“It was not.”
He was smiling. Daniella heard it.
“You are both very determined young ladies. It is a rare trait to have amongst women who were raised to follow their husband’s every word and whim.”
“But I wasn’t raised that way,” she pointed out.
“How were you raised? Did your father ever talk of the future with you on those long ocean voyages?”
An answer hovered on the edge of her tongue but she shook her head and rolled back to face the wall again. “We didn’t talk about the future at all. My father likes to laugh with his crew, but in private he is prone more to contemplation than small talk.”
“Did he tell you stories about his pirating ways before you were born? Where he was born, whether he has family?”
“More leverage against him?”
“Not at all. You keep trying to convince me he is a good man at heart. I merely wanted to understand what drives him.”
He made a good point. “He is a good man at heart but I won’t try to convince you. When you have your belongings back safe and sound, you will see he has morals and knows what is right.”
“And robbing ships and killing men is right?”
“It depends what end of poverty and desperation you come from, my lord. What you would do if everything you held dear was at peril.”
As soon as she’d said the words, she longed to take them back. She didn’t want to know what lengths he would go to to have his mother and sister back. She didn’t want him to think too much on it either.
Chapter Seventeen
When James heard a strange sound during the night, he opened his eyes, his senses on full alert in the darkness. A sliver of light fell across his boots from the end of the bed but didn’t provide enough illumination to see what or who made the sound. In the back of his mind he knew something wasn’t right.
In the distance a loud pop was followed by a whistling sound and then a bang that shook the walls around him. He was on his feet and at the window in less than a heartbeat. The acrid stench of smoke filled the air as yet another booming explosion shook the floor. James ducked, thinking the next cannon ball would be aimed at his head.
He tried to peer out of the window but the smoke was too thick, the night too dark. At his back, a muffled thump was followed by a curse and he couldn’t believe his stupidity. He had let his defences down and someone had found them.
His hand went to where his dagger was always strapped against his leg but he found only the fabric of his trousers.
“Who’s there?” he called.
“Did you think we would never find you, Monsieur Boucher?”
The woman’s Parisian lilt sounded at once both familiar yet not. “Who are you?”
“You do not remember killing me, monsieur?”
His eyes stung and his mind reeled. Was this his day of reckoning? “I won’t apologize, milady, we were at war.”
“Does that give you the excuse to kill women and children?”
Memory once again stirred as she stepped into the puddle of moonlight. Long dark hair billowed down her back and around her face. “Marie?”
“Ah, so La Boucher does remember one of his victims? What about the others? Do you remember all of their names?”
“I did not know all of their names.” His chest hurt and his throat filled with lead at that admission. A single tear rolled down his cheek when he closed his eyes. He blamed the smoke. It was thicker now.
Marie withdrew her hand from behind her back to reveal a long sword, its sharp-edged blade glinting as she advanced.
He did not retreat. Not this time. “You are a ghost: you cannot hurt me.”
She laughed, the sound still in the air as her form disappeared before his eyes as though it came from the very smoke around him. When next he heard her voice, it was from the direction of the bed. “It isn’t you I was thinking of hurting tonight.”
He followed her. “You must stay out of my dreams, Marie.”
“You wanted me in your bed, James. Do you no longer want me?”
He squeezed his eyes shut and when he opened them, Marie lay there on the covers, nude but for the blood covering her chest up to her neck, the gash deep, wide, fatal.
“Get out of my head!”
“Do you recall the night you took my life, James?”
“I remember the night you tried to kill me, yes.”
She pulled the blanket up to her chin and stared at him, her big brown eyes now wide and scared. Exactly how she had looked minus the shock as he’d driven his blade deep into her chest.
“Do you remember Henri?” Her face changed to that of a small child’s. “Or Jean?” The face changed again and again. It was an accounting of his victims. One he’d dreamed too many times before.
“What about the Englishmen who died, Marie? Do you know the names of the boys killed in Bonaparte’s name?”
“We are not talking about the casualties of war, mon cher. You were an assassin, not a soldier.”
When he just about couldn’t stand it anymore, he closed his eyes tight again.
“Is that how you survived, James? Did you close your eyes as you murdered them in their beds? Did you turn your back as their houses turned to ash? Did you tell yourself it was all right to kill me because I was your enemy? I think you felt nothing as my life drained away.”
“You made yourself my enemy when you tried to kill me. A French woman in the middle of an Egyptian war zone cannot be trusted. I was a fool.”
Marie shook her head. “I truly underestimated you, didn’t I? I didn’t think you had it in you to murder a woman.”
“Self-defence is not murder. You were a spy. You were sent to discover my secrets and then kill me. Did you see yourself as
