Chapter 12
Tremaine recalled everything. It was a strangely peculiar and exceedingly helpful skill he possessed which always served him well.
But it had never been more useful than now, with Culross and McQuoid attempting to forge an alliance with Linnie as their chosen pawn.
And you’re doing exactly the same thing.
Tremaine shoved back the Devil’s jeer. At least he had a history with Linnie. They knew one another.
“I remember, Linnie,” he said, sotto voce. “Everything.”
Linnie’s lips parted and she took in a telling inhalation.
Yes, he’d known precisely where to locate Linnie. The moment he’d determined the date, he’d known exactly where he would find her.
What Tremaine hadn’t been prepared for? Just whom he’d locate Linnie with.
Outside their private tent, the sounds of patrons haggling with sellers and shop owners calling out their wares all rolled together like a far-off hum.
“Why are you here?” she asked, her breathless, silvery voice revealing wonderment and not the more deserved suspicion it should.
Tremaine gave her no more than the truth. “I knew you’d be here, Linnie.”
Linnie’s eyes softened as she heard what she wanted from that admission. “Oh.”
She’d always looked at him in that adoring way. Her gaze had never contained the avaricious desire for sex other women fixed on him. Linnie’s contained a warmth and wonderment that’d always made him feel ten feet tall.
Nothing had changed.
That was, with the exception of one: he’d never before seen her bestow that worshipful stare upon anyone else, until today.
As sure as if she had heard his inner thoughts, Linnie’s expression wavered. “Oh.” This time, that utterance emerged halting and hollow.
Worry glimmered in her eyes—eyes that unfailingly told on her.
Not unease alone. Worry along with guilt shone from within those radiant, celestial eyes. That emotion only one of them should be party to.
She’d always been a better person than him.
“I didn’t know you’d be here, Jeremy,” she said urgently.
“Is that a roundabout way of acknowledging the honorable gentleman whose company you kept earlier?” Tremaine flashed a tight smile. “The gentleman whose company you’d still be in were it not for some intervening on your youngest cousin and sister’s part?”
Even though charm was the way to Linnie’s heart, Tremaine remained powerless against the primordial fury that rendered his tone harsh and sharp.
Linnie’s cheeks paled.
She moved her gaze over his face. “Why do you care?” she ventured haltingly.
“I don’t know,” he bit with the first of anything that’d been real since he’d learned of McQuoid’s plan to marry Linnie off to Culross.
But that didn’t make any blasted sense.
Tremaine lowered his head until their noses nearly touched. “Maybe it’s because you so prettily claimed your loyalty belonged to me,” he seethed.
Like a doe caught in the hunter’s snare, Linnie flared her eyes.
Their roughened breaths blended into one.
He gritted his back teeth so hard it was a wonder they didn’t crack. What the hell is the matter with me? Swallowing a curse, he stepped away from the maddening Miss Linnie McQuoid Smith.
For the love of God, he needed to seduce her, woo her. Yet the only reason Tremaine should care one way or the other about Culross courting Linnie was because their joining in marriage would cement the McQuoid, Culross, and Ellsby families into a triumvirate of privateers.
With overseas trade having increasingly diminished prospects for privateers, not all stood to survive and flourish. A fleet of those other gentlemen’s ships would, in short order, take down the already dwindling number of privateers at sea.
It shouldn’t have mattered if Linnie took his side against her family, or liked Culross, or wanted to fuck the bastard.
But . . . it did.
Tremaine felt Linnie’s eyes on him.
“My mother, with Cassia’s help, coordinated his being here today, Jeremy,” she said softly. “I did not wish for him to come. None of the ladies wanted him to.”
Tremaine turned; he brought his lips up in a taut, mocking smile.
“How fortunate,” he said between his teeth, “that despite not wishing for him to come, you and the most agreeable Lord Culross have gotten on swimmingly. Given that no other gentleman, not even one of the McQuoids, has taken part in the Christmastide shopping tradition, I’d expected you to be cross at his cheek in coming.
But I should have known better. Warm, cheerful Linnie McQuoid Smith would be welcoming of a charmer like Culross.
” Tremaine spat out the last of his long-winded tirade, out of breath.
At the same moment he started, Linnie drew back.
Christ. Where had all that come from?
Linnie eased closer. “Jeremy, are you . . . jealous?” She sounded incredulous when he should be.
“Yes,” he hissed. “Goddamn it.”
God help him, she’d hit the bloody nail on the head.
Tremaine didn’t covet women. One was the same as the next.
With that being true, for some reason, his brain locked on the fact Linnie made no attempt to deny getting on with Culross, nor the fellow’s charm.
