Free For the Love of a Pirate by Edith Layton Page B

It looked like many another noble portrait of an English gentleman. The man was lean and dark, with a sly smile that made him look rakish. But what most distinguished him from any portrait she had seen was that glittering smile. Devilish, charming, and bright. She’d always liked him.
    She curtsied to the portrait and then drifted over to the dark one that hung on the other side of the window. She didn’t have to study that one. She had it committed to heart. She’d loved it when she’d been a girl. The artist who had painted it hadn’t been very skillful. She knew that now, but when she’d been a girl it hadn’t occurred to her. It had been the drama of the portrait that had captured her imagination. It had a history as exciting as any fairy story she’d ever been told. This man might have been a gentleman or a rogue. He’d been both.
    He too was lean and dark. But he had a thin mustache over his curling smile, and his close-clipped beard ended in a triangle below his chin. It made him look devilish and polished at the same time. He carried a saber, and stood with his head high, as though ready to take on the world. He’d been painted with the sea behind him. The artist who had created his image wasn’t a fraction as gifted as the one who had limned his grandson, on the other wall, but even he had been able to communicate something of the man’s personality.
    It was a murky canvas, but the man’s smile was a slash of white, his eyes sparkled, his high-booted feet were planted apart. He wore a red cloak that billowed in the invisible wind. In all, he looked like a cavalier from an even earlier day. He was so full of life he looked as though he were impatient to leap away from the sitting, stride down the beach, and board the many-masted ship that sailed the painted waves behind him.
    Lisabeth had hoped to find him one day, in real life. She thought she had done so. But she was sure the painted gentleman wouldn’t have let her lean in for a kiss and then hopped away like a frightened rabbit.
    She sighed. So much for her hopes. The pattern of life here never changed. She’d wondered if the arrival of Lord Wylde would alter it. Much as she loved her life and enjoyed its sweet familiar patterns, still she’d found herself hoping it would. Even heaven must get boring sometimes, she thought. She’d hoped to find a cure for the odd restlessness that had consumed her these last months.
    She didn’t really want to marry, there wasn’t a man alive she’d want to devote her life to, and that was what marriage was all about. She didn’t like the idea of some man ordering her life either, and that was also what marriage was about. Because even though she might be a touch lonely here, now and then, she was entirely free, and had been brought up to value that. She didn’t want to go to London either. Her life was here, at Sea Mews, as was her happiness. As well as her boredom and restiveness. She didn’t understand it, but there it was.
    Lord Wylde was beyond any living man she’d ever clapped eyes on. Well, but she’d only known sailors and farmers, fishermen, local merchants, and those who came down from London to meet with her grandfather. And local smugglers, of course, as well as some of her father’s former associates. She liked some of them very well, but knew enough to avoid getting involved with any of them. Gentle, educated, boring Mr. Beecham shone in the usual company she kept.
    The lord her grandfather had coerced into coming to the heart of Cornwall to see her had turned out to be a bore, and a snob. But at least, she decided, he was a new one.
    She turned, and after bowing to the portrait, went up the stairs to bed.

Chapter 6
    H e’d never felt so alone. It was ridiculous. Constantine had been alone when he came to his childless uncle’s house when he’d been five, after his grandfather had died. He’d felt