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PART I

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MARCH, 1780
ATLANTIC OCEAN, TRADE ROUTE

ELLIOTT JERKED AWAKE, sweating, casting about wildly in the dark to ascertain from whence the screech had come. He knew exactly where he was, but this noise was not normal for any ship. Another screech, just through the bulkhead. A thump. A spate of giggles. A scandalously delighted squeal: “Kit, no! ’Tis wicked.”

Elliott couldn’t make out what the boy said in return, but it was of no consequence. He released a great breath and relaxed into the mattress. He scrubbed at his face with both hands and listened to the sounds of this most unusual night, simply grateful he was not again three and twenty and not chained in the hold of the HMS Ocean.

Faint music drifted to him from the Silver Shilling’s fo’c’sle, some one hundred yards away. Then he heard the foot stomps of dancers, musicians, and people simply keeping time. Both ships’ beams and masts creaked, and their hulls scraped where they were bound together. The Thunderstorm’s bell rang four times. Two of the clock. There was intermittent shouting coming from the officer’s quarters on the Silver Shilling, and Elliott considered joining them at their dice.

Water barely lapped at the hull just below Fury’s stern windows, which were slightly open despite the cold. She liked to sleep in the cold, she’d told him, whilst buried deep in a pile of blankets. It made for a rude awakening, but it was a price she was willing to pay.

The faintest sound of sea chanteys and rowing reached him and he supposed the Mad Hangman would be grappled to the starboard side of the Thunderstorm by morning. It would take the Hollander’s crew the rest of the night to tow her the remainder of the six miles that had lain between them.

Dindi lay curled up next to his ear, the tip of her tail against his cheek, after having encroached upon his pillow space until he had but a sliver. She was snoring, but the minute he put his hand to her head to scratch it, she began to purr.

George was shrieking again, laughing breathlessly. Another cabin door opened, then a fist pounded on Kit’s cabin door. “Settle down, you two,” barked Fury’s lieutenant, “or find another berth. Some of us’re tryna sleep.”

“Aye, Sir,” Kit called, but then George giggled again.

Lieutenant Smith grumbled and slammed his own door. Elliott finally grinned. He knew for a fact that “Smitty” and Fury’s bo’sun had, but an hour ago, been engaged thusly. And upon remembering, Elliott had to admit a great deal of admiration for a tar of his years to have caught the eye of a young woman that beautiful without benefit of an arrangement.

He reached out a hand under the blankets to feel for the woman next to him. Her ridged skin was warm and her breathing slow, shallow, and even. He declined to awaken her, as they had spent the day together touring each other’s ships, meeting each other’s officers and crewmen, tending to tasks upon their respective ships that only they could do, establishing rules for the merrymaking, rearranging duties, and assigning watches.

Elliott, Fury, and both ships’ officers had gathered in the Silver Shilling’s dining salon to partake in a normal Thursday evening supper for the Thunderstorm, prepared by its cooks, but a treat for his officers, who ate no better than Elliott did.

The Arab, Solomon, whose unofficial position aboard the ship was as the women’s physician, was taciturn, but not unfriendly. He had seemed to be assessing Elliott for his fitness as Fury’s lover, but Elliott had no idea if he had met with the man’s approval or not. Elliott didn’t suppose it mattered, as Solomon had decamped to his own cabin as soon as he had finished his meal.

Even though it had been, to Elliott, one of the most wonderful days he had had in years, it had been a long one and they were both fatigued. Yet they had managed to love once after attaining her bunk. He could not get enough of her and, happily, it seemed she felt the same for him. Now, lying beside her, touching her, feeling her kindred spirit, he dreaded more than ever the mantle he must take up once he arrived home.

Never before had he felt so at home anywhere other than in his own manor in the midst of his large, boisterous family. Nor did he expect to feel at home with a wife he did not want, presiding over an estate in danger of being taken by the Crown, and the woman he did want plundering the Barbary Coast never to return to him.

Certainly he had never felt at home at sea and even less in the year since he had gone on account. In fact, he had never felt so alone in his life as he had this past year.

Pirate law was entirely foreign to him and his officers, trained as they were to expect unquestioning obedience no matter how outrageous the order. Thus, having a ship full of fugitives, mercenaries, and major and minor criminals to command with no government authority behind him had put Elliott in a constant state of tension.

