The Uncompromising Lord Flint. Virginia Heath

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СКАЧАТЬ he would be shot of her and her foul temper.

      Above him, he listened to the sounds of the huge canvas sails snapping in the wind and knew the next few days would not be pleasant despite their fast speed. Aside from this ocean journey, he would then have to spend days stuck in a coach with her. It couldn’t be helped. He was between missions and the rest of the King’s Elite were either in the thick of it or on honeymoon. His friend and fellow spy Jake Warriner had been the first to fall into the parson’s trap, something which still came as a shock considering Jake had always been a committed and cheerful rake determinedly averse to settling down. He had been closely followed by Seb Leatham, who had gone and married an effervescent incomparable despite his painful shyness around women. As both friends had been working on the same mission to catch exactly the same smugglers as Flint, their sudden and unexpected plummet into marital bliss was a worry. Two good men down. A state Flint wanted no part of.

      Not this side of fifty at least. Perhaps when he was older and beginning to creak he might welcome the presence of a wife. And then again perhaps not. Merely considering it made him frown.

      It wasn’t so much the institution of marriage he took issue with, rather the inevitable tribulations which came along with it. As the youngest of six children, five of whom were female, he’d had quite enough feminine machinations, hysterics and interfering nosiness to last a lifetime. He’d been hen-pecked, mollycoddled and driven to the furthest limits of his sanity for his first twenty years. Those scars still ran deep. Too deep to plunge headlong into marriage any time soon. Women were born conditioned to find ways to control and confound the men they cohabited with. A fact he understood only too well.

      He loved all his high-strung sisters dearly, was hugely proud and protective of them in equal measure, but also spent a great deal of time wanting to strangle the lot of them. Despite all now happily settled with good husbands and families of their own, they still devoted a huge and wholly unnecessary amount of time meddling in his life.

      In the last two years that meddling had become considerably more unbearable than it had been in his youth—before he had discovered the sweet taste of freedom—because now they had collectively decided their little brother was in dire need of settling, too. In their minds, seven and twenty was precisely the right age for a man to marry. He couldn’t return home without an attractive and eligible female being unsubtly wafted under his nose.

      Last month, when another mission necessitated a protracted visit to his estate, his troublesome sisters had conspired to procure three potential brides who just happened to be invited to every dinner he was home to eat. And he had been purposely non-committal about his possible attendance at all meals—yet those eligible girls were there regardless. One of whom was so enthusiastic Flint had had to keep his wits about him for a whole week to avoid being caught in a compromising situation. That chit had been hellbent on being ruined and his sisters, and his own beloved mother, had encouraged her ardent pursuit! It was a sad state of affairs when a man’s house wasn’t a safe haven.

      Thank goodness the wandering and unpredictable life of a spy had given him a convenient excuse to avoid his siblings for months out of every year. They lived in Cornwall, miles away from anywhere, and he cheerfully resided in London in bachelor lodgings, blissfully female-free. A situation which suited him perfectly. As he knew to his cost, all women—family or otherwise—really couldn’t be trusted.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