Chapter 5
For years, Kerr faced a persistent run of bad luck.
That was putting it mildly.
If he’d gone into the umbrella business, rain would cease to fall in England. Had he inherited a millinery, ladies would have abandoned bonnets and hats altogether. If he sold coal and wood, they’d discover a way to heat households with sun—
Yes, well, one got the point.
Between disastrous sailings on volatile seas and the critical injuries he returned with, Lady Fortune couldn’t have made it any clearer how far he’d fallen from favor—fathoms deep.
Until this very moment.
Since he had followed his unlikely nighttime companion into the hired hackney, the vexing chit hadn’t uttered a word.
Not one.
Not a single syllable utterance.
Not a giggle. Nor her customary uninhibited, brass-bell-like laugh (and the just-as-common whale-spout snort she pushed through her nose).
Why, she’d not even sighed one of her favorite sighs—the exasperated ones she saved just for him. Or her ‘dessert is served, and I am starving’ sigh she breathed at all formal dinners.
Nothing.
Kerr would never, under any circumstances, have believed he’d get this lucky.
After knowing Andromena Smith for years, he would have bet his entire fleet against it, happy to take her silence however he could get it.
But he’d been wrong. Not that he disliked cheerful women.
On the contrary. He preferred them smiling—ideally sated and forgetting their names after he bedded them, or giving him that clear, bold look of invitation.
The dreamy ones donned by young chits confounded him.
Their lack of worldliness terrified him.
Correction. It made him want to find the nearest door.
As they made the journey back from Rat’s Castle, so did this new, disconcerting side of Andromena. The churn of iron ground both gravel and the weight of her unnatural silence. She kept her hooded face towards drawn black curtains.
He discovered his own contrariness; he actually preferred her jabbering to the quiet.
Whatever the reasons for her sullenness or sadness: whatever it was the fortune-teller predicted—or more likely hadn’t—was not his business.
Leave it to Andromena Smith to get pushed against a wall in the Rookeries and receive a tongue-lashing, only to face a drunkard who’d tried to snatch her and then go quiet over the shite lies of some charlatan.
Served the obstinate chit right, Kerr told himself.
Andromena needed some fear drummed into her, or she was bound to repeat her mistakes—and he would be forced to step in again.
And again.
And again.
That’s what he cared about. He certainly didn’t expect to care either way about whatever disappointment she had been handed this night.
He was a rake. He put his own pleasures first. But that didn’t mean he was a dishonorable fellow.
Despite her belief to the contrary, he wasn’t some beast who dined on young ladies’ tears.
Not that she was in tears. Good God. He hadn’t even thought about that.
Kerr swung his gaze over to her. He wasn’t a heartless bastard.
Not completely anyway. The chit was always all-smiles, all the time, for everyone—Kerr’s illustrious self, excluded.
And when she wasn’t rattling nonsense, she wielded her tongue like a saber—at least with Kerr.
The chit drove him to distraction, but he didn’t want to see her laid low, and that’s precisely what the charlatan of Rat’s Castle had done. Mild panic set in.
He briefly eyed the lacquer panel standing between him and the uneven street. A serious look for a serious moment. He’d survived worse—much worse than a tumble from a moving carriage. But the lady was Culross’s sister-in-law. Kerr let out a low, flat breath.
Having hooked barbels in swift currents and tricked grey mullets into biting, he felt fully prepared for Andromena Smith—he already knew the exact bait to lay.
Kerr looped an arm along the back of his bench. “I’m guessing you overpaid for your fortune, darling?” his voice dripped sardonicism.
A slight rustle of muslin gave away her shoulder shrug.
Frowning, he drummed his fingertips on the ripped broadcloth.
No biting reply? No spirited lecture?
He missed—God help him—the sharp back-and-forth with the exasperated Miss Smith. She always matched him blow for blow. Kerr would cut his tongue out before admitting it.
“Come on, darling, buck up. You had a grand adventure. No other lady could profess to have done what you have done, and survived, with a story to tell.”
The rickety wood hackney caught a sizeable pothole.
The foundations of the carriage creaked and groaned and threatened to break.
As such, he couldn’t distinguish whether the slight movement of her shoulders was acknowledgment of his spoken words, or an accidental shrug thrust on her by the sway of the hackney.
This was going to take more work.
During the war with America, Kerr made the move from naval captain to privateer.
Fortunately, he read and navigated women with the same ease he piloted coastal waters.