Here, in Fury’s bed, he could not only indulge his mind and body with an intelligent and enchanting woman, he could also sleep.

More thumps. “That tickles!” More abruptly smothered giggles.

Watching Fury this long day had taught him a great deal about how she kept a democracy of ne’er-do-wells from dissolving at the first hint of weakness. Contrary to everything he had been taught, this captain allowed her men to call her “Jack,” shared jokes, traded insults, drank and caroused and gambled with them. However instructive, it was still not a manner of leadership with which Elliott could ever grow accustomed.

No matter how much he resented that she had deduced the truth of his career, it was because she knew that she could discern his tension and deduce possible reasons for it.

Except … as of ten days ago, Elliott had a hold full of glittering reasons for a mutiny that had nothing to do with his leadership. He hoped that this sojourn would lull even the most avaricious of his crew into complacency. Keeping them drunk on good food and drink, gambling and entertainment, their pricks sated, might prove to be an effective distraction.

His crew was not stupid. Losing that tavern brawl and stealing a near-spiritual icon from a powerful and well-respected ship had unified them as nothing else had: It proved that Elliott was not above a bit of grand mischief. His pursuit of that same ship’s captain to make her his lover had garnered a higher respect he needed.

It also gave any potential mutineers pause: She, along with her partner, were fully capable of sinking the Silver Shilling and, by virtue of his union with her, might be willing to do so at the first sign of mutiny.

“Kit! Oh, God, yes! YES!”

Yet he was loath to ask Fury for the help he really needed. Firstly, he had no desire to involve her in his command, as it would weaken him in his crew’s eyes. Secondly, it would make him appear weak in hers and he had no desire to lose her respect. It was too much to be borne that he would lose her at the end of this voyage, never mind leaving her with an impression of him as a weak commander.

But finally, his mind grew as tired as his body and he was relieved he could allow himself to go back to sleep.

“Where is she?!”

Elliott started at the sound of a scream that was not George in the throes of release. He started again when Fury lunged out from under the linens, hopped up and over Elliott to land on the deck, light as a cat. She dashed across the cabin in the altogether, swept her kimono around her shoulders, grabbed her dagger and whip, and threw the door open with a crash.

“WOMAN!” she bellowed. Elliott flung off his own bedclothes, stepped into his breeches, and went to the door to lean against the threshold and watch. “Get back to your berth and stay there until I give you leave to come abovedecks.”

“Where is my daughter, you whore of Satan!” she screamed again. “Turning her into a harlot, spreading her legs for a wretched pirate!”

Kit’s cabin door banged open and the boy—almost as tall as Elliott, but lean and wiry—stepped out. He was naked. “She is no longer any of your concern, Woman,” he snarled down the hall. “You shut your filthy mouth before I shut it for you.”

The woman burst into enraged gibberish spiked with entirely articulate curses aimed at both Fury and Kit.

Because they were becalmed and at play, with everyone coming and going at will, the hall lanterns were lit and shining brightly despite the hour. Yet she was so far down the hall, Elliott could only see her thin form swathed in a white nightrail.

“Do you take care of this or do I?” Fury asked the boy calmly.

“I will,” Kit answered and stormed down the hall, brushing past Fury until he disappeared.

“I don’t think me old heart can take so much excitement of a night,” Smitty observed from Elliott’s right. Officer Khan, wearing what Fury had called a kaftan, stood behind him looking well-tumbled, drowsy, and irritated.

“Sounded to me as if your heart is right and tight,” Elliott drawled.

The man chuckled, and he and his lover disappeared back into his cabin. Woman screamed again for Kit to put her down. Fury sighed with great exasperation, then followed Kit and his prey anyway. It was then Elliott noticed George standing in her own doorway, wrapped in a blanket, distraught, trembling, and weeping quietly.

The sharp point of homesickness stabbed him; she reminded him of his little sisters and his nieces. “Your mother, I take it,” Elliott said gently.

When the girl turned to look up at him, he saw that she was not distraught. She was furious. So furious, in fact, she forgot to be afraid of him.

“Not anymore,” she snapped, dashing tears away with her fingers. “Thank God!”

Elliott almost smiled. “And why is that?”

“She sold me,” George spat, “to some ugly old man who just wants a baby.”

“Aye, well, ’tis the way of the world, to be sold.”

