing eyes, her brave fury, that had called to him, and it wouldn’t have taken him long to show her just how to use that mouth.
    He’d thought better of it, of course, and it had only taken the second kiss to realize she wasn’t someone you fucked in an alley on a bright spring day. At least he’d thought he’d scared her off fromwandering around the docks alone. So why had he gone back to kiss her one more time?
    He couldn’t get her face out of his mind. When he first looked over and saw her kneeling on the floor he thought he was imagining things, so caught up in her memory that he was dreaming she’d appeared.
    But damned if it wasn’t her after all, and one sharp glance was even more unsettling. He knew the girl, and not just from the encounter in the alleyway. He couldn’t remember where he’d seen her before today, but he most certainly had. And what the hell was she doing in his household, picking up after that sotted Crozier’s mistakes?
    It wasn’t as if she was fair game. Even if he weren’t engaged, he wouldn’t touch a woman in his employ. That was what the toffs did—seduce and discard people like him without a second thought. Though who was he fooling—maids were a step up from where he’d come from. He’d seen them on the streets, following their mistresses when he was a cutpurse, seen them in the houses when he was a climbing boy. Superior they were, clean and starched and prim, looking at him like the dirt he was. No,