He uncocked his pistol and slipped it into his coat pocket on top of the diamonds as he retrieved the lantern from the lawn where he’d left it earlier. He still didn’t know why she’d come to his bedchamber to see him, let alone why she’d let him rob her. He thought of her neat pink toes beneath the dew-marked white silk, and the way she grinned at him like a fellow conspirator. Behind him he heard her voice raised again, this time over the noise of her carriage, as she called George a name more usually found in the vocabularies of seamen.
No, Caroline, Lady Byfield, wasn’t like anyone’s idea of a countess.
And for the first time since he’d lost the Chanticleer, Jeremiah laughed out loud.
“Go on, lad, it’s yours if you like raspberries.” Jeremiah held the jam cake out in the palm of his hand, coaxing his nephew, Johnny, to take it. “Myself, I’d choose the apple, but your mama does them both blessed well.”
The little boy stared seriously at the cake, his lips pursed with a four-year-old’s intensity and his hands clasped behind his waist in imitation of his father, the admiral. But that was the sum of his father that showed, for with his green eyes and dark hair, Johnny was all Sparhawk. If he’d ever stayed in one place long enough to father a son himself, thought Jeremiah with a little pang of regret, his boy would look like this one.
“Take it, lad. I swear it’s not poisoned.” Still the boy hesitated, looking back over his shoulder to his nursemaid for reassurance. Not that Jeremiah blamed him. He hadn’t much experience as an uncle, and this was the first time, quite by accident, that he’d been alone with the boy without Desire to ease the awkwardness. “Be bold now, Johnny. If you see a prize you want, why, you must seize it and make it your own.”
Johnny frowned, considering, and grabbed the cake and stuffed it into his mouth in one messy bite. Then he smiled at his uncle, displaying teeth so covered with crumbs and bits of raspberry jam that Jeremiah, appalled, found it very hard to smile back.
“Oh, Johnny, you know you’re not supposed to bother your uncle!” cried Desire as she hurried into the breakfast room as quickly as she could with her second child, Charlotte, clutching onto her skirts.
“No bother, Des, I swear,” said Jeremiah with more relief than he’d intended. “I thought he still seemed hungry, that’s all.”
“He’s always hungry for sweets.” She plucked a napkin from the table and bent down to scrub at the boy’s face while he squirmed and Charlotte gloated. “But that doesn’t mean the little rogue has to come begging to you.”
“He didn’t beg. I offered.”
“Truly, Jere?” She was slow to straighten, one hand on her back to balance the weight of the third child she carried within her, due in June. But still a beauty, thought Jeremiah proudly, the kind of tall, comely American woman that put all the little whey-faced English ladies to shame. “I’ve told him you’ve been ill, but children don’t always understand.”
“Stop fussing, Des. I’m as well now as I’ll ever be, and the boy did no harm.” He slipped his hand around his sister’s shoulder and guided her to her chair at the head of the table as the nursemaid herded the two children from the room. “You’re doing well enough by him, that’s clear. One look at him and you know he’s a sight more Sparhawk than Herendon.”
“Don’t forget whose roof you’re under,” Desire scolded, reaching out to smack his hand with her teaspoon. “No matter if it’s true, Jack will have your head if he hears you say it.”
“Hear you say what?” asked her husband as he came to stand behind her chair. His blond hair glinting in the morning sun, Admiral Lord John Herendon was the model of an English gentleman and officer, tall and handsome in the white and navy uniform he seemed born to wear. Desire smiled as she turned her face up toward him, her cheeks coloring with pleasure, and he rested his hand gently on the swell of her belly as he bent to kiss her.
The warm intimacy of the gesture made Jeremiah look down at his plate. If any two people in this world loved each other, it was Desire and Jack, and despite Jeremiah’s own misgivings about his sister’s choice of a husband, he had to admit that the marriage had brought her happiness and contentment.
He raised his gaze long enough to see them still wrapped in one another, his sister’s eyes blissfully closed. Though married for nearly five years, they behaved as shamelessly as newlyweds, perhaps because so much of that time they’d spent apart. For the first year, Desire had sailed with Jack on his flagship while the British Admiralty had benignly looked the other way, and Johnny had been born at sea in the admiral’s cabin and Charlotte begotten there. But then the war with France had worsened, and Desire had been forced to make a safer home alone on land for their children until the Treaty of Amiens last spring had brought Jack back to Portsmouth and the Channel Fleet.
Self-consciously buttering toast he had no real interest in eating, Jeremiah considered the dangers of loving as completely as Jack and Desire did, of placing all hope for joy and happiness in a single other person. He’d never known that kind of love himself, or particularly wanted it. Why should he? For him life seemed too uncertain for such unconditional devotion, and he’d been hurt enough by all he’d lost too soon—his mother, his father, his brother, friends and comrades—to willingly risk more.
Besides, he’d be thirty-seven his next birthday, far past the age for sentimental follies. He enjoyed women well enough—he thought again, pleasantly, of Lady Byfield— but he’d never found one worth giving up his freedom for, or would any of them, he thought wryly, consider him much of a bargain as a husband.
He looked up from the toast to his sister and brother-in-law in time to see them exchange one final kiss before Jack went to his own chair at the opposite end of the table, one more moment of such wordless tenderness that Jeremiah again looked hastily away with the same unfamiliar pang of regret he’d felt with little Johnny. What must it be like to love, and be loved, that much?
“You’re looking well this morning, Jeremiah,” declared Jack heartily, unaware of Jeremiah’s thoughts. “Though Desire was ready to give you up, I knew it would take more than that single sword swipe to finish a man like you.”
“I never gave him up!” said Desire indignantly. “I knew he wouldn’t die. Jere’s too ornery, even if that ‘single sword swipe’ was a gash as long as your arm, and then there was the infection on top of that, and floating in the sea for days on end.”
“It wasn’t quite that bad, Des,” said Jeremiah uncomfortably, wishing they’d find something else to bicker over. He was feeling better this morning, well enough that for the first time he’d dressed in the new clothes his sister had ordered for him when his own were lost. A fop’s rags, he grumbled as he’d looked in the mirror, but still he’d admitted to himself that the dark green coat looked handsome enough, and he’d taken extra care with how he’d tied his neckcloth and brushed his hair. The world seemed a more promising place this morning, and he didn’t want to be reminded about how close he’d come to dying. “Though I suppose I should be grateful for your confidence in my orneriness.”
“Orneriness be damned,” said Jack as he cut into the ham and poached eggs that the servant had placed before him. “If Jeremiah’s looking well this morning, I’m more willing to credit it to his own constitution and a good night’s sleep.”
“I wasn’t much for sleep last night. No time.” Jeremiah pulled Caro’s bracelets and earrings from his coat pocket where he’d left it for safekeeping and shoved them across the polished mahogany toward Jack.
Desire gasped, and Jack frowned and lay down his knife and fork.
“I had a visitor,” continued Jeremiah.