Miss Wylde and the Wynd (The Wynd Brothers #2)

Chapter One

With spyglass in hand, Mr. Damian Wynd faced the unrelenting wind coming off the channel and pushed the hair from his eyes to watch the Annabelle grow larger in the distance.

Her sails billowed, and she rode low in the water due to a full hull.

The Annabelle would not be the only ship to return from Quebec City filled with the ever-increasing demand for timber, but four more ships would arrive within days.

The Annabelle was simply the first to return to their docks located in Southampton, which was preferrable to London where congestion and competition made being one of England’s top import-and-export businesses more difficult than it needed to be.

At any one time, Trade Wynd had ships sailing to and from America, Canada, the Caribbean, Cape Colony, Madeira, Greece, Gibraltar and any country on the Continent with a port.

“Where is that one from?”

Damian glanced down at the six-year-old child, Livia, who had become his shadow of late.

“Where did you come from?”

“The earl told me to keep an eye on you.”

The earl was Sterling Wynd, the Earl of Wyndham, who happened to be Damian’s older brother and Livia’s stepfather. She referred to Sterling as the earl or simply Earl, when addressing him directly. Never Wyndham.

His brother had returned home only a month earlier after being gone for over a year.

Sterling had left a bachelor and visited various locations on the Continent to renew trade relations, especially those that had suffered during the war with Napoleon, and to once again increase imports.

His next to the last destination had been Wyndview Farm, a vineyard they owned in the Cape Colony on the southern tip of Africa, where he had met his now wife and her daughter, Livia.

Sterling had been successful in restoring those trade relations and once again Trade Wynd ships were only docked long enough to load and unload cargo or make repairs before they set sail again.

“What bounty do we have today?”

“Bounty? We are not pirates,” Damian reminded her as the crew, dock and warehouse workers were carefully, but quickly, setting the ropes, pulleys, tackles and crane to unload the cargo from the Charlotte Rose that had arrived just that morning.

Olivia shrugged. “It would be more fun if you were.”

“Dangerous and illegal you mean.”

The child blew out a heavy sigh. “What did the Charlotte Rose bring in?”

“Marble from Carrara, Italy.”

Her brown eyes lit with excitement. “Is it for Jules?”

Jules was one of Damian’s younger brothers who had started sculpting as a child when their father had given him a broken piece of marble. He had not stopped since, except for when he had gone off to war.

“If any is broken and cannot be sold, it will go to him.” Though, Jules had spent nearly two years working on a statue that nobody had been allowed to see. That marble had been purchased by him and ordered directly from Carrara—the largest block of marble to have ever traveled on a Trade Wynd ship.

“If it is not broken, where will it go?”

“Stonemasons, sculptors.” Damian shrugged.

“And makes you rich.”

“You are turning rather mercenary.”

Livia frowned. Her delicate dark eyebrows drew together over her eyes.

“Greedy,” he clarified because he assumed she did not know the meaning of mercenary. “First bounty and now becoming rich. Do you hope to be a pirate one day?”

“Maybe,” she answered. “Or maybe you will let me captain one of your ships.”

“Women do not captain ships.”

“Anne Bonny did.”

“She was a pirate. Trade Wynd is an established and respected export and import business,” Damon reminded her.

“So, no woman can be on one of your ships?”

“Not unless they are passengers such as you and your mother were.”

“Then why do you have a woman sailor?”

“We do not have any women sailors. Only men,” he insisted.

“Then where did she come from?” Olivia pointed to a sailor walking away from the Charlotte Rose, hat pulled down low on his head.

Damon was more concerned with why the sailor was leaving before all the cargo was unloaded than if the person was a woman, because he knew such was an impossibility.

“What makes you think that is a woman?” he asked to humor her.

“You can tell from the bum.”

Damian nearly dropped his spyglass. “What did you say?”

“The earl said that a woman cannot hide in a man’s clothes. All you have to do is look at the bottom.”

“He told you this?” Damian practically sputtered.

“He told momma. I just overheard him.”

He would need to tell Sterling to make certain that Livia was not about when he was having private conversations with his wife. “He liked my momma in trousers. He sketched it and I found it hanging in his dressing room.

Damian gaped at the child. “What were you doing in the earl’s dressing room?”