“What!? You have never been sold!”

The corner of his mouth twitched upward. “Sure of that, are you?”

That brought her up short. “You are a man. And a captain,” she muttered with confusion. “How can that be?”

“I was not born fully adult with a ship at the ready. When I was your age, I already knew my father would send me to sea and it was the last thing I wanted to do. But he would brook no disobedience and so I simply made the best of it. ’Tis better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.”

She glared at him. “What does that mean?”

“It means—”

Another scream, but this one of pain. Ah, and there it was, the tell-tale whistle of the cat. George whimpered, her eyes wide.

“It means,” Elliott continued, snapping his fingers in her face until he had regained her attention, “that no matter how much I hated it, since I had no choice at all, I would not countenance being anything less than captain.”

Two.

“That does not compare to being sold to a man nigh on his deathbed to do—” She waved a hand backward into her cabin. “—that.”

Elliott would not argue the point. “You have more courage than I did,” he said simply, “to choose this in spite of your parents’ wishes.”

Three.

“’Twasn’t much of a choice,” she said with a bitter glance down the hall from whence her mother screamed for mercy.

Four. George blanched. Five.

Then, blessed silence.

“Is that so. Tell me then, girl, in the five days you have been here, how your life is worse than being leg-shackled to an ugly old man who needs an adolescent womb to secure his line. Do you not know that once your voyage here is finished, you may collect your earnings and leave?”

She stared at him, aghast. “Leave?” she squeaked.

Elliott could not contain his grin. “I see you don’t care for the prospect.”

“Is she dead?” George whispered when the silence continued.

“Passed out. The surgeon will tend her, but she’ll now think twice about crossing your captain.”

She took a deep breath and released it slowly. “If I left here,” she said after clearing her throat, “where would I go? What would I do?”

He shrugged. “Anything you want. If Fury and the other women aboard this ship can flout Fate and determine the course of their lives, what makes you think you cannot? You have already, in fact. There is no reason not to continue to do so.”

She looked down at the floor. “I thought I was here forever,” she whispered.

“And yet, you have made no protestations of being here. You wasted no time taking up with the first handsome boy to do more than beg a dance. You make an effort to learn your duties and to execute them well. You work hard and are eager to please. I see no sign that you resent being here.”

Her mouth tightened. “This is a pirate ship. If I do not work willingly, I shall be forced to do more abhorrent things.”

“Ah, and smart, too. You are a strong girl, for all you have not been here long enough to be able to fulfill the tasks you’ve been assigned. Fury thinks you a bit of a hoyden, which would, in turn, make me think your parents are glad to be rid of you.”

She flushed. “They made no secret of it,” she grumbled.

Elliott leaned down to her. “And this life excites you, does it not?” he murmured. She gulped. “’Tis the adventure you dreamed of? I dare say ’tis pref­erable to sitting in a parlor working sampler after sampler, painting insipid watercolors, practicing an out-of-tune fortepiano, no? You’re a pirate now, girl. You have a handsome lover, money you will have earned without bearing an old man’s child, becoming a governess to a lecherous lord’s brats, a shop assistant to a harridan of a milliner. Or a whore.”

Her mouth hardened. He had seen that look on his older sister’s face too many times to mistake it. Nay, his instincts hadn’t yet failed him.

“You envy Fury, do you not? The freedom she has, the power she wields? You don’t want to disappoint her, do you? You seek to earn her respect.” She blinked owlishly. Likely she had not thought that far. Then Elliott went in for the kill. “What would your male playmates at home think to see you here, living the life they never dared hope to have?”

She gasped, and a wicked smile began to grow. “They would despise me,” she whispered with conspiratorial glee.

Elliott chuckled. “Green is a lovely shade when someone else is wearing it in your honor, eh?” With that, he turned. “Good eve, George.”

“Captain? Sir?”

He looked over his shoulder to find her grinning at him the way his nieces did when he had granted them his approbation for a job well done. “You are harmless.”

He scowled at her, but she giggled and ducked back into her cabin, leaving him alone in the hall and staring at the closed door. He returned to Fury’s cabin, utterly bemused by this chit even though he had a gaggle of his own females at home he knew perfectly well how to manage.

He dropped into bed and muttered, “Girls.”

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If you don’t want to wait 2 years to get to the end, you can buy it here.

Pirates!