Devil in Tartan (Highland Grooms #4)(29)

She gave him a contrite smile. “I knew you’d know what to do. Pity I didna seek your advice.”

“Pity,” he said crossly.

She leaned back, stretching her legs before her and crossing them at the ankles, as if the telling of her ordeal had settled everything for her, had absolved her of the sin.

“You’ve no’ yet told me of your brilliant scheme to steal my ship. You didna appear to have any plan at all.”

“Aye, that was the plan.”

“Pardon?”

“I was to appear to be a damsel in distress, on a voyage with men who’d never been at sea, who didna know what to do. If you believed it to be true, which you did, we could board your ship without suspicion. Then, of course, the challenge was to surprise you. But as it was the only chance we had, I let down my hair.”

“You let down your hair?” he repeated incredulously.

She nodded. “My hair is what a shiny pebble is to a crow, Captain. It was Duff MacGuire’s idea that we all appear inept, which, frankly, we were. Duff is an actor—he told the men what they were to do.”

Aulay was incredulous that they had crafted such a ridiculous plan. More incredulous that it had worked. He closed his eyes with a groan of indignant shame. “You have added grave insult to my injury, madam.”

“It was Gilroy’s idea that I bear a cut on my leg in the event we could no’ surprise you straightaway. But we had no’ the slightest hope that it would work. It was far easier than we could have imagined,” she said, sounding perplexed by it. “None of you bore swords? Why did you no’ bear swords or guns? And your men! They wouldna turn away from me.”

Aulay felt utterly humiliated. His lack of foresight was astounding. Had he been away from the sea for so long he couldn’t think?

“Does it no’ seem utterly preposterous in the telling?” she asked curiously.

“Please, say no’ another word. No’ a single word.”

She smiled sympathetically. “I beg your pardon, Captain. But I do hope you understand that for us, it was either drown or...or borrow your ship. We had so much at stake.”

“So do we, Lottie, aye?” he said angrily. “Did you consider it for a moment? Did you bother to think that you were no’ the only one with so much at stake?” He shifted his gaze away from her, ashamed he’d been felled by a beautiful woman with a shapely leg.

“I regret the blow to your head the most,” she added quietly.

Aulay gave her a sidelong glance.

“You were the only one who looked at me askance. The others, they looked at me as men always look at me, but you seemed a wee bit suspicious. And, well...poor Drustan doesna know his own strength.”

“I beg to differ,” Aulay said. “He appears to know it verra well.” He wanted to murder something. His gaze traced over her body, down to her toes, and slowly up again. He had a fury rising in him that made him feel almost ill. He was a colossal fool, had made the mistake of a lifetime, and as he gazed at the very woman who had caused it to happen, his rage mixed with...desire. Lethal desire.

It was insanity to admire her for being so bloody audacious, for making a laughingstock of him, but that’s precisely what he did. Had he ever known a woman, or a man, for that matter, who could best him so? It was madness to imagine all the ways he would make her pay for what she’d done, and yet in the same thought imagine making love to her. But that was precisely what was in his head, imagining her without a stitch of clothing, how she would look beneath his body. How soft and warm and wet she would feel.

He’d lost his bloody mind.

He wished for sleep, to wake refreshed so that he might think again how to free himself of these goddamn binds. He stood up from the chair. “I’ll sleep now.”

She stood up, too, and watched him put himself down in the corner of his cabin and kick the chair away in frustration. He propped himself up against the wall and closed his eyes, unwilling to look at her bonny face another moment.

He heard her move the chairs around, heard her put herself on the floor next to her father’s bed.

When he opened his eyes later, he was struck by how graceful she looked, curled with a blanket wrapped around her, that ribbon of blond hair snaking out behind her, that laughably small dueling pistol beside her.

He thought of how she would look in the days to come, when the authorities caught up to her. No matter the mad thoughts roaming about his head, he would not allow her to escape her fate for this. That was impossible. Pirates paid for their piracy, and audacious beauties were no exception.





CHAPTER EIGHT

LOTTIE WAS SURROUNDED by wildflowers—the bright gold of gorst, the brilliant purple of thistle and heather, the rare lilac bindweed. Flowers covered the meadow—which meadow, and where, she wasn’t sure—but her horse, Stjerne, trotted confidently along, shaking his mane now and again with his pleasure at being in bright sunlight.

Lottie glanced back over her shoulder. Anders was riding an inky black horse and she laughed—he’d been trying to catch her for miles, but could never reach her.

She came upon a stream and dismounted to let her horse drink. She heard the black horse approaching and stepped out from beneath the boughs of a tree that stretched over the stream. She leaned up against Stjerne’s side, his body warm and firm. Lottie watched the man ride into view, and realized, with an increasing race of her heart, that it wasn’t Anders at all, but Captain Mackenzie.