“Yes,” he repeated this time, with a proper measure of calm that didn’t match the tumult inside him.
Unable to face . . . no, unable to stomach himself, Tremaine glanced away once more to the opposite side of the tent. In an ironically hilarious juxtaposition, the old milliner sat slumped at his table, snoring loudly.
Tremaine nearly tossed his head back and laughed that anyone could be capable of such calm when he was hanging on by a bloody proverbial thread.
But for some reason, the idea of Linnie Smith with the Earl of Culross—of Linnie bearing the other captain’s name, sleeping in his bloody bed, giving him blasted children—threatened to drive him insane.
Long, slender fingers twined with Tremaine’s.
He stiffened.
“There is no day, Jeremy, in which I would have chosen Lord Culross’s company over yours,” Linnie said earnestly. She traced her innocent gaze over his face. “It is as I told you: My loyalty is yours.”
A savage wave of satisfaction made Tremaine want to toss his head back and thump his chest like the earliest men to roam the earth.
Nor did he bother attempting to feed himself a lie that it was about his scheme to win Linnie Smith and not about the hungering desire to claim the lady for his own.
Taking a deep breath in through his nose, Jeremy nodded slowly. “Forgive me,” he said tersely. “I . . . I cannot explain any of this.”
There, he’d given her another truth.
The joined calls of Fleur and Andromena interrupted the moment. “Linnnnnie!”
Bloody hell. All the time he should have spent seducing Linnie with romantic murmurings, he’d instead been a demonical savage.
“I should go,” Linnie murmured. “Lest we are . . .” She grimaced. “I’m sor—”
“No, I know,” he said quietly. For the first time, and shamefully belatedly, he recognized the internal battle the lady fought.
To the big, loving, devoted McQuoid-Smith brood, family came first.
“It is wrong of me to demand first loyalty from you, let alone any at all,” he said. “I know firsthand the bond shared by the McQuoids and that, even with my feud with your cousin, you’d not only speak to me, you’d speak in support of me, is a gift.”
“You are as much a McQuoid-Smith as any of the rest of us.”
Tremaine gave her a gentle smile. “You know that’s not true, Linnie.”
She frowned. “To me, it is.”
Another set of cries went up. “Linnie!”
This time staggered with the shouts of her favorite cousin, Cassia, the happily married wife of Lord Winfield.
“They’re looking for me,” she said needlessly and with all the same reluctance he felt.
Tremaine bowed his head.
He took a step aside to allow her a clear path to the entrance of the tent.
“Goodbye, Jeremy,” she said softly.
“Goodbye, Linnie.”
Tremaine stared after her slowly retreating figure.
Then he heard it.
“Miss Smith.”
Not “Linnie,” but “Miss Smith.”
Culross.
Hearing that other, unscarred captain of a ship that hadn’t been burnt and sunk to the bottom of the sea speak Linnie’s name, as if he had a connection or claim to her, stirred the green-eyed beast within.
“Linnie!” Tremaine said sharply.
Linnie spun back. “Yes?” Hope filled her eyes.
“We don’t necessarily have to be chased apart again.”
Her adorable, freckled nose scrunched up.
Wordlessly, Tremaine held a hand toward her.
Linnie stared for but a single second and then rushed over. With a remarkable, unwarranted, and undeserved trustingness, she placed her fingers in his.
Tremaine smiled, and this upward tipping of his mouth felt . . . old and uncomfortable, but familiar.
Tugging Linnie along, he urged her to the back of the tent. He paused long enough to dip his head outside and scan for searching McQuoid-Smiths.
After he verified their immediate path was clear, he looked back. “Let’s go,” he mouthed.
Hand in hand, they went flying along the bustling path. Linnie’s vibrant laughter filled his ears and, strangely enough, that part of his chest where his heart had once been.
Linnie knew she shouldn’t laugh. Doing so threatened to give her and Jeremy away. If they were discovered, there’d be absolutely devastating consequences—for him, Arran, and their families.
But God help her, as they charged through Leadenhall Market, the gaiety spilled from her lips and caught the looks of startled passersby.
Jeremy tightened his hold upon her fingers and cast a glance her way. “Shh,” he silently urged, a playful grin on his lips.
And seeing him so happy and smiling and partaking in games the way he used to proved the greatest and only gift she’d take from Leadenhall Market this year . . . or any year.
They wound their way past patrons milling about and in and out of shop after shop. The farther Linnie and Jeremy’s flight took them, the thinner the crowd grew, until they reached the very last stalls of the great market, where less than a handful of strangers mingled.
Breathless with laughter and their quick flight, Linnie’s feet slowed under her.