Heart and Dagger Read online

  Table of Contents

  Excerpt

  Heart and Dagger

  Copyright

  Dedications

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  A word about the author…

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  He could have been her husband

  these years now, had he ever written back, had he not turned himself away from everything London and Paris were to him. He had been a coward and fool.

  And yet, the knowledge did not serve to calm his temper in the slightest. Instead, he nearly ground his teeth to dust, as she continued her even speech.

  “I have never needed a man to care for me,” she said, her gaze so full of disdain, Armand felt himself growing smaller in the wake of it. “I have never needed anyone to care for me.” This time, when she spoke, there was no denying the sadness that filtered through her words, or the expression in her eyes, and Armand felt his own grief in it, felt his own sadness as it mirrored hers.

  “Why are you trying to change me?” she asked him. He knew he needed to back down, knew that if he spoke right at this moment, as this woman stood before him in her britches, then he would regret it forever. He knew all these things, and yet the anger seemed to consume him, anger, fear, sadness.

  “It’s about time someone tried.”

  Heart and Dagger

  by

  Holland Rae

  The Ships in the Night Series

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Heart and Dagger

  COPYRIGHT © 2017 by Holland Rae

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by Debbie Taylor

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Tea Rose Edition, 2017

  Print ISBN 978-1-5092-1806-6

  Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-1807-3

  The Ships in the Night Series

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedications

  To Mahesh.

  You are now officially a romance novel hero.

  You always were, and always will be, my dear friend.

  ~*~

  To Robbie.

  My eternal source of inspiration and support.

  ~*~

  To Bill.

  You were the inspiration for my Captain Dwyer

  and for so much love in this world.

  We know you're still with us.

  Prologue

  16 April 1793

  London townhouse of the Earl of Derby

  “I’m going to marry him.” Charlotte Talbot, eldest daughter of the Earl of Derby, threw herself upon her silk coverlet and allowed her hair to come loose from its perfect coif in an overt display of unladylike behavior. Her sister, Lady Elizabeth Talbot, younger by three years and, though only twelve, often considered the wiser of the Talbot children, raised a delicate eyebrow.

  “Whom, exactly, do you presume to marry?” Eliza inquired, her tone not without reproach. It would be unkind to imply that Lady Charlotte Talbot was the type of young woman prone to dramatic exclamation regarding her future matrimonial prospects. Eliza, however, was her sister, and because siblings were given the distinct privileges of being unkind to one another, Charlotte was precisely the type of young woman prone to dramatic exclamation regarding her future matrimonial prospects.

  Eliza loudly and often placed the blame for Charlotte’s behavior on their mother, or rather, lack thereof, whom she had known just three short years, before a carriage accident had taken her life and permanently wounded her father, Lord Richard Talbot, Earl of Derby, in the process. Ladies who were raised by their mothers, and not the flitting about of servants, nannies, and governesses, were far more likely to behave in a way befitting their stature. To the dismay of said servants, nannies, and governesses, as well as the elder sister gazing longingly to the ceiling above her bed, Eliza had managed to get her hands upon a copy of Florence Pennywig’s A Lady’s Guide to Moral Behavior, from which she had been quoting, rather impolitely, thought most on the receiving end, to any unfortunate soul who dared to defy Miss Pennywig’s proper moral code.

  Charlotte, who couldn’t give a fig for the notions brought forth by Miss Pennypig, as she had taken to calling her simply to spite her younger sister, was ignoring Eliza. It was one matter to have an audience to your dramatic exclamation regarding future matrimonial prospects, but quite another entirely to have said exclamations questioned.

  The truth of it was, she was certain she would be marrying this particular gentleman, given that their fathers had been the best of companions since their school days, spending their youth on country estates a stone’s throw from one another and raising their offspring in the same manner. She had grown up beside him, quite literally. Now that she was a young woman, however, and starting to see him for something other than the boy who lived next door for her whole life—well, she had little doubt that their two fathers would do all in their power to see them wedded.

  Lady Armand Rajaram de Bourbon. It was a mouthful of a name, but so much more worldly than simple Charlotte Talbot, daughter of the Earl of Derby. Truly, her family reeked of the British peerage. Armand, as she had known him all her young life, was son to a man who held titles in both England and in France, and to a woman whose family harkened back to the oldest monarchs in the vast and unknown land of India. Her own family, for the last six hundred years, had traveled as far as Suffolk, and perhaps West Yorkshire, but Charlotte had certainly never been on a ship out at sea for several months, daring the elements to come and take her, as she traveled to new lands.

  Lord and Lady de Bourbon, known in England for their earldom of Devon, had seen the world around, including Armand in several of their epic adventures. It wouldn’t have mattered, Charlotte considered, if they had only been as far as Paris and Rome—that still boasted a lifetime of miles from her own London and countryside homes.

