Free Scandal's Daughter by Carola Dunn Page B

explain our presence. They will not believe we are Greek anyway, since I don’t know the language.”
    “I don’t speak well enough to be taken for a native.”
    “Suppose you pretend you understand well but speak only a very little, just enough to make our wants known, and perhaps a word or two of explanation. ‘Lost,’ say, and maybe ‘ship,’ and a great deal of waving of arms. No, I have it. Tell them we were on a Turkish ship when the captain robbed us and set us ashore. I daresay they will believe any evil of a Turk!”
    “And be glad to help us. Splendid! Let’s see, the Amphitrite sailed north, so the nearest sizable port is probably Thessaloniki, if I recall my geography correctly. I’ll tell them in shockingly fractured Greek that we were on our way to Thessaloniki. It’s just as well you don’t speak any at all. You won’t be able to contradict my story by accident if we are separated.”
    “Separated! Oh no!”
    “It’s not likely,” he soothed, “not for long, anyway, since we shall have to pretend to be husband and wife.”
    “We what?” Scarce able to believe her ears, she stopped and glared at his back. Sometimes she almost forgot he was a rascal, but one way or another he always reminded her. She had guessed right, for all his denials he had designs on her virtue. “Never!”
    He turned to face her, the patient expression she found insufferable combined—still worse!—with amusement. “My dear girl, the modern Greeks don’t keep their women segregated like the Turks, but we cannot expect them to receive with cordiality an unmarried man and woman travelling together.”
    “Fiddlesticks! You must tell them we are brother and sister.”
    “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said regretfully, then brightened. “You will have to call me Iakov, then, the Greek equivalent of James. You cannot call your brother Mister.”
    She frowned.
    They went on. James heard the girl stumbling along behind him. She must be exhausted after the unaccustomed exertion, but he’d be damned if he would offer her his arm. She’d probably cry rape.
    How determined she was to believe him a villain! That was bad enough, but what really annoyed him was her certainty of her own superiority. She even despised and resented her mother, with no attempt to understand or forgive that unfortunate lady’s fall from grace.
    James did not know the full story, only what little Uncle Aaron had told him. Lady Courtenay had found herself at low ebb in Prussia, of all places, with a daughter to support. Without resources or friends to turn to, she had accepted the protection of Mehmed Pasha, in Berlin to court an alliance with King Frederick William against Russia, or Napoleon, or both.
    Lady Courtenay was not the first—nor doubtless the last—beautiful widow to be forced by circumstances to veer from the straight and narrow. James felt nothing but sympathy for her. Yet her daughter, whom she had kept in comfort, held her in contempt and blamed every difficulty on her.
    It was practically his duty to seduce Cordelia Courtenay, he mused. She depended on him as Lady Courtenay had depended on the pasha. Let her learn what had driven her mother to succumb to the Turk’s blandishments.
    Though he’d no more force her than rob her, he would do his best to win her favours, he decided. For the present they were brother and sister, but England was still a long way off.
    The goat track he was following twisted and turned downward until it ended at a gap in the stone wall of a small vineyard. Autumn-yellow vine leaves drifted to the ground under the assault of the strengthening wind, but bunches of purple grapes still hung here and there.
    Cordelia plodded up behind him as he paused at the tumbledown wall. “Do you think anyone would mind if we ate a few?” she said longingly.
    “I doubt it. The vines look abandoned to me, all overgrown and tangled as if they haven’t been pruned in years, and most of the grapes are