Chapter 18 #2
Tremaine spread his hands wide. “Given your chicanery, you would take my intentions as dishonorable ones; you would believe I’d seduce a woman and not offer her the benefit of my name.”
“I’d no sooner believe you than Satan himself!” his former best friend spat.
“What will you do, McQuoid? Call me a liar and cast aspersions upon me as you’ve already done? Do you not think Linnie will see that as further evidence of your disloyalty and blind hatred for me?”
She’d wholeheartedly defend Tremaine once more, and again, he’d remain completely undeserving of her defense. His intentions hadn’t been honorable.
It was strange how guilt should swarm him and shadow over all sense of triumph.
“You are both assuming Linnie wishes to marry Tremaine,” Culross intoned.
Tremaine and McQuoid swung their angry stares in the earl’s direction.
“And you believe she wishes to marry you?” Tremaine asked in a scathing voice, embattled with a soul-searing invidiousness.
“I don’t believe the lady truly knows what she wishes,” Culross said quietly. “I believe between your past relationship with Miss Smith and nefarious plans for her now, you’ve got her head so clouded she can’t see that which is in front of her.”
Tremaine bared his teeth. “That being?”
“That she has a man who genuinely admires her, loves her, and wants to spend the rest of his days with her.”
Spots flickered in Tremaine’s vision.
“Has the lady even given you any kind of indication she wants to become the Countess of Culross?” he asked harshly, some hasty and unthinking rashness pulling the damning question out of him.
It was the last query he should have put to the gentleman, but God help him, he wanted to know. No, he needed to know.
The Earl of Culross’s lips curved in a gleeful grin Tremaine itched to beat from his bloody face.
“I have every reason to believe the lady would be amenable to my suit.” Culross paused. “She’s given me many reasons to believe so. And if you were not confusing the picture, it’s an absolute certainty she would welcome my suit entirely.”
A strain built within Tremaine’s tense muscles and begged to be set free. He wanted to snap, hiss, howl, and feast on his enemy’s remains.
Fuck.
He’d lost the upper hand and Culross knew it.
With a poise that rankled, the earl pulled his gloves casually off and stuffed them inside his jacket. “I believe you and I, Tremaine, can come to some kind of arrangement.”
He snarled. “An arrangement for which one of us gets Miss Smith?”
The earl gave a curt nod.
I want a choice in life of making my own decisions, and certainly over whom I shall marry.
All over again, Tremaine had to fight an insanely potent urge to beat the insolent bastard to a bloody pulp. This time over the goddamned presumption to know what Linnie wanted and speak for her like she wasn’t a goddamned queen capable of making decisions of her own.
This was what Linnie had spoken of the previous day: The gentleman hell-bent on marrying Linnie, and even the lady’s own family, would keep her out of discussions about her own future.
“Tsk, tsk, Culross. Here you go, proving once again how little you, in fact, know Miss Smith. If you believe she’d want to be with a man who bartered and traded for her like some kind of loot he’d stolen on the seas, then you aren’t even fit to lick her slippers.”
Culross remained undeterred. “I have something you want.”
This tenacity spoke to the earl’s determination and set off a savageness inside Tremaine. “Oh?” he asked when he trusted himself to speak calmly.
“Your ship is already partially built, Tremaine.”
He sneered. “Partially.” The two bastards before him had stolen his resources and had since been responsible for the hold on the final construction.
Culross chose not to address that treachery. “I’ll put a hold on the repairs to my ship. You can have all of it. The lumber and full access to all available shipbuilders who service me, who Captains McQuoid and Ellsby will coordinate and employ on your behalf.”
Tremaine found himself . . . silent. Unable to formulate some snappy, snarky response.
Culross offered Tremaine the only thing Tremaine needed or cared about—his career at sea. With the promised work on his new ship—using the collective of builders, craftsmen, and committed resources Culross offered—he’d be back to sailing in but three weeks, maybe even a fortnight.
Everything within Tremaine should have leapt at the offer.
There was a time he would have. He’d had Linnie in his arms. He’d seduced her.
He’d tasted her nectar and brought her the first climaxes she’d ever known, ones she’d continue to recall when she married some other man.
A man who, given her antipathy after Tremaine confided in her, would never be Culross. He’d be back at sea.
She’d assume he sailed off because he’d always been destined to, and his love for the sea proved greater than anything he felt for her.
And she’d never know all the ways in which he’d deceived her.
Everything. That was truly everything.
But intrusive scenes played out in his mind like poison.
A dewy-eyed Linnie in some white, modest nightshift.