  As Armand’s wife, she would travel the world. Her mind slipped back into the romantic whispers of young love. She had heard tales of open seas, of water creatures twice the size of horses, of islands where it never, ever rained. They could visit the land of Armand’s mother, which she had glimpsed through the colorful gowns and sparkling jewels worn by Lady de Bourbon. Her fingers and ears shone in bright firelight, twinkling with rubies and emeralds and gold. Perhaps Armand would take her, Charlotte, there one day.

  Eliza’s voice, in the true nature of younger sisters, came cutting through with a tone so grating that, try as she might, Charlotte could not ignore it.

  “I said, whom exactly do you think you’re going to marry?” her sister rep
eated, the hints of a petulant child still discernible throughout her recently highly polished tone.

  Charlotte sat up in the bed and threw a tufted pillow at her, enjoying the squeak she made before ducking off to the side and tumbling from the chair onto the floor. Now, what would Miss Florence Pennypig have to say about that kind of behavior?

  “Armand,” she told Eliza, when her sister had deigned to sit back down, fluffing her hair as though it were that of a true lady, and not the simple braids worn by young girls still in the schoolroom.

  Eliza, much to Charlotte’s chagrin, snorted in a way positively forbidden by A Lady’s Guide to Moral Behavior.

  “You’re going to marry Armand?” she asked, obviously unable to keep the incredulity from her tone. “As in, our Armand?”

  Precisely the same. They had grown up, both in the countryside and in their London townhouses, as friends and required playmates. More often than not, Armand, two years her senior, and Charlotte would sneak off, trying to lose Eliza and Armand’s brother, Henri, Eliza’s age to the month, in the vast orchards that covered the land upon both of their country estates. As young children, they had climbed trees and rooftops, until nannies and nursemaids had nearly fainted at the sight of them. As older children, they had even shared tutors, so close was the friendship between their fathers.

  Charlotte, though it pained her deeply to admit, could empathize with some of her sister’s confusion. After all, the boys of the de Bourbon family were near as cousins or brothers to them. Was it not strange, then, to find herself quite suddenly declaring plans of matrimony to one, some years before even entering the marriage mart?

  But things had been changing between them, Charlotte knew. It hadn’t been an immediate evolution, barely a noticeable one at all. They had begun dressing in proper attire to visit the other, begun calling each other by, if not title, then at least full name.

  “He’s practically our brother, Charlotte,” Eliza said now, her voice a trifle alarmed. “It’s tantamount to marrying within your immediate family.” Charlotte raised an eyebrow, and Eliza relaxed back into her chair a little. “All right, it’s not quite so bad as all that, but be serious.”

  It was an amusing thought, indeed, that the young men of the de Bourbon family could ever be mistaken for blood relatives to the Talbot girls. Their skin, a gift from their beautiful mama, was so much darker than her own. It was a deep, almost toasted brown, that gave one the impression that Armand and Henri spent their days in the sun, whereas she and Eliza could quite easily be mistaken for pieces of ivory. And Armand’s hair…Her dreamy sighs returned, as she thought of the dark, deep black hair that had been growing more unruly by the day, though he did his best to tie it back. She found herself wondering if his hair was quite as soft as it looked, and why her own hair, equally as dark but nowhere near as beautiful a shade of brown, had the effect of making her appeal a great dealer paler, where as his only served to make him look more rugged—well, as rugged as a boy of seventeen might look.

  “I am being serious. Today, in the gardens…” She blushed, not for the first time that day, as she recalled the way he had looked at her, recalled the sensation of their nearness that would have scandalized anyone, had she been properly debuted. “He told me I looked beautiful today.” Charlotte sighed again and flushed anew at the words, as they sent a shiver of pure joy coursing through her. “Armand has never, ever seen a thing I’ve worn, Eliza. You know that.” Her sister’s lack of response was agreement enough. “He said I looked beautiful.” Charlotte leaned back into her coverlet and sighed. She could hardly wait to get married.

  ****

  2 May 1793

  London townhouse of the Earl of Derby

  There was no use crying anymore. And since there was no use crying, her body should simply stop the ridiculous, embarrassing activity at once. Though her eyes were bloodshot and her sheets stained, more tears still streamed down her face, over the coverlet, and across the white parchment sitting upon her lap, growing increasingly difficult to read with each drop that smeared the inky words.

  Eliza sat beside her in the bed. Though she had yet to abandon her crusade for the advantages of the works of Miss Florence Pennywig, she had been kind enough to temporarily forgo the effort, in favor of trying to soothe Charlotte, to whatever extent she could be soothed, which truly wasn’t much at all.

  Armand, along with Henri and the Earl of Devon and his wife, was gone. Not two days prior, Armand had bid her farewell from the docks, placed a chaste kiss to her trembling fingers, and promised to write as often as was possible. His mother was ill. The once beautiful Lady de Bourbon was growing gaunt, her skin sinking sallow into her bones. If they did not leave immediately, Armand had explained, they would not make it in time for her to see her family. As it was, they were likely too late.

  Charlotte knew she should have wept for Lady de Bourbon, the woman who had been a constant in her life, near as a mother would have been, for so many years. But to her, the earl’s wife had always been reminiscent of a precious china figurine. She was elegant, beautiful, sparkling in the sun and shining in the firelight, but she was fragile, built on a foundation of glass and precious stone.

