Sir Durham's Disarming Lady

Chapter One

A fishing village near Bordeaux, France

Rafe Durham always found trouble.

He snorted. “Found a pot of it now.” He sat on a bench looking out to foam-capped waves of the Atlantic. He had brought this particular trouble with him here. A different kind of trouble. Lovely. Stoic. Steadfast in her declarations to survive the torture she had endured.

He’d brought her here by his choice. As ever he did with trouble he sought to salve. Wounds he tried to heal.

He’d spent his life untangling disasters others made. He welcomed the challenges. Usually his was a lonely endeavor. Occasionally, he lost, the odds too heavy against him. Most often, he found a way to win.

He sipped the fine Hennessy brandy and swished it around his mouth. His “trouble,” his American beauty named Zephora Butler, had better recover her strength more quickly or they’d be here in this fishing village off Bordeaux another week. Maybe more.

Rafe had led the lovely wraith—he liked to call her his “Lady of the Winds”—southwest from Paris to Bordeaux, hoping to find a man who would carry Zephora and him through the double blockade of the Channel.

Rafe had been to the village inland often for food and clothing—brandy, too.

He had come to this village twenty years ago with his father when they attempted to form a bond with a French smuggler who had cheated them of profits for many years.

His father had made friends with the man—and paid him more than he’d earn robbing them. They had made Edouard Fabre richer than he would ever be as a smuggler. The man had been in his twenties then. Today, he would be a seasoned forty years old or more. But no one here claimed to know him.

That meant Rafe would have to move on to another town to find another man he knew in the business of running the double blockade of the treacherous English Channel.

But for another journey, he would have to wait for Zephora to gain more strength.

He had brought her here, when she was barely logical.

Hardly human looking. Eating regularly, but so thin she barely breathed.

Ah yes, his Lady of the Winds gave him a certain kind of trouble.

Yet he had to admit with a snort that he liked her sass of the last few days.

Her weakness of body and frailty of mind had disturbed him those first weeks.

He rejoiced that lately she gave as good as she got—even at night, when she still awakened screaming, she clung to him as if he were her only hope of survival.

He smiled that she relied on him so deliberately.

Many women had. Necessity drove them. Gratitude compensated him.

The love of one had eluded him and he had accepted his lot.

That lady had not the ability to fight for her choices.

Yet this one—this American with fire in her hair and in her heart—had guts.

God knew, she had fought for whatever glory she could seize from her opponent.

Indeed, she had stolen from a prominent man the means to hold him up to Society and make him a laughingstock.

For that, her opponent—a nefarious rogue of high standing and low ethics—used his own power to throw her into an infamous prison dungeon.

The French deputy chief of police, a man by the name of René Vaillancourt, had threatened her life, but not before he allowed his prison guards the ultimate degradation.

“One day, Vaillancourt,” Rafe said aloud to the winds off the sea, “we will make you pay for the sorrow you have cost so very many.”

“I hope I can witness that.”

The ragged voice that lifted on the breeze was the one Rafe had rejoiced in for weeks. He turned to face her, and got to his feet to extend his hand and bring her to the small, rickety chair beside his.

“Wherever you are, then, mon chouchou, I will come for you and we will make a point of destroying him.” He watched her settle her thin frame into her cushioned seat, then he rose. “Don’t go away,” he told her, as he always did when he left her even for a moment.

She needed those words, he had learned. In the beginning, after he had scooped her from that dank, dark cell in the pit of the Conciergerie, she had no voice. But weeks later, when she recovered a bit and was able to at least rasp, she would pick at his waistcoat and beg him not to leave her.

He understood. She was still horrified from her confinement, even months after he’d rescued her. No wonder. She had recoiled in body and soul from the hideous ways the guards had hurt her in the weeks she’d been incarcerated.

Now he entered their little stone cottage and found the knitted blanket he demanded she wrap around her at all times. They had starved her, those creatures in the prison. Rafe had fed her, spoon-fed her, actually, clothed her, washed her, smiled at her and coaxed her back to life.

