How to Be a Proper Lady

property.”

“Didn’t matter with that gal he took up with back in Coruna.” Billy’s pale brow wrinkled.

“What’d you know ’bout that?” Matouba’s bass sounded from his barrel chest. Across the narrow cell, his round eyes were two spots of white in his ebony face. “You weren’t but a mite at the time.”

“He didn’t take up with that one,” Mattie grunted. “And she weren’t free. Master Jin bought her off that bloke as was beating her.” He turned his head to Jin. “Whatever happened to that little Spanish girl?”

Jin shrugged. But he remembered. He remembered every one of the people he freed, their faces, their names. He had found that girl a post as a domestic servant in an old spinster’s house. The woman was ancient but respectable. It was the best he could do in a foreign city. In ports he knew better, he had an easier time of it.

It didn’t matter. Every time he bought someone’s freedom, another chip of the hard, cold stone of rage and old despair inside him fell away. But they were, each one of them, tiny chips indeed, and the stone still quite large. He had a thousand more to go before the rock finally disappeared.

“I sez you buy yourself ’bout four ships, Cap’n, maybe five or six, and stock ’em with crews,” Matouba intoned. “Then you sneak up on that April Storm in open water, close her in, and ’scort her to England like that.”

“No.” Jin shook his head. “She must come willingly.” A woman like Violet la Vile would not come any other way, unless he tied her up and stuffed her in the bilge for the month’s journey. But Jin did not treat other human beings like that. Not any longer. “No,” he repeated. “I have another plan.”

When he first started searching for Viola Carlyle, he had harbored hope he would find her holed up in some little house ashore, anxious to return to England, merely lacking the resources or even the gumption. But after months of searching, when clues finally led him to the privateer captain Violet the Vile, he had been forced to reevaluate. Her real father, Fionn Daly, had been first a barely successful smuggler then an even less successful privateer. He probably only allowed her aboard for practical purposes-to see to the domestic tasks so he would not have to pay a sailor for it. No doubt she’d be glad to return to England and society, Jin guessed.

He’d guessed wrong. The captain of the April Storm-confident, brash, and nothing like a lady-quite obviously would not come easily. Jin must convince her. But he had spent a lifetime alternately lying and knifing his way to victory after victory. In the end, Miss Viola Carlyle would sail to England with him of her own accord and take up again the life she was born to live. He had no doubt of it whatsoever.

Neither did he have a choice.

Twenty years earlier Alex Savege had bought his freedom and saved his life. Nearly a decade after that, when Jin had been nothing but a thieving, scrapping ball of anger directed against the whole world, Alex again offered him another option. He had taken him aboard the Cavalier and shown him how to be a man. Alex’s new wife still believed her half sister to be alive. A lord now, Alex did not need Jin’s money or even his assistance with his ship any longer. All Alex cared about now was his wife’s happiness.

And so, unbeknownst to either Lord or Lady Savege, Jin had set out to find Viola Carlyle. To repay his debt. He would return her safely to the bosom of her family, or he would finally die trying.

The harbor constable pursed his lips, looked Jin up and down for the third time, and demanded gold.

Jin produced a vowel. The port master’s lips curved upward. He locked the office and went to the bank himself. Jin waited without concern. The Massachusetts Bank account of Mr. Julius Smythe, merchant, boasted a hefty balance.

In short order the port master returned, all smiles.

“Congratulations, Mr. Smythe.” He bowed as though Jin were actually the gentleman he pretended to be when he did business at the bank. “You and three of your men may go free.”

Back on the docks with the late-spring morning sun shining through masts and rigging onto worn planks, he told Matouba, Mattie, and Billy to take themselves off until he needed them. The boy and Matouba went off bickering as usual. Mattie cast Jin a dark look, then lumbered away as well.

He walked down the quay, scanning the scene already busy with the traffic of carts, sailors, and merchants, and found what he sought: a sparkling new vessel, the railings not yet even affixed. The sounds of hammers smacking at wood echoed from atop. A pair of boys sanded the main deck, still fresh wood without varnish or tar.

She was not the Cavalier. Nothing would ever be the Cavalier. But she was a beauty, small and fast, just as he’d heard she would be when he passed through Boston six months earlier and saw the plans for her. She would suit his needs perfectly.

But a man could not purchase a ship appearing as though he’d spent the night in jail. He turned and made his way toward his bank.

Two hours later, freshly shaved and clothed, Jin folded the letter that had awaited him at his bank these four months, and tucked it into his waistcoat. He nearly smiled. The Admiralty occasionally managed to send him correspondence via commanders in the field. This letter, however, had not come from the navy.

Viscount Colin Gray was still looking for him.

For years Jin had labored on behalf of another servant of the crown than the Admiralty, a secret organization buried deep in the Home Office, known to only those who required its assistance. The Falcon Club.

The Club had disbanded the previous year-rather, nominally so. Only five of them to begin with, four yet lingered. Jin’s fellow agent and sole contact with the Club’s shadowy director, Colin Gray, had not given up on the organization’s mission, a mission dedicated to seeking out lost souls and bringing them home. Not any lost souls, though; the Falcon Club’s quarries were those whose disappearance, even existence, threatened the peace of the kingdom’s most elite and whose absence and recovery must not become public knowledge. For the safety of England.

Jin had not quit-not in so many words. But for the present, he hadn’t the time or inclination to humor either Gray or the Admiralty. He had finally found the quarry he had chosen for himself two years earlier. Another lost soul. A woman gone for so long that she no longer knew she was lost.

Moving along the quay, he came to the ship that had brought him into port. Resting in her berth like a swaybacked carriage horse in the traces, the April Storm had to be twenty years old if she was a day, a mid-sized brig, square rigged for speed but too heavy in the hull for true maneuverability.

His gut ached. Having been taken by such a ship after outrunning nearly every other vessel on the Atlantic was nothing short of travesty.

His gaze alighted on a girl working at a pile of rope on the dock beside the ship, and his jaw relaxed. She bent to her work, her back to him, revealing a backside perfectly rounded for a man’s hands. Snug breeches encased thighs that stretched sweetly to shapely calves. A white linen shirt pulled at her shoulders as she worked, defining delicate bones and slender arms.

His boot steps sounded on the planking and she glanced over her shoulder. She paused. Then, straightening, she drew off her hat and passed the back of her hand across her damp brow.

Jin’s blood warmed with the appreciation of a fine woman, all too infrequently enjoyed these days since he had bent to his current mission. Her brow was high and clear, dark eyes large and shaded with long lashes, nose pert, and her mouth a full, rosy invitation to pleasure. Strands of richly brown hair curled upon her brow, the rest of the long, satiny mass pulled back in a leather thong. She looked vaguely familiar. And pretty. Far too pretty to be laboring dockside.

“Is the master of this vessel about?” He gestured to the April Storm.

She nodded. Her eyes seemed to sparkle in the spring sunlight. Jin smiled slightly. It was an age since he’d had a woman beneath him, and the way this one stared him straight in the eye looked promising.

“Fetch her then.” He allowed his grin more rein. “And be quick about it.”

“I can be quicker than you imagine, sailor. She’s already standing in front of you.” Her voice was as smooth as her satiny hair. She set her fists upon her curved hips and Jin’s gaze dropped to the dark spot just beneath her lower lip.

His grin faded.

A smile like Christmas cake curved across Viola Carlyle’s alluring lips.

“So they let you go free, did they? More the fools they.” She laughed, then turned back to her work. “I see you found some clothes.”

“I did indeed.” And hers still clung to her damnably feminine body the same as a moment ago when he did not