Page 119 of Dukes for Dessert

He cocked his head, thoroughly bemused. “I’ve never been more curious in my life as to someone’s motives. You are not a murderer. In fact, I remember you begging the Rook to spare my life after I organized a mutiny against him, and abducted his wife, your sister-in-law, as collateral.”

“I fully remember what you did,” she said crisply. “But as you mentioned, Arthur Weller is a man who deserves the worst a villain like you could do to him. In fact, I have already hatched a plan to spirit his wife and daughter away. All I ask is time to do so before you send him to Hell.”

A villain like you.

Sebastian had always been more than happy to play the scoundrel. He’d never let his roguish reputation bother him in the least—in fact, he’d nurtured the status with vigor, until he was considered the perfect mélange of Guy Fawkes, Sir Francis Drake, and Cassanova.

Most women found him irresistible.

But not Veronica Weatherstoke.

Sebastian remembered watching as the Rook slid a dagger into her husband’s brain. Her reaction to the murder had been horrified.

And yet, she’d not shed a single tear for the man.

The Earl of Southbourne, Mortimer Weatherstoke, had shanghaied an injured boy and sold him to a captain in need of a crew. The boy who’d become the Rook, the most terrible pirate in this century. Mortimer had broken his own sister Lorelai’s leg over a toy, and killed her beloved pet rabbits before feeding them to her in a stew. He’d separated the Rook and Lorelai for twenty years on a cruel whim.

What must he have been like as a husband to Veronica?

As it always did, the thought hit him like a hammer to the guts, and the urge to commit murder surged to a fever pitch. “Where is Weller now?” he growled.

She flinched, and he instantly tempered his rage. “He’s with his mistress somewhere in second class.”

“Excellent. Why don’t I simply find him and kill him tonight, and then his wife and daughter no longer have to worry? We can all sip Tuica in Bucharest by week’s end.”

Veronica shook her head vehemently before he’d finished his sentence. “Penelope doesn’t want to marry the Romanian count to whom she is promised. The ink is dry on the contract. The dowry already sent. But if we can lose her in Paris, she can be married quickly to the man she truly loves, and on a ship bound for America by the time she is missed. Penelope is with him now, going over the plans for tomorrow night one last time.”

“You trust this boy?” Sebastian asked.

She nodded. “He will care for her. He’s young, but from a good family with plenty of means and, furthermore, decency. I know them from…from before.”

“From when you were a countess?”

“From when I was nothing more than a shipping magnate’s daughter with an obscene dowry of my own.”

He made a soft sound in his throat. “I forgot you were not born nobility.”

“I was never allowed to forget.” The bleak note that stole into her voice tugged at the empty hole in his chest.

“Do you know the Wellers from then also?” he queried, Weller being a shipping magnate of his own.

“I had heard of him. He and my father were friendly rivals.”

Sebastian’s lip curled with distaste. “Did your father also take refugee and immigrant children and sell them to deviant men on far continents? Did he use his ships to smuggle stolen sarcophagi, relics, and pillaged art?”

“Of course not,” she answered, horrified. “My father was an honorable man, but Weller is a brute and a bully. What he does to his own family is shameful enough, but to learn that he…that he is cruel to children…” She passed a hand over her eyes and then turned to him. “Are you, a pirate, really passing judgment? Do you see yourself as better than scum like Weller?”

“We were not those kinds of pirates,” he defended. “We took from men like Weller. We had no quarrel with refugees or the poor, and often we freed them from such ships, and even added several to our crew.”

“Oh please, don’t make yourselves out to be some sort of Robin Hood figures. There is no such thing as a good pirate, and your lot were among the worst of them. The Rook, at least, was redeemable because he’d been forced into the life, and everything he’d done was for Lorelai’s sake.”

Bending closer, he inhaled the scent of orchids and amber radiating from the warmth of her skin. God, but he hungered for a taste of her. Of every part of her that opened and bloomed. "I never claimed to be good, my lady—if anything, I am one of the most wicked men you’ll ever know.”

She retreated one step, which was all the space the tight quarters would allow. “I know you are wicked, which is why I don’t trust you.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“What do you mean?”

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