I Married the Duke Read Free

Saint-Nazaire? Visit yer rascally brother?”
    “No time. The grain won’t ship itself to Portugal.” Luc tried to shrug it off, but Gavin understood. The famine of the previous year was lingering. People were starving. They could not halt their work for a holiday.
    And, quite simply, he needed to be at sea.
    “Grain. Aye,” Gavin only said, and made his way out of the tavern.
    Luc swallowed the remainder of his whiskey and waited. He did know women, of all varieties, and this one wasn’t even trying to feign disinterest.
    She wove her way through the rowdy crowd, taking care nevertheless to touch no one in her approach. Only when she stood before him on the other side of the table could he make out her eyes—blue, bright, and wary. The hand clutching the cloak close over her bosom was slender but the veins beneath the pale skin were strong.
    “You are the man they call the Pirate.” It was not a question. Of course it wasn’t .
    “Am I?”
    A single winged brow tilted upward. “They said that I was to look for the dark-haired man with a scar cutting across his eye on the right, a black-banded kerchief, and a green left eye. As you are sitting in shadow, the color of your eye is not clear to me. But you bear a scar and you cover your right eye.”
    “Perhaps I am not the only man in Plymouth that answers to such a description.”
    Now both brows rose. The slope of her nose was pristine, her skin without blemish and glowing in the fading sunlight slanting through the window at Luc’s back. “There aren’t any pirates now,” she said, “only poor sailors with peg legs and patched up faces from the war. It is very silly and probably disrespectful of you to call yourself that.”
    “I don’t call myself much of anything at all.” Not Captain Westfall, and not the Duke of Lycombe’s heir. The latter was an unstable business in any case. Luc’s aunt, the young duchess, had never carried an infant past birth, despite five attempts. But that did not mean her sixth could not now survive. So in the year since he had left the navy to pursue another noble goal, he’d gone only by Captain Andrew of the merchant brigantine Retribution . Simple and without any familial complications, it served his purposes.
    The Pirate was a foolish nickname his crew had given him.
    “Then what is your real name, sir?” she asked.
    “Andrew.”
    “How do you do, Captain Andrew?” He nearly expected her to curtsy. She did not. Instead she extended her hand to shake. She wore no ring. Not a war widow, then—the war that for years had kept his brother, Christos, safely hidden in France beyond their family’s reach.
    He did not take her hand.
    “What do you want of me, miss, other than to lecture me on the evils of war, it seems?”
    “Your manners are deplorable. Perhaps you are a pirate after all.” She seemed to consider this seriously, chewing on the inside of her lower lip. The plump lip was precisely the color of raspberries.
    Tastable .
    Luc had not tasted a pair of sweet lips like that in far too long.
    “I suppose you are an expert on manners, then?” he said with credible disinterest.
    “I am, actually. But that is neither here nor there. I need passage to the port of Saint-Nazaire in France and I have been told that you depart for that port tomorrow. And that . . .” She studied him slowly, from his face to his shoulders and chest, and soft color crept into her cheeks. “I have been told that you are the most suitable shipmaster to transport a gentlewoman.”
    “Have you? By whom?”
    “Everyone. The harbormaster, the man in the shop across the street, the barman at this establishment.” Her eyes narrowed. “You are not a smuggler, are you? I understand they are still popular in some ports even since the war ended.”
    “Not this port.” Not lately. “Do you believe the harbormaster, shopkeep, and yonder barman?”
    Her brows dipped. “I did.” A pause, then she seemed to set her narrow shoulders.