  Instead, she wept for the loss of her closest friend. Armand had not promised to return. Even the normally loquacious Henri had looked silently upon them, as they waved goodbye from the ship. It was possible, Charlotte thought bitterly, that she would never see any of them again.

  It was difficult for her to believe that only a fortnight had passed since the time she had promised herself, if not him, that they would one day wed. The fantasy, as brief as it had been, was a glorious one, and in a moment of dreadfully moist weakness, Charlotte sobbed for the loss of that as well. Since she would likely never even see Armand again, it was even more likely she would never marry him. At the thought, and the encroaching realization that, at some point soon, she would have to marry someone, Charlotte broke back into a fit of sobs.

  Eliza, for all she was a pest of a younger sister, rubbed her back and offered her sips of tea.

  “It will be all right,” she whispered, her voice back to its usual, loving cadence, none of Miss Pennywig’s flummery added in. “I promise, darling, it will be all right.”

  But Charlotte, prone as she was to dramatic exclamations regarding her future matrimonial prospects and many other things, truly could not see how a life without Armand Rajaram de Bourbon, eldest son of the Earl of Devon, her once future-husband, could possibly be all right.

  Chapter One

  Ten years later, 14 April 1803

  300 leagues off the coast of the Americas

  Captain of the Liberté, part-time smuggler, full-time mercenary, Catalina Sol woke from her dream with such force she nearly spilled the small pot of ink at the edge of her desk. She had fallen asleep while working again, the sway of the ship in the open seas making her once-sharp focus lilt. It was not the first time in a fortnight when she had woken precariously close to a desk as wet and murky black as the sea itself.

  And what the devil kind of dream had she been having, anyway? Catalina Sol was a fierce captain, fearsome, to hear certain folks tell of it. She defended her people to the very edge of the earth, and in seven years upon the open ocean, she had made a reputation for herself that once upon a time would have made her papa faint dead away.

  Her family now consisted of one sister, far away, far, far away, making a name for their family as she, Catalina, had never done, and the lost souls who had drifted toward the Liberté, sure as she had upon the Starling all those years ago. She liked this life; it was a life she had worked hard for, one she would defend with her final breath.

  What was she doing then, dreaming of the past? Her life now was just the way she had always wanted it to be, free, unencumbered by the strictures of a society that asked too much, without ever asking what it was that she had wanted. Until she left England in the dead of night, no one had ever asked her what she wanted.

  The dream was
not, much to Catalina’s chagrin, melting from the corners of her mind like grains of sand in an endless hourglass. Instead, the more she thought on it, the more the edges sharpened and refined themselves, until she could all but picture her bedchamber in her father’s London townhouse ten years ago. She had cried herself silly for a month over the leaving of her dearest friend in the world. And then she had run.

  Well, Catalina corrected herself, it hadn’t happened precisely like that. Lord Richard Talbot, Earl of Derby and her father in a former life, had confessed his plan to wed her to the oldest son of his closest friend. It had hardly been a matter to be confessed, however. She and Eliza had known it was coming from the time they could spell their own names, and she had been one of the lucky ones who had anticipated matrimony and coming of age with excitement, rather than fear.

  But then, then Armand had left, and she had stayed. Well, that was how it always was in the novels. Catalina rubbed the sleep from her eyes. And if her story had followed the plot of a novel, it certainly had a villain. Lord Chatwin Poppet had been twice the age she had been, when he offered for her hand. She had barely been eligible a fortnight, and his beady eyes had narrowed upon her vulnerable naiveté with the skill of a hungry vulture.

  Even then, even as simply the elder Talbot daughter of the Earl of Derby, Catalina had known that she could not commit herself to a lifetime as the wife of Lord Poppet, with his overly friendly, impolite fingers, and his leering glances. It hadn’t been, however, until he had raised his cane to her one evening, only narrowly missing the curve of her cheek, that Catalina Sol had truly understood just how far she would go to escape his plans for marriage and, as she was later to learn, his desire for her dowry, for not only had the man been as nasty as a rat, but his affinity for cards and birds of paradise had left him as poor as a beggar’s wife.

  It was oddly amusing to think upon it now, Catalina considered, taking a moment to peer at the familiar illustration upon the far wall—the map was nearly ten years old and showed its age. When she had first set out to sea, that map would have served her well, but now it did little more than hang as a relic, a reminder of how quickly time passed—had passed since the very first time she’d needed her own map for her own ship. Why, new countries seemed to be cropping up at an alarming rate, these days. It was very nearly humorous to think that at the ripe age of just eighteen, she’d donned a riding cloak and slipped out in the middle of the night, bound for the docks. A young lady of the peerage who had never once been in any body of water deeper than a washing tub, and she had chosen the docks. Fear and desperation had ruled her that night, emotions she had honed into sharp-edged friends that were never far from her side, better weapons than any rapier or pistol, when properly controlled.