Princess of Fortune. Miranda Jarrett

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      “I didn’t know one to tell him.” She felt foolish and lost, having earned the freedom she’d craved without any sense now of what to do with it. “I have been too much a prisoner to learn of anything beyond those four grim walls.”

      “Ma’am, you were a guest in a Berkeley Square town house.” The captain’s smile was patient and obligatory, a smile guaranteed to make her feel even more foolish and lost. “No one would honestly consider Lady Willoughby’s house to be a prison.”

      “It was the same as one.” Her chin trembled. “They allowed me no liberty, no privacy.”

      “You allowed them no peace,” he countered. “Nothing Lady Willoughby might have done to you merited that tantrum over your hair. When I was a boy, my mother would have taken a hairbrush to me or my brothers or sisters for behavior like that, and she wouldn’t have used it on our heads, either.”

      She’d thought he’d understand, but he didn’t, or at least he was pretending not to, with this nonsense about his mother’s hairbrush. “Your mother wasn’t a queen.”

      “No,” he said, pushing his hat back from his forehead with his thumb, “but she was an English countess, which amounts to much the same thing.”

      She frowned, wondering what exactly her mother would do or say in this circumstance. “But Lady Willoughby and her servants have been unkind to me, Captain. They did not treat me like a guest. They searched through my trunks and mussed my gowns.”

      “How else could they be sure that no enemy could have hidden something harmful in your belongings?” he asked, the logic perfectly clear to him. “They meant only to protect you.”

      She sniffed. “They have intercepted my invitations and letters of welcome from my cousins, your English King George and Queen Charlotte, and kept them from me.”

      “Lady Willoughby wouldn’t do that, especially not with correspondence from His Majesty. More likely His Majesty has been occupied with affairs of state, and has not yet, ah, found the time to write to you.”

      “No, Captain, that was not it at all.” She lowered her voice in confidence, even though they were alone. “Because I am a foreigner, and not English like them, the persons in this house will not trust me. They will not even try.”

      He raised one skeptical eyebrow. “I don’t believe that. It’s rubbish.”

      “You should believe it, rubbish or not, because it is so,” she said, switching back to speaking Italian. She leaned closer to him, close enough that she could see the darker flecks of blue that sparked his eyes. She clasped her hands before her, beseeching as the shawl slithered off her arm. “Can you trust me, Captain?”

      But though she waited, he didn’t answer. Instead of listening, he’d let his eyes follow the shawl as it slipped from her shoulders and came to an abrupt stop there on the neckline of her gown. Monteverdian ladies were not ashamed to display their figures to the best advantage possible, and Isabella had soon realized she wore her gowns cut much lower over her breasts than Lady Willoughby and her dour friends did. Now the captain must have realized the difference, too, his English efficiency scattered to oblivion.

      So this, then, was how her mother would have ruled the captain, but the thought gave her no satisfaction. She didn’t want him to be like every other man, whether English or Monteverdian. She wanted him to be better.

      “I have trusted no one since I left Monteverde, Captain.” She pulled the shawl back over her shoulder, willing to put aside her disappointment and give him another chance. “No one at all, and certainly none of your English. But you, Captain—truly, I might be able to trust you, if you can but trust me.”

      He cleared his throat, and at last looked back at her face. And he knew he’d erred. She could see the chagrin in his expression, which was, she supposed, something.

      “I’m an officer of the king, ma’am, sworn to act with honor,” he said. “You should be able to trust me.”

      “You are a man first,” she said, thoughtfully stroking one of the shawl’s tassels between her fingers. To her he’d always be a man first, and what a shame it was that he didn’t seem to think of himself that way, too. “And you are a man who hasn’t answered my question. Can you trust me, Captain, so that I might trust you?”

      “I told you, ma’am, as an officer—”

      “Oh, Captain, not again,” she said. “How can you say that to me, when the others were officers, too?”

      “Others, ma’am?” he asked with wary surprise.

      “Oh, yes, there were three other captains before you, all old men with white hair, puffed up with their own self-importance and gold braid.” She waggled her fingers over her shoulders to mimic the heavy gold fringes on their epaulets. They had each tried to dictate to her what was proper and what wasn’t, as if they meant to replace her father. They’d lectured her about her behavior and how she’d dressed, and now—now they were lecturing someone else.

      He frowned. “What became of them, these other captains?”

      So the admiral hadn’t told him he hadn’t been the first choice. She was sorry for that. When she’d told him about the others, she’d only wanted him to realize how superior he was to them, not to make him feel as if he were fourth-rate. Ah, a man’s pride was such a delicate thing!

      “Oh, they did not please me,” she said with airy nonchalance, trying to make light of the other men to save his feelings. “I told the admiral to send them away, because I could not trust them.”

      “You dismissed them?” He sounded shocked. “Older officers, white-haired gentlemen who deserved respect for their rank and years of service? You dismissed them?”

      “I didn’t,” she said, surprised he would be so upset. At least he had some pretense to a title and noble blood. The others had been disagreeable commoners, underlings, and surely his inferiors. “The admiral did. But I do not see why I am not entitled to—”

      “You sent those other officers away,” he said, “and because of your whims, they’ve failed their orders. Because of you, ma’am, their lives and careers must be in rare shambles.”

      “Their failure is hardly my fault!”

      “Who else could be to blame?” he demanded. “How in blazes could you do that to those men, ma’am? It’s bad enough when you berate poor Lady Willoughby, but for you to ruin three honorable gentlemen officers because they did not suit you—”

      “I thought I could trust you, Captain,” she said defensively. “I thought because you were as unhappy as I am, you could understand me.”

      “Who in blazes says I’m unhappy?”

      “You don’t have to say it, Captain!” She sliced her gloved hand through the air as if to cut through his protests. “You do not have to speak one word, either in English or in your barbarous attempt at Italian. You make all perfectly clear. You are no more pleased to be in London than I. You would much rather be back on one of your great smelly navy boats with a ruffian crew of thieves and cutpurses.”

      “Ships, ma’am.” He was biting off each word. “In most cases, an English vessel of war is a ship, not СКАЧАТЬ