Some faceless gentleman sliding the material down, exposing her ivory skin to his gaze, touching her, kissing her as he bared her body.
That same man laying her down and driving his cock inside her, pumping her over and over.
And Tremaine would return from some sailing and the unknown-for-now stranger would have a face and a name, and all that hell in his mind would be real.
A tremble shook Tremaine’s body, and crazed, he gave his head a violent shake.
“Well?” Culross’s calm voice, counter to the tumult in his own head, broke through the madness.
“She won’t marry you.” Did Tremaine assert that for the other man’s benefit or his own?
“Perhaps not. Time will tell.”
Time would tell. If Tremaine took their offer.
“You truly believe you’d be a different husband to her than I would?”
“Absolutely,” Culross stated with an immediacy that spoke to his confidence.
Further knotted up inside, Tremaine pressed his lips into a hard line. “And what would you do different from me? Hmm? Give up your life on the sea? Take the lady on dangerous sea runs with you?”
Culross inclined his head. “You needn’t worry about what I will or will not do when Miss Smith is my wife.”
When she was his wife . . .
New thoughts resurfaced. Linnie moaning and rubbing herself against Culross like a contented cat.
Then the image shifted, and it was Linnie, fully clothed, with her arms wrapped about the earl’s waist and her head resting tenderly against the other man’s chest in that intimate way she’d held Tremaine at Hyde Park.
Red pinpricks of rage dotted Tremaine’s vision.
And that was it. The pompous, overbearing way in which Culross spoke of Linnie—like she already belonged to him and Tremaine had zero right to her—was when Tremaine knew.
He’d burn down his own damned vessel and the bloody shipyard before he ceded Linnie to this self-righteous arse.
“Tremaine?” McQuoid asked impatiently. “What is it going to be?”
“I’d sooner kill the both of you than trade Linnie for some lumber and shipbuilders,” he said coolly.
The flummoxed earl turned a stunned gaze over to McQuoid.
McQuoid’s enraged one, however, remained centered on Tremaine. “Linnie won’t marry you,” he predicted. “She may have come to believe she cares for you.” He grimaced. “Maybe she even thinks she loves you.”
A memory slipped in, of Linnie’s luminescent eyes turned up at him after he’d brought her body to the sweetest surrender.
Warmth settled somewhere in his chest.
“Jeremy,” Linnie said softly, her voice rich with emotion. “I lo—”
“But she definitely loves the McQuoid-Smiths, and more than she ever could or will love you,” McQuoid said flatly, slashing across Tremaine’s thoughts of Linnie and what she’d been moments away from uttering—before he’d stopped her from speaking the words.
“She will not give up her family, and she knows if she ever married you, she would bring a divide to the family that simply cannot be undone.”
The lady’s cousin no doubt sought to enrage Tremaine and fill him with indecision. The other man’s adamance, however, had the opposite effect.
Why, the other man was afraid. Desperate.
Tremaine looked to Culross.
They both were.
Tremaine lifted his head. “Yes, well, I trust if you were that confident, you wouldn’t have bothered seeking me out and having Culross here offer me a king’s ransom in shipping terms.”
“Hmm. It’s funny, Tremaine, because given your earlier question regarding Miss Smith’s amenability to my suit, the same might be said for you.”
Culross followed that jibe with an arrogant grin.
Tremaine clenched his teeth, hard.
The rub of it was, after he and Linnie were discovered in Hyde Park, Tremaine had no chance for a proper proposal.
He’d let her cousin and Culross usher her away.
To have staked his claim would have roused her suspicions and fed into the narrative her cousin now regurgitated—her cousin’s not-incorrect narrative.
And from Linnie’s stunned gaze and pale cheeks, he’d had little indication as to how she’d felt afterward.
It was one thing to fraternize with the enemy. It was another to forsake your family for the same enemy. And to Linnie, family was everything.
McQuoid must have sensed Tremaine’s moment of indecision.
His former friend smiled coolly.
Without warning, the door opened on the tense meeting.
Each man had a pistol out and trained on the entryway.
Tremaine’s heart plummeted to his feet. “Christ,” he hissed, the Lord and Savior’s name a prayer.
Pulse racing, Tremaine holstered his pistol. “Linnie,” he said, stepping out from behind his desk. “Bloody hell, you could have been killed.” He was across from her in three long strides, but the lady’s arse of a cousin and his newfound friend stepped into Tremaine’s path and blocked his route.
The battle for Linnie would happen right here and now . . . and never more had victory been less certain and more desired than it was in that instant.