Chapter 3 #2
“Not at all.” Linnie gave her head a toss—before remembering he couldn’t see her. “A wise gentleman once advised I should never allow a man speak so to me.”
Him. He’d been the gentleman.
“Ahh,” he purred like the black kitchen cat who let one think he was keen for a pet and instead answered with a claw. “But that wasn’t what you were saying the last time we met, sweet.”
Linnie puzzled her brow. “No, it wasn’t.” The last time had been when they’d both attended Cassia’s marriage to the Marquess of Winfield.
“Oh, no?” he drawled. “Here, I distinctly remember.”
“You don’t remember any better than I do,” she said with absolute confidence.
During the happy occasion, Linnie had slipped out to the gardens and found herself joined by Captain Jeremy. She recalled each and every single minute of that exchange . . .
“You don’t want some stuffy lord for a husband, Linnie-Lou. You and I both know it . . .”
“Tsk, tsk, what a naughty liar you are.”
Naughty?
“A liar?” she squawked.
“Am I going to have to spank you, sweet?”
Spank her?
Linnie choked. “S-spank . . . Spank me . . .” she sputtered. What the saints on Sunday?
“Ah, how pretty you ask for it.” His voice dipped. “I’d prefer you beg.”
“Beg to be spanked?” she managed to get out in a strangled voice. “I’ll do no such thing.”
“A challenge, sweet? Very well,” he said on a harsh, peremptory whisper. “Come here now.”
She snorted. “Who do you think you are, my father?”
“Is that the game you want to play, sweet?”
Why, he was merely funning with her.
Her shoulders began to shake. “P-pretend I’m a child and you’re my father?” Linnie laughed long and hard until she emitted little snorts and tears spilled from her lashes. “I-I can th-think of thousands of games we can play, but th-that is decidedly n-not e-even remotely close to one.”
“Come here, lamb,” he beckoned. “Whisper in my ear what game it is you want to play with me. That way I can best oblige you.”
Something in his voice—a dark, silky quality—lent a suggestiveness to his invitation.
Linnie’s eyes slid shut and warmth pooled in her belly.
How many articles in how many gossip pages had she read about the legendary rogue, seafaring Captain Jeremy, and his ability to charm the queen out of her crown—a feat he’d accomplished once to Her Majesty’s delight and amusement?
How many times had Linnie secretly imagined him speaking to her so?
“I’m growing tired of waiting,” Jeremy said. “Coy ladies bore me.” His drollery and teasing impatience of before were gone, replaced instead with an unfamiliar coldness that sent gooseflesh climbing on her arms.
“If you want what I know you want, then come to me now, dear,” he warned. “Otherwise, I’ll find some other more agreeable and entertaining company.”
Wounded by the ease with which he’d send her away and promised to replace her, Linnie was tempted to go. She wasn’t a fool, though. If she walked out, this would likely be the last she ever saw of Captain Jeremy Tremaine, new enemy to the McQuoid-Smith family.
And the longing and love she’d forever carried for the notorious seafaring gentleman would not allow her to go.
Linnie eased out from behind her host’s sculpture and drifted nearer. “I’ll have you know, I am not coming because you’re ordering me about,” she warned. “And the absolute only reason I’m not leaving is because I’ve missed you and longed to see you.”
He chuckled. With every step she took, his deep, low resonant rumbling came closer.
And then she stopped. She saw him for the first time in so long she dared not move out of fear he’d vanish into nothingness and she’d be left with just the remembrances of all the times they’d spent together over the years.
He looked the same and yet also different in every way imaginable.
Not for the first time, she wondered at what’d happened to him and mourned the changes wrought by tales only the men of her family were allowed to speak of. They always went quiet when they caught Linnie listening too closely.
With his long, black locks, always fighting free of the leather queue he used to keep the recalcitrant curls tied at his nape.
He sported a new scar. A white, upside-down crescent traversed from his cheekbone, all the way to the right corner of his lips in a way that left an almost macabre and permanent half grin upon his genial face.
Well, his once-genial face.
This was the first she’d seen him since The Night No One Spoke About—as in, the great falling-out between him and her cousin.
Jeremy looked harder. Angrier.
“What’s the matter, Bo Peep?” he purred. “Never tell me a naughty sheep stole your tongue.” He ran a dark but playful gaze over her person. “That would make for a most disappointing meeting between us.”
Just like that, Jeremy brought them to a familiar place of levity and lightness.
A relieved laugh slipped from Linnie’s lips.
When she’d stumbled upon Jeremy, she’d carried dread that his feud with Arran would have left him angry with her, too.