“I was looking for Momma.”

It was a reasonable explanation, he supposed.

“Momma found me there and then scolded the earl for putting the drawing where anyone could see, but he said that the only people who knew it was there were him and his valet, to which Momma said that it was one person too many and insisted that he take it down. The earl then told Momma that it was a reminder of the perfect day that they had climbed Table Mountain and she said that if he liked her in trousers so much that she would start wearing them. The earl liked that idea very much, but Momma just stomped off and said the earl was infuriating.”

Damian could only stare at Livia as she regaled him with what had transpired, and he was fairly certain that she hadn’t even stopped long enough to take a breath.

“Do you want to know how you can tell?” she asked innocently.

“Tell what?” he asked.

“If it is a woman,” Livia answered, her voice bordering on exasperation that one would associate with someone much older. “So, do you?”

Damian could form a guess but since he had never seen a woman in trousers, britches, or anything other than a skirt, or naked, he was not certain he would know, and he was not going to ask a child.

However, he was nearly certain that the sailor Livia pointed to was no more than a lad of thirteen or so, slight and not quite fully matured.

Likely a cabin boy or someone who was working his way up in rank to one day be an officer.

“A gently rounded bum,” she answered with confidence and a nod of her chin.

If Damian hadn’t been so shocked, he might have laughed.

Those were also words that Sterling would use and not a six-year-old girl.

“Just like that sailor.”

It was impossible that there had been a woman on one of his ships, but Damian lifted the spyglass to get a closer look so that he could point out to Livia where she was wrong.

“You cannot even see a bottom, not that I should be looking anyway.”

“Because she fixed her coat. I could see it when she bent over to pick up her valise and when she straightened, she tugged at the back of her coat to cover her bum.”

Damian focused on the sailor walking away, certain that it was a lad, whom he needed to identify and possibly sack for leaving before the cargo was unloaded.

Except, the sailor had a different gate and balance than a man or boy who had served years on a ship.

The feet were smaller, limbs more delicate and their hips swayed much like a female as she tried to sneak away without being noticed.

While he could not tell what the bum looked like because the coat was too long, there was no doubt that the person walking away was female.

“Bloody hell.”

“You are not supposed to swear in front of me.”

Damian rolled his eyes. The child was just explaining bums to him and he could not say bloody hell in front of her.

He handed the spyglass to Livia. “Take this to the earl. I have a stowaway to catch.”

“How do you know that he is even here.”

“Because you would not be up here if Sterling were not in the offices.”

She gave a shrug, smiled then skipped away holding his spyglass. Damian followed and took the stairs to the docks then followed the stowaway, closing the distance as he hoped to catch her before she disappeared.

*

She’d always dreamed of traveling and venturing beyond her village to experience more of life before she took over her grandfather’s bakery, but Miss Georgiana Wylde never anticipated that the first time she sailed away from Italy that it would in the cargo hold of a ship.

With the straps of the canvas satchel over her shoulder so that the weight rested in front of her body, Georgiana adjusted her coat so that it was no longer bunched and covered her body as much as it could, pulled the knitted cap down and made certain that none of her hair escaped then walked away from the ship, old worn valise in hand.

Her instincts were to run, to get away before she was caught.

She also resisted that urge because doing so would most certainly draw unwanted attention and see her being discovered.

Instead, she kept her pace determined, with each step taking her further away.

Once free of the port, ships and dock, she would locate an inn where she would plan what to do next now that she was in England.

She would also need food. When she had left home, her satchel had been loaded with various breads, dried meats, and canteens filled with water. Now, it only contained empty canteens and her carefully concealed and necessary funds.

It would also feel good to sleep in a bed again and bathe.

She’d spent the past three weeks in the bowels of the ship surrounded by crates and marble slabs.

More than a few times she feared being crushed by the cargo shifting when the ship rose and fell over taller waves.

Thankfully, that never happened as the slabs had been stored in such a manner that they did not move.

If she had not been so frightened of being caught, Georgiana likely would have admired the transportation of the coveted Carrera marble, and enjoyed the thrill of her first real adventure, but her greatest concern had been reaching England without discovery—a task she had accomplished.

“You, sailor,” a man yelled from behind.