A hard chunk of well-baked crust caught him on the temple. ‘Do not dare try to ignore me, English pig! Let me out of here! You do not know what you have got into. They will come and they will kill you. Every one of you!’ He dodged the next doughy projectile and rolled his eyes. All this combustible feminine emotion was tiresome. She saw it and became most fervent, her small hands curling around the bars and her dark eyes wide beneath the tangle of curls.
‘Do you seriously think they will let me set one foot on English soil and not be there waiting?’
Something he and his superiors were counting on and the real reason why she had been held tantalisingly on this huge ship, conveniently anchored within plain sight of the beach at Cherbourg for almost six days.
Lady Jessamine was bait.
A tasty morsel to lure her fellow traitors out of the woodwork. ‘You are overreacting, madam. Before you know it, you will be stood firmly back on English soil, in the dock and found reassuringly guilty and we’ll all be much happier for it.’
Her hand went straight to her neck as she stumbled back a step and he felt a pang of guilt at being so brutal before he ruthlessly quashed it. So what if she was a woman? She didn’t deserve his compassion and any residual, instinctually protective ideals about the fairer sex did not apply here. She was a traitor. A criminal.
She might not have wielded the pistols that had killed, but she’d had a hand in loading the bullets and reaped a share in the ill-gotten profits. Shamelessly co-ordinating the smugglers for the elusive Boss, a man the King’s Elite had been desperate to arrest for over a year. The callous and invisible criminal mastermind behind a plot to restore Napoleon to power. His network had infiltrated the upper echelons of the English elite and flooded the market with smuggled brandy, the proceeds from which went straight into the enemy’s coffers.
Alongside the Comte de Saint-Aubin-de-Scellon, the petite Lady Jessamine was his partner in crime. The Boss’s assistant across the Channel. Every covert, coded message they had intercepted in the last few weeks had been written in her pretty, looped handwriting. Times, places, shipments, vessels, corrupt English peers complicit in the widespread and dangerous treachery—Lady Jessamine was privy to it all. In fact, she had assisted in orchestrating it. Always had. There were three other convicted traitors languishing in Newgate awaiting execution who had repeatedly testified to as much.
A midshipman arrived with a lamp and the damp brig was suddenly bathed in golden light. Another pang of pity troubled him as she flinched in pain and shielded her eyes. She’d been kept in the dark too long. Her skin had the grey pallor similar to that seen on long-term prisoners.
Now he could clearly see her body, the evidence of her rough treatment appalled him. One sleeve hung limply at her elbow, ripped nearly clean from the bodice. Finger-shaped bruises marred her upper arm. Her dark hair was matted. Her small feet bare. The remnants of her gown stained and filthy. The coarse, utilitarian fabric surprised him. Flint had expected silk and lace—the obvious trappings of wealth and ill-gotten privilege—not dull, patched serge.
A disguise? It had to be. Once her hideaway had come under siege, it made sense she would don the garments of a servant and attempt to flee capture. But still...
‘Send for soap and hot water, Captain. Some fresh clothes and a hairbrush.’ Whatever she had done, Lady Jessamine was still a human being. ‘And arrange a screen out here so she can bathe in private. The guards can wait outside.’ She was also the sole woman on a ship filled with lusty men who spent the majority of their lives on the ocean with other males.
‘If we can’t see her, there is no telling what she might do! The blasted chit has tried to escape three times already!’
‘The anchor has been weighed and we are miles from shore. Unless she swims underwater with the speed of a dolphin, where exactly do you think she will go?’ Flint turned at the same moment she brushed the dark curtain of hair from her face.
Beautiful.
That was the only thought he had and one that certainly wouldn’t do. He’d been bewitched by traitorous beauty before and had trained himself to be immune since. As her deep brown, almond-shaped eyes locked with his, he abruptly turned on his heel, a little staggered at the odd emotions the sight of her conjured. He had thought he hadn’t needed Lord Fennimore’s stinging reminder about his previous gullibility—now he clung to those insightful words gratefully.
‘Don’t let her wiles waylay you. Remember what happened the last time.’
As if he could forget? His father had almost died as a result. But that had been years ago when he had still been green around the gills and had assumed that all women were like his sisters—over-emotional but good inside. That particular prisoner had duped him with her tears, capitalised on his familial obligation to protect and then thoroughly seduced him into dropping his guard. To then watch helpless as she had shot his poor father with Flint’s own pistol had been a hard way to learn his lesson—but learn it he had. What she looked like and how his body responded had nothing to do what his mission. The mission always had to come first. ‘Get yourself cleaned up. We will talk again in an hour.’
Jess watched him leave. Watched the Captain and her two surly guards follow closely behind, then sank to the floor. The last few weeks had been terrifying and exhausting, but tears had no place now. Self-pity was an indulgence she couldn’t afford—not yet at least. Perhaps soon she could curl up in a ball in a safe little room far, far away and cry for a month to let it all out. Until then, she needed to hold the tears back, knowing instinctively that if she started then she wouldn’t be able to stop.
Everything was going entirely to plan.
Not that she really had any more of a plan now than she had when all this had started a few weeks ago. It was more a series of events and opportunities created out of necessity and desperation and a large sprinkling of unexpected luck, but at least she was out of the run-down pension which had been her prison for the last month and was heading home, albeit as a prisoner again.
She hoped this ship was fast.
The more miles between her and Saint-Aubin the better. Cruel, callous and with the single-minded determination to crush anyone or anything that got in his way under the heel of his glossy boots, that monster had stolen too many years and sucked all the joy out of her soul. Oh, how she hated him! Except now he had an excellent reason to turn all that venom towards her. She hadn’t just escaped, she had destroyed the documentation he would need to fill the void she had left. Every name, every contact, every supplier carefully recorded in her mother’s leather journal now languished somewhere at the bottom of the harbour in Cherbourg. It would take him weeks and possibly costly months to piece it all together again—unless he found her first and forced the details out of her.
Torture, then death.
Neither appealed. Once she was in sight of the English coast, Jess would find a way to escape properly and disappear, never to be found again. A new life and a new identity, miles from the shore, ships and the smugglers who had stolen her old ones.
The only hatch to the brig opened, followed by the tell-tale smell of boiled cabbage and stale sweat, and the same toothless sailor who had watched her lasciviously for the last week, carried steaming wooden buckets of water. Over his shoulder were tossed towels and fresh clothes. Behind him came the other guard, not quite as hostile but no more compassionate, with a small tin bathtub filled with folded sheets which the pair of them suspended from the low ceiling like a sail. Then with a snarl, the toothless one produced a key and undid the padlock of her cell, warily watching Jess as she sat unmoving before him.
‘Your bath, your ladyship. Not that traitors deserve baths as far as I’m concerned. If it was down to me, I’d leave you to rot in your own filth.’
‘As you do?’ Bating him was