Dropping a hand on her hip, she wagged her index finger at him. “What I believe you mean is ‘cat’s got your tongue,’” she teasingly chided. “I expect you of all people would remember that old sailor’s phrase, Captain Tremaine.” He should. He’d been the one to teach it to Linnie.
Jeremy ran a surprised gaze over her person. “I wasn’t expecting you,” he confessed, if not jovially, then certainly warmer.
At the pleasure in his eyes, all her earlier annoyance melted away.
“But you, my dear, are proving to be a very unexpected and delicious surprise.”
Linnie’s heart did another somersault. It had never skipped a beat for any man—any man other than Captain Jeremy Tremaine.
“Nothing and no one could keep me away,” she said softly.
Jeremy moved his dark gaze over Linnie. As he was sprawled on a white French bergère with his legs outstretched and his elbows propped on the scrolling arms, he had the look of Henry Every, the King of Pirates, whom he’d once regaled Linnie and her cousins with tales of.
Suddenly nervous when she’d never been that way around him, Linnie hovered beside a marble statue of a gracefully dancing woman, frozen in time.
He quirked an eyebrow. “Never say you’ve come this close only to flee now, sweet?”
“As if I would ever run from you,” she gently chided.
Her family may have cut him out, but her love and loyalty to this man were not so fragile.
“That is what I like to hear, love.” Jeremy’s grey eyes darkened to a nearly obsidian shade. “Though I will confess I find myself tantalized by the idea of tying you up.”
Old memories surfaced: of the time she, Andromena, Cassia, and Myrtle, then young girls, played pirates with their elder brothers and cousins and Jeremy. Those young men had tied them up and left.
The louts.
“I will have you know,” she warned, “you won’t find that such an easy feat.” Not anymore.
The amusement in his eyes deepened.
“Is that a challenge or an invitation?” he purred.
Linnie gave her head a big shake. “Neither. It’s merely a statement of fact. Over the years, I’ve become quite skilled with knots myself.” She waggled her eyebrows. “And even more skilled in how to get myself out of the trickiest ties.”
“What a clever thing you are. My intrigue grows,” he murmured in more of his newly guttural tones.
In his next breath, Jeremy’s patience appeared to abandon him.
“Come now, Bo Peep,” he said crisply. “Do not be shy. Show off all those adorable white ruffles.”
With his cajoling, Linnie came fully out from the shadows. Tossing her arms wide, she did a full pirouette even her stern ballet instructor would have been hard-pressed to find fault with.
His expression grew all serious.
“Closer.” He lowered his dark lashes. “That is, if you dare . . .”
He might as well have cast a line about her waist and reeled her in because, just as he’d demanded, Linnie drifted nearer.
“Stop,” he said sharply.
Linnie froze in her tracks.
Jeremy drifted his gaze over her person, taking his time as he did.
There was something methodical about his search, detached.
All the while, Linnie kept absolutely still.
When Jeremy finished his inspection, his focus lingered on the neckline of Linnie’s gown.
She forgot how to breathe. That basic life-sustaining function failed her.
She’d never been kissed—not even on the cheek—nor had a man ever so much as glanced her way.
Everything she’d learned about passion had been from the pages of romantic novels she and her cousin Cassia passed back and forth.
Not a day passed when Linnie wasn’t cognizant of the fact she remained pitifully naive, while her younger cousins experienced grand passion.
Despite all those facts being true, Linnie knew with a woman’s intuition that, in this instant, Captain Jeremy Tremaine saw her not as little Linnie-Lou, but as a grown woman. And that slate glint in his eyes was one of desire.
Linnie fought to keep from trembling.
“Well, look at you, sweet.”
His voice contained a rough quality, like shards of broken glass that’d been hastily reassembled, which revealed coarseness but also hints of how smooth it’d once been before. “You are definitely no shy, demure shepherdess.”
“I’ve never been shy, you know.” How did she manage to keep her voice from shaking the way her very body quivered?
The white scar at the upper right corner of his mouth transformed his hard lips into an even grimmer smile. “I didn’t believe you were, which makes our meeting all the more enjoyable, love.”
As if the blazing fire Jeremy sat beside touched her skin and kissed her insides, Linnie went warm all over.
Her entire life she’d yearned for Captain Jeremy Tremaine to see her in the same romantic light he had all the grand beauties he’d been linked to in the scandal sheets. Now she found herself living out that greatest dream, and in real life.
She’d been wrong earlier about this night and her brother and cousin. Linnie owed her brother and cousin a debt of gratitude. They had—albeit unknowingly on their part—brought her to this very moment.
Linnie closed her eyes and smiled.