In the sunshine reflected off the sand and sea, she sat. Her eyes were closed, her hands falling serenely to her lap as he dropped the cover around her and tucked it around her spare shoulders.

“It is too hot for this, dear sir.” She pulled the thing down, a bad move for him.

He liked the way her breasts were blossoming. He shifted in his chair and focused on the waves rushing up the sparkling shore. He had no idea, of course, how her body had appeared before Vaillancourt locked her in the Conciergerie and allowed the warden to starve her near to death.

But Rafe knew all too well what she had become.

Once all sharp angles stretched over taut skin so pale, so fragile, that she bruised at the slightest touch, Zephora Butler had changed and survived because of his diligent care.

His administering of beef broth by spoonfuls, his baths of warm water, his applications of fragrant oils, had been his daily ritual for more than two months.

Only the other day had she ventured to walk without a cane.

Only last week had she objected when he removed her muslin night rail to put her in the hip bath each morning.

Her hair was another matter.

He’d done away with it all. Once flowing flames of vermilion that had curled to her waist, her mane when he carried her away from Paris had been filled with lice.

He’d had to cut it off. What else could he do?

She would be eaten alive and scratch herself to death.

That was, she would only if and when she survived the ordeal that Rafe and his friends had also attempted.

Because the others—his best friend, the Earl of Halsey, that man’s wife Inès, and the man Halsey and Rafe had originally come to Paris to rescue, Inès’s brother Luc Bechard—had sailed down the Seine the night they took Luc and Zeph from the famous French prison.

They were chased by guards who ran along the paths beside the quays, shouting at them, calling insults.

But the guards were hapless buffoons, good only to bully and punish their victims. They soon abandoned their quest. They could not swim and had no bateaux.

The boatman Inès had hired for their escapade was far more agile than any of them expected.

She had paid the man well for his night’s work.

Amid their escape, the frail burden in Rafe’s arms had remained silent.

Her eyes, red and swollen, examined him, questioning his mission.

Her voice, wrecked, could not find breath to ask who he was or why or how he held her in his arms. Her body lolled in his embrace, unable to fight, only able to submit.

Over the weeks as they sailed away from Paris, then took carriages south toward Orleans and the Loire and freedom from pursuit by Vaillancourt’s thugs, Zeph had accepted Rafe’s words of calm, his deep bass voice crooning of simple ditties, his giant wool cloak, and his whispered promises of safety.

Heaven had granted her reprieve. But she had been nigh unto death.

The bastards in that prison had denied her food, decent clothes to hide her young body, and, worst of all, her virginity.

Rafe would not speculate on how they had treated her. Luc Bechard, her friend and cellmate whom Halsey, his wife Inès, and Rafe had captured along with Zephora, had said the guards had abused her.

Luc had not elaborated. Halsey and Inès and Rafe had not asked for elaboration.

They had assumed her fate. If they thought on it too long, they would imagine what uncouth men given full largesse would do to a young lady who had once been privileged, rich—and now in disfavor of Vaillancourt.

Rafe was quite certain now, as she recovered health and strength each day, that before her incarceration, she had been quite attractive.

If she looked in a mirror today, he doubted she would see what she had been.

But she will recover her beauty—and all else. I will see to it.

Each day, he smiled more and more because he saw how she flowered.

As he had cared for her from the beginning of her release, he had seen her at her worst, and in her pitiful distraction and near nakedness, he’d believed that she had the makings of a stunning creature.

Her daily progress—if not her cantankerous nature—only spurred him on to cooking her finer meals, demanding she eat his cakes and muffins, two of them, three of them, all she wished.

The changes he saw in her drove him onward each day, each time they moved farther south and on to the coast to find her a comfortable bed and a secluded house in which to recuperate.

It also propelled him to find another skilled dressmaker, a better cobbler—and a new and eager greengrocer with access to sweet oranges and plump grapes.

Her attitude toward her everyday existence had changed little by little. She did not stare out at him from narrowed, inquiring eyes. No. He had shared who he was and how he had gotten involved in the group that freed her. She did not pull back or startle when he approached.