He didn’t even need to try. Being un-charming came unnaturally, save when it came to the young woman seated across from him.
Women of all stations melted for him. The indecent ones vied for a place in his bed.
The doe-eyed debutantes batted lashes his way—or they had, before he’d returned, scarred.
Nary a woman with a breath in her body failed to respond to Kerr. Andromena was no exception. That much he’d learned on a snowy Ermine Street; she’d been ready to climb astride his mount and make off from her sister’s wedding.
But seduction wasn’t Kerr’s goal; cheering her up was.
He glided his fingers over the top of that gloved hand behind her current troubles.
It was an innocuous caress—not even intended as a caress.
Andromena’s slender body tensed and trembled.
He felt the sudden, fine tremor run straight through her skin into his own. His fingertips—as did his body—remembered the exact, soft give of her skin, her sleek thighs yielding like sun-warmed wax.
“Never tell me?” Air scraped through his suddenly dry throat. “You went looking for answers about your one true love and future marriage.”
“Fine. I won’t.” She snatched her hand back and made the curtain the only thing she had eyes for. “You needn’t go to all the effort of trying to seduce me again.”
“I did not attempt to seduce you,” A flush of heat crept up his neck. “I charmed you.”
“You did, neither.”
The hell, he hadn’t.
At least he had gotten her back to her normal, perpetual state—tart-mouthed shrew.
Except… Her tears loomed.
Kerr scrubbed a hand over his face. “You aren’t a complete peabrain to believe some charlatan.”
“The Siren isn’t a fake.”
He scoffed. “She’s some girl who resents her lot in life.”
“As she should. And?”
“And no doubt enjoys when a bored young lady such as yourself—”
Andromena pushed her hood back, and he welcomed the battle to come.
He recoiled. This was not Andromena McQuoid Smith. This haunted, pale creature bore no resemblance to anything or anyone McQuoid related.
“She was not jealous, Edgar,” she whispered. “She pitied me for what she saw.”
He restrained his response. “That’s certainly what she wanted you to believe.” Kerr’s instinct to haul Andromena away from that girl had been the correct one.
“Why is it men believe women are enemies of one another? Is that because that is the way you men are?”
“That’s because that is human nature. It’s not reserved for a sex.”
“Such generalized information could only come from a man,” she muttered, giving him a patronizing look. Even worse, a McQuoid began to educate him. Him. A man who had seen every corner of the world.
“I know what you’re thinking, Edgar.”
“You can’t even begin to—”
“You believe because you’re so much more worldly, that you’ve sailed all the seas, that you must know if not everything, then at least more than a young woman whom you feel is your inferior in every way.”
Frankly, he didn’t know what he believed anymore. At some point, they had deviated into the philosophical. This was certainly a first for him, with any woman—and even more outrageous that it was this particular lady. And now she was correctly reading unspoken thoughts he withheld.
Her pert chin tipped at a triumphantly arrogant angle.
“Nothing to say? I’ll say it because you’re not able to… I’m right.” She smiled. “Even that, you’re trying to rationalize in your mind. How can this McQuoid lass—”
“I would never use the word ‘lass’.”
“Who I once treacherously deceived,”
His brows came together. Treacherously deceived? But now that she had spoken it aloud…
All of this was increasingly distasteful.
His fingers twitched toward the fabric, ready to pull his curtain back. But her eyes spoke the warning her lips spared him: I know your next move before you make it. He dropped his hand.
“But for every experience you’ve known, Edgar, and every place you have visited in every person you have met, there is something you will never do and can never understand.”
He waited.
The lady did not disappoint.
“Women.”
Kerr burst out laughing. He laughed so hard tears spilled, his sides ached, and his body shook.
Andromena smoothed her hands over her lap. “Are you done?”
He held a finger up and continued, indulging in more amusement than he had known, possibly in his entire life.
Not only was he confident in his knowledge this woman cast aspersions on, a doubt he had never had and would never have, was about his skill with women.
She didn’t speak again until his hilarity ceased.
“As much as you think you know a woman’s body, and any pleasure she could find in the carnal, the truth is, you know just about as much as what it’s like to be a woman. Women, regardless of station, have no power, no influence; we don’t even have freedom of movement.”
He heard all of that. That was the philosophical piece. The one he was marveling at earlier.
But, to her point: he was a man. And no real man tolerated aspersions on his manhood.